There he is, Hope thought, smiling at Rafe. He sat awake just beneath the overhang, water pouring from the rocks above and splashing down at his feet. There’s my precious boy. He smiled back weakly, his eyes as fluid and confused as the stormy sky. Hope reached out to touch his head but then walked by, awed, afraid, confused about what the signs meant. From their first meeting she had believed in Rafe, but after last night—after he had touched the Shantasi and drawn out the slayer spider’s poison—her belief had expanded into fear. She was a witch, had been one her whole life, but this boy’s single touch made a mockery of anything she had achieved. Being a witch in a time without magic consisted mainly of knowing things, shocking people with arcane secrets, frightening them if necessary with the forgotten qualities of nature and paths of the mind, and sometimes fooling them with exquisitely simple deceptions. For her, knowledge was power.

Rafe’s demonstration was the opposite, and infinitely more daunting because of that. He was a young boy, confused and shocked, and though he displayed such power he seemed to have no knowledge of it at all. It terrified him.

The boy stared into the night as if searching for answers, and Hope wanted to have him all for herself.

She walked farther back into the cave to where the others were trying to get some sleep. All of them were awake. All but the girl, Alishia, whose strange display had disturbed them all. The fledger sat with her head in his lap, stroking her hair, trying to whisper some life back into her eyes. They were open and staring and so vacant, as if reflecting the darkness from outside rather than showing the hollowness of herself.

“How is she?” Hope asked.

The fledger looked up. “She knew so much. Now she’s nothing.”

“It scared us all in different ways,” she said, thinking of her own ecstatic thrill as she had watched Rafe laying his hands on the Shantasi.

“It didn’t frighten me,” the fledger said. His comment was loaded, but Hope let it go. What else has he seen and known? she wondered.

She turned to Kosar the thief. He was tending A’Meer, using a damp cloth to wash clotted blood from her face, neck and scalp. She had some terrible wounds, but the pain had been drawn away along with the poison, and she had stitched several of her cuts together herself soon after they had entered the cave. Her sleep now was from pure exhaustion.

“I can’t talk to them,” she said. “The ravens. It was fine yesterday, but now they’re unreachable. I can’t shake the idea that they’re laughing at me even as I try to commune. I feel them rooting around in my head, and I wonder what they see, but they fly away and cry to the rain.”