North finally manages to swallow the mouthful he’d been chewing. “Where I come from, we remember religion from long ago, but no one practices it anymore. It causes so many problems—so much violence—like your cultists. Why are they looking for you, anyway?”
He’s being so careful, and yet I can see it in his face, hear it in his voice—he speaks of religion the way he spoke of magic. Like both are somehow no more than the product of foolish minds.
My answer—I am the living goddess, and they want to kill me—hangs on my lips, but the words don’t come out. A tiny, shame-filled part of me knows why: though he would try to hide it, this boy would find the idea ridiculous. He would find me ridiculous.
And, sitting here beneath the first lilac streaks of sunrise with the only person I’ve met since I was a child who didn’t know me by my divinity first, I find I want to stay as we are just a little bit longer.
“Finish eating,” I advise him, ignoring his question and entertaining the cat with one of the laces on the pack. “We ought to keep moving.”
North lifts the strip of povvy and asks curiously, “What is this, anyway? I’ve never had anything like it.”
“Povvy,” I tell him. “Dried and salted and spiced.”
“What’s povvy? A kind of root?”
I hide my smile—no doubt he dislikes feeling ridiculous as much as I do. “No, not a root. Povvies are little rodent-like creatures who live in the forest-sea, though the ones we eat are usually raised by farmers for their meat. They get very fat if you let th—are you all right?”
North’s gone absolutely still, his eyes wide, his face a mask of horror. “This—this was an animal? This was—was alive?”
I lean forward, alarmed, though I cannot reach out to him. “Yes, of course—it makes excellent food for traveling, dense protein and—”
“I’m going to be sick,” North mumbles, dropping the strip of povvy and lurching to his feet. The cat leaps out of the confines of the pack and stalks over to the discarded meat, flashing North a very dirty look indeed before snatching it up and then carrying it behind a nearby stone to feast in private.
“Take deep breaths,” I urge North, getting to my feet as well, although I can do nothing but offer advice from a distance. “Bend down, lean your elbows on your knees—that way, yes. Keep breathing …”
It takes him several long moments, but he manages not to throw up. The look he finally shoots me is accusatory. “How could you—how can you eat flesh?”
“How can you not?” I reply, as confused as he. “We eat what we must—food is scarce and meat is filling. We have always done so—your ancestors did so. Have you no meat in the clouds?”
North shakes his head vehemently. “We have no animals at all. Birds, yes, but no one …” He stops, swallowing hard, catching his breath. “No one would ever think of eating one.”
He looks so distressed, so suddenly forlorn and out of place, that I find myself moving quickly toward the cloth containing our meager meal and gathering up the rest of the povvy strips so that I can stash them away in my pack, out of sight.
“Wrap up what remains there and bring it with you,” I tell him. “None of that is meat; it is all vegetable and grain.”
North looks as if he’s doubting he’ll ever eat again, but he’s no fool even if he is out of his depth. He gathers up the corners of the cloth, wrapping up the last of the food, and then tucks the packet into the waistband of his suit.
I rise to my feet, signaling that we must keep moving. The plains stretch as far as the eye can see, the sun touching first the very tallest of the ruins and then flowing slowly, inexorably down into the shadows below. The sky above is streaked with the thinnest of clouds, stretching like rose-gold arrows pointing toward the thick mass of white and gray that marks the underside of the cloudlands. Wind, unimpeded here by the dense forest-sea, sweeps down across the plains, bending the grasses before it and making the hills and hummocks seem to undulate as if with remembered life.
North is quiet as we begin to walk, his eyes round, taking in every sight as if he’s never seen grass and hills before.
Perhaps he hasn’t, I think, watching him out of the corner of my eye. Are there hills in the sky? For a moment, I nearly lose myself imagining a life surrounded by mountains of cloud and oceans of empty sky.
“What’s that?” North asks abruptly, his steps ceasing beside me.
Alarmed, my eyes go first toward the forest-sea, a now distant smear of dark gray-green behind us. But then I see the direction of North’s gaze and follow it across the horizon. In the distance is a cluster of pink and gold, as if one lone puff of cloud held on to dawn’s colors as it came and went.
I lift my head, noting the wind flowing past me, and swallow a flicker of alarm. “A mist-storm,” I tell him. “We must move quickly.”
“What’s a mist-storm?” he asks, eyes still on the distant, unnatural-looking cloud. “And why would we be worried about it?”
I hide my surprise by holding tighter to my spearstaff. Every time I think I understand how little North knows of this world, he shows me I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of his ignorance. “The mist is … I cannot think how to explain it to you. It is the residue of creation, the source of all magic. But this world is old and tired, and the mist is not harmless as it once was. The mist is all around us even now, but sometimes it gathers together, drawn to itself like motes of dust, and then it storms and rages across the land.”
“So, like … pollution? Poisoned air?”
I tilt my head. “It is one of the things your ancestors fled from, to their world in the sky.”
North eyes me sidelong. I pretend not to see and start walking again. He falls into step at my side, with the bindle cat maintaining a careful distance between us. “What would happen if it caught up to us?”
“Do all cloudlanders ask so many questions?” I can hear the irritation in my voice and try to bury it. “We must keep going, North.”
He falls into step beside me again, and this time the silence is heavy until he asks, his voice even, “Why worry about it? Couldn’t you just use your magic and whisk it away?” This time, he makes no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice.
“For one thing,” I tell him, “no magician can control the mist. We draw power from it, but we cannot direct it. For another, the mist makes magic unpredictable—it can rob even the strongest magician of her abilities, or bestow power upon those who have never been touched with magic before. It can bring illness, or great skill, or despair, or a knowledge of things to come. To some, it brings madness itself.”
A warning tickle of sensation winds its way down the back of my neck, and as North opens his mouth to reply, I lift a hand to forestall him. Above us, difficult to see at first against the smoky underside of the cloudlands, is a second swirl of pink, this one tinged with green.
A second storm, and this one is gathering fast.
My throat tightens. Hiret’s story about how Quenti was injured echoes in my ears—the storm that had come from nowhere and gathered so quickly he was hit before he knew to run.
The storms are no longer behaving as they ought, as they used to. They are becoming wilder, unpredictable.