Fellen and I did eventually switch roles. She wasn’t happy when she learned I let her sleep in, and we both used that to distract from the uncomfortable conversation we had before she fell asleep. I could tell she wasn’t sure how to address what she learned. After all, if I was right about my blessing and she still took into account the healer’s beads I had worn for most of my life, then I was the most life-ridden person she had ever known and Fellen should have no association with me in case I drew the goddess’s eye. But we also needed each other to find our way out of Flickermark and there was the possibility that since the blessing was a gift of the goddess that canceled out the dangers of the life given with it. Nor did I have my healer’s beads any longer, so the life I had collected through using the healer’s craft should be slowly ebbing away. In the end, Fellen decided to ignore the issue all together.

When she heard me getting up after a handful of rough hours of sleep, she stated her decision quite clearly. “I don’t think the goddess would give you a blessing that would deny one Her aspects. Perhaps that time when you were sick was a fluke or your—the healer really is that skilled. So I’m going to treat you the same until there’s proof that your blessing is what you say it is.”

She was still stubbornly clinging to our rivalry then. I let her. Just because I was owning up to my blessing didn’t mean everyone else was going to accept it with open arms. I already had one prime example of that. Fellen, at least, was trying to live up to her aspirations of being a burr despite what she had learned.

We didn’t wait for the sun to go down before we got moving. Daylight hours were when the nocturnal animals that populated Flickermark were the most lethargic and thus, when we had the highest chance of a successful hunt. We did keep to one path though, and only went around a handful of corners both ways to keep from straying too far in a direction. I kept track of our progress with the knots and we left a bit of leather in the nook we had slept in to help orient us when we passed it. With those precautions we didn’t get lost, but we also didn’t catch anything. Our lack of experience showed through—neither Fellen nor I had been deemed ready to take on a hunting expedition back at Gabbler Shore, much less Flickermark. We hadn’t even gotten to go fishing with the huntresses in the lake. Apparently, spears came after slings in the lone huntress training regimen as spear fishing was better suited to the Pack—Nole was the exception.

During the couple hours we tried to hunt we only spotted two different animals. Both in the second hour. The first was a lizard sunning itself on a rock that I spotted, but Fellen fumbled when she went to put a stone in her sling. Both the clatter of the rock and its echo scared the lizard into hiding before I got to throw my stone. Fellen nearly redeemed herself with the second one. She stopped me as we were rounding a corner and pointed out a small mole that had poked his way through a dirt patch and was snuffling around. She didn’t fumble her stone that time and sent it shooting through the air after a few twirls of her sling for power and speed. Her shot went wide by a few inches though, and the mole disappeared back down its tunnel in the next instant.

We rested for the remainder of the time until the stars shone through the tail ends of dusk, quieting our stomachs with a few small sips of water and Fellen’s dried fish. There was only enough for a few bites each, but we didn’t complain. There wasn’t much point.

That night went more poorly than the first. As the night continued wisps of clouds began to cover the stars and block the moonlight. If we had been with the tribe they wouldn’t have caused that much trouble, unless we had gone very off course, with the maps and compiled knowledge of the huntresses to guide us. They could compare all the constellations they saw to figure out where to go, but as it was it seemed at least half time the ones Fellen knew got obscured. Which left us with the options of wasting time waiting for the clouds to clear when we came upon new paths so we could check which way to go or guessing and going ahead anyway. Both options had the possibility of us not making it out Flickermark before the cold season hit along with the danger of starvation and dehydration. In about a day, our meager resources were already almost cut in half despite us rationing our water and doing my best to find things for us to eat.

We weren’t consistent. Debates did happen every time we reached a new split in the path, but we didn’t consistently choose to press on or wait. Often I was the one in favor of waiting while Fellen was eager to press on and leave—in her words—the oppressive quiet of Flickermark behind. If it looked like the clouds would pass soon, I would win the argument, but there were times when they took too long and Fellen reached the end of her patience. It got shorter as the night wore on. Then she would pick a path to march down and my choice became to join her or let us split up. I could have pressed her on it, called her bluff, but the rumors of Flickermark’s changing paths and confusion tactics encouraged me to keep her insight. We had a better chance together.

Those weren’t the only times we had to pick a path based only my recording of the turns we’d taken and our intuition. Sometimes the walls of the ravines blocked out all of the constellations Fellen knew or we could see them, but none of our options curved in the right direction. All we had then was guesswork and Fellen often deferred the decision to me. When she wasn’t being impatient, she recognized that I had the better eye to notice the small details that indicated which paths might have water or food even if she didn’t like to admit it out loud.

On one of the paths I picked we did find a few scraggly bushes that we cut up and stored in our packs for firewood. They would burn well unlike the shaded pod crawler we had found the night before.

We found another nook to settle into in the morning and I took first watch again. Our next two days fell into the same pattern. First watch for me, second for Fellen, then two or three hours spent hunting before we rested until night came. Then we did our best to travel in an easterly direction until dawn. We found a small stream tucked into the side of a path on the third day and, after we refilled our waterskins, we followed it for as long as we could before it disappeared into a crack in the ravine’s wall. On the fourth, I got my first kill. Fellen and I had been about to finish our hunt empty handed when we heard the familiar trills of cliff singers, small gray and white birds that had liked to nest on the upper reaches of the bluffs at Gabbler Shore toward the end of the warm season. The trills echoed through the ravines, so we didn’t doubt that other predators would be coming to try to get their fill, but with a silent look we both agreed at the insistence of our rumbling stomachs to risk it and leave our designated path. The birds quieted down as we drew close, but they didn’t fly off. It took us a bit to pick them out in the fading light against the gray stone they blended in so well with. The birds were high up on the ravine’s wall, perched on little lips of stone and wedged in holes that couldn’t be bigger than two fists put together. We crouched behind a bulge in the ravine wall. Readied our slings with as little movement and sound as possible. Stepped out from behind our cover as we twirled our slings and released. Both shots missed, but the sound of the rocks hitting the wall scared the birds, and it looked like a gray cloud lifted from the the wall. I got another shot off before they all flew away and managed to hit one. The cliff singer fell and broke its neck—not the clean, beautiful shot I had wanted for my first kill.

Still, we finally had more meat even if the bird’s size would largely amount to the same situation we had with Fellen’s dried fish. As quickly as we could, we collected the bird and our stones before trying to make our way back to our nook, but we must have gotten turned around because we couldn’t find it. So, we did our best to put some distance between where the birds had been—hoping to avoid any predators that had woken up and decided to go hunting—while looking for another nook. We found one and Fellen used the twigs we had gathered to make a small fire while I plucked the bird. Night fell as we roasted and ate it.

That marked the start of us being completely lost—without even the idea of how to get back to where we started. I would never admit it to Fellen, but a part of me worried that I had missed marking a turn in the excitement of finding the birds. Not that I needed to say it out loud—the worry and suspicion was in her eyes as well.

She started to check whether I had made a knot in the thread when we rounded a corner or sometimes she would bluntly ask about the type of knot I had made. It quickly ground my patience down. We had just navigated a quick series of twists and turns and were trying to decide between following the path we were on or continuing on the offshoot we had found when I caught her once again glancing at my hands and the way we had come, mentally comparing the turns to the number of knots from the last time she checked two turns ago.

“Maybe if you paid more attention to the sky than my hands you would know which to go!”

Fellen snapped her gaze up to glare me. Evidently, her patience was at its end too. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t miss marking a corner we would be at spot that’s easier to see the constellations I know!”

I crossed my arms. “I never said I missed a corner! Besides, all you have to do is stare at stars. I’m keeping track of where we’ve been and finding food and water. Half the time I’m also the one who has to decide which way we go because you can’t see anything useful anyway.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be in charge of all that then, since you seem to be doing a pretty poor job of it.” She held her hand out for the ball of woolen thread.

I ignored the gesture. “You can’t blame me for the lack of resources in Flickermark.”

Fellen held firm. “The animals seem to do well enough. If you can’t find what they can, maybe I should give it a try.”

“You know that’s stupid. Just figure out which way we should go, so we can keep moving.”

“I just told you: I can’t tell if that bunch of stars is the Hawk’s beak or not, so I don’t know which way to go!”

I rolled my eyes and was about to retort back at her when a sound caught my attention. I held a hand up and Fellen clamped whatever she had also been about to say behind her lips. In the quiet that suffused Flickermark we both heard the tiniest scraping sound from the way we had come. We held still, desperate to not give ourselves away while also straining to see what was coming. The scraping sound grew louder until it morphed into a long scrape with a quiet thump at the end, like when one of the huntresses had broken her leg last year and limped along for months afterward.

Something moved at the last corner.

Fellen and I both took an involuntary step back when we saw it.

Bipedal, with gray skin that blended well with the night and that stretched gauntly over its bones. Its eyes and mouth were voids of deep black with edges that cracked into the skin. No hair, no clothes, no identifying features, except for the overall nightmare image of a corpse lurching its way toward us.

A shamble man.

If it touched us it was said that we would bear the goddess’s curse as well and that when we died, even when our tribe lit our funeral pyres, we wouldn’t burn. Instead, we would be locked within the Carver’s Maze for eternity, without even the barest chance of earning the goddess’s mercy as her servants. Doubly cursed and punished. Another myth whispered that if you gazed too long at where a shamble man’s eyes were supposed to be, it could suck out your soul in an attempt to replace its own, but it wouldn’t be able to keep it, and your soul would be locked away in the Ever Dark. What was left got instantly transformed into a shamble man. More myths crowded my mind as the shamble man drew closer—many warning of terrible fates that occurred because someone came in contact with a shamble man or someone wasn’t burned and became one or because someone betrayed the goddess and She cursed them as She had those that had wished Grislander into being.

Its head cocked to the side as it took another step forward. Fellen yelped; I shook. Our hands found each other. And when it started to reach a hand out—we fled. In that moment it didn’t matter which path we took, all that mattered was that we got away. Stars forgotten, knots forgotten, we fled deeper into Flickermark’s depths.