They made camp right at the forest’s edge, far enough from the river bank to have warning of another water dragon, but not enshrouded by trees where woodland animals might sneak up on them. A large fire flickered in the middle of the group, with great chunks of the water dragon roasting on improvised skewers above a separate pile of coals. The rest of the corpse lay motionless along the riverbank, its scales dull.

“I hear this is the best way to enjoy them,” Mohani said as she poked at the meat, its skin papery but still intact.

Tanin doubted it, but didn’t argue.

Iona sat propped against a tree, gazing at first one shoulder, then the other. “Thank you for bringing me here, Tanin Fell. The water and sun will help.”

“Thank him?” Orrock said, salting thick strips of meat into travel rations. “How about the creature who carried you all day through the forest?”

Tanin scowled, but then let the expression drop as he caught the mild grin on Orrock’s face. He never thought he’d see the monk in anything resembling a pleasant mood, yet that was exactly the Guar’s demeanor. Even Mohani seemed more buoyant than gruff.

She picked a piece of meat off a skewer. She pulled at the skin, which peeled off easily, leaving only moist white meat. “Now that you have slain a living thing, you are ready to face the Charic?”

He did feel ready, but didn’t want to say so. Pride still flushed his tan skin with a crimson tint.

Mohani grinned, munching loudly on the water dragon’s cooked flesh. “What of you, wood witch? You will not be much use against them without your arms.”

“My arms will grow, Mohani Agnise.”

“And then you will fight them?”

“I will search for my people among them, Mohani Agnise.”

Mohani snorted. “The two of you. Off on a mission to save the dead. I will never understand it.”

“That’s fine with me,” Tanin snapped, his good mood abating. “Where are your people?”

“The Agnise live in mountains far from this place, from which we travel when we are of age to take a Guar.”

“So all your life is designed only to take a Guar. How very noble.”

Tanin hid his fear as Mohani’s singular eyebrow dropped low over her eyes. Perhaps that had been a step too far.

“Enough,” Orrock said, lifting a skewer from the coals. “How did the Charic find your people, wood witch? You are not known for your visibility.”

“They knew how to draw us out, Orrock Guar. They have read enormous books and scrolls and skins. Somehow, they knew.”

Orrock nodded gravely. “This is truly their greatest strength. For every people they conquer, they learn more and apply that knowledge well. They are barbarians, and yet the most intelligent of all creatures.”

“Ah!” Mohani barked, waving a hand. “They are predictable zealots and nothing more. Their only strength is their numbers. I would gladly fight a Charic’sada or two with my bare hands.”

“May you get your wish,” Tanin said, as an apology.

The Agnise glared at him, but then nodded once with a martial gleam in her eyes.

Relieved he’d undone his insult, Tanin helped himself to some of the dragon meat and tasted it gingerly. Not bad; quite salty and bitter, but tender. “How do they travel so fast, so many of them? There must have been hundreds in my town. Then they were gone. I followed them into the forest by their tracks, but then . . .” He shrugged. “I’ve not seen any tracks since we joined.”

Mohani’s eyebrow arched. She turned to Orrock.

Orrock tossed his empty skewer into the fire. “They travel lightly,” he said, and his voice sounded quick in Tanin’s tall ears. “As the wood witch said, they gather information in service to their god, learn it as they go, and teach the others. Their burden beasts, the curcus, are thin and strong, easily adaptable to many environments. They have no reason to stop but to rest, and then not for long.”

“But, we travel south,” Mohani said.

Orrock raised a hand. “We will come upon them in Anyi’s time.”

Mohani laughed aloud. “Indeed?”

“It is time we rested,” Orrock declared, standing.

“Monk, I do not share the little Fell’s clear desire for death, but why do you deceive him?”

Tanin rose. “What?”

“Irritant,” Orrock sighed, closing his eyes for a moment.

“What is she talking about? Orrock? What is Mohani saying?”

The Guar heaved another deep sigh and walked a few lengths away. Tanin spun toward Mohani.

“What is it, Agnise? Tell me!”

Mohani kept her seat, plucking more meat from the fire. “All clans of the Charic’sada travel ever westward. They only change this if they come upon some feature they cannot cross, in which case, they will seek a way to cross it or go around. It is part of their religion.”

Listening, Tanin remembered Orrock saying something similar days ago. He hadn’t caught the implication of it as they moved away from the camp where they met, but now it rang clear in his head. Without question, the group had been moving steadily south since then. Tanin cursed himself for not trusting his instinct enough to question the direction of their travel; while the forest canopy had certainly obscured the sun, it had been obvious which direction they travelled on each new day. He simply hadn’t thought to worry himself about it, trusting the Guar to guide them well.

They were moving away from the Charic.

“Liar!” Tanin cried at Orrock’s back. The monk stood still with his arms crossed and head bowed. “How could you do this thing? You knew what I sought, and you take me away from it? Why?”

Orrock turned. “To save your life.”

“My life doesn’t need saving, it’s the life of Memine that’s in danger!”

Orrock spread his arms open. “Listen to reason. The Charic are many and powerful. You have seen this yourself. Your mission is laudable but will end in your death.”

Tanin stalked to the larger creature. “That is my choice to make.”

“I cannot allow harm to come to one of our Holy Creator’s creatures if I can—”

“There is no god!” Tanin screamed at him. “You great fool! Stop blaming your errors on something you can’t see or touch yourself!”

The monk stiffened, and Tanin didn’t care. When he’d pushed back against Mohani, yes, he’d felt a quick pulse of fear. Now, despite the larger creature before him, his rage superseded any worry for his safety.

“I am not surprised by your anger,” Orrock said patiently—though whether the patience was to calm himself or Tanin, Tanin couldn’t tell. “And Anyi loves you despite your unbelief. We are all here on this riverbank searching for something—”

“I found what I was looking for,” Mohani said casually. “I just have not gotten it yet.”

Orrock’s eyes flicked her direction, but quickly came back to Tanin. “What I seek is to find my god. Brother Obos told me I would, eventually, and that in the meantime, I was to serve all living things as best I could.”

“And yet you didn’t,” Tanin said. “You did the very opposite by taking me three days’ journey away from Memine and the rest of my people. Your god is a deceiver.” Tanin paused and looked the monk up and down, his lip curling. “And he deceives you now, even as we speak.”

He stomped back to the fire and gathered his belongings.

“You cannot possibly mean to leave,” Orrock said.

Tanin put a hand on Iona’s shoulder. “Will you come with me, and can you walk?”

“I will and I can, Tanin Fell.”

He gave her a squeeze and continued packing. Mohani watched, eating dragon meat while watching the scene with keen interest—and perhaps a withering sneer at Orrock.

Orrock tried again. “Listen to me, Fell—”

Tanin spun. “I will not listen to you, Guar! You are a fool and you are a liar and I should have known better than to trust a zealot. You’re no better than the Charic.”

“Anyi’s eyes see all. He knows your pain, just as I know it. Pursuit of the Charic’sada is madness.”

Tanin was beyond hearing. “Anyi’s eyes see all? Ha! Where was your god when my town was burned to the ground and the survivors enslaved?”

“Anyi was weeping.”

“Well he should’ve been sharpening a spear to stop it.”

Orrock tilted his head. “Why do you insist Anyi do something you would not do yourself?”

A furious silence settled over the group. Even Mohani stopped smacking her lips on the dragon flesh.

Tanin felt his body sag, like a condemned creature accepting its death. Eyes half-shut, he said to the Guar: “There is no heaven. But if there’s a hell, I’ll see you burn in it. May your god damn you.”

Orrock’s broad nose flared, his eyes growing steely. “Do you know your namesake? You are the Fell because your entire cursed race is fallen! When your ancestors rejected the Holy Creator, they rejected the coming of heaven and all its glory. Perhaps your people are exterminated because the Fell turned their backs to Anyi.”

Tanin slung his pack and stalked back to the monk. He narrowly avoided Orrock’s great horns to put his own face right up to the Guar’s.

“Then Anyi is an imperfect god,” Tanin whispered fiercely, “because he missed one.”

This thunderstruck the monk for a moment. Tanin walked back to Iona, who stood easily without the use of her arms. The sun and water had done her well: several new inches of growth sprouted from under her shoulders.

“I’m sorry you were led away from the Charic,” Tanin said to the wood witch. “I should have known better.”

“We will find them, Tanin Fell.”

Nodding, Tanin led them into the forest, not speaking nor looking back at the two larger creatures.

He and Iona marched in silence in the woods for a time before Tanin spoke. “I don’t know how we’ll ever find them now,” he muttered as they pushed through the forest undergrowth. “So many days lost . . . how could I have been so stupid?”

“We did not know how the Charic travel, Tanin Fell.”

“What if we don’t find her.” This came as a statement rather than a question, as if he had already given up. “What if we don’t find Memine or your people or mine, or . . .”

“They will know we are searching, Tanin Fell. They will feel our presence.”

Tanin had to resist an urge to snort his derision. “You’re a zealot too, then.”

“Not like the monk, Tanin Fell.”

“Like what, then?” He, like other Fell, didn’t care much for protracted philosophical debates, but it was better than letting the darkness wreak havoc on his fear. He’d lit an improvised torch after Iona guided him to which branches would be best for the purpose, but the flickering orange light felt paltry against the invasive blackness of the forest. If the moon had risen, he could not see it; the canopy was impenetrable at night.

Iona had no issue navigating the woods, of course, and Tanin found it challenging to keep up with her swift, even pace. It was as if she glided through stumps and bushes rather than going over or around them like he did.

“We are of the earth, Tanin Fell. Like all things. Created by the dust of stars. Perhaps the monk’s god decreed it so. Perhaps not. I know only that the earth has not betrayed me and will not so long as I do not betray it first. We all are one, and they will know we are coming, Tanin Fell.”

Tanin said nothing. He couldn’t have argued the point even if he wanted to.

“I suppose,” he said after a time, “the Fell believed something like that. Once, anyway. I can’t believe in anything caring about me now. Nothing but Memine.”

If the wood witch had a response, she hadn’t have time to say it. He stopped them. “Iona, wait. Did you hear that?”

Iona cocked her head to one side. “Yes, I heard Mohani scream, Tanin Fell.”

“Yes . . . that’s what I thought I heard, too. Should we go back?”

“I go where you go, Tanin Fell.”

Despite the urgency of the situation, Tanin hesitated. “Why?”

“We are not meant to be alone, Tanin Fell.”

While Iona’s eyes did not glow in and of themselves, Tanin found they were inescapable in the dark; not a glow so much as a burning, like that of a forest fire.

In a heartbeat, he understood what she meant; understood it and knew it on a level he’d never really investigated in depth. Living and working together came naturally to the Fell. He’d never known anything else. That such an arrangement might be necessary on a level beyond mere survival—perhaps even in some mystical sense—had never occurred to him.

As the wood witch gazed at him, Tanin felt the whole of his previous life, his life before the Charic’sada attack, come into dizzying focus.

And it hurt.

The Fell were not wicked creatures, he knew that. But their desert environment had allowed them a natural defense against things like the dogrels or even the Guar, Agnise, or Tashri. No other creature could survive the desert they way the Fell did, much less thrive. This safety, generation after generation, had given them peace—but also a haughtiness, a sense of invulnerability that they had not earned, as the Guar had. They’d grown soft. Nothing substantively threatened them, so they came to believe that nothing ever would. The occasional death by a sandcat caused sadness, yes, and the town took measures to reduce such deaths as best they could.

But against foes like the Charic, they were powerless. Just as powerless as Tanin now felt looking at Iona, a creature who had cast her lot with him for no other reason than . . .

Than that is what creatures did. That is how they survived.

Maybe, he dared to think, it would even be how they would win.

Tanin straightened his spine and hefted his spear.

“Let’s go,” he said, and pivoted on his heel. “She might need us.”

Iona kept up easily with him as he raced back the way they’d come, calling for the Agnise.

# # #

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