Something compelled her to go around to his side of the fire, to take one of his hands in her own. His skin was rough and warm, and for some reason that startled her. She let go.
He looked up at her, his face shiny with tears. “I’m afraid, Eda. I feel the world weighing on me—I feel it splintering apart at the seams. And I feel my mother’s soul, wandering, lost. We can’t get to Tuer’s Mountain fast enough. I don’t know if we can even get there at all.”
Eda crouched on her heels beside him, the fire popping and sparking, the light dancing on Morin’s hair. “I feel it too. The weight of the world.”
“Every night when I dream, I see spirits slipping through cracks in the world. They devour all life, and Endahr dies, and its light is put out, and all is nothing more than wheeling dust in the void.”
“We’re going to find Tuer,” she said, with more conviction than she felt. “We’re going to put your mother’s soul to rest. We’re going to fix this.”
“I thought all you cared about was making him pay for what he did to you.”
“I’ve found I can care about more than one thing,” she told him simply.
His eyes met hers in the flickering flames, and she felt a sudden, fierce kinship with him.
Somewhere out in the boundless night, something screamed. The scent of decay crowded her nostrils and she shuddered. Morin grabbed her arm, squeezed tight. “I know they’re out there. I know they’re following us.”
“What are we going to do when they catch up?”
“Keep going, as fast as we can. Trust that Tuer is stronger than they are.”
“Do you think he is?”
“I think he wants us to reach the Mountain. I don’t think he would have brought us this far just to let us fall.”
Eda took his hand in hers, lost in Morin’s eyes, in the strength of his faith in the god she hated.
And then Tainir came through the trees with a fat hare draped over her shoulders. Eda let go of Morin immediately, but his hand remained on her arm for half a dozen heartbeats before he drew away.
Two days later, the ayrrah circled the cliffs for a long while, looking for a place to deposit their riders as the sun slid too quick down the rim of the sky. The air smelled like dead things, and the eastern horizon was writhing with shadows. At last, Morin blew a series of notes on the horn that hung around his neck, and the birds approached a narrow rock ledge barely wide enough to stand on. The ayrrah hovered awkwardly while Morin dug climbing spikes from his pack and hammered a few into the cliff. Dread shot down Eda’s spine, and it only deepened when Morin clambered off his ayrrah to perch precariously on the spikes, clinging to the rock with his fingers.
“Sit tight,” he called to Eda and Tainir. “They’ll take you round a few more times, and then I’ll have the hammocks ready.
“Thewhat?” said Eda, but Filah had already shot into the sky again. “He surely can’t mean we’re sleeping on the side of the cliff!” Eda called to Tainir.
But Tainir didn’t seem to hear her.
The last rays of the sun were glinting off the mountain when the ayrrah returned to Morin’s perch. He’d rigged three hammocks on spikes pounded into the rock, and had somehow managed to put his climbing harness on. He waved Tainir over, and helped his sister climb off her eagle and join him on the cliff. She put her harness on, too, and settled into one of the hammocks.
Filah flapped her wings uneasily, clearly ready to find her nest for the night. Eda would have preferred to take her chances sleeping with the giant eagles, but Morin held out his hand. “Come on. It’s not quite as terrifying as it looks. We’ll be safe here.” He glanced at the darkness behind them. “As safe as we can be.”
Eda gulped and took his hand, lunging off Filah’s back and colliding with Morin on the impossibly narrow rock ledge. For an instant, her feet slipped and she thought she was going to fall, but Morin wrapped his arm around her chest and held her tight. She could feel his heartbeat, rabbit quick, pulsing in time with her own.
“All right?” he said into her ear.
She was too shaky for speech, but she nodded. He helped her put on her harness, which he secured with another climbing spike and a length of rope into the rock. She sank gingerly into the central hammock, expecting it to rip off its moorings and plummet to the ground below, but it held.
Morin climbed around her like a spider and took the hammock on her right, while Tainir got comfortable in the one on her left.
“We’ve done this before,” said Morin, digging about in his pack. “There’s always a chance the ayrrah can’t find anywhere flat for us to camp, so we learned to make do.”
“You’ll find it’s really quite comfortable,” added Tainir.
There was no possibility of tea, but Morin had squirreled away some dried meat and an apple for just such an occasion, and divided the fare between the three of them.
Eda watched him cut the apple with his knife, the blade flashing in the light of the rising moon, and for some reason couldn’t stop thinking of peeling an orange in Ileem’s chambers in Eddenahr, back when she’d thought he could be a friend.
The night deepened and the moon brightened, illuminating half the sky while the other half lay plunged in darkness that looked thick enough to touch. Tainir began to sing, raising her hands to the cliff above them. Gold light swirled round her.
