With great strides, it did. Bred under the shrouded skies of the Vale of Gorgantum, it ran with ease in the pale-lit darkness, and thundering on either side were two riderless horses. One was a ghostly grey, the color of forge-smoke; the other was pitch-black. And before them all, the shadowy figures of the ravens of Darkhaven forged the way.

Homeward.

DANI HAD SLIPPED.

It was as simple as that. He did not know that the terrain he and his uncle traversed was called the Northern Harrow, but he did not need to be told that it was a harsh and forbidding land. He knew that bare feet toughened by the sun-scorched floors of the desert were a poor match for the cruel granite and icy clime of the northern mountains. And he had discovered, too late, that ill-sewn rabbitskin made for clumsy footwear. When the cliff’s edge had crumbled under his footing, he slid over the edge with one terrified shout.

Unmindful of the pain of broken and bending nails, he clung to the ledge he had caught on his downward plunge, fingertips biting deep. Below him, there was nothing. It was an overhang that had broken his fall; beneath it, the cliff fell away, cutting deeply back into the mountain’s peak. His kicking feet, shod in tattered rabbitskin, encountered no resistance. There was only a vast, endless drop, and the churning white waters of the Spume River below.

“Uncle!” Craning his neck, Dani fought terror. “Help me!”

Uncle Thulu—lean Uncle Thulu—peered over the edge of the cliff, and his eyes were stretched wide with fear in his weather-burnt face. “Can you pull yourself up, lad?”

He tried, but something was wrong with the muscles of his arms, his shoulders. There was no strength there. It might, Dani thought, have had to do with the popping sound they’d made when he caught himself. “No.”

“Wait.” Uncle Thulu’s face was grim. “I’m coming.”

Since there was nothing else for it, Dani waited, dangling from his fingertips and biting his lip at the pain of it. Overhead, Uncle Thulu scrabbled, finding the braided rope of rabbit-hide he’d made, looking for an anchor rock to secure it.

“Hang on, lad!” Thulu called over his shoulder, letting himself down inch by careful inch, a length of rope wrapped around his waist, his bare feet braced against the mountainside. “I’m coming.”

The rope was too short.

Dani’s arms trembled.

At home, the rope would be made of thukka-vine. There was an abundance of it. It was one of the earliest skills the Yarru-yami learned; how to braid rope out of thukka. Here, there was only hide, only the scant leavings of one’s scant kills, poorly tanned in oak-water. And if Uncle Thulu had not tried to make him shoes, Dani thought, the rope would be longer.