She’s cut off by the sound of frantic braying, then a jolt of lightning. “Orrin,” Ruti snarls, twisting back to look for him. Instead, she sees their three donkeys, all racing away from Orrin at top speed. Ruti manages barely the beginning of a chant before she knows that it’s too late, that she can’t stop them in time. A witch’s weakness is always time, the long moments until a spirit might choose to grant them relief.
The donkeys careen toward the lake, and Ruti glimpses with horror that Kimya is on the last. Orrin is still far back, sparking energy in his hands, and three hyenas are racing away from him at top speed. He must have used his power to chase the hyenas off, but the donkeys had been spooked. Ruti runs at the last one, spotting Kimya hanging on for dear life.
The donkey bowls her over, a flash of hooves and brown fur and Kimya’s mouth stretched round and terrified. Ruti takes a hoof to her head and topples over, helpless as the first of the donkeys reaches the lake.
It’s a magic unlike any she’s seen. The donkey’s legs go first, as though all the blood is being sucked from them. They turn black and hard, the donkey braying in sheer terror, and it falls beneath the weight of its own body, keeling over to sink beneath the lake. The water envelops it, leaving dessicated, shrunken skin that hardens into something unrecognizable.
The second donkey is already nearly gone, and Kimya seizes desperately at the third’s reins, slowing it down only incrementally. Ruti screams, “KIMYA!” She clambers to her feet, already beginning a new song for agility. There is a rock in the lake jutting up near where the donkey thrashes in the shallow start of the water, and if she leaps, she might be able to reach it.
A hand seizes her and yanks her back. “Stop!” Dekala snaps. “I’ll go.”
“You’re not going!” Ruti says frantically. Stone is beginning to climb up the donkey’s legs, making it totter in place, Kimya reaching for them. “I need to—”
“I’m stronger than you,” Dekala reminds her. “You’ve seen me fight. Sing me there.”
There’s no time to argue. Ruti sings, her eyes fixed on Dekala, her voice rising and rising to impossible heights as Dekala takes a running leap across the lake. If she falls, Dekala will be gone, along with Kimya. She can’t fail, can’t lose them both, and she sings and sings and pleads helplessly with the spirits for the kind of strength and speed that she’d managed in the training room when she’d last sung Dekala. She is running out of herbs and offerings, and all she has to offer is her voice.
Dekala lands on the rock in a crouch just as the donkey is falling on useless legs. She snatches Kimya from the donkey’s back, cradling her in her arms as though Kimya is an infant, and meets Ruti’s eyes grimly. “I can’t jump back,” she says. “Not without a running start.”
Ruti stops singing. They’re maybe ten feet out, huddled on a tiny rock in the middle of a toxic lake, and they’re so close that Ruti can almost touch them. But at the same time, they’re unreachable.
Kimya signs, her eyes tired and afraid, and Ruti doesn’t understand what she’s saying at first. “Trees? Why do we need a tree? It’ll just turn to stone.” She glances around, spotting the few trees near the lake’s shore, their trunks sunken and dead from the water.
“I only need a few seconds,” Dekala says, her eyes following Ruti’s. “Get Orrin.”
Orrin. Orrin who had lost sight of the most important thing he’d been guarding, and now has left them at a deadly lake with no donkeys. Ruti narrows her eyes and turns to him. He’s watching them, chagrined.
“Take down a tree,” she snaps. “Quickly.”
He doesn’t fight her. It takes them time before they can find a tree that has grown high enough to stretch to the rock, and Orrin splinters it with some lightning. “At least that skill of yours is good for something,” Ruti snaps, helping him lift it. They’re far back from the lake, but Ruti can still see Dekala and Kimya, tiny figures in the midst of the purple-red water.
“Was I supposed to let the hyenas turn our rides into carrion?” Orrin shoots back. “They rarely attack people. These were desperate.”
“You were supposed to protect Kimya!” Ruti snarls. “I don’t care about anything else!”
Orrin scoffs. “Well, we both know that isn’t true, is it?” His eyes gleam with resentment. “You could have taken her with you. But then you might be too distracted to sigh over my—”
Ruti’s eyes flash. “Shut your mouth,” she growls. Orrin calling Dekala his is enough to turn her stomach. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Orrin yanks the tree forward with a grunt of effort, dragging it down a hill toward the lake. “Dekala loves me,” he says coldly. “And you are nothing more than a Markless brat she needs to preserve our love. Have you forgotten what this journey is about?”
He doesn’t wait for a response. Ruti fumes, shoving the tree along, and they bring it in hostile silence to where Dekala is keeping a protective grasp on Kimya. “Drop it in,” Dekala instructs them, her voice strained. “As soon as it hits the water, we’ll have moments before it sinks.”
Orrin strains to hoist the tree up and then lets it crash down toward Dekala, landing against the rock where she stands. Immediately Dekala races along it, Kimya in her arms, and she’s on the shore before the tree breaks and sinks into the lake. She drops Kimya with a cry of relief and then falls to the ground. The cry of relief becomes a cry of agony, and Ruti and Orrin rush to Dekala as one.
“It’s fine,” Dekala says, twisting away from them. “I just—the rock was damp, that’s all.” Her sandals are hard, halfway to stone, and Ruti peels them off and gasps at the sight beneath them.
Dekala’s feet are red and blistered, her soles burned. The purple-black of the burn is greying at the center, on the verge of turning to stone. “How did you stay standing on that rock when this.…” Ruti takes in a ragged breath, her fingers brushing against Dekala’s soles. “Dekala,” she manages, out of words.
Dekala grimaces, an uncharacteristic whimper emerging from between her lips. “I didn’t really have a choice, did I?” she croaks. Kimya crawls over to her, wrapping her arms around Dekala and pressing her hand to Dekala’s shoulder.
Ruti blinks back strange, unwanted tears at the sight of Dekala’s pain. “Hold still,” she whispers, and chants a new melody. It’s haunting, a quiet dirge that sends shivers up her spine, and it holds less desperation than she’d meant for it to. There is something about the unstoppable, untouchable Dekala now brought down to earth, helpless and in pain for helping Kimya, that changes every song Ruti knows.
She sings, pressing her rough hand to Dekala’s burned feet, and Dekala shuts her eyes but doesn’t cry out. Instead, her throaty voice hums along to Ruti’s song and she wraps her fingers around Ruti’s wrists. They are entwined, holding on to each other, quiet comfort in the touch, and Ruti can feel it like strength in her song.
Gradually, Dekala’s burned skin begins to heal, the blisters fading away and the red-black fading to a healthy brown. In the center of her soles, a tiny patch of stone remains, thin and impossible to heal. Dekala’s eyes are squeezed shut for a long time as she is overcome with pain, and when she opens them, she whispers, “Why are you crying?”
Ruti doesn’t know. Ruti can’t answer. Ruti doesn’t know, except that Dekala’s hands are gripping her wrists and Kimya is curled against Dekala and the spirits are singing with her in a gentle chorus, and she aches for this, for it to last forever.
The outer skin is healed, but it takes hours before Dekala can walk barefoot without wincing. Ruti offers Dekala her sandals, but Dekala refuses them, walking along the rocky land with her head high. She has the stride of royalty even like this, barefoot and in a Ruranan cloak, and her upturned chin and grim gaze still grip Ruti’s eyes and don’t let them go.
They have no donkeys and no supplies, and there is no map to show them which way to go. Instead, they walk along the shoreline of the sharply pungent lake and away from it, moving forward toward the Southern Sea. “It won’t be too far, even by foot,” Dekala promises them. “And from there we can find a Guder ship that will take us to Somanchi. Guder has a thriving trade with Zidesh.”
“How will we pay them?”
Dekala slips off a familiar silver ring with a gleaming red stone at its center, the one that Kimya had stolen from her in the Merchants’ Circle, what feels like a lifetime ago. “This should grant us passage,” she says, eyeing it critically. “My uncle gifted it to me for my seventeenth birthday. I won’t be grieved to part with it.”
By foot, the journey takes them almost three days. Unlike their trip through Rurana, their views are less uniform. First, there is the walk to the Southern Sea, and the dusty land is replaced with creeping green dotting the hard rock until there is grass everywhere around them. The trees rise high above them, windblown to a light tilt, and there are little creatures rushing through the trees over and around them, skittering through the underbrush and unbothered by their new visitors.
They sleep at night with the crickets and the monkeys singing their own songs around them, but the weather is cool and Ruti slips into slumber easily. Kimya curls against her in the evenings, wiggling her fingers into the ground so that insects can climb over her hand, and Dekala sits across from Ruti and speaks with Orrin about the state of the kingdoms.
“When I return,” she says, and there is no uncertainty in her voice, “I shall put an end to the search for my soulbond. I will make it clear that I have been excessively tolerant of my uncle’s intrusions, but I now have the magic that will stop them forever.” The vials are a welcome weight in Ruti’s cloak, and she pats them as Dekala’s eyes flicker to her.
“He will say it is not enough,” Orrin points out, his big forehead furrowed. “He will say that you are still Unbonded, and it makes you a liability. You know that he wants your crown.”
Ruti remembers the time that the air had been sucked from the dining hall, that Dekala’s untamed magic had nearly killed them all, and she privately thinks that Dekala’s uncle might have a point.
