“You should get some sleep. You’ll want to be rested for whatever we face tomorrow,” Marcus said, tossing the water out the open door and resealing the air barrier. He let the other elemental bundles dissipate, and the cotton cloth fluttered to his hand. I caught the seed crystals with a scoop of air and dropped them into my bag.
Oliver had fallen asleep tight around me, and I had to wake him to free myself from his stony embrace before hobbling on stiff legs to my cot. Stretching out, I toed off my boots and pulled the scratchy wool blanket over myself. Marcus dimmed the lanterns and settled on his cot. The cozy atmosphere morphed, turning the friendly energy into something intimate and awkward as I listened to him arrange his covers. Tension crept back into my muscles, and I thought it would keep me awake, but the rocking of the train lulled me to sleep minutes later.
*
I woke looking into Celeste’s glowing amethyst eyes. Marcus breathed softly on his cot, asleep, and Oliver lay stretched out and sleeping on the floor beside me. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been asleep, but I guessed it’d been a few hours. Softly, I reached for the dormant gargoyles, testing them. They’d weakened. Not as much as before, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
Rolling quietly to my feet, I tiptoed into the middle of the gargoyles, where I’d left my bag of seed crystals. I sat and wriggled my chilled toes into my boots, then opened myself to the gargoyles’ boost. After carefully heating the air in a weak version of Marcus’s spell, I decided to do what I did best: work with quartz.
Before I’d become a gargoyle healer, I’d had ambitions of being Terra Haven’s preeminent quartz artisan. Now the goal felt juvenile and shallow. Nothing compared to the joyful rush of healing a sick or injured gargoyle, and the most prestigious artistic accomplishment couldn’t compete with saving a life. However, I still enjoyed creating beautiful objects with quartz and it kept my skills sharp, and the money I made selling quartz jewelry and figurines at a gallery in the city augmented my sporadic healer income.
Drawing as much as I could hold of all the elements to help feed the dormant gargoyles, I separated delicate strands of earth, fire, and air to combine several seeds into a blob. With practiced ease, I twisted the lump and stretched it into the most popular figurine I sold: a replica of Oliver. Normally I used carnelian to match his distinctive body, but the clear quartz did a good job of catching the light and refracting it through the small details of his eyes, ears, and folded wings.
As soon as I finished, I started the next figurine, making one for each of the dormant gargoyles, then a few of Celeste. I strung together ten crystals and created the train, complete with miniature people on the inside and the khalkotauroi in the engine car, clear hay strands scattered around his feet, clear flame breathing from his nostrils to heat the water. I left out Conductor Naomi.
Sleep weighted my eyelids, and after a while, I reclined on my side with my head propped on the curled fox. I planned to doze for only a few minutes, but when I woke, indigo sky was visible through the open door and the glow of the sun lit the edge of the horizon.
Today was the day—either I was a guardian, capable of fixing a baetyl and saving the comatose gargoyles, or I wasn’t, and everyone in our party could die for my hubris. I prayed I wasn’t handing Reaper’s Ridge its next victims.
6
“Naomi agreed to let us use her private bathroom, but you’ll need to be quick to make it through the train without disturbing the passengers,” Marcus said when he noticed I was awake.
I grimaced, not needing the reminder of the gorgeous conductor before I’d fully woken; thinking of Reaper’s Ridge had made me queasy enough already. But refusing the offer out of spite would cause only me to suffer. Besides, my bladder didn’t care how Marcus had convinced Naomi to give us access to her quarters. I grabbed my bag and scurried through the open door. When I returned in fresh clothes and as clean as a sponge bath could get me, Celeste was perched atop the freight car once more. She nodded her head to me but didn’t talk, and I didn’t linger in the chilly morning air.
Marcus knelt in front of the figurines I’d created last night, holding up a clear replica of Oliver to examine it in the light of a glowball he’d formed.
“The detail in this is amazing,” he said without turning toward me.
“You can have it, if you want.” Caught off guard by his praise, I tried to sound dismissive, as if it wasn’t one of my finer pieces.
The glowball winked out and he closed his long fingers around the figurine. “Thanks.” He grabbed his bag and squeezed past me on his way to the bathroom.
“He’s smart,” Oliver said after Marcus had left.
“Because he picked the one that looked like you?”
“Yes.”
Chuckling, I checked on the dormant gargoyles. They were all weak but stable. It pleased me to see the fox’s injuries were healing nicely, and when I checked Oliver, his new patch of clear ruff had striations of red carnelian stretching to the surface. By the time we returned to Terra Haven, all signs of his injury would be healed.
I glanced around at the dormant gargoyles and tried to picture the return trip. Would they be with me? Would they remain in their baetyl? Would they all live through the trip?
Would I?