To do communicate back to Dr. Burdock, though, they would have to make it to Thyrion. As happy as Calea was with her progress with the crutch, she was still slower than Bron and Nyasha. It also bothered her to realize how used she was getting to always leaning on a stick of wood. She didn’t want to get used to it. Before them, the BurntMountains grew, hour by hour and day by day, until they filled the horizon and dominated the sky.

As difficult as the foothills were to traverse, the mountains would be worse. Calea’s heart sank when they finally reached the foot of the nearest mountain and found themselves looking up and up and up a slope that seemed unending, bare and rocky and hostile. Nyasha calling the BurntMountains “lovely this time of year” had never seemed more ironic.

Nyasha fluttered around, looking for the path she remembered, muttering to herself in a way that might have been hilarious if Calea’s heart hadn’t turned into a brick at the sight of the ascent. “I know it was nearby…. Papa always said it wasn’t the easiest but it was the best. Fastest, right, that’s what you wanted?” She called this last over her shoulder to Calea.

Calea turned to Bron, who was looking up the mountain, his head craned back, with an expression of subdued dismay. It was his version of sobbing aloud in terror. They were both such tenderfoot city folk, they truly were.

“Bron, I’m not sure I can do this,” Calea admitted quietly.

He looked at her gravely. “You think perhaps the caravan might have been better?”

It stuck in her throat to admit her wrong, but after a moment, Calea jerked out a nod. “It might have been better.”

Bron didn’t look smug or satisfied at the admission, just accepting. He nodded, taking her words for the apology they were, and went back to staring up the mountain.

“I found it!” Nyasha called. She turned to face them, hitching her pack higher on her back and grinning. “It’s a good path. I knew I could find it.”

Calea and Bron made their way to her, choosing their footsteps carefully through a loose fall of pebbles and grit, and stood beside her to see what Nyasha considered “a good path.” It was wide enough for them to walk only single file, but it didn’t go straight up the slope, instead crossing the face of the mountain at a moderate angle. Some way up, it made a hairpin turn in the opposite direction, and so on up the mountain.

“It’s a switchback path,” Nyasha said, as proud as if she’d made it herself. “There aren’t any good passes through the Burnt Mountains, not for days and days in either direction, so this will take us pretty near the top before we cross over. We’ll be able to see Thyrion from above, and it’s something to see. Quite a distance away, though. Once we see it, it will still take a few days to get there.”

“We’ll be able to see the Great Well,” Calea said. “I’ve seen maps of the city. They call it the Heart of Thyrion. It was once a canyon, and it’s like a small sea in the middle of the buildings and walls.”

Nyasha nodded. “Yes. I thought it was pretty, like a huge bubble in the ground, never still.”

Calea breathed deep, shoring up her confidence and her strength, and started up the path. It wasn’t quite as impossible as Bron and Calea had feared, but by the end of the day both were worn thin. For the first time, even Nyasha looked bedraggled and weary. Nyasha had stopped adjusting the pack higher on her back, letting it droop until the straps dragged on her upper arms.

Even so, they had made it the right distance, as evidenced by another previously used camping spot in a place Nyasha recognized, this one on a wide shelf of rock where a few hardy bushes had contrived to grow into the side of the mountain. Bron did not seem enthusiastic about sleeping in such a place. There was little chance of being ambushed here by man or beast, but they would still set a watch, one of them sitting nearer the edge while the other two slept pressed against the mountain. Small protection, but better than none.

They set out from the cottage the next day with renewed determination. Bron led them on an oblique angle back to the path, so they returned to it far away from the scene of yesterday. Calea appreciated it. She didn’t know what had happened to those men they’d left in the road like so much detritus, and she didn’t want to know.

It seemed that she was always leaving attackers behind in roads and alleys. One dead face was already trapped in her mind’s eye. She shied away from imagining the others, the men buried in stone, the men sprawled in the desert sun. But Calea’s was a mind that saw patterns and fit them together at all times, whether she willed it or not, and now it was far too easy to see them all, one face after the other, dead because of her.

As if to mock the dark turn of Calea’s thoughts and prove just how purposeless they were, the day’s travel went better than expected. Bron seemed to be healing surprisingly quickly, and Calea felt stronger and more able than ever. After her grimness in the cottage, Nyasha bounced back to her cheerful self, full of stories and songs. She seemed to have even softened toward Calea, for some reason, and the two women managed to be more civil toward each other.

The days were difficult. Travel in the rocky foothills leading toward the BurntMountains was slow and painful. They tried to keep up a good pace, constantly chivvied by Nyasha, who told them repeatedly how much swifter she and her papa had been on these paths.

“Are you sure you’re not just remembering those trips with too much nostalgia? Surely the two of you could not have always been such wonderful travelers,” Calea snapped back at her at one point, irritated by constantly being compared to a strong man in his prime and being found wanting. Nyasha shut her mouth and was sullenly silent for a few hours.

However, Calea noticed that Nyasha watched her struggle on the path, and eventually Nyasha seemed to forgive her. “Perhaps I was,” she admitted as they began to set their camp that night beneath a sheltering ridge of rock. “I remember those trips very fondly, it’s true.” For once they were managing to camp in a place where Nyasha and her father had stayed, and that made her smile like a little girl.

*    *     *

Nyasha loved the campfires. On nights when they were not all too exhausted by the day’s walk, she wanted to share stories. Mostly she wanted funny tales, but the two Jalseians were grossly short of such things. Their lives back in Jalseion must have been very sad and serious, if they were too busy even to notice the funny things that happened in every life.

“Come now, you lived and worked in the Academy, yes? A place chock-full to the brim with Select of all kinds? You must have had eccentrics on every side.” Nyasha grinned at Calea across the fire, hoping she understood that this was not meant as an insult. “Dr. Burdock is the only Select I’ve ever known well, and he’s the funniest little man.”

“What do you mean?” Calea asked.

“I found him to be very kind and considerate,” Bron said almost in the same breath.

“Well, that too,” Nyasha said. “Dr. Burdock is an uncommonly gentle man. But he had such funny habits. I think he told you that his talent with magic was rather weak, and he was best at making things somewhat warmer or somewhat cooler. Well, he took advantage of that. He loved his tea, but he didn’t like to drink it all at once. So he would brew his tea and leave the pot in the common room in the clinic, take a cup with him to his exam room, and sip it a little, then leave the cup there. When it got cold he’d touch it to warm it up, which was a trick that always delighted the younger patients. He’d do that over and over, then go back to the common for another cup and do the same thing with that one. He never got tired of it, and by the end of the day that pot of tea looked dark as a pit.”

She laughed at the look of horror on Calea’s face at the idea of rewarming tea over and over again. “It must have tasted like the worst medicine by the time he was done,” Calea said. Her face was both fascinated and repulsed.

“I don’t know, I never touched it.” Nyasha grinned, hugging her knees to her chest. “I wouldn’t dare. The other doctors always wrinkled up their noses at it, too. Dr. Burdock is a very sweet man, and everyone likes him, but that habit of his is disgusting to anyone who enjoys proper tea.”

They all laughed, Nyasha joyously, Calea hesitantly, and Bron low and soft.

“I hope the young doctor is all right,” Bron murmured a bit later.

“I’m sure the others returned from Jalseion soon after we left,” Nyasha said. “Like I said, everyone likes Eman Burdock. They’ll look after him. But when communications come back, I wouldn’t mind hearing from him. I’ll call or write or something.”

As impossible as it seemed, Bron did know where to go. He led them far away from the path into territory he had absolutely no way of knowing. And yet, at the end of the trip was a house, a little stone house set in the side of a hill, built into the rock itself. Small and quaint and in all ways unexpected and inexplicable, but there it was. A house. Or at least a cottage.

Bron and Nyasha hesitated several paces away, trying to come up with some sort of protocol for dealing with this situation. Calea, though, tromped right up to the wooden door of the cottage, her crutch clattering in the loose rocks and drifts of gritty sand. She knocked her prosthetic hand on the door, once, twice, and sheets of dust fell from the aged and pitted wood like an arid waterfall. It swung inward of its own accord, dislodged by the knocking, and Calea pushed her way inside.

The place was lit by sunlight coming through the roof above, which was part wooden latticework, part rocky ledge protruding from the hillside. The furnishings were sparse and covered with the ubiquitous tan dust that sifted over everything in this miserable region, long untouched by any human. Her feet and the end of her crutch left dark impressions in the dust on the floor.

“It’s abandoned,” she called over her shoulder, but Bron and Nyasha were already pressing in behind her, looking around in wonder.

“What is this place?” Nyasha mused aloud. “Whoever would have built it, and why?”

“I think I know.” Calea moved to a table in the back where she’d spotted, in the dust and filth, a familiar object. She leaned on the creaking table with her hip and lifted to the light a roughly cylindrical lump of dark blue glass. “It’s an inkwell. A scholar lived here.”

“A hermit, more like,” Bron murmured, brushing dust off a stool so he could sit down. He was pale and all but swaying again, now that they were comparatively safe. Nyasha halted her exploration and moved back over to him, slinging her pack off her back as she went. If she was wise, she would have brought some sort of medical supplies from the clinic. Calea was beginning to learn that Nyasha was indeed wise, in her way.

“A hermit,” she agreed, turning the inkwell around in her hand. She had had an inkwell much like it in her first classroom, but that one had been attached to her desk. Magical outbursts among the young Select often flung objects about in amusing but dangerous ways, and the Academy took a few precautions to avoid injuries. Not enough, some might argue, but a few.

Curiosity pushed Calea upright again, forging further back into the abandoned cottage. A particular formation of rock had caught her eye, and as she approached she confirmed it. Yes, these were bricks, not rocks, arranged against the wall in a semicircle that looked very much like…

“An indoor well,” she announced with satisfaction, pleased to have plumbed the mystery. She leaned against the lip of the well, looking down into the deep black pit of it. No smell of water, no sound of dripping, however faint and distant. It wasn’t a water well, though that would have been useful out here in the desert, too.

A separate water cistern against the opposite wall validated her theory. She turned back to Bron and Nyasha, nodding along with her thoughts. “There used to be magic here, probably only a very small pocket not large enough to support a community. A Select must have learned about it and built this cottage to study magic in his or her own way. A fine pursuit. I confess some envy at the idea.”

The other two didn’t look nearly as interested as she thought they should be, but they listened. Bron’s arm was now bound with clean bandages, Calea noted. He leaned against the wall and drank from a canteen, seeming comfortable enough, for Bron, and some of his color had returned. Nyasha was retrieving something else from her pack.

They were tools, each laid neatly on the floor within easy reach of Nyasha’s clever little fingers. “I want to adjust your prosthetics,” she told Calea, kneeling primly on the floor with her hands on her knees. “We have time now, and it needs done.”

Calea reluctantly left her explorations and made her way back to the others. She was leaning on the crutch less and less, she noted with pleasure, though the flat floor inside the cottage might have had something to do with that. Maybe in a few days she would be able to graduate to a walking stick.

Nyasha had wiped a wide area of the floor around her clean of dust, and Calea lowered herself down, sitting with her legs spread out in front of her. She couldn’t help a sigh of relief when Nyasha reached out and started undoing straps, releasing the tight suction of the socket against her arm stump.

“How do you feel?” Nyasha asked. “I know they’re bothering you, but how much?”

“It’s bearable,” Calea said. But her mind was caught on that question. How do you feel?

Now that the curiosity of her initial exploration of the hermitage had faded, all her confused emotions from the scene at the road were returning. She felt weak and helpless, and furious at her weakness and helplessness. Bron had been useful. Even Nyasha had been useful. All Calea had done was sit there and watch.

“Did you find any magic in that little well?” Nyasha asked as she started tinkering with the arm prosthetic. “Maybe you could start to show me how you altered your old prosthetics.”

Calea shook her head. “There was nothing. But that’s not surprising. It’s only sensible that whatever affected both Jalseion and Averieom had power enough to reach this place, too.”

Thyrion was far away over the mountains. Surely magic still filled that mighty, powerful place.

She had watched the brigand die, back at the well. Blood had flowed from the wound in his chest, and he sat there and clutched the knife, and he knew he was going to die. His face had been…terrible. Much the way, she imagined, her own face had looked when she’d realized the Well in Jalseion was empty.

Calea shuddered, trying to fight away the dread of it, the knowledge. She had seen dead bodies in the streets of Jalseion as they’d departed for Averieom, but she hadn’t seen anyone die during the disaster. This was the first time. She had always thought it would be just a thing, a process, like anything else in nature. In a way, it had been just as she’d thought. The body had shut down because it could not continue, like any machine with too many broken parts or not enough fuel.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. That dying man, the spark in his eyes slowly fading, his drawn face white as white could be against the red and brown rocks. He had expected only to steal a few items from unwary travelers, not to die at the hands of a stranger. He had woken up this morning just as they had, roused from his bed, and had met his companions to walk the hills, blind and ignorant in the sun. Now he would never do any of that again. He would never do anything.

Calea had been staring blankly at the wall as she thought, but now she looked up, turning to face Bron. “Don’t risk your life again,” she rapped out, harsher than she meant to. “You stood over that food, not giving way–they could have killed you. It was only food. We could have gone back to Averieom for more. It’s not worth your life.”

Nyasha snorted, but it was not a derisive sound. It seemed almost…sad. Calea whipped around to stare at her. “What?”

“Are you still so naive?” Nyasha asked, which was something, coming from her. “They didn’t only want the food. They wanted to kill you. Bron fought for your life, not just a bundle of supplies.”

Calea looked to Bron, expecting a chuckle, a shake of the head. But he just looked back at her, close-mouthed and grim. Calea drew in a breath and fell silent.

The last time her life had been threatened, she had pulled on enough raw magical power to melt stone, entombing her attackers and saving both herself and Bron. She still didn’t know if those men had survived–she hadn’t wanted to ask after them, hadn’t wanted to know. This time, she had been completely useless and unable to protect anyone, even herself.

There had to be magic in Thyrion. There just had to be.

Calea lay on her back on the rocky hillside, winded and hurting, as the world erupted in chaos around her. All she saw at first was the sky, blue and cloudless. That horrid, filthy man’s first action had been to shove her, hard, and she’d fallen flat, her crutch spinning away. She didn’t know where it was. All she could manage at the moment was to lie on the rock and try to breathe.

“Nyasha, run!” Bron bellowed.

Calea hoped the girl would obey. At least one of them should reach their destination.

Then fury filled Calea, from the top of her head to the sole of her foot. What was she doing, lying around like this? She had to get up, she had to do something, she had to… She had to breathe. Pulling in air in hard-won sips, her anger fuel for her paralyzed limbs, Calea forced herself upright, fingers digging into a jutting rock to support herself. She groaned, pained and dizzy, but she would not lie down, she would not.

Bron was fighting, one against four. Calea had been so stupid not to recognize these men for what they were–vandals, thieves, brigands. Everything Dr. Burdock had feared, everything Bron had been watching for, and she had had no idea. She had simply been irritated at the interruption their presence had caused, the way they spoke and looked and were, so uncouth and savage. The only comfort in her stupidity was that Nyasha obviously hadn’t understood the threat, either. They had been stupid together.

One of the thieves was making off with the smaller bundle Bron had been carrying, the one that should have been Calea’s burden. Bron’s own pack had fallen off his back and was now on the ground, where he was trying to keep it, beating off the thieves who came for it. The vandals’ leader was at Bron now, swinging at him with a huge stick, and Calea was afraid. If that hit Bron on the head, if he went down…

But Bron grabbed the club in his big hands and wrenched it away, then struck back at the man. His knives were already gone from his waist. Calea hauled herself upright against the rock and looked around, trying to see what had happened to them.

Oh, how nice. The thief who had tried to steal Calea’s bundle was down and bleeding about twenty paces away, the items from the pack tumbled on the ground around him. Maybe Nyasha could get them.

Another vandal was leaning on the hillside opposite where Calea sat, and he was panting in convulsive jerks, clutching inconsolably at another throwing knife, which was… Great stars, it was in his chest. The thief’s face was pale, knowing, and the blood flowed and flowed. Calea stared at him, unable to look away. He was dying, and she was watching. It was as if they were both trapped in some horrible circle, staring at each other, neither able to escape the inevitable or even to look away. He was dying.

Bron shouted in pain, and Calea’s eyes tore away from the dying brigand and back to the fight. Bron’s arm bled from a slashing cut, new and awful and bright. But he held on to the leader with both arms, wrestling him down to the rock. Bron had him almost in a headlock; he was going to win that fight. But the other vandal, the fourth one, had a long, wicked knife, and he was raising it for another strike. Bron was vulnerable, his arms full, his legs spread wide for purchase on the rubbled path. The man with the knife had already gotten him once, and now he was going to stab Bron in the back.

“No!” Calea yelled.

Out of nowhere, her crutch flew through the air and struck the knife man upside the head. He toppled like a felled tree. And over him stood Nyasha, wide-eyed with horror and panting with adrenalin, clutching Calea’s crutch in pale-knuckled hands.

She hadn’t run, though she would have been wise to. Calea was almost absurdly grateful. It was a huge emotion filling her as completely as the rage at her helplessness had done, overwhelming and unfamiliar. She’d never felt anything like it.

Bron held his choke-hold on the leader until the brigand went down, slack and still. Then he straightened up and looked around, at the four downed thieves, at Calea sitting in the rocks, at Nyasha standing there still frozen with the crutch held angled from her shoulder like a batsman at a game.

“We’re…we’re all right,” Nyasha said wonderingly.

“Yes, we are,” Calea said more firmly.

The blood from the wound on Bron’s arm dripped into the grit and sand, bright and red and far too quick, like water from a bad faucet, leaking and leaking. He didn’t seem to notice at first, but stood swaying over the pack of food and other supplies he’d nearly given his life to protect. Its straps were broken. Sliced. They’d cut it off him and they would have cut him down to obtain it.

Who killed for food? Who attacked people for the mere things they carried? It was obscene. Calea couldn’t understand it at all.

“Bron, your arm.” Calea grabbed the rock with both hands, hauling herself up to her feet. She couldn’t go to him–still too clumsy, too weak on her new legs. “You’re bleeding. Bron!”

Bron looked down at the gash incuriously, raising his arm as the blood continued to drip down his forearm, off the knob of his wrist and into the ground. Nyasha made a high-pitched sound and suddenly broke her paralysis, running around the man she had downed to get to Bron. At least she tossed the crutch in something approximating Calea’s direction.

“Give me that,” Nyasha ordered Bron, hands already reaching to tear open the ragged cloth of his sleeve.

Bron held his arm out to her without comment, watching mutely as she bound the cut with bloody strips of the shirt sleeve. Calea found something to admire in the efficiency of Nyasha’s movements and the way she used what little material she had available to her to cover the gash very quickly. Then she realized that Nyasha’s hands were shaking, and what she had taken for efficiency was something closer to panic.

“We need to find shelter,” Nyasha said. Her voice trembled, too. “We have to…we have to rest.”

We have to get away from all of this blood, these bodies of men both living and dead, she could have said but didn’t. Calea heard it even so.

“She’s right,” Calea said. She bent down, stretching for the discarded crutch. The sun suddenly felt too hot, too bright, an all-seeing eye far above them watching them with judgment.

Bron stood there in the path, breathing. He did not object. Then they both saw him sway, back and forth, just once.

“Bron!” Nyasha grabbed his arm above the elbow, away from the cut, holding both him and herself upright. “Bron, we have to find shelter.”

He met her eyes. Calea watched, uncomprehending, as something happened between them, a moment of connection and understanding. It made no sense. They had known this girl for only a few days. Perhaps a week. And already Bron looked at her like that, like he knew her. It was…

It was the way he looked at Calea, come to think of it. She’d always hated that about him, from the very first day. That idiotic belief of his that she needed to be protected and he was the one who was supposed to do it. But why would he look at Nyasha like that? And…

And… Calea’s mind halted. It was true, wasn’t it? They both needed his protection, at least out here in a desert peopled with thieves and monsters.

Even if it was true, that didn’t mean she had to like it.

Nyasha looked at Bron, and Bron looked at Nyasha. Then he nodded, his eyes sparked, and he lifted his head. His legs were firm and steady again, and he bent to lift the pack with his uninjured arm. “This way.” He nodded off into the hills. “I know where to go.”

Nyasha paused long enough to scoop up the spilled items from the dropped pack, and Bron retrieved his knives. When the leader of the robbers started to stir, waking from unconsciousness, Bron kicked him hard in the ribs. The man stayed down. Then they walked into the hills, straight off the path, and didn’t look behind them.

On the third day, though, they found themselves suddenly not alone on the path. As they rounded the bend of a hill, the highest they’d climbed yet, a group of four men appeared as if from nowhere and fell in with them, two walking behind and two before. They wore fashions familiar to the area and looked not unlike the farmer who had given them a ride out of Averieom.

“Greetings, fellow travelers,” the one who seemed to be their leader said as the men descended from the hill onto the path. “Mind if we walk with you?”

“Of course not.” As usual, Nyasha was in front, and she grinned at the fellow without a thought. Bron was instantly wary, but he resisted the urge to put his hand on his knife. Where had they come from?

“We’re just simple hillfolk, traveling from our cottages to our herds of goats in the mountains,” the leader said to Nyasha, glib as could be.

“Really? I never heard of anyone living out here before.” Nyasha’s voice was curious and interested, without a hint of suspicion. Which was good in a way–Bron could let her talk, and perhaps the men wouldn’t notice that he was ready to fight back if they started something. The girl would lull them into false security.

And maybe they were telling the truth. Maybe.

Still, Bron stepped closer to Calea and touched her elbow in warning. She glanced at him and seemed to understand, nodding once, then turning her attention back to the path. Bron walked close to her, and the strangers near them were wise enough to keep their distance.

“And where’re you from?” the leader asked Nyasha.

“Avereiom,” Nyasha said, in the same easy tone. Oh, no, thought Bron. Don’t say… “From the Medical Sanctuary, you know, all the doctors and nurses? I used to work there.”

Bron felt the tension in the men around him ratchet further upward, and his gaze darted back and forth, though he kept his face pointed forward, trying to keep track of them all. Even those quick glances caught the edges of weapons poorly hidden under jackets and shirts, walking staves that would serve very well as clubs….

“Oh, yes?” The leader tried to keep his casual tone, but it was obviously a strain. “You have any drugs, medicine? That stuff is valuable now, you know, with the world all higgledy and no knowing when new supplies will come.”

This was blatant enough that even Nyasha noticed, and she went quiet, glancing nervously back at Bron as if for instructions. He frowned at her, unsure of what to do. Years of experience in the roughest neighborhoods of the roughest Section of Jalseion told him a fight was brewing, but he’d never learned how to dispel the clouds as they gathered.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Calea said, exasperated. Bron wondered suddenly, desperately, how both of the females he’d associated himself with could manage to be so smart in some ways and so stupid in others. He nudged Calea’s elbow again, but she didn’t seem to understand.

“We have nothing to trade with you and no need to do so even if we had the goods you seek,” Calea went on, imperious and firm as she had always been. But oh, this was so very much the wrong time to pull out her commanding voice again. “We’re in quite a hurry, so really, you should just get back to your goats.”

Here it all ground to a halt. The conversation, the chance of escape, and the men surrounding them. Calea pulled up short, surprised, as one grubby little man turned to her and leaned far too near her face.

“I’ve heard that tone before. Those words.” He grinned, and his teeth were broken and yellow. Calea recoiled into Bron, who tried to keep her upright without entangling his hands. He would need them soon enough. “You’re from Jalseion. You think you’re better than us.”

“I don’t… I didn’t say…”

Bron had never heard Calea sputter before. Behind the man, Bron caught a glimpse of Nyasha’s big brown eyes, wide and terrified.

“You’re Select, aren’t you?” The man’s smile became something ugly and stunted, sick and mean.

Then the weapons came out.

Bron found his roll and bedded down. He was asleep in seconds, his fatigue dragging him down so suddenly it was like being swallowed. No dreams, or none he could remember. He simply closed his eyes, then opened them what seemed an instant later to a bright early morning and Calea’s angry voice.

“I call it disrespect, that’s all. You could have at least asked me. Instead, you didn’t even try.”

Nyasha’s voice was exasperated. “You were asleep. Neither of us wanted to wake you. Probably because we assumed you’d be grumpy and unreasonable, just like you are now.”

“I’m not unreasonable! It’s completely logical for an equal burden to be shared equally.”

“Not in every case, my lady.”

“Stop calling me that. It’s not even correct. Jalseion has no nobility. We are a meritocracy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you liked it when people bowed and scraped before your obvious superiority.”

The argument went on, but by this time it had devolved to a very childish level that might have been amusing if it hadn’t been so sincerely sharp-edged. Resigned to the need for intervention, or at least distraction, Bron pushed himself out of his blanket and walked over to where they sat by the rebuilt fire. “What’s wrong?”

Calea turned on him, eyes flashing. “You should have woken me for a share of the watch.”

Bron looked down at her and was silent for a moment, thinking. It would do no good to explain his reasoning to her–she would reject the idea that she should have been allowed more leeway simply because she needed it. She was not like Nyasha. She didn’t know how to receive kindness without seeing condescension in it.

“All right,” he said at last. “Tonight we will split the watch equally.”

Calea was satisfied and turned back to watching their morning corn cakes cooking on the fire.

Nyasha, though, sighed noisily, as teenagers were wont to do. “I still don’t think it’s necessary. Papa and I never had trouble on this road before. It’s too unknown to be dangerous.”

“Better to keep watch for no reason than fail to keep watch and be set upon,” Bron said.

Nyasha gave him a crooked smile. “Is that a saying from Jalseion? I never heard it.”

“It’s a saying from my old trainer, the man who taught me how to fight. So I suppose it is from Jalseion, in a way.”

She just laughed at him, light and delighted. Fond. Bron was startled to realize that he was one of the people Nyasha considered a friend. Calea watched the girl with narrowed eyes, confused and annoyed.

From their spiteful words to each other, it appeared that Nyasha considered Calea less than a friend. Now Bron would see how accurate his assessment of last night had been. He did not look forward to it.

They set out after breakfast. In the next couple days the path led them into a series of foothills leading up to the mountains. They traveled both up and down, following the slopes, but certainly it seemed to be more up than down. Despite Calea’s objections, Bron carried her bundle as well as his own, and she had a much easier time without the extra weight. Her practice back at the clinic had clearly paid off.

Nyasha was cheerful, too, sometimes tromping ahead to the tops of the slopes and waiting for them there, sometimes telling little stories of when she had traveled this road with her father. She had seen nothing on her watch last night, and she expected to see nothing tonight, or so she told them repeatedly. This was a safe path, because who in their right minds would climb mountains when they could simply go around.

“The caravan might very well beat us there,” she said at one point, chuckling at the idea. “The main roads to Thyrion are very good and the way is flat. My papa and I went through the mountains because it was cheaper than going with a caravan, and we walked fast.” She didn’t say that this group was moving much slower, but she didn’t have to. She’d made the point very clear in other conversations.

Calea frowned at this but said nothing. She needed her breath for walking.

Bron kept the watch and wondered about things he couldn’t explain. He had moved away from the dim red glow of the fire, putting his back to it as he looked out on the darkness beyond their little grove of desert trees. He could hear the women breathing behind him, Nyasha and Calea for once acting as one, if only in unconsciousness.

He thought his life had been complex before. He’d had no idea.

His loyalty lay with Calea. That was the choice he had made, and he would keep his promises into death, no matter how useless or old-fashioned others, including Calea herself, might think them. It was his job to make sure Calea was safe, whatever that meant and wherever it took him. That was a truth he regarded as highly as any scientist regarded truths of magic and power.

But the other girl had laid a claim on him, as well. Bron wasn’t sure when it had happened. Perhaps it had been when he’d drawn her out of the rubble of her home. Perhaps when she had started panicking and he’d calmed her with his mere presence. Perhaps it had been when she’d looked at him earlier in the evening, trusting and hopeful and afraid. In that moment, he had accepted that she was his to protect, too. The beginning had not been so formal–no employer had told him, “Now you must keep Nyasha safe.” But perhaps it was all the more powerful for being something chosen between them, not laid on them by an outside party.

Yet how could Bron keep two promises? Calea called him simple. Frequently. It was true enough. He found a certain joy in having one task, and one task only. Now… Everything was more complicated, and part of him shrank from it.

At the same time, he could not be sorry he had met Nyasha. She and Calea were similar in many ways–both intelligent far beyond his capacity to understand, both inventive with tools and materials, both stubborn and aggressive and bossy. Good stars above, they were both so bossy. Bron wondered what sin he had committed to deserve two such women in his life, tugging him this way and that.

But Nyasha was very different from Calea, too. She was much younger and more naive, yes, but also a great deal more open with herself. Where Calea hid, Nyasha displayed proudly, letting all the world know exactly what she felt at any moment. Nyasha was generous with her friends, like Dr. Burdock, so sweetly saying farewell that even that nervous young man had had no choice but to accept it. Bron suspected that Nyasha could also be cruel to her enemies, though he hadn’t seen that yet.

That was another difference–Nyasha had friends and enemies. Calea, it seemed, held all the world in the same low regard. Her life was much the poorer for it, Bron believed. As much as Calea seemed to despise Nyasha’s openness of spirit, perhaps it would be good for her to be around it. Bron could not explain how the three of them had fallen together, but it did not seem like an evil.

Another thing he couldn’t explain was how he’d found this tiny, sheltered valley in the first place. When Nyasha had looked into his eyes, her gaze so desperate and pleading, his mind had been blank. He knew nothing of travel, of the signs to look for in order to find what those alone in the wilderness needed to survive. He was a man of Jalseion, born and bred, and he’d never been outside the city walls before this week.

But when he had decided that he must obey, that he must help this girl, and all of them, in any way he could, suddenly he had known where to go. The women probably thought that he’d heard water or smelled the scent of greenery or saw some track in the rock. But none of that had happened. He’d simply known that there was only one safe place to go, all the rest of their surroundings barren and exposed, and he’d led them there.

How? Bron had no idea.

He also couldn’t explain how Calea had been healed, of course. That was a subject his mind had been unwilling to touch since it had happened. It was just so bizarre. He was less inclined to think some remnant of magic had done it, though, and thought it more likely that fate had lent a hand in some way. Or perhaps the blurry, amorphous, beyond-the-sky God his mother had always spoken of. But that was insane, and he would be a fool to say anything about it to Calea.

Bron swayed slightly where he stood and blinked, pulling himself upright. He was tired, and he ached. Maybe he should sit down….

No, he really ought to get a few hours of sleep. He couldn’t tell the time by the stars, as a true wanderer could have, but he knew he’d been standing guard for many hours. Dawn couldn’t be far off, though as of yet he didn’t even see a slight lightening of the sky in the east to presage the sun.

Bron’s eyes closed of their own accord, and he forced them open. It was no use. He had to rest.

He turned to the fire, hesitating, then finally went to Nyasha. Yesterday had been far too hard on Calea. She needed as much rest as they could afford her. Nyasha was young and strong, and she was eager to prove herself.

Bron crouched down, patting the girl’s shoulder. “Nyasha.” He kept his voice low but let some urgency into it. His body was warning him that soon enough he would keel over, whether he willed it or not. “Nyasha, please wake.”

She stilled beneath his hand, the deep breaths of sleep pausing as she woke. “Yes?” She sounded alert, if a bit wary. “What is it?”

“I need you to keep watch till morning. I have to sleep for a few hours.”

Nyasha sat up abruptly. “You’ve been keeping watch? You haven’t slept at all?”

“Yes.”

Her voice was suddenly troubled. “Papa and I never kept watch before.”

“The world has changed, now, I’m afraid. Can you look out for a few hours? Wake me if you hear or see anything suspicious. Just a touch to my arm will do. I’m a light sleeper.”

“Yes, of course.” Nyasha shook her blanket off, leaving it in an untidy pile, and moved away from the fire just as Bron had done. She had good instincts, even if she had never stood a watch before. Bron’s shoulders relaxed a bit, seeing that. “You sleep. I’ll be fine.”

“Thank you.”

Nyasha wondered if Heaven laughed at the vain practices of Calea Lisan, too. She smiled at the thought and turned to see how the Jalseian woman was faring. At the sight, though, her smile slid away. Calea was lagging badly, and misery was etched across her face, which was both pale with effort and already reddened by the sun. A grimace contorted her face each time she leaned her weight on the prosthetic leg.

Bron had slowed his stride to match Calea, and he eyed her with a look Nyasha knew. He wanted to offer to take Calea’s pack, which was already the lightest of the three of them. He knew his help would be rejected, so he was silent. But he was just as miserable as Calea. They were both such silly people, sometimes Nyasha didn’t know what she would do with them.

Well, Nyasha didn’t care what Calea thought of her, so she could do what she wanted. She glanced at the sky, waiting for them to catch up, as she’d outpaced them. It was still mid-afternoon, nowhere near time to stop for the night yet if they truly wanted to reach Thyrion in anything like the time she and her papa used to make.

When the Jalseians caught up with her, Nyasha reached over and took Calea’s pack without asking permission. “We’re going too slow,” she said bluntly, when the silly woman dared open her mouth in protest. She handed the bundle to Bron, who held it under his left arm without apparent effort.

Nyasha turned back to Calea. “Now, lean on my shoulder. Don’t fuss, my lady! We don’t have time to dither. I know a place up ahead where we can shelter, but it would be wise to reach it before nightfall.”

Calea’s cheeks flushed even brighter, but she handed her crutch to Bron and deigned to lean on Nyasha instead. Nyasha passed an arm around her torso and bore her up. It was more weight than she was used to, but she could handle it.

After a couple of hours, though, Nyasha had to admit defeat. She traded duties with Bron, letting him support Calea while she carried the pack. Calea accepted being passed from person to person with ill grace but could not spare the breath to voice her discontent. They stopped for a meal, wordlessly rushed by Nyasha as she continually looked at the sun and distant mountains, worrying about how far they still had to go. They moved on, Nyasha again propping up Calea.

It wasn’t fast enough. As sunset began to shade the mountains in deeper hues of orange and gold bisected with cavernous black shadows, Calea had faded much further. Nyasha, sweating and determined, dragged her along, but she could not see the place where she and her father used to stop. They hadn’t reached it, and they wouldn’t make it by full dark.

Nyasha paused, pulling in big lungfuls of air to refresh herself. Calea sagged against her, panting too hard to spare breath for complaint or question, which was something of a mercy. Nyasha looked to Bron.

“We need to find shelter.” She knew her eyes were big and pleading, her voice young and almost breathless. She was beginning to be frightened.

But she trusted Bron. He might be a Jalseian, same as Calea, he might never have spent a night in the wilderness in his life, but he was smart and strong. And he cared deeply about Calea, and about Nyasha too, she was sure of it. He would protect them or die in the attempt. If Nyasha couldn’t have her own papa, she couldn’t imagine a better alternative.

He looked back in her eyes, accepting the charge. Nyasha felt something pass between them, almost like static electricity jumping from one person to another. She gave her trust, and he took it and vowed to be trustworthy, all without a word.

Almost instantly, another light sparked in Bron’s eyes, and he stood up straighter, looking about with purpose and certainty. “I think…” he began, hesitantly at first. “Yes, I think we should… Yes, this way. Follow me. We will find shelter.”

The confidence in his voice invited no question, and Nyasha hitched Calea up a little higher against herself and followed him. Bron led them off the path at an angle around the rise of a rocky, scrub-covered hill. They followed the line of the hill for several minutes, then came around it into a slight dip between two or three hillsides. Nyasha heard the trickling of water, then saw the green.

A natural spring bubbled out of the side of one of the hills that surrounded this tiny valley, little bigger than one of the houses in Nyasha’s old neighborhood. Several azazel trees grew around the spring, thrusting their thin, gnarled roots into the rock and spreading a thin cover of leaves overhead. There was even a rock-ring circling wood ash and scorch marks, the remnants of fires from previous travelers.

It was a perfect place to shelter for the night.

“How about that.” Calea sighed, raising her head from Nyasha’s shoulder. “You did something right, you great lump.”

Bron smiled.

They found a ride with a farmer through the fields north of town. The midday sun was high overhead, but at this time of year it wasn’t too hot. The fields were planted and sprouting, and the farmer was proud to point out which ones were wheat or corn or watermelon or a dozen other crops. Nyasha knelt at the edge of the half-empty cart, pressed against a strapped-down crate, and looked out on everything with interest. She was determined to press Averieom into her memory and always hold on to the good things, and the fields of dark brown earth and tiny green sprouts were beautiful and worth remembering.

“Say, you’re from Jalseion, aren’tcha?” The farmer looked back at Calea and Bron. “You know anything about magic and the wells?”

Calea nodded, her back to the side of the cart and her legs stretched out in front of her. She had been strangely quiet since the goodbye at the Sanctuary. “I know something of magic.”

“You think the land’ll go infertile again now the wells are gone? Folks are mighty worried on that thought. If the desert all returns, how will we live?”

Calea shrugged. “Anything is possible. It might be that the magic in this part of the world has only moved somewhere else. I know nothing of agriculture, but perhaps since the land has been fertile so long, moisture will remain in the cycle. I suppose the children of this world will live as they always have–on the edge of survival, searching for all the scraps they can find to feather their nests.”

“That’s sorta poetic.” He looked at her side-eye for a moment, then turned back to watch the path ahead, touching the back of his horse with a furled whip. “Haw, now.”

At the edge of the fertile land, where the northern desert began to encroach on the fields and meadows, they descended from the cart, strapped their packs on their backs, and thanked the farmer. He farewelled Nyasha by name, though she couldn’t recall ever knowing his. Perhaps that was why he had been willing to take them so far beyond his own holding, to the place where sand and earth mingled. Nyasha could offer only a smile and thanks in return. Then she turned her back on Averieom.

The road ahead was rocky and barren, but she knew the way, and she wasn’t afraid. Nyasha led them into the land beyond civilization, her steps sure and her head held high. Rocks peppered the landscape all around, gradually growing larger as they continued. Here and there an azazel tree or gorse bush pushed its way through the sandy soil, spare yellow-green leaves fluttering in the cool southerly breeze.

Nyasha remembered treading this path with her papa, beginning the journey to Thyrion for a festival. They had made the trip three, perhaps four, times that she remembered. The journey had taken almost two weeks of walking each way, but the time had been pleasant and carefree, and they had both always been strong and sure-footed, finding pleasure in the exertion.

In truth, she remembered little of the festival itself. It had been a harvest celebration, which was a common enough holiday, but Thyrion raised it to ridiculous heights. The people were required to take their taxes to the government during that period, standing in long lines to present their documents and goods to government bureaucrats in the “Tithing Tents” set up in every plaza and square. In Averieom, taxes were paid with much grumbling and resignation, but the hardy people of Thyrion had chosen to make it into a time of fun.

Everywhere the Tithing Tents were raised, other smaller tents followed soon after–and food carts and tumblers and bards and merchant booths and fireworks and a thousand other entertainments and delights Nyasha scarcely remembered. “People are always willing to spend their money on anything but what they have to,” Papa had told her at one of their campfires, grinning his big white grin in the darkness. “If you have to give ten gold to the taxman, why not spend a copper for a pie?”

It was how the Thyrians kept their defiance, in a way, standing up and finding their own pleasure despite a rule that was much harsher and more restrictive than those in the other great cities. And going to enjoy it as a non-citizen had been Papa’s way of showing his own defiance. He no longer had to pay the tithe, but he could take his little daughter to see the jugglers and fire-eaters, to eat the lemon cakes and partridge soup, to laugh at the government men with their gray clothes and grayer faces. They couldn’t go every year, but each trip had been a wonderful treat.

More wonderful to Nyasha than the festival itself, though, was the time in the desert with her papa. In Averieom he worked hard every day, doing all sorts of jobs for anyone who would hire him. He shingled roofs and painted walls, built sheds and laid brick paths, glazed windows and mucked stables. He could do anything, Nyasha was firmly convinced, and anything he didn’t know already, he quickly learned.

Nyasha loved her mama, too, but Asha Cormorin had always been content to stay at the house, doing all the warm, homely things that made it such a lovely place despite its shabbiness. She gardened and knitted and painted little decorative patterns on furniture–all sorts of things. But from the time Nyasha could carry a toolbox, she followed her papa whenever she could. Most of Papa’s customers were wary of a little girl working on their property, however, so eventually she started going to the clinic to look for tasks to keep herself busy.

In the desert, though, Papa wasn’t working. He was free to laugh and chat and sing and tell stories, and that he did every day from dawn till dusk, to Nyasha’s endless delight. She learned how her parents met: “Over a soup kettle in an inn where she was working as a cook,” he said, slapping his knee in merriment, “And when I tried the soup, I kissed and claimed her in the next instant.” All the mischief he had gotten into as a child: “Scuttled up a chimney and pretended to be a soot-puff that could talk, scolding my sister for her terrible cleaning skills. She was so scared she brought down the house with her screaming. I got a whipping, but it was worth it.”

And, on their most recent trip, she’d learned why he and his wife had decided to leave Thyrion. Papa had sobered when she asked that question. “Our emperor had ambitions too great for the world to hold,” he told her, without even a hint of laughter in his voice. “It began to frighten us. Heaven laughs at the vain practices of we children of dust and water.”

Nyasha wasn’t sure what she had expected. Bron just stood there in the doorway, staring at her, and behind him Calea was working her way over to them and frowning like a thundercloud. They didn’t want her to come.

The smile slowly faded from Nyasha’s face, but it didn’t matter. She was coming.

She thrust the sack of food into Bron’s arms. “Here, take it. I gathered it from my old house. My mama always kept a well-stocked larder.” Bron reached out reflexively to relieve her of the burden, then continued to just stand there as if he didn’t know what to do, the silly man.

Nyasha’s hands ached from digging through the wreckage of her old home. Fortunately, the lean-to larder had been at the back of the house, so she hadn’t had to search where her parents had died. Papa had built that larder himself because the little space that came with the house hadn’t been large enough for Mama’s needs. When the house had collapsed, it had remained partly standing. Papa built things sturdy.

The house had been still and quiet. She hadn’t seen any neighbors. Her hands shook as she approached, unsure of what she’d find. The memory of her mama and papa, wrapped in each other’s arms in the rubble, was sharp and awful in her mind. No one had come to look for her while she’d been trapped. Why would anyone have taken care of…that?

But one of the first things Nyasha noticed, when she was finally able to see through the tears blurring her vision, was something new in the backyard. Nyasha approached, trembling, mind blank. She couldn’t imagine what it was.

Two fresh mounds of dirt, two grave markers made of broken planks from the debris. Someone had carved in the wood with a knife, simply inscribing her parents’ names. Asha and Brand Cormorin.

Nyasha wept for a long time, kneeling between the graves in the damp grass. It was mostly grief and pain, but with a lot of gratitude mixed in, too. Someone had cared. Someone had cared enough to bury them. She hadn’t known that anyone in Averieom gave even that much thought to her family.

It didn’t change her resolution to leave. This tiny village held nothing for her now. Her work at the Medical Sanctuary had just been something to pass the time; she’d always known that. She called no one here her friend, though there were certain folks she was friendly with. She had no reason to stay.

The only person she might really consider a friend…in all the world, really…was Bron. Nyasha knew how pathetic that would sound if she said it aloud, so she didn’t. If Bron was leaving, she would too. And, fortuitously, the Jalseians wanted to go to Thyrion, where her family had come from in the first place. She might have cousins there, maybe even an aunt or two. It was the only place she could think to go, and Bron was already heading there. It was perfect.

So Nyasha had gathered as much food as she could. And she was going.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Calea said, making her way over to the door to frown at Nyasha along with Bron. “You’re not going.”

“You need me,” Nyasha said. She had worked this all out in her head. “Your prosthetics aren’t perfect–not even close. I will bring tools from the clinic and keep adjusting them until they are as comfortable as possible. You need a guide, and I know the way through the mountains. It’s not just one path, it’s many; and I’m no artist, so any map I made would be confusing. Much better for me to come along instead. Besides that, I have the food you need. I’m not just giving it to you. If you want it, you have to take me, too.”

“Oh, dear.” And that was poor Dr. Burdock, coming out of the exam room to look on the proceedings with wide, worried eyes. “Nyasha, you’re leaving me, too?”

Nyasha gave him a sad smile. She truly did like Eman Burdock, and he’d been nothing but kind to her since Bron had brought her back, covered with dust and blank with the horror of her ordeal. She was sorry to leave him, but she had to. “Yes, Dr. Burdock. Please forgive me.”

“Why are you standing there in the doorway? At least come in and talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” But she crossed the threshold and went to him, putting her arms around him in a tight hug. “Thank you. You’ve been wonderful to me. But I have to go.”

“Oh.” He drew back and held her shoulders, looking her gently in the eyes. “Yes, I suppose you do. This place holds too much sadness for you now.”

Nyasha sniffed, suddenly overwhelmed, and could only nod.

Dr. Burdock wiped the wetness away from the corner of her eye with his thumb. “I hope someday at least you can visit. I’d be sorry to never see you again.”

“You’ll be all right.” She took his hands and squeezed them. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Even Calea had no more objections.