The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,83

Kiran tried to decide if Dev was joking.

Dev’s one-sided grin appeared, for the first time since the avalanche. “Yeah. Alathian prospectors don’t carry charms powerful enough to keep them away, so they’ve gotten bold.” He tilted his head, the amusement dying out of his expression. “I guess if a bear came, you could just, you know—” he made a vague hand gesture, and grimaced.

Kiran was startled into a disbelieving laugh. “Oh yes, I’ll get close enough to touch a wild bear.” He shook his head. “Any magic from a distance means releasing my barriers, and that means—”

“Ruslan crashes down on you like a two-ton boulder and makes the bear look like a fuzzy kitfox cub, yeah, I got it.” Dev turned away. “Look, we’ve made it over the mountains, and you said Ruslan couldn’t cast anything strong at us so close to the border, right? Try and relax a little.”

Kiran swallowed a sharp reply. Though Dev’s voice had brimmed with confidence, he knew Dev well enough now to see the tension in his stance that put the lie to his bravado.

He followed Dev back from the lip of the gorge into the forest. In a move that by now was almost habit, he brushed a hand across a pine trunk.

The forest in front of him abruptly shimmered, as if seen through a heat haze, and changed into a panorama of snow and rock. Startled, Kiran stumbled, and the ghostly image vanished. He rubbed a hand over his eyes. His barriers stood firm, and no hint of magic tinged the aether. Perhaps exhaustion was catching up with him.

Dev glanced back. “How’s the arm?”

Kiran rotated his wrist. He’d been skimming off bits of ikilhia from trees all morning to finish the healing. Unmarked skin now replaced the torn, bruised flesh left by the rock, and the throbbing pain had gone. Better yet, the pulse of wrongness that last night had burned in an unceasing scream for power had now faded to a whisper so faint Kiran could ignore it with ease. “Almost completely healed,” he told Dev.

Dev’s eyes were narrowed and thoughtful. “Can you heal yourself of anything, that way?”

“Any physical injury, yes. But the greater the injury, the more power is required.” Kiran didn’t explain that the greater the injury, the more instinctive and uncontrolled the power draw. No need to make Dev more wary of him than he already was. He cast about for an innocuous subject that might ease Dev into further conversation.

“What kind of pine trees are these?” The trunks weren’t quite as broad as those of the bristlebarks in Garnet Canyon, but these pines were far taller. Kiran couldn’t even see their tops, his view blocked by heavy branches laden with blue-green needles.

“Cinnabar pines. See how red the bark is? It reminded people of cinnabar ore.” Dev’s face settled back into impassivity, and he picked up his pace.

Kiran sighed. His thoughts returned to the momentary visual distortion he’d experienced. Had it been a hallucination, brought on by stress and lack of sleep? He feared it signified some new assault by Ruslan, yet he’d felt no magic. He worried at the question, as he and Dev wound their way between cinnabar trees and hopped over trickling streams half-hidden by arching ferns.

The vision had happened just after he’d taken a flicker of ikilhia from a tree. Everything he knew about magic said touch-drawn power shouldn’t affect his barriers...but just in case, he refrained from any further attempts.

Yet an hour later, it happened again. One moment he was trudging after Dev up the side of a gentle ridge, the next the world before him blurred and transformed. Not to snow and ice this time, but to a marshy meadow lined with trees of a kind Kiran had never seen, thin slender things with white bark and tiny fluttering leaves. Kiran stopped dead. He searched his barriers for any flaw, hunting for any suggestion of magic.

Deep within his mind, the tiniest twitch, so subtle it was barely detectable. The meadow scene dissolved back into cinnabar forest even as he isolated the sensation.

“What is it?” Dev had turned to stare at him. “Has Ruslan cast another spell?”

“No...” Cold descended over Kiran. That faint twitch, like the brush of questing fingers across a barred door...“Not in the way you mean. But I have a suspicion...tell me, where do you find trees with trembling, heart-shaped green leaves, and bark pale and smooth as stone?”

Dev eyed him with wary confusion. “Sounds like aspen. No groves