Neither Jika or I were keen on sleeping with molten rock two feet from our toes and the lingering threat that the fire dancers might draw close again. Jika eventually couldn’t stand the quiet tension and we turned to trading stories to pass the time as what sunlight lit up the fog slowly faded. At least that way we had some kind of distraction from the fact that Prevna and Tike had failed to return with Kuma so far and Deamar hadn’t returned with reinforcements to bring us back to the village.

Once the light faded away we had no way to tell how much time had passed. Outside Steamer’s Fall there had been enough ambient light from the moon and stars to have some sense of the night progressing but, here, the fog might as well have been a black void. Only sporadic bubbles of bright lava broke up the darkness and they did nothing to lessen the feeling that we had descended into some offshoot of the Ever Dark that had been given space in the mortal world. Outside of time and no way to escape the enveloping dark for the taunting stars that were always out of reach.

And out of everyone in the world, I was stuck there with shivering, nervous Jika who seemed like she thought I’d bite her head off as soon as I looked at her. Not that she was wrong, but her nerves added an extra edge to the hellscape surrounding us that I didn’t have the energy to deal with. She had relaxed some during our story exchange but I could feel the way her nerves ratcheted up every time there was a noise overhead or I neglected to give some kind of positive response to her stories.

So I briefly debated between the extremes of knocking her out and doing what Prevna would do.

“Tell me about your favorite memory or the best thing you ever got. Your favorite place.”

What Prevna would do won, mostly because I didn’t want to get accidentally dipped in molten rock if knocking Jika out turned into a scuffle. And even with an aching head that she was making worse, I could understand the long term consequences of knocking her out likely wouldn’t be worth the respite. But I also refused to touch Jika to bump shoulders or sling my arm over her shoulders, so I settled on her tendency to focus on the positive.

I could still feel Jika staring at me as if I just asked her to give me a dozen rare herbs so I could toss them into the lava just for the sake of watching her break. Not that she cared one whit about herbs, but she definitely thought I was trying to gather information to hurt her with later.

I would have asked for her favorite myth but she had run short of stories long before I did and she had taken to telling tales about her Picker band’s daily antics and hunting stories. I wasn’t that keen on hearing another tale about people I didn’t know or really care about.

“Tell me yours first,” she demanded.

I sighed, but somehow between the exhaustion and the darkness and isolation I found myself picking through memories rather than keeping quiet. Nothing to do with healing since that would raise too many questions and there wasn’t a place that came immediately to mind that stood out as a favorite. I had seen some pretty amazing places, but I couldn’t say I was drawn to go there again. But something I had received…

My fingers brushed over my poisoner’s pouch. It held all my most treasured items whether I wanted to admit it or not. I might not use the poisoner’s recipes Rawley had taught me, but there was no denying that she had given me back a piece of myself when she had gifted me the pouch and then went a step further to help me earn the poisoner’s mark on my wrist.

“The best thing I ever received was my poisoner’s pouch. My mentor helped me see there was a path forward when I thought that was impossible before she gave it to me.”

“Oh.” Jika obviously hadn’t expected a real answer. “She was a good mentor then?”

“The best.”

Jika fell silent for a bit while she thought through her answer. “I think…my favorite thing is a place. There’s this tall tree in our territory with sturdy branches and when I climb it I can see past the forest to the Cut down below and the Seedling Palace on the horizon.” I heard her shift before she continued again. “It reminds me that there’s more than this place. Picker bands don’t move around as much around the Cut. Territory is too highly prized for when everyone needs to travel through from the goddess procession every year. So this is probably the most I’ve traveled around since Nerco secured our borders and…and I always wondered what else is out there.”

I asked, “Did you ever go see the procession yourself?”

“No.” Her disappointment was evident in her voice. “There’s not enough members in the band for us to splinter off for weeks on end and still get everything done. Some other band would probably start poaching our territory and if we don’t have enough, we’ll starve.” There was a long moment of silence as her last statement sunk in before she tried for a lighter tone. “I’ve seen the sky go dark multiple times though. It often reaches here and that’s our signal to expect travelers in the coming weeks.”

I watched a bubble of lava burst a handful of feet from us. Wiped sweat from my forehead while I tried to think of something to say. “I went to the Calling Road when I was nine years old and that’s when I vowed that I would drink the shadows. That I’d do whatever I could to become one of the goddess’s chosen.”

“Because She was so awe-inspiring?”

“Terrifying. But that wasn’t what pushed me to make the vow.”

I closed my eyes and stepped into my memory tent before I walked over to a stone placed on a pedestal next to the pot that held my recent important memories. The stone had a carving of a forest with a dark opening inside it and a path leading from it. People gathered around the path but they were little more than stick figures. The whole drawing looked like a child with little time or patience had drawn it in the dirt. This was my memory of that pivotal moment before my lessons became to sole focus of my life. Touching the stone I could remember the gut wrenching terror of the goddess walking by and Her Chosen striding behind. Lithunia gripping my hand and watching her and the others continue on with pride and purpose. The sense that they had control over their lives without shame or fear and the vow I made to obtain that.

And yet…ever since I had stepped foot into the Seedling Palace, ever since I had lost my healer’s beads, I had been striving for something else. To return to the comfort of what I had.

What binds you?

I had become a seedling with the sense that it was because I had nothing else, that I had been trapped since birth by the mark on my thigh. I conveniently ignored the vow I made and the sentiment behind it because I didn’t want to serve the goddess—not when She already controlled everything else and my mark seemed to bring me more pain than help.

But I hadn’t made the vow for Her. Not really. I had made it upon seeing how the chosen had no higher authority than Her and the authority they were able to hold themselves. I had wished for the black lips that everyone identified whisper women by so they would know I wasn’t someone beneath them. They would know just by looking at me that I wasn’t weak or cursed for having too much life.

I could strive for that again. That power, that authority. Gaining black lips hadn’t done much for my standing among the whisper women even if the normal tribes would likely hold me in same regard as a full whisper woman now. If my actions helped the goddess—well, everything in Her territory was there to serve Her or pay the price. I could put more effort into gaining the sects’ good will so that they’d be willing to take me on as a Sapling. More effort into learning about the Lady of Calm Waters and Esie, and leveraging their patronage instead of passively waiting for everything to be taken from me again.

“Gimley?”

I blinked and came out of the memory. From the sound of it Jika had asked me something several times. With a bit more bite than I meant to, I snapped, “What?”

“Oh, sorry, nothing. I just wanted to know what pushed you to make the vow if it wasn’t the goddess, but if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I saw the chosen and wanted what they had.” A small bit of gratification flared in my chest at the shocked silence that followed.

She floundered for an appropriate response, “I—well—that makes sense.” Jika shifted again before she continued, “Like me and my tree, right? Wanting to experience what else is out there?”

I didn’t want to be similar to Jika in any way but I could begrudgingly see how she had made the connection. “You have two feet, you can use them. If your band can survive the purge without you, surely they aren’t so incompetent that they’d fall apart if you went to see the procession. Even Deamar and the other boys from the village will be going to the Seedling Palace at the turn of the season now.”

Jika’s voice became a mere whisper. “They might not have. They were right next to the Fangs’ new territory and all that fighting.”

I snorted. “Maybe and, if they did fall, do you think your presence would have saved the whole band?”

“I can fight!”

“And?”

“Maybe more of the band would survive if I was there helping.”

“If you were that worried you wouldn’t have followed us down into the inner valleys. You and Kuma and…the other one would have gone harrying off to wherever Nerco likely holed up no matter how dangerous the mountainside is. So they can survive without you and even if they happened to get blindsided and you were with them, the only change would be that you’d all be dead. So either way you might as well go on a trip instead of pining after it since that way you’ll be able to carry on their memory if something did happen.”

My logic was full of holes and blatantly ignoring the finer details of the whole situation, but I had momentum and it ground down Jika’s protests any time she tried to break into my little speech.

By the end of it all she had was a weak, “Maybe.”

The darkness persisted and I ended up telling a few more tales to keep the reminder of the Ever Dark at bay. Even dark sight did little to alleviate the way it pressed in around us since the fog here had been nearly impossible to see through during the day.

“How do you know so many stories?” Jika asked. She sounded somewhere between impressed and cowed by the sheer number of myths I was able to recall.

“All part of my training,” I said and left it at that. She could think that whisper women put more significance into knowing such things than I had currently seen, outside of the odd pair in the nested library.

By the time morning light finally settled on the fog and made it glow, we were still alone with no sign of the others and by my best guess we had less than a handful of hours before our resistance to the fog wore off. I strongly doubted that the fire dancers would still terrorizing the valley so many hours later since it didn’t smell like the entire thing had burned to a crisp, but that also meant that Deamar might have chosen a comfy night at home over returning for us or that something had happened and the reinforcements he was supposed to get weren’t coming at all. Prevna shouldn’t have gotten lost with Tike so there was also the possibility that they hadn’t been able to return to Steamer’s Fall with how close the dancers had gotten. If they couldn’t come here they were likely holed up in some random spot or returning to the village on their own, hopefully after finding Kuma. If they did still come here they would be in the same predicament we were if Deamar didn’t show up.

I needed the fog to put me to sleep but I still didn’t think this was the best place to fall under its influence, just as I didn’t want to be caught out in the open where any predator could happen upon us. We didn’t know how to navigate the valley but if we followed the lake’s edge, as long as we went in the correct direction, we should eventually end up at the outpost the village had by the lake. The problem, of course, was that the fire dancers could still be wrecking havoc and the fog would likely get to us before we made it to village, if something else didn’t go wrong first.

Ultimately, we had the same choice we’d had since the others left: stay put and wait for them to return or move, taking the chance we’d miss them and find other danger.

I touched the pouch that held the experimental mixture I had made. Another risk with possible reward.

I laid out our options for Jika. “Either we can wait and hope someone shows up to get us or we can use what time we have left and try to make it around the lake and to the village before we succumb to the fog. Really, we probably should have left yesterday, even after we decided to wait, but there’s nothing we can do about that now.”

“What about the fire dancers?”

“If they’re still around we can hide like we did before.”

Neither of us bothered to point out that was a lot less likely when we were on the same level as the fire dancers and surrounded by significantly more burnable material.

“And what if Deamar gets here right after we leave?”

“That’ll no longer be our problem since we’ll be gone. He can take the full blame for taking so long.”

A long breath in, a long breath out and then, “Fine. Let’s go.”

Prevna had wanted me to get to safety. Well, now I would.

“Let’s go,” I agreed.