Atrius and I didn’t say anything else as I finished his bandage. I secured it, and then we were off into the mists once again, one step after another.
40
The next days came and went in a blur. Walking until exhaustion. Eating until sleep. Sleeping in shifts, in the sparse, fractured hours. Waking and walking. Repeat. There was no sun or moon to track the passing of time. The terrain grew rougher, my shins and ankles sore and bruised, and often scraped because I couldn’t focus on navigating for the group while also navigating for myself. I leaned on Atrius more and more heavily, and in turn, he leaned more on me—because as the stone grew rougher, so did our path forward. Now, the path branched very frequently, forcing me to stretch my awareness through the stone far ahead to cut off dead-ends and find the safest route forward.
Sometimes, even the paths that went nowhere stretched on for miles, making it almost impossible to truly tell which was the right way. At some of these branches, I sagged against the rocks, my cheek pressed to the stone, sweat beading on my forehead as I reached through the threads for many long, agonizing minutes to make a decision.
I was forever conscious that the stakes of these choices were high. The further we went, the more frequently we came across the remnants of travelers who were far less lucky than us. Some were ancient bones, clad in dented, cracked armor rusted away with time. Others were fresher—fresh enough that one could make out the teeth and claw marks from the slyviks who’d picked their body clean. The freshest we came across were a pair—an adult and a child.
Erekkus had paused at that one, a brief, powerful stab of sadness in his threads.
“Why would someone bring a child—” he’d started, and then shut his mouth abruptly, as if halfway through the question he’d understood exactly what the answer was.
Of course he did. We all did. Desperation. Perhaps the same desperation that would make a man bring his child to wander the world to strange foreign countries, searching for a new home.
Atrius laid his hand on Erekkus’s shoulder, gently nudged him forward, and we didn’t look at that tiny little corpse again.
As we drew further north, I began to sense the slyviks more frequently. With every branch in our route, I was now checking not only for dead ends that would have us walking in circles to our deaths, but also for the beasts. This far north, they tended to congregate in groups, which made them slightly easier to avoid but also much more dangerous to encounter. Sometimes, I took us on dangerously convoluted detours in order to avoid clusters of them that I sensed nearby. Though it slowed us down, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision when we’d hear those not-distant-enough screeches.
Atrius kept track of the days with marks in a little, bloodstained notebook he carried in his pocket, though I was skeptical of how accurate his sense of time was. I was convinced that none of us, him included, were really sure how much time had passed.
The cycle was endless. Walk. Sleep. Walk. Hold our breaths. Change course. Walk.
Atrius’s totally unreliable estimation was that seven days had passed when I felt it.
We had come to yet another fork in our path. The elevation had started to ramp up, and the space between the rocks had gotten even narrower, so our two-by-two path of soldiers had become a long, winding single-file line. I’d turned my ankle some miles back the day before, and I wasn’t the only one who had injured myself on the terrain. We were moving slowly.
Worse, we were running out of food.
A terrible question had started to nag at the back of my mind—what if I had brought us the wrong way?
Those doubts were whispering loudly in my ear at this particular fork in the road, when I leaned against the stone and felt for the threads…followed them…
I jerked upright, nearly sending myself toppling backwards into Atrius’s chest.
“What?” he asked, alarmed.
“Sh,” I hissed.
I pressed myself to the cliffs again.
I was terrified I had imagined it. Terrified I’d just made a mistake.
But no.
No, I hadn’t imagined any of it.
I turned my face against the cold, dusty rock and let out a shaky breath that sounded more like a sob than I meant for it to. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I ended up doing a little of both.
Weaver damn us.
Atrius gripped my shoulder and leaned close. “Vivi, what?”
I shouldn’t like it when he called me that. But I did. Life was too short to lie to yourself. Very short now.
I straightened and turned to him.
“We’re less than a few miles from the end of the pass,” I said.