I take a deep breath and meet her eyes the way she met mine before, hoping that feeling of connection will get her to talk to me. Even now, in the midst of all this horror, there’s something about her that makes it hard to look away. She’s magnetic, drawing my gaze wherever I am.
Keeping my eyes on hers, I try again. “Why would I be safer without you? How can you be sure they’ll come back?”
Nimh swallows, looking very young, and very sad. “Because they were looking for me.”
The words hang between us, drifting like the campfire smoke. I should ask who’s after her—and why they want her. I should ask her why she’s so sure they’ll kill anyone who’s with her. I should demand she explain everything she’s holding back, every truth she isn’t telling me. But of all the objections and protestations flashing through my mind, all I’m left with as she meets my eyes is one thought:She’s all alone.
I lean down to pick up the pack and swing it over my shoulders. “I’m coming with you. Let’s go.”
SEVEN
NIMH
My thoughts are a storm of guilt and anger and fear, pulsing and shifting with every step I take. Jolts of pain strike me like lightning through the haze of urgency and danger. My cheek, where the blood fell on it, still burns like fire. Sometimes the whole world falls away, my whole self too, and I am just a tiny ember of hurt beneath a deluge that threatens to drown me.
I need to meditate, to find some tiny grain of stillness in my mind, or I will be next to useless if we’re discovered. I cannot work magic without the concentration of my will, and right now, I have nothing in my mind but chaos, as violent and uncaring as a mist-storm.
And then I hear North crashing through the undergrowth behind me, swearing strange oaths under his breath and slapping at insects, and I am all at once myself again, my feet on the ground, my eyes clear.
To let him go, to tell him heshouldgo, was almost beyond my strength—to return without him, whether he is the Last Star or not, would be to give up on everything I’ve hoped for, to let everyone hanging in the trees have died for nothing. But if he is as important as I believe him to be, then North’s life means more than my own now.
And I am the only one who knows it. Without me, he would be safer.
Despite all that logic, all those reasons to convince him to make his own way, the one truth that pounded through my thoughts in that long, long moment as he stared at me was this:I don’t want him to go.
We move in silence for a time, until we’ve traveled far enough that low voices are unlikely to betray us.
“We will be out of the forest-sea soon,” I murmur to North, whose footsteps behind me are beginning to falter. He’s exhausted, and my throat tightens with sympathy, for surely there are no forest-seas in the clouds, and he could not have known to prepare for this. “We will go through the ghostlands, where you will find walking easier. It is a less direct route, but there are no trees, and those who are hunting me are most at home here in the shadows. We will be safer there.”
North draws a breath and then chokes, no doubt on the insects he just inhaled. “You—you know who those people were, who attacked us back there? Who killed those …”
I try not to think of that sight, the first shocking image of the tangle of bodies overhead, so thoroughly mutilated that I could not recognize their faces—but it does no good. I think I will see them there behind my closed eyes forever. “Members of the Cult of the Deathless. I have heard of this practice. They punish followers of the one they call thefalse divinity, suspending them in symbolic exile among the gods who abandoned us.”
North doesn’t answer. Either he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, or he’s simply breathing so hard that he can’t speak. I concentrate on moving as quickly and as quietly as I can, hating that I must set such a ruthless pace for him, though he keeps up with admirable determination.
“We will be safe soon,” I murmur, and I do not know whether he hears me or not. I do not know whether I was even speaking to him at all.
The stars still gleam dimly in the predawn sky when we emerge from the forest-sea. Miella and Danna hang low on the horizon, twin moons locked in their perpetual dance. The trees stop abruptly here, their growth hindered by the magic of the ancients that still lingers, though all that remains of their vast city are piles of stone and twisted metal, lying still beneath their shrouds of earth and grass.
North is some distance behind me, still struggling through the undergrowth and still choking on oaths and the insects that swarm his face. If we’d had time, I would have shown him how to wind a strip of cloth across the nose and mouth. I’d have shown him the way to find a path through the tangle of vines and roots instead of fighting them. I’d have stopped to let him rest.
When he stumbles out of the deeper shadow of the trees, my heart sinks with sympathy. His face is scratched and filthy, his thin shirt is drenched with sweat and clinging to his body, and his eyes are glazed with the effort of continuing on. Even exhausted and bedraggled, he has a presence I cannot deny. He may not know his importance, but that heisimportant, I do not doubt.
“A few more steps,” I say softly. “Let us put some small distance between us and the trees, and then we will rest.”
North just gives a little groan in response, but his steps—which had begun to slow after seeing me—pick up again.
We keep moving until the dim glow to the east of the plain lightens enough to throw faint shadows beneath our feet. I lead us to one of the grassy hummocks that once would have been a building tall enough to touch the clouds, and even before I can tell him it’s time to stop, North drops down onto a lichen-covered stone like a bird with broken wings.
I find to my surprise that when I move to sit, my legs collapse beneath me rather more quickly than I’d expected, and I hit the stone with a faint thud. All I want to do is fold over like North, but I know we cannot stay here for long, and if we hope to keep moving, we must drink and eat.
And talk.
North did not ask, back beneath the grisly canopy of corpses, why I was the one the cultists had been looking for. But I know the question cannot be far from his mind.
My own thoughts tangle as I try to order them. I cannot believe that this ignorant boy is the answer to my people’s suffering—and yet I do believe it; Imustbelieve it.
If he isn’t—if the falling wreckage was not the star I read about in my vision of the lost stanza of the Song, if Iwasn’tmeant to make this journey and risk everything to find him …
