Another body he would have to deal with.

The others were too squeamish, so Cruze had taken on the duty of disposing of bodies when nature did not do it for them. This would need to be addressed quickly or it would bring more predators crawling around their new camp.

“Are you all right?” he asked Kess, who still hovered near the tree, her palms pressed to the bark and her head ducked low.

“I do not know how much longer I can stay here.”

“You are not her,” Cruze told her. “You are a survivor.”

“Right now I am. But this place … if we stay here, it will take us eventually. Somehow, someway.”

“You want to leave?”

“Don’t you?” The question came not from Kess, but from the other girl, the one with the mark. Cruze scowled, turning to face her. A swarm of otherness pressed in around him, and he knew immediately what it was. He had made promises in his time here. He had seen deaths both in the present and the past—so many that he was beginning to know the forest by the marks death left behind, by the memories and ghosts that lingered. They had opened themselves up to him, and he could not abandon them.

“You two should go back to camp. I will deal with this,” Cruze said, gesturing toward the body, another death. He wondered if he would encounter her spirit at one point too.

“Really though,” the red-haired girl continued. “You think it better to stay here than try to leave? Maybe we could make it out of the jungle, find another city to take us in.”

Cruze resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He might have lived in a ramshackle house shared with near a dozen women, but one thing his father had done for him was provide the books needed to educate himself.

“The nearest Stormling city is Odilar, on the other side of the Sahrain mountains. We would have to trek north through the entire jungle, then cross the mountain paths. Here at least we have water and some degree of shelter. If we leave, we are at the mercy of both the storms and the land.”

The girl lifted her chin. “Then we don’t make for a city. We make for the coast. Perhaps we will have some chance there of finding help.”

Curious. If she was a witch of water, as he suspected, she would feel more comfortable by the sea. His father had called the original magics evil. When Cruze had asked for a book on the subject, he had gotten a swift slap to his cheek, and an order never to speak of those magics again.