You let loose a fury in my stream, breaking the pattern of my patterns, drying up my dreams. Who will hold me? What will guide me? Water is life, but what do you care that I am river no more, but a deluge, and afterward dry dead land making a lethal storm of the wind?

Mercy? Hosting this last rainbow, I—

15

Monsters

Darkness swirled behind Awa’s closed lids. The pattern of her being was faint. She might have slipped into the death lands, except irritating river talk made her heart pound, made her gasp in breath.

“Mercy is a miracle,” Awa croaked at the Amethyst River. “To give or receive…”

And who believes in miracles? The River replied.

“I should be dead, I was dead, but…” Awa’s temples throbbed with the beat of hooves on solid ground. “I’m alive again.”

Yari claimed that every moment was a gift, a miracle, yet despite dazzling experiences in Smokeland, Awa never understood miracles until now. Coming back from the dead, she found joy in needles of rain cutting her skin and in panic sweat drying under her arms. Bird shrieks from up, down, and sideways were a serenade. Crow slurry sailed past her nose and jolted her eyes open. The poison master sat behind her now, holding her up, and she was thrilled to be cradled by a monster.

“A wonder…”

The sky spun more than darkness had. She blinked a gray horizon into its rightful place. Night was coming. The sun was pink haze behind a high canopy of trees. Dry fields had given way to the foothills of the Eidhou mountain range. Cathedral trees covered every ridge. They’d traveled far. Awa must have been dead to the world for a long time.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back to yourself,” the poison master murmured, relieved.

He pulled things from her hair and tossed them to the wind before she saw what filth it was. He thought himself kind. Were all monsters deluded? He touched her withered arm with a soothing balm. She flinched all the same. Gravelly-throated crows swooped up from the valley and chattered about survivors trotting toward them.

“We’re only a few leagues ahead of good citizens who might want to stone us,” he said. “The carrion-eaters celebrate everybody’s heartbeats.” He had a smile on his tongue. “Hearty folks from Holy City ride warhorses also.”

Perhaps Meera and Rokiat had ridden impossibly far too. Awa smiled. “Miracles.”

“Yes. We’re on high ground,” he said. “Safe.”

Awa frowned. “No matter what miracle you did on the bridge, we’re not safe. Did you hear the Amethyst River? Your death-spell hounds us still.”

“Not my death-spell. The People die from their own poison.” Rage burned through his icy cloak and stung her. “Reckoning fire does not consume a good heart.”

Fannie snorted as the incline got steeper. Her hot breath fogged in cold drizzle.