“Do you expect him to wake up and make himself useful by morning?” Mukira asked.
“I hope so.” Perhaps he could decipher what was going on with the wind at the top of the cliff. But the truth was that I had no idea what condition he’d be in the next day. We’d barely had time to get acquainted before he lost consciousness, putting us in a situation even worse than the one in which we’d met. Tomorrow he might choose to save himself and leave me behind, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same.
CHAPTER 12
A WIDE PAW BATTED AT MY CHEEK, ROUSING ME FROM restless sleep. I gently pushed the lynx aside. She gave me an affronted look and stalked off in the direction of the exit. Elder Mukira was nowhere to be seen, nor was anyone else. Though no sunlight penetrated the cave to help me determine the time, voices chattered unintelligibly outside and the smell of seared meat drifted into the cave. Morning had come.
“Hal,” I whispered, rising to my knees to hover over him. He’d shifted during the night and now lay on his side. He opened his eyes slowly, taking a minute to focus them fully on my face.
“I knew you’d come through,” he said, his voice a little scratchy. “Lovely accommodations you found. A bit rustic, mildly creepy . . . but they’ll do.”
“It’s hardly the time to joke,” I said, handing him the clay vessel of water one of the Tamers had brought us. All I could think about was finding Ina, and what might happen if I didn’t succeed. She would try to kill the king. She would die—and I would be completely alone in the world.
He took a slow drink.
“Thank you for not leaving me,” he said, and I recognized in the look he gave me that it meant more to him than words could communicate. Perhaps he’d been left before. Something broke in me as I remembered the feeling when Ina took to the sky, leaving me alone with the blood and chaos she’d strewn across the road.
I understood.
“So what trouble have you found now?” he asked with a half smile.
“The Tamers got us. I had to strike a bargain with them,” I said, twisting one of the wool blankets in my hands. “I may have promised them we could find a dragon and get her to leave the forest in exchange for our freedom.”
“Find a what?” Hal asked.
“Ina’s manifest is a dragon.” Telling someone felt strange. Manifests were not private business, but Ina the dragon was very different from Ina who had loved me in our long, quiet hours on the mountain. I didn’t feel qualified to explain who or what she was now when I hardly had it figured out.
Hal groaned. “Start from the beginning.”
I took a deep breath and cast a nervous glance toward the fissure in the wall that led outside. The absence of people in the cave didn’t mean that no one was listening. Mukira’s lynx stared at us from atop her cushion with a gaze far too keen for my liking. I whispered an explanation of everything else that had transpired after he collapsed, including the supposedly wind-cursed cliff.
“For the love of fewmets. I think my headache is coming back,” he said.
“Oh no! Let me get you some peppermint—”
“I’m teasing, Asra.” He laughed.
I glared at him. “That’s not funny.”
“On the bright side, if the Tamers’ dogs eat us, my headache will be the least of our problems.” He gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
His touch calmed me a little. “I’m afraid,” I admitted. I didn’t know how to be scared and not serious. It didn’t seem possible. Each situation I found myself in seemed worse than the last, and my anxiety rose with every day I failed to find Ina. I wanted to go back to my quiet life in the mountains, where long, solitary winters were the hardest part of my life. They hadn’t been so bad after all.
“Look at it this way—after we get out of here, this will make a great tale. What good is life if you don’t have wild stories to tell when you’re old?” He grinned again, making me wonder what stories he’d gathered before he met me. In spite of my better judgment, I wanted to know them. But first, I had to find a dragon.
“Between my Sight and your Farhearing, it could be fairly easy to find Ina. I don’t know about the cursed cliff, but that’s a mess to untangle once we get up there, I suppose,” I said.
Hal frowned and rolled onto his back with a grimace. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be very useful to you. After the headaches, it usually takes most of a day for me to get my energy back. I doubt I’ll make it far today. I certainly can’t climb up a cliff.”
My heart sank. “But can you Farhear? If you could send me in the right direction until I’m close enough to use my Sight . . . I think I can find her. Then I just have to hope she’ll listen to me.” I didn’t dare say more. If he knew the truth about what she’d already done—the violence of which she was capable—he might try to stop me. It scared me even more that part of me wanted him to. With no one left who cared, responsibility for my life and well-being was all my own.
Sometimes it was too heavy a burden to carry.
“I may not be able to scale a cliff, but I can listen for her. In the meantime, who do we have to charm to get some food?” Hal asked.
“I’ll go find something,” I said, grateful he’d changed the subject before digging too deeply into the history between me and Ina.
“Thank you.” Hal nodded, his eyes already closing again. Even the short conversation had exhausted him.
Outside, I followed my nose and found the Tamers taking a communal breakfast farther north alongside the cliff. They sat in a scattered circle on rocks and logs, eating and laughing as they challenged one another to see whose Tamed animal would do the best trick for a scrap. Rather than hot oatmeal laden with fruit preserves, which was a common morning meal in Amalska, the Tamers started their day with meat. A woman and a man stood over a small but intense cook fire, searing thin strips of spiced venison over smooth river rocks pulled fresh from the embers. My mouth watered.
As I passed by clusters of Tamers, conversations among them silenced. I caught only bits and pieces—most of them were sharing tales of their hunts and of the latest city folk they’d managed to scare out of their woods. Instead of trying to talk to them, I took the plates of food they gave me back to the cave and ate in silence with Hal. The meat nearly melted in my mouth, tender from the quick sear. Hal ate even more greedily than I did, so much that I ended up giving him a few more pieces from my portion.
Afterward, Hal and I took turns scrubbing ourselves and our clothes clean in a hot spring deep in the mountains at Mukira’s insistence. “You’re no use at hunting if your prey can smell you coming,” she’d said. Neither of us objected. The bath was a luxury we were all too grateful to have. When he saw me shivering in my damp shirt, Hal dried my clothes with a whirling gust of warm air beckoned by his fingers. We did our hair in companionable silence; I detangled and braided mine while he applied a thick, buttery cream to his and styled it back into the twists he’d been wearing before.
We emerged from the cave just as the sun peeked over the edge of the cliff at the apex of its journey across the sky. The hunters were already waiting to escort me and, I supposed, to bear witness to my failure if that came to pass. I half expected Kaja to be among them, but the Tamers accompanying us today were different, their animals diurnal. Mukira’s lynx sat beside her in a patch of sunlight streaming down from above the cliff. Hal squinted and shaded his eyes even though it wasn’t bright—another aftereffect of the headache, no doubt.