The world beyond her eyelids went from dark to light in what seemed like an instant.

Jian opened her eyes and tilted her head, but already knew she wouldn't see Yugen seated by her bedside. Instead, there was Quinn's empty space, blankets neatly stacked on top of his pack. He was already up, though the sun hadn't yet fully shown itself.

Jian glanced to her other side, where Madrigal lay curled, facing away from her. She could tell from the rise and fall of his shoulders that he was deeply asleep.

It was better this way, Jian decided. She needed time to think about her vision. Quietly she extricated herself from Mother's blue blanket, the same one that had appeared so vividly in her dream. The details were fading fast, as they always did. There had been a fall from a height, that she remembered; an injury to her leg.

Jian put her hand on the spot where the boy had tied the dressing. Under her leggings, the limb felt strong and healthy.

She would hurt herself, in the cold and dark, and the boy would come to wrap her in Mother's whistelm quilt. Stay with her until she recovered.

"Yugen." The name came unbidden to her lips. He is called Yugen. A boy with a sad expression.

There wasn't much else Jian could hold onto—the images smouldered away with the sun, as they always did. His name, though, that was a triumph to remember. Giving Yugen a name granted him a sense of legitimacy he hadn't enjoyed as that boy from Jian's visions.

Madrigal stirred at the sound of Jian speaking aloud, but didn't wake. She'd let him sleep awhile—he'd been the first one up since the night their provisions were raided. It was rare to see him resting so soundly. He'd tucked one arm under his head as a pillow, and the other was pressed into his forehead, curled into his chestnut hair, as if he were thinking deeply rather than sleeping.

Quinn's absence from their campsite surprised her, but also came as a relief. Jian didn't know where he might have gone, but she didn't feel comfortable with Quinn one-on-one. He struck her as the sort of man who would take advantage of Madrigal's absence, just as he leapt at any chance to be near her. She suspected he wasn't told "no" by women very often.

He was probably off meditating bare-chested under a waterfall somewhere, she thought with disgust, as Madrigal had joked. It didn't please Jian to think such a thing, either. She respected those who chose to rise early for physical training or meditation, but they didn't impress her, and if he thought such things raised his position in the party, he was sorely mistaken.

Jian put aside thoughts of the newcomer as she stirred the coals of last night's banked fire and retrieved their tin flasks. The breeze was uncomfortably cold, even as the trio had made their way further south. A hot drink would prepare her for the day. She opened Madrigal's undented flask first and found it sour with the scent of unfamiliar alcohol.

Madrigal's outburst the night before had made her uncomfortable, despite the good heart she felt certain he had. She didn't think it had as much to do with Laudonian culture as much as he'd at first implied, either. If men where he came from truly could obtain whatever they wished for, without consequences, perhaps it was true they never learned to temper their anger. Madrigal acted like a man who had been through fire, however, and the story she'd heard the previous night about being denied the Kesmettan woman he fancied didn't seem to match up with his rage. Jian felt positive there was more he wasn't telling her. She cast one last look at his slumbering form before picking up the empty flasks and setting off in the direction of the lake.

She followed the same path she and Madrigal had walked the night before, past telltale marks of other travellers' wayfinding stones and footprints dried in the mud. The pointed leaves of the wolkberry bushes had begun to drop to the ground, a sure sign the equinox was only days away. Mother would be gathering the last of the vibrant red berries to split between her food stores and her winter dyeing projects.

Thinking of home made Jian's heart ache. Now that they were more than halfway to the southlands, there could certainly be no turning back, no matter what awaited them in the border towns. She'd come too far to return empty-handed, particularly now that Quinn had visited Elsinoor in her absence. When she arrived home, the news of her betrothal was sure to have spread all over the village.

Whether Jian agreed with it or not.

Maybe, she couldn't help think, Madrigal had been right all along. He championed freedom of choice in life partnerships, like what they had in Laudonia, where the Goddess' influence no longer mattered. Could it truly be possible that Jian would come to care for Quinn as much as, or even more than, she had for the boy in her dreams?

But if that was so, why did Maere keep showing her these endless visions of Yugen?

It didn't make sense, and there were too many possibilities to consider. After all, Quinn was here, and now, and real. Yugen existed in a future Jian couldn't see clearly, and could only remember bits and pieces of. Did Maere mean for Jian to infer Quinn and she would only be together a short time?

Or could there be a possibility that there were two different futures open to Jian, one with Quinn, and the other with Yugen?

Jian had never considered such a thing. No Elsinooran had ever failed to experience their Moment of Clarity, the time when they would relive the vision they'd been shown by the Creator as a youth. Yet no Elsinooran had ever experienced multiple Pathfinding dreams, either. Jian's experiences already failed to line up with anything the Elders expected.

If two futures were open to her, and she chose Yugen, Quinn would fail to experience his Moment, or it might even come to pass very soon, over the coming days and weeks as they travelled together. Perhaps she and Quinn weren't meant to be life partners after all, but only travel partners. There was no way to know without asking the man himself, an idea Jian wasn't comfortable with. Quinn was an outsider, and she didn't trust him with her confidence. She wasn't even sure yet if she liked him as a person.

But if Quinn had seen his partner Path with her, and what they said about the Goddess was true, that future would come to pass whether Jian liked it or not, as certainly as the eventual future with Yugen would also come to pass.

There was no doubt in Jian's mind that Quinn felt he knew her, despite how she tried to keep him at arm's length. She suspected what he'd seen in his Pathfinding visions would leave little doubt about their future relationship, and she wanted to know. If the two of them did reconcile enough for her to ask him for more details, though, he might then ask about her visions, in turn.

And there was no way Jian would be able to tell Quinn anything about those.