‘We’ll stop here awhile,’ the man Tobias, the man who seemed to be the leader, said gruffly. He was exhausted, angry and in pain: she could see and feel it radiating off him, even more than the others. Older, weaker, filled with a sense of failure that bit at him.
They reached a small copse of scrubby trees, set back a little from the track they were following. They had left the road almost immediately, heading up slowly towards the hills before them where settlements were fewer. Best not to meet people just yet, Tobias had said. Thalia did not understand why he said it, but she was glad. She did not want to meet people just yet.
The trees gave a little shelter from a warm wind that blew grit into Thalia’s eyes and mouth and made her hair whip around her. She sat quietly while the men checked over the area then unpacked meagre supplies of food. She looked at the small trees, pale wood with pale, fine leaves that shivered in the wind, flashing silver undersides. The ground was half barren, thin yellow grass crowned here and there with brilliant pink flowers. Looking up into the sky, she saw for a moment a bird hovering away to the east, wings beating frantically to hold still in the wind, before it shot downwards and disappeared into the tawny landscape. A hawk, she thought. She had read of hawks, but never seen one. She had never seen a goat before she watched a flock of them meander across their path. She had never seen houses, or carts, or dried meat, or a horse. She had never seen the trees she was sitting under, or the scrubby yellow grass with pink flowers, or the afternoon sunlight filling the vast expanse of the sky. She had never seen running water.
The three men, the other three as she thought of them, ignored her. They ate their food, talking among themselves of small things. Marith and Thalia sat a little apart, though she was conscious that the others watched them – no, watched him – continually, as though afraid. Marith himself barely spoke to her, seemed to want to avoid her looking at him fully, but gave her his food and water, until she had to make him eat and drink himself, not give it all to her. ‘I don’t feel hungry,’ he said in a quiet voice, but when she made him eat some bread he ate quickly, like someone who had not eaten for a long time. She still wore his cloak; he had removed his jacket and spread it carefully for her to sit on. His eyes sought hers. She met them and he rubbed his face painfully, blinked and looked away.
After they had rested a little, Tobias made them get up and continue walking, for all that it was getting towards evening now. After a while a village came into view in a low valley ahead of them: Tobias made them turn aside, track back into the scrub. The ground was becoming barren scree. No trees. The desert came very close here; he was leading them into it, away from anything that lived. What are you so afraid of? Thalia wondered. She felt fear in all of them.
Past dusk when Tobias allowed them to stop again. That they had walked through the dusk was stranger than anything to her. Dusk was the time of terror, the time that was neither light nor dark, the time everything in her world stopped. She had stopped walking as she felt the twilight fall, staring around her, her voice stammering out the words of her prayer. Here in the desert the dusk was horrifying, an abyss swallowing her up, a physical pain. So huge. So hungry. The other three men muttered angrily, Tobias barking at her to be silent, to keep walking. Marith reached out and touched her hand, then drew back. He kept trying to touch her, like a child trying to touch a flame. She could feel him, strong and vivid like the hawk in the sky.
Tobias had chosen a good place. Trees. A small stream. Thalia liked the stream, only the third stream she had ever encountered, the water trickling over stones. In the firelight she could just see the water reflecting the flames, its surface smooth as skin. The fire itself was small, the dry sticks spitting as they burned, giving off a sweet-scented smoke. The youngest of the other three, the fair-blond one, Rate, made tea over the fire. The man with the copper-coloured skin, Alxine, sat against a tree and Tobias re-bandaged his arm.
Thalia got up and walked a little way away from them, into the dark beyond the circle of the fire, towards the stream. Marith got up and walked a little way away from them too, towards her. She heard Tobias call out to him sharply, Marith’s voice mutter something low and sad in reply. This seemed to satisfy them: Tobias grunted and she heard Rate laugh.
He came to sit beside her, his presence strong and clear in the dark. Even in the dark, even with his terrible eyes and his downcast face, she could see how beautiful he was. His face when he had first appeared before her, driving the men attacking her away, brilliant as cold light. The touch of his hand as he raised her to her feet, scalding her.
‘You are really … one of the Altrersyr? A descendant of Amrath?’ Thalia said hesitantly.
She felt him flinch, in the dark. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that,’ he said. His voice was very sad and very hesitant. He rubbed at his eyes. It was something about him that irritated her. The only thing about him that was not perfectly beautiful. He picked up a small stone and threw it into the water of the stream, and he told her who he was, and what had befallen him.
Thalia sat looking ahead of her into the dark. She saw the moon emerge from behind a cloud, a bright thin waxing crescent, and she realized she should have been fasting and kneeling in prayer before the High Altar, waiting to kill a man. She laughed, and he started at the sound, and in a sudden rush she told him who she was in answer. And then he laughed too, a wild sad laugh, and threw another stone into the stream.
‘I knew it,’ he said after a while. He dared look at her a little more, now. As though her knowing who he was gave him a confidence in himself. ‘I didn’t know you were … were that, of course.’ Child killer, her mind whispered. Child killer, murderer, as she was called across Irlast and even to the other side of the Bitter Sea. ‘But I knew you were something beyond … beyond everything. I can’t explain …’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘You must not tell the other men,’ he said then. ‘They … they won’t understand. They will fear you. You made them take you along with us. Or I did, I don’t know. But what they would do, if they found out what you are, I know that.’
They sat in silence a while longer, side by side with the water running before them. Thalia shivered with cold despite the cloak wrapped around her. A great, intense tiredness came over her, her eyes grew heavy, she yawned. She had not slept for a long time, another lifetime ago; all had changed since she had last slept.
‘Why have you come to me?’ Marith asked her.
She wondered at the question, as though she had fled her Temple and abandoned everything because he wanted her to. ‘I wanted to live,’ she said sleepily, as though that explained it all.