Black walls gave way to higher walls yet, speckled with rosettes of white and gray. She tried to focus on them as a way of fighting back the panic, but it welled up inside her anyway, sharp and hot and demanding. What was the Prince going to do with them, now that he had taken them prisoner? Each thing she thought of was more terrible than the last. It was clear that they had to get away from these people, but how? Once the Light flashed briefly and she tried to use it like Hesseth had taught her, to break through his chains, but she just wasn’t strong enough, or maybe she didn’t do it right. Or maybe it was like Hesseth had said, that the Light did its best work with minds and souls, and wasn’t that good with inanimate objects. The failure filled her with frustration, and with anger. Tarrant had said that the Light was a kind of power, but what good did that do if she couldn’t Work it?
The river meandered through the wasteland, twisting and turning as its current carried them westward. The walls were so high that Jenseny couldn’t see the trees above them at all, not even when the moonlight was strongest. And then Domina—if that big moon was Domina—began to set, and sometimes the light would be lost behind a twist in the canyon. That was a very scary thing, when they were all in darkness except for the single great lantern at the head of each boat. Jenseny thought she could see things stirring along the edges of the water then, things that sometimes looked like white trees and sometimes animals and sometimes the Terata. Were those fear-things which they had made? Tarrant had explained that once, how the fae could make shapes out of fears and hopes and give them a life of their own. Did that mean she might see her father one day, reflected in the fae’s dark substance? She huddled close to Damien, afraid of the thought. Tarrant said that all the fae-things fed on people, even when they looked like things you loved. What a horrifying concept, that your most precious dreams could be turned against you! How she longed to be in her own room again, where the love and order of her father’s house had protected her from such nightmares!
Slowly, mile by mile, the canyon walls lowered. Equally slowly the river widened, until it was hard to see the far shore in the darkness. The nearer shoreline glistened like Tarrant’s handful of gems had, only all white and silver and black, with no colors. She looked up at Damien to see if he was watching it, but he was gazing into the night with unfocused eyes, his brow furrowed as if in painful concentration. “Are you all right?” she whispered. She made her voice as soft as it could be, so the soldiers wouldn’t hear her. For a moment the priest’s eyes turned her way, but they remained as glazed and unresponsive as before. He seemed to be trying to talk, but for a long time no words would come. “Can’t think,” he gasped at last; it was clear those two words were a triumph. “The potion . . .” Then his strength failed him, or maybe it was just that the words deserted him; he sagged back against the engine housing and shut his eyes, shivering in the cold of the night.
“It’ll be okay,” she promised him. Echoing his earlier words, hoping they would comfort him. “We’ll get through it okay.”
You can’t be strong anymore, so I’ll have to be strong for both of us.
She was hungry and she was thirsty and there was not much she could do about it. The soldiers had taken Damien’s pack and that was where all the food was. She could scoop up water in her hand if she stretched down as far as possible, but she was afraid of drinking too much and then having to go to the bathroom. That would be incredibly embarrassing. She had gotten used to slipping off behind a rock or a bush to do her stuff, but there were no rocks or bushes here and she figured the soldiers would be quick to anger if she fouled their boat. What did they do when nature called?
“Water,” the priest whispered, and she cupped her hands and scooped some up—almost falling out of the boat in the process—and brought it up to his lips. He sipped a little, then nodded for her to spill back the rest. Evidently he didn’t want to fill up his bladder too much either.
And then the three boats turned, bright oars managing the maneuver with practiced precision. That brought them into a cave that led from the river, and they were quickly swallowed up by its narrow confines. Lamplight glittered on a crystalline ceiling not ten feet from their heads; if one of the men had stood up, he could have reached up and touched it. She wondered what would happen if the river got higher. Maybe after a hard rain they couldn’t use this route at all.
After a time, the walls opened up. The ceiling gave way to darkness, then to stars. They floated on the surface of a lake so black that it could hardly be distinguished from the land surrounding it. And then before them . . .
They rose up from the ground suddenly, magnificently, their manifold facets reflecting the moonlight with solar brilliance, their myriad surfaces like mirrors. Vast towers of crystal that soared toward the heavens, their peaked tips sharp against Domina’s brilliance. Some were as wide as buildings and equally as solid; others were slender spines of glass, barely translucent, that jutted out from among their perpendicular brethren at sharp, arresting angles. Here and there a cluster of crystals, diamondlike, adhered to one of the mirror surfaces, or filled in the gap between two towers; here and there a spine had been broken by some mischance of nature and tiny crystals gathered in the wound like blood. It was a chaos of brilliance, of knife-sharp edges and night-black surfaces that flashed with light as the boats moved toward them, a field of living crystal so complex, so intertwined, that it was impossible to focus on any one form, or to trace a single outline to its end. Staring at it, Jenseny felt dizzy and breathless and afraid all at once, and at last she turned away from it.
“Rakhlands,” the priest whispered. No more than that. Rakhlands. She wished he had told her more about that journey, so that she could understand the reference.
Directly east of them, low on the horizon, the pale light of dawn was just beginning to compromise the night. Cool sparks played along the edges of the crystal towers where the newborn sunlight touched them, and one mirrored surface, angled perfectly to catch the dawn light, flashed a blue so bright that it hurt her eyes. Jenseny wondered what this place would look like in the sunlight. She wondered if they would live to see it.
The boats were brought to a gentle shore and there moored. Clearly the beach, like the lake it surrounded, had been deliberately sculpted; the land in this region was a wild mixture of swirling lava and crystalline growths, hardly suitable for a harbor. There were other boats nearby, Jenseny noted, some like the ones they were in and others much larger and much more complicated. None were tall, she noted. She guessed that was because of the cavern they had to sail through to get here.
When they had reached the beach, the soldiers at the front quickly disembarked, boots splashing in the water as they took up careful positions around their prisoners. They needn’t have bothered. It was clear that Damien could hardly stand, and as two of the soldiers helped him from the boat he went down on his knees, hard; it was clear that their firm grip on his upper arms was the only thing keeping him upright at all.