had packed for them. He’d given them a dozen; they could each eat two a day.
When they’d eaten the last crumbs and washed them down with a sip of water, Jedra said “Let me take down my robe and we can go,” but that proved more difficult than he’d expected. The cactus thorns had tiny barbs pointing toward their bases, and the breeze had flapped the fabric enough that it was stuck to hundreds of them. Jedra and Kayan both tried to work his robe free, but the thorns wouldn’t let go without a great deal of wiggling and spreading of the weave. Most of them were out of reach anyway, so Jedra finally wound up simply tugging the robe down. It came free with a loud rip, leaving dozens of tatters of cloth behind in the cactus.
Jedra held up the robe to inspect the damage and was annoyed to find that the worst tears were in the back, where they would let tomorrow’s sun through to his already-tender skin.
“So much for that wonderful idea,” he said. He picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulders, noticing how its rough fabric chafed his back.
Kayan put on her pack as well. “We needed the shade,” she said. “You did what you had to do. Tomorrow we’ll figure out something different.”
“I hope so.” He turned toward the sinking sun and began to walk.
He set a pace much slower than the elves had, but one that he hoped would ultimately be just as productive. If he and Kayan could keep from exhausting themselves, they would make better time than if they had to stop and rest all the time.
His strategy paid off for the first couple of hours. Luck was with them, too; when the sun sank below the horizon in front of them, Guthay, one of Athas’s two moons, rose behind them and continued to provide light. After the day’s brilliance, its golden glow was a welcome change. It was a little more difficult to see where they were going under its softer illumination, but there didn’t seem to be much to worry about. The plant life was thinning out the farther west they went, and they saw little else but an occasional pile of bones where some poor animal had evidently starved and scavengers had picked the carcass clean.
They walked side by side and kept their eyes on the sky almost as much as the ground, trying to navigate by the stars. That turned out to be a bad idea; Jedra had become mesmerized by the brilliant stars when he suddenly felt a sting in the arch of his left foot.
“Ow!” he yelled and jumped backward, but he nearly fell over when his foot refused to lift.
“What the—?” He tugged on his foot, but each tug sent a lance of pain up his leg.
“What is it?” Kayan asked.
“Something’s got me!” he shouted, pulling harder.
It felt as if something were trying to pull his bones out through the sole of his foot. It wasn’t pulling on his sandal; whatever it was had penetrated the leather sole and stuck deep in his foot. He managed to lift it a few inches off the ground, but it simply wouldn’t come any farther, and now he could see a thin cord or a root or something leading into the sand.
In full-scale panic now, he yanked backward with all his might and finally pulled free of whatever had snared him. It looked like a cactus spine with a thumbnail-sized hunk of his leather sandal and some of his skin still attached. He staggered backward, his left foot on fire—and stepped on another spine with his right foot.
“Ye-ow!” he screeched, and he wrenched free of it with one mighty jerk.
“Jedra!” Kayan took a step toward him.
“Don’t move!” He bent down and brushed the hem of his robe cautiously over the sand, and sure enough, it hung up on another thorn sticking up between them. He swung the cloth around in as wide an arc as it would reach and encountered three more of the strange spines a foot or so apart.
“It grows underground,” Kayan said, her voice full of wonder.
Jedra could hardly stand on his feet. Pain and anger made him snap at her, “Of course it grows underground. Everything is hostile in this damned desert, even the land itself, and the sooner we realize that the longer we’ll live.”
A little taken aback, she said, “Jedra, I know that. But neither of us could have