The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,74

out of the air and took another bite.

Jedra bit into his own and closed his eyes to savor the wonderful flavor. It was slightly sweet and nearly melted in his mouth. He hadn’t tasted anything this good in all his life. He wolfed down the first roll and picked two more. Kayan did the same, and they continued their walk through the trees, munching the miracle bread.

A rushing sound had been growing steadily stronger as they walked deeper into the forest. When they grew closer to the moving white thing—it looked more like a long banner waving back and forth in the breeze now that they could see more of its length—he realized that the sound came from the same source. Something was moving across the ground. Something long and sinuous. Bits of it splashed upward, glittering in the sunlight. “No,” Jedra said, stepping closer. “Impossible.” But it was no more impossible than bread growing on trees. There before him, as real as anything else in this bizarre world inside the crystal, flowed a stream of open water.

It was about as wide as he was tall, and it poured down from right to left over a bed of rocks. It pooled up in a few places before spilling over, and when Jedra walked up to the edge of one of the pools he saw flashes of silver in the water.

“Did you see that?” he asked. “Something’s alive in there.”

“Fish!” Kayan exclaimed. “I’ve heard about them. They still exist in the hinterlands, I’ve been told.”

Jedra reached down and stuck his hand in the water. It was cold, almost as cold as the frozen meat in Kitarak’s cold-box. “Wow!” he said, jerking his hand back. It was just the shock that had startled him, though; the water actually felt kind of nice against his skin. He cupped his hand and dipped it in again, then brought it up to his lips to drink.

It was the coldest, freshest, cleanest water he had ever tasted. Jedra scooped up a double handful and drank it all.

Kayan bent down to try it, but she stopped when she saw her reflection in the water. “What the—?” She reached out to touch the image, then withdrew her hand when it broke into ripples.

“What’s the matter?” Jedra asked.

“That’s not what I look like,” Kayan said. “Well, it is, but my nose is bigger than that, and my hair isn’t that long, and—”

“You look great.”

“I know I look great. I mean, if that’s really what I look like.” Kayan nodded to the water, which had returned to its mirror smoothness. “But I never looked like that before.”

“Sure you did,” Jedra said. “You’ve always been pretty.” But now that she mentioned it, her nose was smaller, and her hair was longer than before. And her eyes were an even brighter green than before, too. He hadn’t noticed it until now because he had always thought of her as beautiful.

Her tunic had changed, too. The cloth was finer, and it fit her body better. The neckline plunged lower than before, showing much more of her sensuous curves than she usually exposed by daylight, and it was shorter as well, allowing her slender legs more freedom to distract Jedra’s gaze.

Curious, he looked down at his own clothing. He had put on a tunic similar to Kayan’s this morning, but now his was tighter, too, tied at the waist with a silky cord. It was made of soft brown leather and had no sleeves, exposing his tanned and muscular arms all the way to the shoulders, which were broader than he remembered.

He looked into the water. The face that stared back at him looked a little like his, but Jedra felt the same disorientation Kayan must have, for it seemed much more handsome than he’d ever thought it before. His cheekbones were higher, more elfin than he’d remembered them, his mouth was wider with fuller lips, and his jaw was more rounded than before. And his sandy blond hair, normally unkempt, now looked merely tousled in a dashing sort of way.

“Wow,” he said. “I’m different, too.”

She looked at him for a moment. “Now that I think about it you are a little more handsome than usual today. But you’re always handsome,” she hastily added.

“Even when you’re mad at me?”

“Oh, especially then,” she said, blushing. She looked at her own reflection again. “This is wild. How could we suddenly become more beautiful?”

“The same way we found bread growing on trees and water running free right