Rhaif looked doubtfully above. They still hadn’t escaped the warship’s shadow. It looked to be drifting closer to the Eitur. He pictured it descending and offloading a hunting party. Before long, he and the others could be pursued by air and by land.
He stared down at Shiya.
And what about her?
He knew Pratik was right. Plainly those aboard the warship had a means of tracking her, as surely as Xan had done in leading their group to Shiya’s broken form.
He looked over to the elder, who sat back on her heels in the rocking wagon, as if she had already given up on Shiya. Instead, Xan lifted an arm. The other four women in the wagon did the same. The elder started singing, which was picked up by the others. It was a wordless melody, just a lyric of resonance and chorus, rising from throats and fashioned by lips into something even grander.
As he listened, the old lullaby sung by his mother rose again in his head, as if stirred forth by the women’s chanting. Around him, all the Kethra’kai lowered their palms to the bronze form of Shiya. Where each hand touched, the dark bronze melded into lighter hues of copper and gold. The magick spread outward from their fingers, pooling across Shiya’s chest.
It was as if the women carried sunlight in their touch, but Rhaif knew the power wasn’t so much in their hands as it was in their singing, raised by voices that were strong enough to pierce bronze skin and burnish the cold forges inside her, to warm them back to life.
Thin, strong fingers—Xan’s—grabbed his wrist and drew his hand to the center of the swirling pool. She lowered his palm between Shiya’s breasts, as if inviting him to feel a heartbeat he knew was not there.
As his skin touched bronze, the singing grew louder, heard not with his ears, but with his own heart. His mother’s old lullaby echoed there, too, rising and falling, finding home in that greater melody. Then something new arose. It was a golden strand of warm bronze that threaded through all, joining everything together. But it wasn’t entirely new. It was more like his mother’s lullaby, there but nearly forgotten. Only this song existed within him and without. It shone brightly enough for him to follow its threads down into Shiya and back into his own heart.
He remembered wondering why he was so connected to this bronze woman. Back in Anvil, he questioned whether she had bound him up in some silent version of bridle-song. He now recognized he was right—but also wrong. What tied them was not a song of command and entrapment. It was a melody forged as much by his own loneliness and despair as it was by Shiya’s solitude and displacement. They had needed each other and found each other. Here was not a song of bridling, but one of companionship, of two spirits sharing one another.
Warm fingers found his hand and pressed his palm more firmly to Shiya’s chest.
While he was still lost in the song, it took him a breath to see that it was not Xan who held him.
He stared at the bronze fingers resting atop his.
“Shiya…”
He turned to find glassy eyes upon him. They were still cold but with the barest flicker of warmth there now.
“I’m here,” he whispered.
The tribal song rose around him, but he sensed the others weren’t trying to revive Shiya further. He suspected their singing did not have the fiery power of the Father Above. It only had enough strength to stir her, to sustain her for a time.
Instead, the new crescendo served another purpose. The combined voices swelled higher, slowly hiding the brightness beneath their greater song.
Soon Rhaif could barely discern those golden threads any longer. But he knew such masking was not meant to blind his eyes. He stared up as the wagon cleared the warship’s giant shadow and rode back into sunlit mists. He squinted against the glare, watching that dark moon setting toward the glow of Eitur’s green waters.
He understood.
It is those eyes that must stay blind.
* * *
STANDING ON THE shore of Eitur, Wryth shook Skerren’s orb, then held it steady again. He studied the jostling spin of lodestones, waiting for them to stop, to point where he should go. But they just wobbled and twirled in the oil, some even going in opposite directions. He tried rotating the globe and turning himself in a circle.
Still nothing.
Brask watched his frustration from the end of a ramp that extended from the hovering mass of the Pywll. The commander’s crimson features had darkened. Wryth had urged him to lower the warship over the lake and drop a ramp to shore. A trio of trackers with chained thylassaurs had already left, scouting the forest ahead. But the main hunting party, which consisted of a dozen knights on horseback, led by Brask’s second in command—his brother Ransin, another Vyrllian—awaited instructions from Wryth.
“Do you have any further guidance?” Brask asked, his impatience worn thin. “I can’t have my brother and the others traipsing in circles out there.”
Wryth lowered the orb, ready to admit defeat. Maybe I need to be in the air to pick up those winds again. Perhaps this close to the forest, some natural emanation masks the artifact’s location.
He faced Brask, prepared to leave the search on the ground to the trio of trackers and their thylassaurs. Until he could reestablish contact, he feared he would be wasting resources and further irritating the Pywll’s commander. But before he could admit as much, a commotion drew their focus back to the woods.
One of the trackers burst out, winded, clearly having run all the way back, leaving his beast with the others. “We … We found some encampment. An area scuffed by a great number of feet, rutted with wheels, and trampled by hooves. The mud there is fresh.”
Brask looked to Wryth.
But the tracker was not done. “It appears whoever was there fled to the south.”
“Toward Havensfayre,” Brask mumbled.
Wryth breathed harder.
It has to be them.
If so, he realized it might explain his loss of the signal. Maybe the thieves took the artifact beyond the reach of Skerren’s orb. He stared off into the mist-shrouded forest, anxious to follow that trail. He dared not lose it again. More importantly, he had to stop the others from reaching Havensfayre, where it would be much harder to root them out.
He turned to Brask and told the commander what he wanted done, what else he needed for this hunt. The man scowled but passed on his instruction. In short order, a low hissing growl rose behind him. He turned as two massive black-furred scythers stalked down the ramp. The steel-helmed cats, each the height of a Gyn, bared fangs longer than their jaws. They came with a pair of bridle-masters, the rare songsters who could control such massive beasts.
Wryth turned to the tracker. “Take the cats to the encampment you found.” He then faced the bridle-masters. “Have your charges pick up the scents there, then loose them on the trail. They’re to run down and slay anyone they find.”
He had no fear for the bronze woman. She cast no scent of sweat and blood, and her metal body could certainly withstand the ravaging of such beasts.
With nods all around, the others took off.
Wryth turned to Brask. “I will accompany your brother and his men.”
Brask looked happy to oblige, plainly ready to rid his forecastle of an overbearing Shrive. But as the man turned to his brother, the blasting of a horn cut through the mists, coming from the south. It blared three long notes of distress.