places. So many wonderful people. So many strange plants, strange sights, strange foods to taste.
When they’d fled, the same wonders had become threats overnight. The entire trip home had been a blur of marching, sleeping, and foraging in human fields.
Eshonai reached another chasm and leaped, trying to recapture her excitement. She increased her pace, coming up even with Thude and eventually passing him—before the two of them pulled to a halt to wait for Rlain, who had slowed a few plateaus back. He had always been a careful one, and he seemed better able to control the inclinations of the new form.
Her heart racing, Eshonai reached out of habit to wipe her brow—but this form didn’t have sweat on her forehead to drip into her eyes. Instead, the carapace armor trapped air from her forward motion, then pushed it up underneath to cool her skin.
The awesome energy of the form meant she could probably have kept running for hours before feeling any real strain. Perhaps longer. Indeed, the warforms during their flight from Alethkar had carried food for the others and still moved faster than the workforms.
At the same time, Eshonai was getting hungry. She remembered well how much food this form required at each meal.
Thude leaned against a high rock formation as they waited, watching some windspren play in the air. Eshonai wished she’d brought her book for drawing maps of the Plains. She’d found it in the human market of Kholinar—such a small, simple thing. It had been expensive by Alethi standards, but oh so cheap by her standards. An entire book of papers? All for a few little bits of emerald?
She’d seen steel weapons there too. Sitting in the market. For sale. The listeners protected, polished, and revered each weapon they’d found on the Plains—keeping them for generations, passed down from parent to child. The humans had entire stalls of them.
“This is going to go poorly for us, isn’t it?” Thude asked.
Eshonai realized she’d been humming to the Lost. She stopped, but met his eyes and knew that he knew. Together they walked around the stone formation and looked westward, toward the cities that had for centuries been listener homes. Dark smoke filled the air—the Alethi burning wood as they set up enormous cookfires and settled into their camps.
They’d arrived in force. Tens of thousands of them. Swarms of soldiers, with dozens of Shardbearers. Come to exterminate her people.
“Maybe not,” Eshonai said. “In warform, we’re stronger than they are. They have equipment and skill, but we have strength and endurance. If we have to fight them, this terrain will heavily favor us.”
“Did you really have to do it though?” Thude asked to Pleading. “Did you need to have him killed?”
She’d answered this before, but she didn’t avoid the responsibility. She had voted for Gavilar to die. And she’d been the reason for the vote in the first place.
“He was going to bring them back, Thude,” Eshonai said to Reprimand. “Our ancient gods. I heard him say it. He thought I’d be happy to hear of it.”
“So you killed him?” Thude asked, to Agony. “Now they’ll kill us, Eshonai. How is this any better?”
She attuned Tension. Thude, in turn, attuned Reconciliation. He seemed to recognize that bringing this up again and again was accomplishing nothing.
“It is done,” Eshonai said. “So now, we need to hold out. We might not even have to fight them. We can harvest gemstones from the greatshells and speed crop growth. The humans can’t leap these chasms, and so they’ll have trouble ever getting to us. We’ll be safe.”
“We’ll be trapped,” Thude said. “In the center of these Plains. For months, perhaps years. You’re fine with that, Eshonai?”
Rlain finally caught up to them, jogging over and humming to Amusement—perhaps he thought the two of them silly for speeding ahead.
Eshonai looked away from Thude and stared out across the Plains—not toward the humans, but toward the ocean, the Origin. Places she could have gone. Places she’d planned to go. Thude knew her too well. He understood how much it hurt to be trapped here.
They will strike inward, she thought. The humans won’t come all this way to turn around because of a few chasms. They have resources we can only imagine, and there are so many of them. They’ll find a way to get to us.
Escaping out the other side of the Plains wasn’t an option either. If the chasmfiends there didn’t get them, the humans eventually would. To flee would be to abandon the