“Do you think she can find us?” Railing asked, gesturing toward the low ceiling of mist and haze.
Farshaun shrugged. “She’ll find us. She’s resourceful, that one. But she won’t get here until morning. She won’t bring the Walker Boh into this mess under darkness. We’ll have to hold out until it’s light.”
Railing looked over the edge of the precipice to the rocks below and the dark smudge of the trees beyond. “Maybe we can do that,” he said doubtfully.
They sat without saying much, looking out over the bleak countryside from their elevated vantage point, waiting for either Skint or Seersha and the Trolls to appear. Every so often, Farshaun would leave the boy’s side to talk with the Speakman. He didn’t say anything about his reasons for doing so, but the boy could tell that the Speakman was in need of constant reassurance. It made him wonder how the man had survived out here alone for so many years. But he supposed that if you hid in a cave and pretty much kept yourself out of sight, you could survive anywhere. Or maybe it was just that you could survive in surroundings you knew well enough to avoid the things that would do you harm, and that being taken out of those surroundings made you vulnerable.
He spent most of his time thinking of home. He would not have joined the expedition if he had known what it was going to be like. He wouldn’t have come if he had thought he would be separated from Redden. He wasn’t all that different from the Speakman. He was removed from familiar surroundings, and his own fears and insecurities were being exposed as a result. What he wished now was that he and Redden and Mirai were back home, flying Sprints or scavenging pieces of downed aircraft or doing anything but what he was doing here. What he wished was that things could be put back the way they had been.
It was almost dark when a scrabbling sound on the cliff face announced the arrival of Seersha and the Trolls. They hauled themselves up the cliff face and onto the ledge, where the Druid set the guards at immediate watch and ordered the Speakman and Farshaun into the shelter of the overhang. She kept Railing out in the open, positioning him about six yards in front of the other two.
She looked ragged and spent, and her face was smudged with dirt. “From here, you can see most of what happens when we’re attacked. I want you to do two things. I want you to watch our backs. If anything gets behind us, anything we don’t see but you do, your job will be to send it back over the edge. Second, I want you to protect Farshaun and the seer. And yourself. Can you do all that?”
Railing nodded. “I can do it.”
“It’s a lot to ask.”
“I know. I won’t let you down.”
Seersha gave him a flash of her crooked grin and clapped him on his shoulder with her strong hand. “I don’t expect you will.”
Afterward, when she had gone back to the edge of the precipice and was repositioning the Trolls to her left and right and putting herself in the middle, he found himself wondering if he was being overconfident. He had use of the wishsong’s magic, but was that enough? He had used it only once in a fight, when the company was attacked coming into the Fangs. The attack had happened without warning, and he had reacted instinctively. But this time he knew what was coming, and he wasn’t sure if knowing and reacting were the same and would produce an identical response. Sometimes thinking too much about something or even anticipating it for too long caused you to freeze at the crucial moment.