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  The light level increased. Then, suddenly, it became blinding, brighter than any lamp. Rhia blinked and looked down, her vision filled with violet afterimages of the vents.

  When her sight cleared she noticed people staring at her. She ignored them.

  With the light came heat. Men unlaced jerkins and removed hats. Rhia sweltered in her oversize dress. She made to take off her hat, then paused. Under cover of its wide brim, she inventoried her fellow travellers. Of the twenty-three besides herself and her companions, eight were Zekti; they sat together and did not engage the Shenese in conversation. Rhia tried not to stare at their bare legs and woven sandals. She could not remember the last time she had seen a grown man’s toes.

  The Shenese men ranged in age from boys to old men; some travelled alone, some with one, or at most two, companions. Her party of four was the largest group. The soldiers sat around her formed a barrier against casual contact, which she appreciated. She had no idea how to talk to these people.

  Captain Sorne had no such issues. He turned to the man beside him and started chatting about skiv-skiv, a brutal ballgame played in the lower city. Lekem, who had ended up on her other side, put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Breen sat on the central bench across from her and stared into space, wearing the relaxed half-smile which was his default expression.

  Rhia went to fiddle with her signet ring, a habit boredom or nerves sometimes drove her to, before remembering she was no longer wearing it. Instead she removed her hat and fanned herself. She was not looking forward to the next seven days.

  Chapter 16

  All the next day Dej tried to follow the others’ lead. She even managed to meditate, or at least to fall into periods of tired numbness. But she kept coming back to how her friend had abandoned her. Min wasn’t a coward, but she had taken the easy option. And now Dej had to face the hardest moment of her life without her only friend.

  She tried to recall everything she knew about bondings. Very little. The skykin didn’t tell outsiders much.

  Where lessons ended, dorm rumour took over. She’d heard late-night tales of bondings gone wrong, of madness, agonizing deaths and strange half-formed failures. Which didn’t make sense, because how would anyone in the crèche ever know how a bonding had gone? But that didn’t stop the thoughts intruding.

  Or perhaps that hollowness she’d felt those last few days with Min was a good sign, an opening up of the space she’d need in her heart and mind for her animus. Perhaps all would be well after all, as Mev said.

  The wagon halted just after dark. The skykin had told them, before they set off this morning, that the next time they stopped would be at the bonding site.

  The woman opened the door, and the man, standing behind her, said, “Follow me.”

  The skykin set off on foot, the man in front, the woman at the back.

  Dej tried to keep her thoughts positive as she fell into step behind the man. Ahead was a rocky outcrop spattered with odd patches of light in shades of mauve and blue. Beyond that, Dej saw a warmer glow, like firelight. The air smelled of dried sage.

  No one spoke. The world felt calm, poised. Outside her head, at least.

  When they reached the rocks, Dej saw a passage through them. The skykin plunged into the narrow, dark defile. Dej’s shoulders tensed as the walls closed in.

  After a few dozen steps they emerged into a more open area, though still hemmed in by high rocks. Ahead, a pool lay half under an overhanging rock, like a tongue sticking out of a mouth. Its surface mirrored the stars.

  The skykin led them to the pool. “Strip,” said the woman, “and bathe.”

  Apparently a bath before they left the crèche wasn’t enough.

  Mev and Pel both started by removing the pouches containing their parting-gifts. Dej pulled her tunic over her head.

  The skykin gave them tight bundles of sweet-smelling rags. “Use this to cleanse your skin.”

  The water was cold, but Dej welcomed it. She scrubbed hard, holding her nose and ducking under to immerse herself.

  She was the last to get out. She would happily have stayed in the pool longer, perhaps forever. The others had put their parting-gifts back round their necks. There was no sign of anyone’s clothes, nor of the male skykin.

  The woman passed a small leather flask to Pel. “Drink this.” Something else they hadn’t been told about at the crèche.

  Pel spluttered, and Mev hiccoughed when her turn came. As Dej was last she drained the flask. The burning liquid made her cough.

  They set off in silence, led by the skykin woman. The dark shapes of Dej’s companions wavered in her streaming vision. Naked and wet, with the ground rough under her bare feet, she had no chance of meditating now. Instead she hummed under her breath; private tunes, her own meditation.

  They went through a gap in the rocks opposite the one they’d come through. The stars over there looked odd, golden, and they rushed upwards–

  No, that was the fire, and those were embers. She shook her head. It looked really pretty. And she could hear music. Yes, music! Up ahead, someone was beating out a complex, insistent rhythm. For the first time since leaving the crèche, Dej didn’t want to be somewhere else.

  Her body thrummed to the beat. Sparks from the fire eclipsed the stars.

  Emerging from the defile, she blinked. The fire was bright as the Sun, and ringed by shadows. People, a dozen or more of them.

  “Tonight you become an adult.”

  After a moment she located the speaker as the woman nearest the fire. Probably a seer. Her life could have been worse: she could have been chosen to be a seer, brought up in a cave, having to take everything she was told on trust. She laughed, and someone hissed. She shut up.

  People approached her, taking her arms. She didn’t resist. Her legs were too long, even as the ground pressed up around her ears. Strong stuff, that drink.

  Ahead, the earth was flat and covered in colours: yellow and orange and red and green. The people holding her lowered her to the soft, coloured ground. It was a blanket, of course it was. Her head fell back, and was caught by a pillow. Overhead, specks of burning gold raced into darkness. This wasn’t so bad.

  “Do you accept the gift of bonding?”

  She wasn’t sure who’d spoken, or even if anyone had, and for a crazy moment she considered saying No, I don’t – can I go now? But that wasn’t an option so she murmured, “Yes,” half nodding, feeling her head move on the pillow.

  The bright sky went dark. Her heart stuttered. No, just someone leaning over her. Something cold and hard touched her forehead. She tried to raise a hand but another hand caught it. Her body felt weak, distant. Suddenly afraid, she whimpered.

  “There is no shame in fear at this moment,” said a soothing voice. “We have all walked this path.”

  The cold pressure on her head increased. Then the world exploded between her eyes. Surprise as much as pain made her arch her back, bucking against the restraining hands.

  Pain rushed in. Huge pain, centred on her forehead, driving out all other sensation. But even so, it was distant, bearable. She didn’t have to acknowledge it.

  The light returned. Stickiness oozed into the corners of her eyes. Even as she tried to blink her vision clear, a figure leaned over her. They held something in their cupped hands, pale, small as a finger, moving by itself, questing and twisting.

  Despite the drugged trance, her fear redoubled. Her bowels knotted and she tried to scream, but all that came out was a gasp.

  Cloth dropped over her eyes. An instant later, coldness touched the agony in her forehead. Coldness and slithering, right between her eyes. She wanted to scream, but her body was too far away.

  Then the pain was in her, no longer distant and escapable. Crashing around inside her skull. In her mind. Experiences unravelled, snatches of the past, scents and tastes and vision and distorted sound; a nauseous, giddying, mind-wrenching rush. The dark, lonely stink of the contemplation room; sitting in a tree and singin
g at the sky; reaching out to take Mam Gerisa’s pen; praying for Min when she had a fever; crying alone, before Min was her friend; first steps taken across a scrubbed wooden floor; a warm breast, rich milk in the mouth. And always, the pain.

  The past visions expanded, deepened. A sky full of stars. Running across the desert. Standing on a high mountain, the world like a map below her. Sitting by a fire, listening to stories of ancient lives. Plunging into an icy stream to come up sputtering and laughing. Shouting a name she no longer knew. The tearing agony of childbirth. Wonder and confusion chased through her head.

  The whirling blade of the animus’s progress was undoing what she had been. Its presence rose like a flood. She was submerged. She was going to lose herself.

  No, this was right; this was how it should be.

  But what if I don’t come back? She’d never asked for this… She fought the animus, trying to assert herself, to not be overwhelmed. It brushed her aside.

  The pain became intensely physical. She could feel her body again but would give anything not to. Her skin grew hot and tight, an unbearable itching racing across it. Bones popped in their sockets. Sinews stretched and muscles contracted.

  The bonding was beginning.

  Chapter 17

  The wagon slowed and stopped soon after full darkness fell. When the door opened Rhia was eager to get out, but had to take her place behind everyone else while they filed down the steps.

  Outside, the fat crescent of Greymoon hung bright and low in a clear sky. The wagons had parked side-by-side with a wide gap between them. She inhaled, trying to smell any difference in the skyland air, but found only an absence of smell, compared to the stink of warm, unwashed bodies she’d been immersed in.

  Skykin moved around, some with lanterns, unhitching the beasts and fetching items from the luggage wagon. Rhia stuck close to the passenger wagon with the other shadowkin, though instead of facing into the space between the two wagons she looked the other way, out beyond the wagon, into the skyland.

  The land glowed. Every enquirer who had travelled through the skyland had written of this and Rhia smiled to see it. The effect was, at first glance, no brighter than a night when both Moons were up: a silvery wash across the nighttime world. But while moonlight was constant and monochrome, the light beyond the wagon concentrated in certain areas – areas, Rhia now saw, where bushes, or amorphous clumps of what must be foliage, grew on the otherwise barren ground – and came in various shades of blue and purple and green; a soft baby-blue from that round clump, a turquoise wash on the patch of whatever-it-was over there. Some of the commonest plants were pale green cages of twisted stems which appeared, as far as scale could be gauged, to be around knee-height.

  She turned at the sound of a throat being cleared to see Sorne looking her way. She nodded at him, then faced in like everyone else, ignoring the world at large. But even here there was life. On the bare earth by her feet was a regular patch of deeper shadow. She crouched down, squinting at the interlocking hexagons which covered an area the size of two hands side-by-side. Paving pads, according to Naturalist of Menb. Like many living things in the skyland, this was several creatures combined. Reminded of the apiaries at the family estate with their hexagonal cells, she came up with the analogy of a hive of bees where the hive itself was alive. This same pattern also existed on the largest scale, with the shadowlands themselves distributed in a hexagonal pattern around the widest part of the world. Not for the first time she wondered at the gaps in this pattern: the total of the five rows – three of twenty and two of twenty-one – should give one hundred and two shadowlands. Yet there were only eighty-seven.

  Back on the local scale, this particular plant/animal was said to be one of the few skyland organisms it was safe to touch. Rhia pressed down gently. The pads felt like close-grained wood and exuded a faint gingery aroma.

  She looked up as light flared. The skykin had lit a fire between the wagons. Loitering shadowkin wandered over to it, carrying folding stools like the one on her observation platform at home. Captain Sorne stood close by, not quite watching her.

  She straightened, then looked up farther still. The sky was packed with stars, as many as she would see out in the estates. Not more though: as other enquirers had noted, whatever shaded the Sun by day in the shadowlands had no effect on the night sky. The stars were the same in skyland and shadowland.

  She strode over to Sorne and gestured vaguely into the semi-darkness. “I need to, ah…”

  He nodded and looked away. Rhia walked round the far side of the wagon. On the northern horizon loomed the dark, distant bulk of the Northern Divide; the mountains they must cross to reach Zekt.

  Having checked she was unobserved, she crouched next to a wheel.

  When she straightened she realized that she now faced west, with the Moon behind her. She had an excellent view of the sky from here. And, because she never let her satchel out of her sight, she had her sightglass with her.

  She turned back to examine the wagon. The main structure was raised up to near head-height by its great wheels; how Father would have marvelled at the skill that went into building such a vehicle.

  She ducked underneath, behind the nearest wheel, then got out her sightglass and rested it on one of the spokes. When she smelled something odd she stepped back, wondering if someone else had already used this space to relieve themselves. But this was not human waste, only a scent of ripe rot on the wheel itself, as though the wagon had run over something unpleasant. Careful not to touch the wheel, she stepped close again, and repositioned the sightglass.

  Something gave a mournful hoot out in the lambent night. Rhia started, then shook her head. Whatever it was, it was not close. She looked through the sightglass. She had to slouch to bring her eye in line with the lens, but the view was rock-steady.

  The bottom quarter of her vision was dark; the sightglass was shorter than the spoke was deep, so part of her field of view was blocked. Above this the stars in her vision shone bright. She smiled and moved the sightglass along the spoke a fraction, and found more stars. However, she had no idea which stars. In her eagerness she had looked without observing. She raised her eye from the lens and peered out at the sky between the spokes.

  The constellation of the Burdened Traveller was dead ahead; the stars she had seen were in the figure’s upper chest. That strange, hazy area near the head had always intrigued her. She moved the sightglass up a spoke. In order to line it up with her target she would have to support it with one hand against the steeper angle this spoke lay at. On her return to Shen she must get a proper stand made, some sort of tripod perhaps.

  When she looked through the sightglass the fuzziness on the celestial figure’s brow sharpened into focus. Rhia was stunned. She expected to catch one or two additional stars through the sightglass, yet here were a dozen distinct points! Some stars were embedded in the haze, while others shone clear through it. She could make out colours too: hints of pink and gold amidst the overall pale blue glow.

  Rhia chuckled. The sky was no immutable tableau, as priests and commoners believed. It was a living vision of infinite wonder!

  “Hello?”

  Rhia jumped, then saw a dark figure standing off to the left of the wagon.

  “Captain Sorne.”

  “Are you all right under there?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been gone some time.”

  “I said I’m fine.” But the militiaman was only trying to protect her. There would be other nights. “I’ll come back now.”

  At the fireside the shadowkin had settled near the passenger wagon while the skykin kept to the far side of the fire. Despite the division both races appeared relaxed. Some of the shadowkin were playing dice or knucklebones. As Rhia settled on the dusty ground, one of the boys produced a wooden whistle and began to play. People clapped or beat time on their legs. The skykin looked on, impassive.

  When the shadowkin woman got up to dance, Rhia tried not to st
are. One never saw stamping feet and swirling skirts like that at court! The woman sat down again when a pair of skykin came forward to ladle stew out of a pot nestling in the fire. The skykin worked efficiently but with no obvious direction. Did they have a leader? One of them was looking across the fire while the others organized the meal. Was looking, in fact, straight at her. Rhia returned the shameless regard.

  “Um, did you want this?”

  She took the bowl Breen passed her. The stew was pale and starchy, based on white tubers and something beige and mushroom-like, but surprisingly tasty. She had read somewhere that skykin did not eat meat.

  As the shadowkin were passing their empty bowls back to the skykin, one of the Shenese traders came over to talk to the woman. After a short discussion overseen by the woman’s mousy companion, the pair walked off. They went behind the skykin, who ignored them, and into the luggage wagon. Well, that confirms my suspicions about how she earns her living.

  Some of the skykin were bedding down for the night, wrapped tight in cloaks. Rhia wished she had thought to fetch her own cloak from the luggage wagon before it was put to its current use. Having no alternative, she hugged her knees for warmth and stared into the fire. She had not sat like this since childhood. It was oddly comforting.

  “M’lady?”

  She started at Sorne’s whisper. Despite the cold night air and hard ground, she had been dozing, lulled by the firelight.

  “I have news.”

  About a third of the traders had retired to the passenger wagon. There were no strangers in earshot.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “The way-trader I dealt with back in the umbral confirmed that a young lad matching your brother’s description and travelling alone passed through a few months back.”

  “And how did he seem to them?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”