She finds the water she seeks around midafternoon in a deep ravine walled away by steep banks formed of bedrock that feels entirely out of place with the desert. But the water is good, and she fills the containers she carries after drinking her fill, and starts back the way she has come.
It takes her the rest of the day to make the return. It is dusk by the time she arrives back, the shadows deep and layered. She has hurried, but she needn’t have. Her companions are dead. They lie scattered about the space in which they were hiding, torn apart by whatever found them. The tracks of something huge are visible in a patch of soft earth. Neither demon nor once-men made these tracks. This is something else entirely, a desert hunter come in search of food, in all probability a mutant beast born of the changes wrought by humans. Pieces of the Elves killed are missing; parts of them have been eaten.
Almost nothing of Chenowyn’s body remains. It appears from the marks on the rocks that the larger part of it was dragged away.
She feels the heart go out of her then, and for a moment she considers just sitting down and waiting for the inevitable. She is going to die, and she knows it. All of the Elves are going to die. But the moment passes, and her despair recedes. She will not give in. She will find a way to stay alive.
She slips from the rocks where the lifeless bodies of her companions lie and begins to walk. She travels all night through the scrub and the rocks, and by morning, when she has seen nothing more of the winged creatures, she knows she will be all right.
HE WAITED until he was sure she had finished, his eyes on the land ahead, and then he said, “Skrails.”
She looked over at him. “What?”
“That’s what they’re called. The winged creatures. Skrails.”
She nodded without comment. They drove in silence for a while, and he kept thinking she would say more about what had happened. Because something important was missing from her explanation, and it troubled him.
At last, he could leave it alone no longer. “Why didn’t you use the Elfstones?” he asked.
Her face was stony. “I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. She gestured absently. “I couldn’t make them respond. I don’t know why. I watched Kirisin do it. I saw what he did. We spoke of it afterward, and I understood what was needed. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what to do.”
She exhaled sharply. “But I couldn’t call up the magic. I tried, did everything I knew to do to summon it. I held the Elfstones in my hand and I begged for the magic to help me. I was fighting to stay alive, to keep the others alive, and I begged for the Stones to do something. But there was no response at all. And then there was no time, either. I shoved the Elfstones back in my pocket and fell back on what I knew best without even thinking about it.”
She wiped at her eyes, but it didn’t seem to help. He had never seen her cry. She was always so composed, so in control. It seemed as if all her defenses had simply collapsed. He didn’t know what to do.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Of course it is.”
“I would have done the same thing you did,” he said finally.
Her laugh was sharp and bitter. “Not you. You would have found a way. You would have made the magic obey you. You know you would have. I should have found a way.”
“You can’t know that. It was the first time you tried. Maybe trying to use them in the heat of battle was asking too much. Even Kirisin wasn’t asked to do that.”
She stopped crying finally, wiped again at her face, and looked at him. “I keep trying to forgive myself. I tell myself that using the magic would have just attracted the demons. That’s what happened to Kirisin when he used the Stones: it brought the demons hunting us. They could sense it.” She shook her head. “But it’s just an excuse. I don’t know how it would have worked out. I think I’m just looking for a way to get myself off the hook.”
“It doesn’t seem to be working,” he said. He gave her a quick smile. “You can’t second-guess yourself about things like this, Sim. You do the best you can and you walk away. If you try to rethink what you should have done or could have done, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”
She nodded, looking off into the distance again. “I can’t help it. They’re all dead, Logan. All of them. No one made it out but me.” She looked over quickly. “Did they?”
“No. You’re the only one. Maybe, later, there will be some others.” He smiled again. “I’m just glad to see you.”
This time she smiled back. “I really didn’t think I would find you.”
Her face was battered and dirt-streaked, and he reached out to touch her cheek. “You say that as if you were looking for me.” He studied her blue eyes, surprised at what he saw there. “You were, weren’t you?”
She touched him back. “What do you think?”
It wasn’t a question that required an answer.