trees near the riverbank when the Middle killed that Young Dread. Should we wander a bit?”
“Sure.”
He folded up the map and tucked it away in a pocket. Again Quin caught a fleeting glimpse of pain in his face, but he said nothing.
They walked in ever widening arcs away from the riverbank. Quin wasn’t sure what they were looking for, except perhaps traces of what had happened with the Middle Dread—traces of what had been written about in the journal. Yet after an hour of pressing through the undergrowth at the side of the river, they had found nothing.
They decided to move on to the second journal entry. After following that new set of coordinates, they emerged from another anomaly into a dense thicket of large bushes within a broader forest clearing. The anomaly let them out slightly higher than Quin had expected, and she landed gracelessly on top of Shinobu.
“Ow.”
“Sorry. Was that your bad leg?”
“Yes, but it’s nothing,” he said as they climbed to their feet and picked their way out of the thicket.
When they got free of the confining branches, Quin saw that Shinobu was looking away from her, as though pain and ill temper had gotten hold of him.
“Hey,” she said, nudging him with the toe of her boot. “Are you all right? We can do this another day. I can take you back.”
“I’m fine,” he told her. He tried to smile, but it didn’t come off very well.
Quin brushed twigs from his hair and jacket, refusing to be pushed away by bad humor.
He asked her irritably, “Are you finished sorting my clothes?”
“Yes, I am. You’ve got a beetle in your hair, but it probably won’t hurt you.”
Quin, who knew he hated insects, was amused to watch him lean over and rake his hands across his head frantically.
“Is it gone?” he asked, straightening.
“Yes. You look quite beautiful.”
His very short hair was standing on end and pointing several directions, but despite this—or perhaps because of it—he did look rather beautiful.
“I hate when you use that word.”
His mood was darkening quickly, yet it had begun to remind her so much of times when he’d been cross as a child that she was surprised to find herself enjoying it a little bit.
“You hate the word ‘beautiful’?” she asked him.
“You used to call me beautiful,” he said, looking away from her to scan the forest around them, more out of vexation than actual interest in their surroundings. But Quin took the opportunity to study the environment herself. The trees and undergrowth were somewhat different here, but the air felt the same as it had in the first location. “And you meant ‘untouchable’ or ‘unlovable’—nothing good.”
“ ‘Sullen and bad-tempered,’ that’s probably what I meant,” she suggested, unable to resist teasing him. She’d spent so much time worried, it was a relief to poke fun now that he was out of danger from his injuries.
“You meant I looked like a painting or something— Can we get on with our search?”
“No.”
All at once she grasped the source of his bad mood.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” he asked.
“You never finished your tea before we left,” she told him, feeling like an idiot for not remembering sooner.
She’d gone to Master Tan’s that morning and brought back his daily medicinal tea, but Shinobu hadn’t drunk much of it. They’d been practicing with whipswords and exploring for hours now, and Master Tan’s tea was what made that sort of exertion possible. Shinobu was out of steam.
“I did drink it,” he said. “You watched me.”
“Give me the backpack.”
“I’ll check,” he told her, turning to keep the pack out of her reach.
He removed it from his back and turned away to search through it, as if he could more easily prove himself right without Quin looking. He turned around sheepishly a moment later with a nearly full bottle of tea in his hand.
“I packed it,” she said.
He set the bottle on the ground and looked at it balefully as he tied up the backpack and slung it over his shoulders. Even in the face of proof, he wasn’t ready to admit defeat.
“I don’t need tea right now,” he said. “Do I look like some frail grandmother to you?”
“A little.”
“But a ‘beautiful’ one, right?”
She put the bottle in his hands and kissed his cheek. “Very beautiful. Now drink.”
Sullenly, he unscrewed the bottle and drank the whole thing in one go. When he was finished, he coughed and made a face, then bent over as though he might vomit up all of it. This