Her purpose put her at great risk. Despite the harm she’d caused along the way, in the end the price of failure—or success—could be her life, but the alternative for so many others was too great. The path ahead terrified her compared to the life she’d known and wished she could take back.
Wynn accepted this, but Chane didn’t.
Not even the whys and wherefores entered into it for him. He didn’t believe in the absolute necessity of her mission, not on any level that mattered beyond his own desire. All that mattered in this world to Chane, beyond himself or his vision of the guild, was her.
Something had to be done.
Chane opened his eyes. At first the ceiling above looked unfamiliar. Anxiety rushed in, followed by pain. He could not remember where he was or how he had gotten there.
Apprehension increased as his sight cleared. The entire ceiling was covered in bark that flowed down the wall on his right. He rolled his head to the side.
Wynn sat cross-legged on the floor, writing in a journal—or perhaps she was crossing something out. Shade lay on the bed ledge across the room, watching him, as usual.
Chane realized that he lay upon a bed ledge in their room at the guild. This did not take the edge off his discomfort. His head throbbed, as did his side and left shoulder, but worse were the scattered and disconnected fragments of memories as they began to return.
What had happened in the clearing around that barkless tree?
“Wynn?” he rasped.
She looked up, dropped the journal and quill, and crawled toward him.
“Are you ... are you all right?”
He swung his legs over the bedside. The room swam before his eyes, and the pain in his skull and side sharpened. He had been badly damaged somehow. Hunger followed too quickly, and he forced it down.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I had to ... had to have Ore-Locks stop you. We brought you back, and you’ve been dormant all the way to this evening.”
Chane glanced toward the curtained window and then stared at her. “It is the next night?”
“Yes. But I think I know where to start searching ... sort of.”
Her words barely registered.
Chane tried to stand up, and winced as something tightened around his stomach. His shirttail hung out, the left side stained with his own fluids. When he lifted the edge, a linen bandage was wrapped around his midriff. When had he been cut?
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Wynn said. Then she repeated, “Are you all right?”
Chane let hunger leak slightly through his cold flesh to eat away some of the pain.
“I will be.” Bits and pieces of the night before started coming back. “You ran off alone,” he said, unable to keep the accusation from his tone.
“And I told you to stay in Vreuvillä’s home,” she countered. “You were foolish to go running around in that forest ... no matter how it worked out in the end.”
Chane sat silent at that. Try as he might, he remembered so little beyond the moment he had found her—and then after he had pulled her away from those moving roots.
Wynn watched him closely, with the hint of a frown. She was biting back something more, perhaps not wishing to argue. What else was wrong?
“I’m fine,” she said, perhaps reading him. “I’ve got information that might help us find the seatt ... and other pieces I don’t yet understand.”
The situation was more than disconcerting. He had never lost time like this before. The last thing he remembered clearly was pressing the ring against Wynn’s shoulder in blind fear of losing her.
Wynn sat back on her knees.
“Let’s just move onward,” she said evasively. “I think we need to get you out of this land as soon as possible. Everything will be better, will be all right, after that.”
It was not—would not be so. It was all broken in his head. And the beast began to rumble and whine inside him. He pushed his hair back with both hands and clenched at the sharpening pain in his head. Glancing once toward Welstiel’s pack in the room’s corner, he thought of what he needed in there. In the moment, he had a greater concern.
“You learned the location?” he asked.
“Not precisely. No one could possibly know that. I have a direction and something to look for.”
Wynn related what Vreuvillä had told her and what else she had surmised. When she mentioned the Fay’s scratching “leaf-wing chorus” in her head, Chane was uncertain what to think. Had she truly heard these nature spirits, or could she have imagined this?
“If dwarves visited among the Lhoin’na forerunners in ancient times,” she went on, “then the Slip-Tooth Pass would’ve been the most direct route. We’ll head south down the pass to where it meets the Sky-Cutter Range. I believe the seatt is on its far south side, closer to the desert, but if we travel in a straight line from the pass’s end, we’ll have the best chance to spot any ‘fallen mountain. ’ At this point, it’s the most sensible way to begin.”
“What makes you think it will be on the south side?”
“Something Domin il’Sänke told me. When spoken in Sumanese, ‘Bäalâle’ is pronounced min’bä’alâle, which is an ululation of praise for a desert tribal leader. That suggests the seatt was near the desert. Perhaps the dwarves of old were friendly with some desert tribe or people.”
Taking in Wynn’s oval, olive-toned face, Chane saw a hint of her old, blind confidence there. But he pondered the strange duality of what she said she had heard from the Fay. What was the difference between “the fallen dead of the Earth” and “that of the Earth?” What did “a slave to a slave” have to do with any of this?
None of it mattered against the mounting danger to her. It unsettled Chane that she had managed to gain enough information to head into what sounded like a correct direction.
“We need to restock supplies,” she said, “and prepare for at least a moon’s worth of travel, if not more. I don’t know if there are settlements along the way. Certainly not once we head into the range.”
Which meant that she had no intention of turning back, no matter what.
Chane swallowed hard, though his throat had gone dry. At least her plans offered two immediate solutions.
“Do you ...” he began, and faltered. “Is there anything more you need here at the guild?”
She looked at him in puzzlement. “I don’t think so. But it may take a few days to prepare before leaving.”
“Then we should lodge elsewhere in the city—find an inn; be on our own.”
Before he even finished, he saw agreement flood her expression, and perhaps relief. It would not surprise him if Premin Gyâr was having them watched. Chane had not forgotten the menace on the premin’s face in the archives.
“Yes,” Wynn said, nodding. “On our own again.”
Shade lifted her head, ears pricked at full attention. She hopped off the bed ledge and padded to the door, sniffing at its bottom crack near the floor.
Chane rose, clenching his teeth against the returning pain. “Take hold of her.”
Wynn started at his words, and then saw what Shade was up to. She pulled Shade back as Chane jerked open the door.
He looked both ways, seeing no one along the passageway’s gradual arc. Someone had been there. Even with the ring on, the starving beast inside him sensed this as much as Shade had smelled it. And there was something more that he sensed.
A thin and strange scent lingered in the passage. Partly cinnamon, but with another spice or two he did not recognize.