Perry wondered where Cinder was but knew he’d come back on his own, just as Roar had said. When Perry saw him, he’d lay into Cinder for running off, and then he’d find out what happened in the cookhouse.

“Perry!”

He sat up in time to catch a wadded blanket, tossed from below.

“Thanks, Molly.”

“Don’t know why you’re up there, and they’re all warm in your house,” she said, and bustled away.

But Molly did know. There were few secrets in a tribe this small. Everyone knew about his nightmares. Up here, at least, he could pass the sleepless time by reading scents on the breeze and watching the play of light through the clouds. Such a strange spring, with a thick blanket of clouds always above. Much as he feared the Aether, part of him would have felt better if he could see it now.

Brooke fell in step with him as he left the compound at dawn, her bow and quiver over her shoulder. “Where you heading?”

“Same place you are,” he said. She was a Seer, and one of the best archers in the tribe, so Perry had given her the task of teaching everyone in the Tides how to shoot a bow. Her lessons were near the same field where he was meeting Bear.

Their walk was awkward and quiet. He noticed she still wore one of his arrowheads on a strip of leather around her neck, and he tried not to think of the day he gave it to her, or what it had meant to both of them. He cared about her, and that would never change. But it was over between them. He’d told her so over the winter, as gently as he could, and hoped soon she’d see it too.

As they reached the eastern field, he found an argument already nearing a boil: two farmers, Rowan and Gray, who wanted more help in the fields than Perry could give them. Bear stood between them, massive, yet gentle as a kitten.

“Look at this,” said Rowan, the young farmer whose child had had fever the night before. He lifted a boot sopping with mud. “I need a retaining wall. Something to stop the debris from coming down the hill. And I need more drainage.”

Perry’s gaze moved to the hillside half a mile away. Aether storms had wiped the lower portion to nothing more than ash. When the spring rains started, waves of mud and debris flowed down the slope. The whole shape of the hill was changing without the trees there to hold the earth fast.

“This is nothing,” Gray said. He stood a full head shorter than Perry and Bear. “Half my land’s underwater. I need people. I need use of the ox. And I need them both more than he does.”