dusty road that led east. He flexed his fingers, as if they were remembering something, then let his hands droop slack at his sides.
Emily caught up with him in a half dozen quick steps and placed her body in front of his. He did not look at her but rather past her, his eyes fixed on the road. She reached up and placed a hand on either side of his face. He flinched but did not pull away. She gently tilted his face down until his eyes met hers. She looked into those green eyes, trying to find something there that would reassure her, but there was nothing—only distance and formality. She let her hands drop quickly.
“I swear it won’t happen again,” he said.
“Which?” she said. “The blood magic, or—”
“Both are unforgivable.”
Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.
“Grimaldi will have gotten off at the next stop. He will have gotten a horse. He’ll find us. And when he does—” Stanton stopped, and when he spoke again his voice was brilliant with despair. “You don’t know what he’s capable of. I know you don’t trust me … I can’t even trust myself. But I can’t leave you. I won’t.”
Emily put her arms around him. She held onto him as if she were trying to keep him from floating away from the earth. He did not bend under her embrace, but rather stood with fists clenched at his sides. She held him more tightly.
“I do trust you,” she whispered fiercely into the dirty, torn fabric of his shirt. “I have faith in you. We’ll find a different way together.”
Stanton was still for a long time. When he did finally put his arms around her, he clung to her like a drowning man, his hot breath stirring the hair on the top of her head. He held her like this for a long time. Finally, he straightened, drew in a deep breath. She looked up and saw that his face was set with familiar determination.
“Thank you, Miss Edwards,” he said, releasing her.
There was a sound, like the dry chuckle of a very old woman. Emily turned slightly, trying to catch it, but it was already gone. But as she was turning her head, something else caught her eye: something back at the crossroads. For a moment, it seemed that the dust took a shape, the shape of a woman pointing. Emily took a couple of steps away from Stanton, staring at the dust as it blew away on a refreshing gust.
“What is it?” Stanton looked in the direction she was staring.
“Follow me,” she said.
She walked back to the crossroad. Leaning against the empty signpost, she pulled off her boots and her stockings. She ground her bare feet into the hot dust, wiggling her toes.
Speak to me, she whispered. Speak to me in a language I can understand.
Closing her eyes, she imagined Ososolyeh, its intricate glowing traceries spreading out from beneath her feet. And as she imagined it, she found that she could feel it pulsing and throbbing beneath her bare soles. She let herself sink into that vast place, let herself expand to become part of it.
She took a step.
And then another.
Energy threaded up around her feet, her ankles, her legs. A hundred tiny filaments—like roots or streams or veins of ore—traced the contours of her calves, her thighs. They gently pulled her forward, and her steps became a drumbeat, rhythmic and cadent, step after step after step, in the direction Ososolyeh wanted her to go.
“What are you doing?” Stanton hurried after her, grabbing her boots and stockings out of the dust. “You’re going west!”
Emily hardly heard him. The earth was singing in her ears.
Her body, a tiny pinprick on a vast terrain, moved through eons of memory.
But she was no longer in her body, crawling like an insect through dust and sun; rather, she slept in cool dark water flowing in deep channels. She remembered glaciers, great mountains of ice. She dreamed of oceans.
After an eternity and an instant, there was the sound of