content instead to observe and listen with an alien and faintly unsettling curiosity. Had he known? Had he known that Saran was not who he appeared to be? What about Zaelis and Cailin; surely they had known? Cailin would have, certainly: she could sense Aberrants merely by looking at them. All the Sisters could.
In the aftermath of her discovery, in the rage that came after grief, she had wanted to face Cailin and Zaelis and demand to know why they had not told her. But it was useless; she already knew their arguments. Asara was a spy, and it was not their place to reveal her. Kaiku had spoken little enough to anyone but Mishani about Asara, and said nothing at all about her attraction to Saran. Why should they intervene? And besides, she would only be feeding Cailin ammunition for her demands that Kaiku apply herself to the teachings of the Red Order. If she had attended to her lessons instead of restlessly combing the land, she would have sensed Asara’s true identity herself.
And yet she had not suspected. How could she, really? She had no idea of the extent of Asara’s Aberrant abilities. She had witnessed her shift her features subtly, change the hue of her hair, even seen a tattoo on her arm that faded away; she had seen her repair the most horrendous burns to her face. But to change not only the form of her body but her gender . . . that had been beyond even Kaiku’s notion of possibility. What kind of creature could do that? What kind of thing?
And what kind of thing can twist the threads of reality to shape fire or break minds? she asked herself pitilessly. She is no more impossible than you. The world is changing faster than you imagine. The witchstones are remaking Saramyr, and all that once was is uncertain now.
‘You’re brooding, Kaiku,’ Yugi said from behind her. ‘I can feel it from here.’
She smiled apologetically at him, and her heart lifted a little. ‘Talk to me, Yugi. This will be a long journey, and if someone does not do something to lighten the mood then I do not think I will last the day.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been a little remiss as the provider of good humour,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was suffering somewhat from last night, but the walk has cleared my head.’
‘Over-indulged yourself, did you?’ Kaiku prodded.
‘Hardly. I didn’t touch a thing. No wonder I feel so awful.’
She laughed softly. Nomoru, up ahead, glanced back at them with an irritable expression.
‘You’re troubled,’ Yugi said, his voice becoming more serious. ‘Is it the Mask?’
‘Not the Mask,’ she said, and it was true: she had entirely forgotten it until now, obsessed as she was with nursing the hurt Asara had done to her. It lay wrapped in her pack, the Mask her father had stolen and died for. She felt it suddenly, leering at her. For five years it had been hidden in a chest in her house, and she had never put it on again; for she knew well enough the way the True Masks worked, how they were narcotic in nature, addicting the wearer to the euphoria of the Weave, granting great power but stealing reason and sanity. Yet the insidious craving was undiminished, the tickle at the back of her mind whenever she thought of it. Calling to her.
Sometime in the afternoon, they rested and ate on a grassy slope beneath an overhang. They had passed out of the ravine and were skirting a sunken plain of broken rocks, bordered on all sides by high cliffs. Some of the rocks had thrust their way up from below in shattered formations like brutal stone flowers, their petals lined with quartz and limestone and malachite; others had fallen from the tall buttes that jutted precariously into the sky. The travellers had been darting from cover to cover for over an hour now, and while the progress they made was faster than it had been through the ravines, it was harder on the nerves. They were too exposed for comfort here.
‘Why did we come this way? We’re not in so much of a hurry,’ Yugi asked Nomoru conversationally, as he ate a cold leg of waterfowl.
Nomoru’s thin face hardened, taking umbrage at the comment. ‘I’m the guide,’ she snapped. ‘I know these lands.’
Yugi was unperturbed. ‘Then educate me, please. I know them too, though not so well as you, I’d imagine. There’s a high pass