Ramus looked at the stretch of shadow across the southern horizon and tried to decide exactly how he felt. Excited, perhaps. Nervous. Behind them stood the final huge standing rock, and between here and the horizon was an unremarkable plain of rolling grassland swept bare of trees. Across that landscape, where it met the horizon, the first part of their voyage would end.

“I've been examining the pages every evening,” he said. “There's nothing that tells me this is the end. Everything indicates that the Divide is the beginning of somewhere else.”

“A place where words can turn people to stone?”

Ramus looked at Lulah—her face nervous, belying the image of the strong woman bristling with weaponry—and shook his head. “Those words are special.”

“The words of a Sleeping God?”

“Perhaps.” But when he looked south again, he thought, Perhaps sleeping, or more likely fallen, because some of what I see on those parchments . . . But that was a myth within a myth, and the more he thought of it, the more those doubts were swallowed by the presence in his mind, leaving only the good behind.

“If there is a Sleeping God—” Lulah began, but Ramus cut her off.

“They were good. And only good will come of finding it.”

Ramus went first, keen to head as far south as possible before darkness fell. He felt a terrible moment of sickness later that afternoon and the sun seemed to explode, casting a bright light into his eyes that he knew originated from within. The pains scorched his skull and he lowered his head, letting the horse carry him on. When he could look up again, he lifted the charms around his neck—the bone from the border guard, the circular stone that Lulah had seen, and Konrad's snapped-off fingers, which she had not—and pressed them to his lips. He exhaled past each and inhaled again, hoping to breathe in charmed air.

The pain subsided, barely, and he imagined Nomi standing before him naked, her body pierced by bolts fired from a crossbow held in his hands. The bolts went in slowly. They hurt. She screamed, and he aimed at the parts of her he had never seen. Let Beko kiss them better, he thought. The daydream went on for a long time, and when his horse stumbled and jarred him back to reality, it took a while to lose the image. It did not shake him as much as it would have a score of days before. He hadn't realized he had changed so much.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14