“Nimh!” I take a step toward her. “It’s yourlife, that’s more important.”
Nimh glances over her shoulder at me. “So you’d catch me,” she murmurs, “if I fell?”
I’m about to snap a reply when the look in her eyes stops me cold.
I thought I’d seen hopelessness in the eyes of that child who begged for food as we passed on the way to the village. I thought I’d seen pain on Quenti’s face as he clung to my hand.
But there’s an emptiness to Nimh’s face now that makes my heart drop down so violently I feel sick.
“You told me you believed you and I were destined to meet.” I take another step toward her, keeping my eyes on hers, though the unhappiness there is painful to see. “You know all this talk of prophecy and fate freaks me out, and mostly just makes me wish I’d never evenheardof my glider. I don’t know what it means that Jezara didn’t lose her divinity when she was touched, and I don’t know what it means that her daughter might be the Lightbringer.”
Nimh’s face tightens, and I hurry to keep speaking while she’s still listening at all.
“I don’t know anything,” I tell her, spreading my hands helplessly. “Except that I’mgladI fell, Nimh.” My eyes burn as I say the words, not least because I’ve never said them even to myself—not least because to say them means turning my back on my family. It means surrendering hope that I’ll ever see my friends again. “I’m glad,” I repeat. “Because I met you.”
Nimh’s eyelashes dip, then lift as she focuses on my face, her own drawn and weary. The sunset behind her is glorious, but I can scarcely see it, I’m so focused on scanning every flicker and shift in her expression.
I swallow, hunting for my voice. “What do you call that, except destiny?”
Nimh’s lips twist, then press together, eyes brimming. “Oh, North—I don’t know what todo.” Her shoulders quake, and then she’s spilling over with tears.
I’m about to step back, to clear the way for her to come back from the edge, when I see her weight shift. She’d been holding herself stiff and straight, and now she sags with the weight of breaking emotion—and she takes one tiny, tiny step back.
Our eyes meet, horrified, in that single instant before she begins to fall.
I lunge, grabbing at her, fighting for balance for one terrifying moment as my muscles scream and my heart tries to push its way up my throat. I’m sure we’re both about to go tumbling down the cliff, but as I dig in and grit my teeth, she steadies. Her wide eyes are fixed on my face, her breath coming quickly. Then her gaze drops, and mine follows, and I realize I’ve caught the blade of the spearstaff, and she’s clinging to its handle.
With that realization comes a line of searing pain across my palm, and I quickly shift my grip until I’m holding the spear’s haft instead.
Even with her life on the line, I instinctively grabbed at the staff, rather than her arm or her hand.When did I learn to think like that?
“Are you all right?” I pant, carefully backing up, still holding the spearstaff.
“Yes,” she says, shaky, holding on to it as well, following me away from the edge of the cliff. “You?”
I finally manage to peel my grip off it, breath still coming quick. “My hand,” I say, with a weak huff of laughter for how small a thing that is. “It’s cut.”
There’s a line of red across my palm where the blade of the thing dug in, oozing blood. I’m quick to squeeze my hand into a fist and tuck it away—no need for Nimh to worry, not when a pause to heal my palm leaves us so exposed.
There are still tears on Nimh’s face, although the fear of nearly having fallen, and nearly taking me with her, seems to have broken through her misery for now. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, running a hand over her face. “I-I’ve never had to believe in my faith when no one else did. I don’t know how.”
“I’m pretty sure that if I were you, I’d be curled in a fetal position somewhere, hoping my mothers would fix everything.” The joke finally,finallyearns me a smile, tremulous and thin though it is. “Let’s make camp, and we’ll have another look at that scroll. Maybe it has some hint about what to do next.”
So when we reach the top of the cliff and find a small clearing among the scraggly forest there, we stop. We’re both still shaken by the near miss, and Nimh is eyeing a glimmer on the horizon that might be an approaching mist-storm, but the silence as we make camp is companionable, rather than tense.
I go through our supplies and fetch water, pulling together a meal that leaves as much as I can manage for tomorrow. Neither of us speak until we’ve eased down to sit by the small fire and chewed our way through what I think are some dried mushrooms and some flatbread.
“Want to take another look at the scroll?” I venture.
“I dare not hold it near the fire, and I might need the fireseed I have—since I cannot go back to the temple to replenish it.” She lets out a long, slow breath. “We must wait until daylight.”
I hold up my wrist, showing her my chrono and activating the built-in flashlight. “Sometimes science reallyisthe answer.”
Nimh blinks, and then actually lifts a hand as if she might seize my arm to draw it near. Of course, she doesn’t, but her urgency is enough to prompt me to retrieve the scroll from among my things and hand it to her. We unroll it for the second time, Nimh handling it with a lot more care than I did in the moments after we stepped out of the tunnel.
We end up laying down first my jacket, and then my spare shirt, under it, then carefully weighting the corners of the paper with small rocks cleaned of even a speck of dirt.
We lean in together over the lines of neat handwriting, and Nimh points to a section low down. “This is the extra stanza,” she murmurs, her eyes wide. “In the copy back at the temple, there was only a blank spot, but in my vision the words appeared.Thesewords.”
