We joined the others sitting around the blaze. Shad gazed into the flames as if he were looking through them. He was hunched, probably three inches shorter than he’d been in his prime. His left eyelid fluttered. I thought he was winking but then decided it was involuntary, perhaps from weariness. He looked like he’d been on the road a long time. Too long.

I heard a sucking noise as he opened his large wrinkled mouth. “Join us,” he said.

I thought I did.

“The way is difficult.”

Sounds like a barrel of laughs.

“Reward is to be shared and so is hardship. The red road of Thuros is meant to be walked, but not alone.”

Thuros? He spoke in one cryptic, fortune-cookie statement after another. I heard demands in his voice, not warmth. I stood to move to the other side of the fire. I had many questions but didn’t trust him enough to ask them.

“You’re welcome to stay in our tent,” Mason said. Inside the tent, on hard ground, we lay too close for my liking, but it sure beat the cave. David was snoring, and Mason lay stone still. I wished I could ask them where we were and why. I lay there thinking again about Joshua and his troupe. No doubt he knew his location. What was Skia? What was Thuros? Why was I unwilling to risk asking the questions that plagued me?

I listened to the soothing sounds of crickets and frogs, which gave me the illusion I was back home on a hunting trip, holed up with my buddies Barry, Jack, and T. J. I held my breath a few times when I thought I heard a flapping tarp. It was only the tent door fluttering in the breeze. I still felt I was being watched, and I looked out in the moonlight to see just a foot away a large frog with bumpy, lime-green skin, four spread-out rubbery toes on both of his front feet, and bulgy red eyes with black teardrop pupils.

“You know more than I do, don’t you?” I whispered to him. We studied each other for a minute before I put my head down. Stray stones beneath the tent floor bored into my back. I stood up and stomped them into the ground.

All those hours of hiking in the fresh air settled upon me like a warm blanket, and even without a pillow, I slept.

We rose early, when the light was like rosy honey painting the hillsides, which looked like gentle ocean waves frozen in place. Breakfast consisted of stale biscuits, jerky, and some “potato pearls,” as Quon called them, soaked in water over the fire.

“Like the jerky?” Mason asked, smiling too broadly.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Why? What is it?”

“Possum—Quon trapped it a few weeks ago.”