A’Meer sat in her saddle, leaning forward so that she almost breathed in the horse’s mane. Kosar found his own horse and remounted, and this time he and A’Meer rode side by side. The skull raven fluttered on ahead, waiting for them, flying on again, never quite losing itself to the dark. It circled overhead once or twice as if catching moonlight.

After hours spent traveling through the night, the bird still hovering but joined now by more shapes, all of them calling quietly, they mounted a small hill and saw the flicker of a campfire at its base.

RAFE WAS THE first to hear the horses.

He and Alishia had been watching each other through the dancing flames of the campfire, smiling, glancing away, looking again. Something about her eyes drew him in, but there was a disturbing factor there repulsing him as well, a sense that beneath her outside beauty lay something rotten. If he closed his eyes as she watched him he could smell bad things, feel the breath of the world stuttering against the walls of his heart, hear worried whispers passing through blades of grass, apprehensive heartbeats pulsing from the depths of the land. So he kept his eyes open, and while he knew that she was wrong, the young lad in him reveled in her smile.

The horses came quietly, but not so quiet as to be secretive. He knew who rode them. Hope panicked and Rafe spoke soothingly, reminded her of the skull ravens she had sent out, and soon Kosar and A’Meer rode into the circle of light cast by the fire.

A’Meer was dying.

Kosar took her gently from the horse and asked Hope about cures, antidotes, all the while refusing to see the witch shaking her head. Alishia watched, and Trey sat back in the shadows, keeping away from these new topsiders.

Rafe was told of a deep dread in the fledge miner’s mind. The whispers told him. The echoes of sunlight filled his mind with news.

Something huge was growing inside. It was a potential already fat with possible futures, all of them far wider and deeper than any he had ever dreamed possible. He looked down between his feet at the pale green grass, the dust, the corpse of the land that had been rotting for three centuries since the Cataclysmic War, when the Mages had taken nature’s trust and torn it asunder, corrupting themselves and that trust in the process. And the growing knowledge promised him a second chance. It was still hidden away, developing in safety, but already its tentative tendrils were exploring outward, experiencing Rafe’s own senses instead of feeding sensations to him. He knew the whole world—a million facts and the truth of a million rumors—and it would have driven him mad, had not the world itself been protecting him right then.