With your invisible talismans, I thought but did not say. To my knowledge, River hadn’t used his magic again since he had fought the fiangul. Despite this, Tem remained convinced of what he had seen.
“There was one time,” River went on, his gaze distant, “when Norbu and I were hiking along the Lake of Dumori in the Southern Aryas, and a water ghost sprang up and dragged me into the depths. Norbu stood on the shore, waving his beads around and yelling his useless head off, while I battled twenty of the wet, nasty things, all of them intent on draining the breath from my lungs and taking my place among the living. I had to freeze the lake just to immobilize them, and then hack my body free with my own ice ax. Norbu couldn’t even master a melting spell.”
I shook my head. “Why bring Norbu at all?”
“All explorers bring at least one trained shaman on their expeditions. It’s just the way it’s done.”
“But why Norbu? Why not someone capable of casting a warding spell strong enough to repel more than a rabbit?”
“I told you—I can trust Norbu.”
I sighed, giving up. Perhaps River’s reasoning made sense to him, but it made little to me.
River glanced at me, a faint smile on his face. He turned back to the dark valley and made a small motion with his hand. Out of the night rose a single flower, plucked from the valley floor far below. It was a lily, its pale petals brushed with moonlight. River gestured again, and more flowers drifted up, like ghosts rising out of a primordial void. Roses and orchids and heartleaf—they hovered there, as if rooted in the darkness. A shadow meadow, teeming with flowers.
“Oh,” I murmured. I had never seen a summoning spell used this way before. As I was staring, River reached around me and grabbed the bottle.
“Hey!” I tried to wrestle it away from him. “You—you sneak!”
“Sneak?” He began laughing again. “That’s insubordination.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I was laughing too, in spite of myself. “Send me back to Azmiri? Let Dargye guide your expedition?”
“Well, he’s not as pretty as you, granted, but he’s more tractable. Wait, don’t—”
As we were tussling, the bottle, slippery with spilled liquor, slid from his hand. I batted it away before he could make a recovery, and it tumbled down into the darkness. We both froze. Seconds later, there was a distant, echoing smash.
I turned to him, grinning triumphantly. “Serves you—”
He kissed me.
I let out a muffled noise. His mouth was warm and tasted slightly salty. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was kissing him back, pressing my face into his. A fierce desire rose inside me, hot and rippling like summer haze, startling in its intensity. I could not have said how long the kiss lasted—a second or a minute; I was oblivious to everything except his lips against mine and his hand as it threaded through my hair.
Finally, we broke apart. River gazed at me for a moment, then he began to smile. My heart was pounding, and I felt light-headed, as if I had drunk as much as he had.
“I told you there was something you could give me,” he said. He was still holding my arm. I yanked it away.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes, I am.” He rose unsteadily to his feet. “But not enough, thanks to you. Good night, Kamzin.” Shoving his hands in his pockets, he staggered off, heading vaguely in the direction of his tent.
I stayed where I was, waiting for my heart to stop pounding. It took a long time. Whenever I thought about the feeling of River’s mouth on mine, it would speed up again.
The flowers were still floating in midair, only now they seemed adrift, like abandoned ships in a storm. The wind tossed them up and down, pushing them south along the ridge. One, a golden marigold, came within arm’s reach. I lunged out and grabbed it.
What am I doing? I thought. I released the marigold, and it drifted away with the others. Suddenly, I wanted nothing to do with flowers, bobbing eerily on the wind. I stood so fast I had to steady myself against the rock until the spots cleared from my vision. I turned my back on the floating meadow and hurried back to my tent.
FOURTEEN
IT DIDN’T MEAN anything.
I kept repeating that to myself as we hiked through the rubbly moraine that bracketed Raksha’s enormous glacier. Though we were still miles from the glacier itself, we were in another world. We had left trees behind—all that existed now were rocks so battered and broken they could have fallen from the stars, and reticent tufts of grass speckled with tiny pink flowers. The sun beat down. It was too hot for walking and laboring under a heavy pack, and too chilly to rest for any length of time.
It was nothing. It didn’t mean anything. Sometimes I muttered it out loud to myself. The yak grunted, as if agreeing with me. River was far behind, walking with Tem this time, gesticulating every few seconds at some feature of the landscape and talking his head off. I had to keep myself from sneaking glances behind me as their voices drifted on the wind. Occasionally, I caught my own name, but I couldn’t make out the thread of the conversation.
He kissed you, but he was drunk. He probably doesn’t even remember.
And indeed, River hadn’t seemed to remember. He had been his usual self in the morning, making strange comments about how the yak was glaring at him and declaring that he had finally decided, after much consideration, that Ragtooth was in fact a raccoon crossed with a monkey. His only reference to the previous night was to ask, when I passed him a bowl, whether I planned to throw his breakfast over the cliff—but even that seemed offhand. Did he truly not remember kissing me, or was it simply unimportant to him? It made me wonder if I should throw his breakfast over the cliff.
“What did River say to you, anyway?” Tem asked that night, as we set up our tent in the shadow of an enormous boulder.
I started. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been sniping at him all day. I saw you two talking last night as I was setting the wards. Did you have an argument?”
“No,” I said, turning away. “It doesn’t matter.”
We were quiet for a while, the rustle of oilcloth and the hammering of spikes into the rocky soil the only sounds. We were quick at making camp now—it all came together in a few minutes, which was a relief, because it allowed more time to rest. We were only a day or two from Raksha, and were all paying the price of our grueling pace. My blisters had blisters, and my shins were peppered with bruises and scrapes from clambering up hills and over boulders. I tried not to complain, because I knew Tem was worse off. His chest pained him—more, I suspected, than he would admit. He had thrown up after the last uphill hike. More worryingly, his cough was now a near-constant presence, forcing the entire group to stop and wait during the worst bouts. I urged him to increase the medicine he normally took, but he refused, saying it made him tired. As he already had difficulty keeping up with us, I couldn’t bring myself to insist.
“I wanted to give you this,” Tem said after we had finished assembling the tent.