badly she wanted to use it. So very badly. But she could hardly protect Aerax if the venom rendered her unconscious until morning, and she knew from many attempts that the weaker remedy no longer had any effect on her. “If you only wish for help falling asleep, rub these hairs on your skin. This is enough to share with all of your warriors. It will keep for a full turn in a moistened jute sack . . . which we ought to have brought with us.”
Seri held out her hand to take the coil. “I care not at all if I stick myself with one of the thorns. I intend to sleep as the dead for a full night.”
“Then you are the fortunate one,” said Ardyl as they returned to the path they’d made. “I am on first watch this eve. A half night I will spend guarding the camp with my fingers plugging my ears.”
For Lizzan, that would only keep the worst of the noise in. And the ache, too.
“I do not mind the noise so much.” Seri ducked low beneath a hanging fern so her torch would not catch on the leaves. “Instead it is feeling as if I am about to be swallowed. Or as if all these trees will soon fall over and crush me.”
“You are sky-starved,” Ardyl told her, then looked to Lizzan and explained, “The same happened to many of our warriors when they joined the alliance army at the river Lave, especially those who first came to the jungles or forests. On the Burning Plains, the sky is open. Every rising and setting of the sun and the moon are there to see. But here . . .” She glanced up. “It seems there are no stars at all. I know the moon is three days past full, but it is hidden behind these leaves. Even on the road or in a clearing, the sky is but a narrow view. Tracking time is near impossible. And it is all so—”
“Dreadful,” said Seri.
Ardyl nodded. “I do not like it much, either.”
“Sky-starved.” Wearing an irritated pout, Seri kicked at a root. “Do not tell my brother. He will coddle me. And say nothing to Tyzen, or he might begin cutting down trees.”
“I will say nothing.” The corners of Ardyl’s lips twitched. “But I might not have to. Did you already pierce yourself with that thorn?”
The girl groaned in realization.
“You came through Stranik’s Passage,” Lizzan said. “You did not feel sky-starved then?”
Seri shook her head. “That is different.”
“But you are beneath a mountain. And it is full dark.”
“The darkest dark you have ever seen,” the girl agreed.
And only a few years past, that tunnel had been a mere legend—a story from the beginning of time, when the goddess Temra had broken through vault of the sky and began reshaping the world with the pounding of her fists. It was said the snake god, Stranik, had fallen asleep with his body stretching the length of the western realms, and as Temra’s pounding fists forced the Astal mountains to rise, they covered the sleeping god. When he awakened and slithered away, the shape of his body left a passageway under the mountains.
But in ancient times, that tunnel had been used to imprison a demon and sealed off . . . until a generation past, when the Destroyer had opened the passage and marched his army through. Freed from its prison, the demon had plagued Blackmoor, and the passageway had been filled with revenants. Only after the demon was slain had a safe route opened from Blackmoor in the south to Krimathe in the north. But that was a route Lizzan had never taken—and if Temra was merciful, it was a route she would never take.
Ardyl’s wry look told Lizzan that she had not completely suppressed the horror from her voice as she’d spoken of the tunnel. “You would not like to pass through it?”
Lizzan would rather fling herself into a snake pit. “Did you like it?”
“It is not as terrifying as all the wagon drivers make it out to be,” Seri told her earnestly, clearly delighted by the terrors that had been there. “The bones scattered about can appear to move if you stare at them for too long by the torchlight. But the revenants have been cleared. And I sensed no demon’s foul magic lingering to raise the hairs on my neck.”
The hairs at the back of Lizzan’s neck rose now. “You are braver than I.”