They left Skariz an hour after dawn, five of them and two mules, through the same gate they had come in by.
Talon came down to see them off. He stood under the arch with his hands folded in front of him and watched them load the packs, and he didn't say much. When Gemma passed him, he reached out as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to think better of it and let his hand fall. The chains on his wrist made a small sound.
"Come back," he said. He said it to her, not to Aros.
Gemma nodded because she didn't know what else to do. Then she followed the others out into the fog, and when she looked back from the first bend in the road, he was still standing there.
The road to Bondrea ran west and down, out of the hills and toward the coast. Broko walked in front with the mules, whistling something that never found its tune. Diana walked beside him with her map case strapped across her back, stopping every so often to take a bearing on a church tower or a ridge and make a mark. Aros took the rear. He always took the rear.
Candriela walked alone, a little apart from everyone, her sword across her back and her eyes on the trees.
Gemma had been trying to talk to her since they left. It wasn't easy. Candriela answered questions the way some people pay debts, with exactly what was owed and not a coin more.
"Last night," Gemma said finally, falling into step beside her. "You asked me about the crying."
"I did."
"Who is she?"
Candriela walked for a while without answering. A crow flew up out of the hedge beside them and went off across the fields, complaining.
"Someone I lost," she said at last. "A long time ago."
"Is she like me?"
"She was." A pause. "She is."
Gemma waited for more. Nothing came. She tried a different door.
"In Skariz I made a ring," she said. "Two, actually. It was easy there. The walls were full of something and I just... took a little. But out here there's nothing. I've been trying all morning." She held up her hands, cupped, and showed her the empty space between them. "See? Nothing."
Candriela glanced at her hands. Then she looked at Gemma's face for the first time since they'd left the city, a long, measuring look.
"You're doing it wrong," she said.
"How would you know? You can't do it."
It came out sharper than she meant. Candriela didn't seem offended. If anything, one corner of her mouth moved.
"No," she agreed. "I can't. But I watched someone who could, every day for six years, and she used to make that same face when she was trying too hard. Like she was trying to lift a cart with her teeth." She nodded at Gemma's hands. "You're reaching out for it. Grabbing. That works when the air around you is full, like in Skariz. Out here it's thin. You'll come back with nothing every time."
"Then what do I do?"
"One point," Candriela said. "One breath."
Gemma frowned. "That's it?"
"That's what she used to say. I didn't understand it either." Candriela kept walking, her eyes back on the trees. "She said the light was already inside her, a little, the way warmth is inside your hands when you've been holding a cup. You don't go looking for it. You pick one place on your body, the very tip of a finger, say, and you breathe all the way down, and you let the breath carry it there. Just to that one point. Nowhere else."
"And then?"
"And then you let it out."
Gemma tried. She picked her right forefinger. She breathed in until her ribs ached and breathed out slowly, and imagined the breath running down her arm like water down a gutter, all the way to the tip of her finger.
Nothing.
"Again," Candriela said, without looking.
She tried again. And again. They passed a farmhouse with its shutters nailed closed and a field of black stubble where nothing had grown in years. Diana stopped to sketch a bridge. Broko fed the mules an apple and pretended he hadn't eaten half of it first. Behind them, Aros said nothing at all, but Gemma could feel him watching.
On the eleventh try, somewhere near noon, it worked.
Nothing like the bright, easy ring of Skariz: a point of light no bigger than a grain of salt, sitting on the very tip of her finger. It trembled. It felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with heat, and when she breathed out, very slowly, it grew. It stretched into a line. The line bent. And then, so thin she could barely see it in the grey noon light, it closed into a circle the size of a coin.
She almost dropped it from surprise.
"Don't look at it," Candriela said quietly. "Keep breathing. If you stare at it, you start grabbing again."
Gemma breathed. The ring held. It hovered above her fingertip, turning slowly, and the voices that had been murmuring at the back of her head all morning grew a little louder, a little closer, like people leaning in to see.
She let it go. It vanished without a sound.
"I did it," she said. Her voice cracked on it, embarrassingly. "Out here. With nothing."
"You did it with what you had," Candriela said. "That's different from nothing."
"What comes after rings?" Gemma asked.
Candriela was quiet for a few steps. "Rings first," she said. "Then channels. Then things I never had names for." She glanced at Gemma's hand. "She called the first part the echo. Hearing. You've been doing that your whole life, I'd guess. Most people who hear never get as far as rings."
Gemma looked down at her fingertip, where the light had been. She found that she liked having names for it. She liked numbers even more. Two rings in Skariz, where the air was full. One out here, where it wasn't. Two and one. It was the first thing about the voices that had ever felt like hers.
Gemma looked up at her. The tall woman's face had gone back to stone, but there was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before, and Gemma realized, with a small shock, that it was grief, for someone who used to make that same face a long time ago.
"What was her name?" Gemma asked softly.
Candriela didn't answer. Ahead of them, the road dipped down into a long green shadow, and the first trees of the forest closed over it like a hand.
The forest was old, and it didn't like them.
That was how it felt to Gemma, anyway. The trees grew close and crooked, their roots buckling the road, their branches knotted so thickly overhead that the grey noon turned into a green dusk. Moss covered everything. The mules' hooves made no sound on it. Even Broko stopped whistling after the first mile.
The road narrowed where it crossed a stream, dropping into a ravine with steep banks on both sides. Diana stopped at the top and frowned at her map.
"This bridge isn't on here," she said. "It's new."
Aros came up from the rear. He looked at the bridge, a few planks laid across the stream, the wood still pale where it had been cut. He looked at the banks. He looked at the trees on the far side, and Gemma saw his hand move to the small of his back.
"Nobody builds a bridge in the middle of a forest for free," he said quietly. "Broko. The mules back. Everyone off the road."
They were still moving when the first bolt came out of the trees.
It hit the mule nearest Broko in the neck. The animal screamed and reared, and then there were men coming down both banks of the ravine, eight or nine of them, ragged and shouting, with crossbows and hatchets and one long spear. Broko got his musket up and fired, and the noise in the narrow ravine was enormous. One of the men folded over and slid the rest of the way down the bank.
Candriela was already moving.
Gemma had seen Aros fight. He fought like someone closing a door: quick, quiet, and done. Candriela was different. She drew the long sword off her back in one motion and went straight up the bank into the middle of them, and the sword didn't flash so much as it swung, heavy and wide, like a scythe in a field. The first man raised his hatchet to block and lost the hatchet and most of his arm. The second didn't get the chance to raise anything.
"Down!" Aros shouted. He was in front of Gemma without seeming to have crossed the space between them, the gutting knife in one hand and someone else's hatchet in the other. A man came at him with the spear. Aros let it pass his ribs, caught the shaft, and pulled. The man came with it.
Gemma crouched behind the dying mule with her heart slamming against her ribs. The voices had come up the moment the first bolt flew, roaring like a crowd, and she couldn't think through them. She pressed her hands over her ears. It didn't help. It never helped.
Then she saw Diana.
The mapmaker had gone down to the water's edge to drag the second mule out of the stream, and now she was standing knee-deep in the current with her short knife in her hand, alone, while a man on the opposite bank knelt and lifted a crossbow to his shoulder. He was taking his time. Diana hadn't seen him. She was looking at Broko, who was shouting something and reloading.
There wasn't time to shout. There wasn't time to do anything except the one thing Gemma had learned that morning.
One point. She picked her forefinger. One breath. She breathed in so hard it hurt and pushed the breath down her arm, all of it, and pointed at the space between Diana and the man on the bank, and let go.
The ring came out of her fingertip like a spark flying from an anvil. It crossed the ravine in an instant, growing as it went, from a coin to a plate to a shield of pale light as wide as a cartwheel. The bolt struck it a hand's width from Diana's chest.
It stopped. It didn't bounce or break. It simply stopped in the air, quivering, as if it had hit a wall of ice, and then the ring went out and the bolt dropped into the stream with a small splash.
Diana looked down at it. Then she looked across the water at the man with the crossbow, who was staring at the place where the light had been with his mouth open.
Candriela reached him first.
The fight ended the way fights do, all at once and without anyone deciding it. One moment there was shouting and the clang of metal; the next, two men were running into the trees and the rest were on the ground, and the only sounds were the stream, the wounded mule, and Broko swearing as he finished it with his knife.
Gemma was still crouched behind the dead mule. She couldn't stand up. The voices hadn't gone back down when the ring went out. They had stayed up, loud and close, and for a few terrible seconds she could hear individual sounds in them, words almost, as if a crowd of people were leaning toward her and all of them were saying the same thing at once, and she couldn't make out what it was.
Then a hand touched her shoulder, and the voices drew back, slowly, like water draining from a basin.
It was Diana. She was soaked to the thighs and there was blood on her knife that wasn't hers, and she crouched down in front of Gemma and looked at her without saying anything.
"I saw that," she said finally.
Gemma nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
"Thank you." Diana held up her hands, both of them, and wiggled the fingers, and something that was almost a laugh came out of her. "I told you I liked them attached."
Gemma laughed too. It came out wrong, half a sob, and Diana put an arm around her shoulders and didn't mention it.
Aros was walking among the bodies.
He did it as he did everything after a fight, slowly and carefully, crouching by each one, checking hands, belts, pockets. Gemma had seen him do it before and had never asked why. Now she got up, with Diana's help, and went to stand beside him.
He was kneeling over the man who had held the spear. A thin man, unshaven, in a coat so patched it was hard to tell what color it had been. A bandit, by any measure.
Except for his boots.
They were good boots. New boots, black leather, the soles barely worn. Aros pulled one off and turned it over, and stamped into the heel, small and neat, was a golden sun.
"Custodian issue," Candriela said, coming up behind them. She was wiping her sword on a handful of moss. "They hand them out to the men who guard the temple roads."
Aros said nothing. He searched the man's coat. He found a purse with six silver suns in it, so new they still shone. He found a folded paper that Gemma recognized before he opened it: the notice from the crossroads, her face too round, her hair left white.
And folded inside the notice, a second sheet.
It was a map. Not a good one, nothing like Diana's. A few quick lines in black ink: the road they were on, the forest, the stream, and beyond the forest a wide stretch of nothing marked with little tufts like grass. The marsh. Someone had drawn a circle at the edge of it, beside a small square that might have been a ruined house. Next to the circle, in a cramped and careful hand, the hand of a man who did not enjoy writing, were three words.
Slow them down.
Aros turned the paper over. On the back, in the same hand, there was a date. Tomorrow's.
Gemma looked from the paper to the road, which ran out of the forest a mile ahead and down toward the marsh, the only road to Bondrea. She thought of the man on the pier at Calad, touching his sword to his brow.
Someone had already drawn the place where they would sleep tomorrow night, and he was waiting there.