I tilt my head. “It is one of the things your ancestors fled from, to their world in the sky.”
North eyes me sidelong. I pretend not to see and start walking again. He falls into step at my side, with the bindle cat maintaining a careful distance between us. “What would happen if it caught up to us?”
“Do all cloudlanders ask so many questions?” I can hear the irritation in my voice and try to bury it. “We must keep going, North.”
He falls into step beside me again, and this time the silence is heavy until he asks, his voice even, “Why worry about it? Couldn’t you just use yourmagicand whisk it away?” This time, he makes no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice.
“For one thing,” I tell him, “no magician can control the mist. We draw power from it, but we cannot direct it. For another, the mist makes magic unpredictable—it can rob even the strongest magician of her abilities, or bestow power upon those who have never been touched with magic before. It can bring illness, or great skill, or despair, or a knowledge of things to come. To some, it brings madness itself.”
A warning tickle of sensation winds its way down the back of my neck, and as North opens his mouth to reply, I lift a hand to forestall him. Above us, difficult to see at first against the smoky underside of the cloudlands, is a second swirl of pink, this one tinged with green.
A second storm, and this one is gathering fast.
My throat tightens. Hiret’s story about how Quenti was injured echoes in my ears—the storm that had come from nowhere and gathered so quickly he was hit before he knew to run.
The storms are no longer behaving as they ought, as they used to. They are becoming wilder, unpredictable.
“Run,” I whisper.
“What?” North blinks at me, then follows my gaze. “I don’t—”
“Run!Now!” I gesture with my spearstaff, and the bindle cat leads the way as I break into a run. Behind me, I can hear the grass rustling as North follows. Dubious he may be about the dangers of the mist, but evidently he’s not willing to take his chances alone.
I’m already exhausted, and my muscles begin to burn and my head spin in protest after only a few moments. North must be hurting even more, unused to this world as he is. But as the thought of slowing my pace pops into my head, a whirl of mist stretches down out of the clouds like a grasping arm. Spindly fingers clutch at the earth not far from where we were a few moments ago, with a series of earsplitting cracks and squeals as the stone rearranges itself, twisted into spires as if reaching back toward the clouds.
North chokes out something that must be an oath in his world, and puts on a burst of speed that brings him up beside me. “Can’t keep this up,” he manages over the howling of the storm as it gathers the funnel back into itself and races along behind us. “How …”
“There,” I gasp, not bothering to gesture—the place is obvious, the only shelter visible on the plains. It’s the heart of this fallen city, and there are ways inside some of the rubble-formed hills. I know because I came here often in my childhood, when it was still safe to travel.
I can’t stop to look at his face, but North’s silence tells me he’s dubious about how well the ruins will shelter us. I wish I felt as certain as I sounded.
We reach the bottom of one of the hummocks just as the storm begins to darken the sky directly above us, purpling now with its intensity. I lead North around it and between two other hills, where an uneven gash of shadow stretches across a long, uniform rise. Pointing with my spearstaff, I shout, “Inside—quick!”
He dives into the darkness, scrambling on his knees to make room for me to follow. Every hair on my body is standing on end, and I can taste the mist—or its power—like bitter, burned caramel on my tongue. Still, I wait a moment longer. Better to be mist-touched than to bump into North in the dark.
I drop to my knees and crawl in after him, and then the storm is upon us, howling furiously past the entrance.
I can hear North’s harsh breathing, but I can see little in the sudden gloom.
The dark shadow that is the bindle cat is pressed in against North at the back of the recess, identifiable by the faint glitter of his eyes, round as the twin moons. North’s quavering breath tells me he must be nearly as shaken.
“A-are you all right?” he asks, his form shifting in the dark. “Are we safe here?”
“Yes.” My voice shakes, so I leave him with that one answer to both questions until I’m sure I can speak without scaring him further. My eyes, adjusting to the dark, find his outline against the stone.
“How is anyone still alive down here?” North murmurs, running an unsteady hand through his hair. “Everything about this place is trying to kill us!”
The mist-storm, the cultists, the mist-bent boar … Was it only hours ago that I sent those creatures scrambling? My head spins, and I draw up my knees so I can rest my forehead against them.
“You have had an unusually difficult welcome,” I whisper back, as if the mist-storm might hear.
North’s breath hitches as though he’d laugh if he weren’t so winded. “Can you make your staff glow again? One of your … light spells?” He says the words rather dubiously.
A flicker of irritation makes me long to retort,You can’t scoff at magic and then turn around and ask me to use it.
Instead, I take a breath and lay a hand on the stone wall, despite how the feel of it makes my skin crawl. “I cannot in this place. There is too much sky-steel in these stones. It protects us from the mist, but it renders me …”
Helpless.
