dwarf pines amidst a set of rocks.
I pointed. “Will those work?” If so, we might be spared hours of stumbling in the dark.
“They’ll help.” Kiran’s eyes were dark holes, his expression indistinct in the gathering gloom. The careful way he held himself told me his arm was hurting him badly.
“Then we’ll stop there for the night. I’ll run ahead and set up camp before the light fails completely,” I said. He nodded, and I picked up my pace, glad to put extra distance between us.
When I reached the trees, I found a nice dry patch of ground between two boulders big enough to act as windbreaks. I set up the tarp, and lit the fire stones the moment Kiran arrived.
He didn’t say a word, just went straight for the nearest tree and grabbed a branch like it was a lifeline. I don’t know what I’d expected. A flash like a mage ward would give, or a sound, or something—but there was nothing like that. His head fell back, his eyes closed, and the look on his face made my skin crawl. I’d seen that same slack-jawed pleasure in lionclaw addicts when they swallowed a dose.
The needles of the tree withered to brown, then curled and blackened as if burned.
“Khalmet’s bony hand,” I breathed, suppressing a shudder. Those charred-looking patches of catsclaw before Broken Hand Pass...Lightning strikes, my ass. It had been Kiran. I remembered his wild-eyed desperation right after the storm, and felt an uncomfortable shock of recognition. Don’t touch me, he’d said, much as he had after the rockfall. I swallowed hard at the thought of how close my hand had been to his shoulder. I’d always thought the Alathians a bunch of priggish idiots for their restrictions on magic, but this trip was changing my mind fast.
Kiran worked his way through the entire clump of trees. When he returned, his arm still lay in the sling, but the pinched look had gone from his eyes and mouth, and he sat without wincing.
“Is it better?” I wanted to ask, is it safe, but I didn’t want him to know how unsettled I really was.
“Not all the way.” He poked his arm. “I’ll have to wait until we reach more trees to finish the healing. But it feels much better.”
“Good.” I tried to sound matter of fact, and not look at the blackened husks where living trees had once stood. “We’re over the worst terrain, so no more climbing or rappelling. But we’re still two days out from Kost. How long do you figure we have before Ruslan tries something else?” How long, before he murdered some other Khalmet-touched convoy member? I struggled to blot out an image of Cara, bloody and screaming.
Kiran rubbed his forehead, looking unhappy. “Two days...I think he’ll cast again, in that time. If he believes we’re still above timberline, he may try a series of earthquakes to trigger rockfalls and avalanches over a broader area—or if he realizes we’ve reached the western slopes, perhaps wildfires...”
Wildfires. Great. I’d better make sure we stuck close to streams.
Kiran hastily added, “The closer we get to the border, the safer we’ll be—the wards are so powerful they’ll disrupt other workings.”
“We’ll rest up for a few hours, then, and keep going once the moon rises,” I said. If we headed straight west, another half day’s walk would put us at the rim of the Elenn gorge, as close to the border as we could get until Kost. I prayed that’d be close enough.
***
(Kiran)
“There it is, the border with Alathia.” Dev stood balanced on a prong of rock that jutted out over the dizzying chasm of the Elenn Gorge.
Kiran had no intention of joining him on a perch so precarious. He edged closer to the rocky rim. Far below, the shining silver ribbon of the Elenn River twisted along the narrow canyon bottom. The leaden gray cliffs of the gorge’s steep sides had a stern, foreboding aspect after the bright rock of the high mountains.
The forest on the far rim appeared no different than that on Dev and Kiran’s side. Yet when Kiran concentrated, even through his barriers he sensed a deep, soundless thrumming, warning of quiescent power. He wished he dared release his barriers and examine the border properly. When he’d researched the Alathian wards, every scholar he’d read had agreed on the wards’ strength, but none had any certain knowledge of their design, or the source of their enormous power.
Kiran had his own theory, based in part on a