He doesn’t know it.
I suddenly need to breathe free, and I reach up to tug my kerchief down from my lips so that I can gulp a breath of fresh air.
“You may call me Nimh.”
SIX
NORTH
Nimh leads the way across an open plain, the stars above reflected in the water around us—a thin sheet covering the ground, less than ankle-deep. It’s like walking through the sky, except that it’s already soaking through my boots.
It hurts to leave the Skysinger behind, but I can’t stay with her. She can’t get me home, destroyed as she is. My only hope right now is that Nimh was telling the truth, that there might be someone in this temple of hers who can help me.
Every time I look at Nimh’s agile silhouette ahead of me, try to wrap my mind around the fact that she’s human and she’s right here, my mind staggers back. Nobody’s meant to live Below, but here she is. And she talks sense, sort of. She knows medicine, or at least chemistry—and she says there are other people.
We’re told the surface is uninhabited. We learn this from the time we first speak. I have no idea what to make of this girl, of her showing up at my crash site, except that I’m not dead yet, and I would be if she wanted me to be. For the first time since my glider stopped responding and I dipped below the city, I have hope.
And if I’m honest, there is a tingle of excitement somewhere deep in my chest. I dreamed of the surface. I dreamed of exploration.
I never dreamed of anything like this.
She’s setting a decent pace, and my aches start to assert themselves, my breath forced shallow by a pain in my ribs.
“Nimh,” I say, and she turns her head without breaking stride. “Could we slow down a little? I’m sorry, I’m hurt.”
She shakes her head. “My … friend said she would come for me after half an hour,” she replies. There’s just enough of a pause before friend that I wonder what she was going to say. Is the girl she’s talking about her pair? Her superior?
“Then she’ll find us,” I say. “And I assume she’s going to notice me sooner or later. Will it be a problem?”
“Your presence will be a challenge,” she says. “But I cannot have them raising the alarm when they realize I have slipped away. That will be worse.”
“All right,” I say, reaching for a lighter tone. “Better get introduced before I get you into trouble, then. Everything else I’ve met here except you has seemed to take a deep dislike to me.”
I need her help. I need to be charming. I need to avoid any hint of a threat.
Her lips move, forming for the first time the faintest of smiles. She wears it well, that smile. She can’t be much older than I am, a fact I missed thanks to her spear and her magic and her fighting off a horde of terrifying creatures. The smile is only there for an instant before she’s walking on again. But she’s moving a little bit more slowly now for my benefit, and with a private grin to myself, I follow.
The dark shadow ahead turns out to be a tangled mass of trees—any single one of them would rival the largest trees in the palace gardens for size, and these are nothing like the straight, clean lines of our orchards and ornamental gardens at home. These are tangled and wild, linked together as if they’re wrestling, their limbs forming knots above us, their roots turning the ground rough and uneven beneath our feet. As we enter the forest, the starlight is blocked out, and sticks and twigs jab me as I move past them.
Pinpricks of faint yellow glow here and there for a handful of seconds, appearing and then fading again at random. I try to track them with my gaze, but they vanish before I can get a closer look. Is this more “magic”?
I’m diverted from trying to figure out what chemical could cause the glow when swarms of insects rise around us. I clamp my mouth shut and shield my nose with one hand as Nimh draws a cloth over her face. I cautiously draw breath to ask how far we are from her camp, and a horde of insects invade my mouth, leaving me coughing and spitting in their wake. The warm, damp air is close around us, clinging to my skin.
Nimh clears her throat, and from behind her scarf, she makes an odd rippling, trilling sound with her lips that seems to blend with the night noises of the forest all around us. She pauses, brow furrowed, and I take the opportunity to lean against the nearest tree and rest.
She makes the sound a little louder this time, hands on her hips. “If you do not come now,” she says quietly to the forest, in the same tone my mothers used to use to get me into bed, “I shall leave without you.” And then, to me, without turning her head: “North, the ants that nest in the hirta trees will bite you.”
I scramble away from my tree and she sets off again, never seeming to need to check where to put her feet among the maze of roots. She moves as if this place is her home, or like she can see in the dark. It’s like she’s a part of it, and a million questions bubble up inside me.
I trip and nearly fall flat on my face before reminding myself to watch my own feet, and not hers.
“Who were you talking to just now?” I ask, taking a couple of quick steps to catch up with her, ducking past a vine that wants to catch me around my neck.
“The cat,” she says simply.
“What’s a cat?”
“What’s a—” Finally I find something that can make her break stride, and she nearly trips herself, stumbling two quick steps in a row. I reach out to catch her elbow, and she yanks away before I can touch her, spinning around to glare at me as if I’d tried to murder her. She’s quick to calm her expression—or at least to remove some of the fire from the eyes visible over the edge of her scarf.
“Sorry,” I offer, though I’m not entirely sure what I’m apologizing for. I guess she doesn’t like being touched.
She brushes aside my apology without addressing her odd reaction and turns to resume her course. “A cat is … there, that is a cat.”
As if on cue, a dark silhouette about the size of my torso drops from the nearby trees to land square in her path. All I can make out are a pair of glittering eyes, and a suggestion of a wide, fluffy tail that rises briefly in warning, or greeting. I’m assuming that if she wants this thing to come with us, it doesn’t want to kill me.
“Oh, hello,” I say, trying to mask the fact that I can’t tell if this cat is intelligent. Is it a friend? A servant? “Are you going to introduce us?”
“How would I do that?” she asks, sounding amused.
“Well, what’s its name?” I try.
“Name?” She allows herself a soft huff of breath that might be a laugh. “You do not name a cat. He is a cat; he keeps his name to himself. Have you no cats in the sky?”
“None,” I say. “And we don’t have any of those boar either. Is he safer than them?”
“That is a complicated question,” she replies. “To me, yes. To others … it depends. To the temple mice, he is their own personal Lightbringer.”
She says the word like it’s a name, and she looks sideways at me. In that moment, I’m sure she’s trying to gauge my response—perhaps it’s a sacred word, and if I were from here, I couldn’t help but react.
But I’m not, and I’m left creasing my brow, confused, partly because I don’t know what mice are either. “Their own personal what?”