A Haven in Ash Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Jasen said lamely.

  It wasn’t good enough. He knew it, and it was perfectly clear from Alixa’s response: “Yes, well.” She brushed at her hair, smoothing it into place across her shoulders. “What did Uncle Adem say?”

  “Little,” Jasen answered.

  “He wasn’t pleased, of course.” Not a question.

  “Of course not.” When had anyone been today? Only the Malori parents seemed to occupy that camp, and Jasen had barely seen them; they’d been summoned, come in a red-eyed rush, swept up their boy, and instantly burst into tears. Doubtful there’d be an appreciative word out of them for a week.

  Then again, after Hanrey got his time with them and spent a good hour putting them in their place, they might be too subdued to say a word at all.

  “As expected,” Alixa said, a hint of satisfaction beneath her annoyance.

  Silence fell over them.

  Jasen watched the mountains. Just above, but probably many miles beyond, a single opening had appeared in the cloud. The gash revealed a diagonal portion of sky turning pink: twilight was coming. Temperature had dropped again, and a frail mist had begun to cling to the mountains’ base. Scourge certainly roamed it, and Jasen wondered idly what had happened to the one he and Tery had almost been eaten by. He’d watched it slink into the rye, of course—but where had it gone then?

  If he said it aloud, Alixa would ask, “Who cares?” And Jasen shouldn’t. Yet he couldn’t keep himself from wondering at it.

  What would his mother say, he wondered, if she were here? Would she be pleased that he had done a brave thing? Concerned for his wellbeing, of course. But happy? Pleased he’d done something beyond these walls? That he’d saved a life?

  He reached into the neck of his tunic to finger …

  Her amulet. It was gone.

  He leapt up, fingers gripping for a thing that was no longer there.

  “What?” Alixa demanded.

  “My mother’s amulet!” he said. He lifted the tunic’s neck forward to peer down, one hand groping. “I’ve lost it.”

  The fresh scowl Alixa had started to don vanished. A look of worry replaced it. “Are you certain?”

  “It’s not here,” Jasen said. His voice was rising. He patted and patted his neck, as if somehow it might reappear … and then, just in case it had fallen free, he tugged the entire tunic over his head. Alixa averted her gaze as he shook it, turned it inside out, patted himself again—

  “It’s not here!” he cried.

  Had it dropped right into his trousers? He clutched at the belt—

  “Jasen!” Alixa hissed and swiveled as far away as she could. Just for good measure, she slapped a hand to her eyes.

  He yanked them off, frittered through, clad in nothing but his undergarments. Every second his groping grew more panicked. His heart beat faster, harder in his chest, and tears threatened … and still there was nothing. No lump to indicate the polished stone, tucked into a fold; no ridge hinting at the chain.

  The amulet was gone.

  “No,” he moaned. “No, no, no …”

  “Have you put your clothes back on yet?” Alixa asked.

  “I can’t find it!”

  She fired a very daring glance over her shoulder, then immediately jerked back around and slammed her hand over her face again. “You can’t just stand there like this—”

  “How have I lost it?” he cried. “It was right here this morning!” And again he groped around his neck, hoping, praying that somehow he had made a mistake, that the thing had been there the entire time, hadn’t gone anywhere at all …

  He had not. The amulet, one of the only heirlooms he had, and the only thing he could carry with him each and every day—it was gone.

  Tears threatened. “No …”

  “Jasen,” Alixa muttered. She twisted just incrementally, as far as she was willing to go. “It’ll be okay,” she said softly. “We can find it again. We’ll just retrace your steps today. You said you had it this morning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Before you went back in to get your roughing boots.”

  “Did you have it after that?”

  He racked his brains. Long gone were the days when it felt new and he’d been aware of the cool stone against his chest at every turn. He fingered it throughout the day though, always had, to check it was there and to think of her. The action was automatic, and if he’d done it once today he must’ve done it a hundred times …

  Only he could not recall reaching for it a single time other than the lone touch this morning. The onslaught of guilt, and the sudden wave of unhappiness and being without a place had overtaken him. In his preoccupation, he hadn’t reached out for the amulet again until now.

  Which meant he’d had almost a full day to have lost the thing.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know. Out here is the last time I know I had it.”

  “Okay,” said Alixa. “Well, let’s retrace your steps. Just … just put your clothes back on, and we’ll go now, before it gets too dark. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jasen echoed breathily. “Okay.”

  This was good. This was something. A plan. He must’ve dropped it—things did not just vanish into the ether. At some point, the chain must have come loose, and it had slipped out—maybe between two cobbles, or someplace he’d loitered while killing time this afternoon. Heck, someone might’ve laid eyes on it and taken it in to the assembly, where he might reclaim it.

  He awkwardly fumbled back into his clothes, running hands along them one last time, just in case. Then he brushed through the grass at the boulder’s base in case it had landed there—no sign of it—and then raked fingers through the moss on the stone itself. It was not long enough to conceal it, and he knew that it was futile, but that did not stop him from trying.

  “Are you decent?” Alixa asked.

  “Dressed, yes,” Jasen said. “But by your standards, I doubt I am ever decent.”

  She still turned his way slowly, glancing at him through a very slitted eye. Only when comfortable that he no longer showed an excess of skin did she hop onto her feet.

  “Let’s go searching. Where have you been today?”

  Just about everywhere, was the answer, and Jasen said as much.

  “Well, why don’t we backtrack from here?”

  Jasen nodded—and then shook his head. “No. Maybe we should go back out to the wall.”

  Alixa froze. “Jasen …”

  “Not over it,” he said quickly. “But that’s the last time I had it, on the way. What if I knocked the clasp when I touched it, and that’s how I lost it? I’d have dropped it out there somewhere.”

  “You could’ve easily lost it in Terreas …”

  “The lamps will be lit. If we scour Terreas now, it’ll be too dark to check the route we took out here when we’re done.”

  “But if we find it we won’t need—”

  “Please?” Jasen said. His voice had been rising again, his whole body seeming to grow itchy. He wanted nothing more than to be off—and Alixa was dawdling, trying to lay out a plan, when all he wanted was to rove, eyes raking for the thing.

  “Jasen,” she moaned.

  “I want to find it tonight.” And after a pause, he croaked, “It’s my mother’s.”

  Alixa relented at that, though she looked none too happy about it. “Ohh … we shouldn’t be doing this.”

  But Jasen was already off, and however conflicted she might feel, she had little choice but to follow.

  He retraced his steps to where he last remembered having it—or at least to approximately where he had been. Tracking up and down the dirt path, he scoured the grasses to either side of the exposed strip of earth. He ran a foot across them, moving those long strips of green this way and that … but there was no sign of it.

  “It’s not here,” he said, and turned away from Terreas, out toward the grassy reaches leading down to the boundary.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just check the villa
ge first?” Alixa called from behind. “You were here all day; you had much longer to drop it.”

  “Path first,” Jasen said without looking up from his search.

  Alixa made a pained noise. “Fine. I’ll search this side, you search that; we’ll be quicker this way.” She gravitated toward the right edge of the path, walking on the grass itself, and swept through clumps with a foot the way Jasen was. Probably squinting, as she tended to, but Jasen didn’t look.

  “You know what it looks like, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen you wear it.”

  “It’s a smooth black stone,” he said anyway, “with pale spots across it. Kind of teardrop-shaped. The chain is silver.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  They trekked out, searching. Jasen’s heart was pumping at one and a half times the usual speed, the kind of drumbeat it made when he set into a jog.

  Once in a while he thought he saw it. Alixa must have had moments like that too, because she would stop forward progress and stoop down, running her hands through the grass instead. Those sent particularly hard spikes through him, little pulses of adrenaline that caught his breath. But it always turned out to be just a stone, or a clod of earth that was nestled far enough down to obscure its true color and shape.

  Terreas fell away. Overhead, unnoticed, the gash in the cloud closed.

  The mists at the base of the mountains thickened.

  Twilight had well and truly fallen by the time they reached the wall. Everything had taken on a muted color. The grass was turning a kind of grey, and though the dark of Jasen’s amulet would still stand out, his pace had slowed. Alixa’s too; she’d fallen some twenty feet behind.

  Jasen looked out into the rye. It whickered in a light breeze.

  No scent of rot in the air just now.

  “It’s not here,” Alixa said quietly from behind. “We should turn around.”

  Jasen frowned to himself.

  “Jasen?”

  Out in the rye? When he’d gone to save Tery?

  A wave of nausea displaced the fear. Surely not. After everything today, it couldn’t be out there. It couldn’t.

  And then the memory slapped him in the face as though he’d run headlong into it: tension around his neck as he barreled toward Tery. He’d been sure it was a particularly vicious stalk gripping him—but then it had snapped, and Jasen had felt free, almost unnaturally so.

  “It’s out there,” he whispered.

  Alixa began wearily, “Jasen …”

  “It’s out there,” he repeated. “I know it. I felt the chain snap.”

  “Why didn’t you say—?”

  “I didn’t remember. Didn’t know.” But he did now. The chain had definitely broken as he hurtled toward Tery—which meant his mother’s amulet was somewhere out there—where the scourge lurked.

  “Baraghosa comes soon,” Alixa began, a desperate note in her voice. “If you ask, maybe he’ll—”

  “Where did I cross?” Jasen asked. Baraghosa be damned; he wouldn’t ask that skeletal remnant for help if he’d fallen himself beyond the wall and a scourge were galloping toward him.

  “Jasen, you can’t—not again—”

  “It’s my mother’s amulet,” he pleaded, turning to her. The panic was back again, in his voice and in his eyes, boring into Alixa’s. “It’s all I have. I need to get it.”

  “But the scourge—!”

  “I know how far in I was when it snapped.” Not entirely true, because it had been so hard to tell as he waded—hadn’t he almost crashed head over heels when he ran into Tery?—but he had a decent idea at the least. “And the scourge, they must sleep. They can’t be stalking now.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Alixa’s voice sounded thick with worry, a croak like she might be sick right here in front of him.

  “I have to get it. I need to.” And he began to track along the wall, trying to calculate how far along they’d gone before he vaulted it this morning. Not too far, certainly; it hadn’t taken long to catch Tery’s cries—

  Or to see that dark shape stalking him in the rye.

  Jasen swallowed. That didn’t matter. Whether scourge were here or not, his mother’s amulet was more important.

  “I can’t do this,” Alixa whispered. Her breathing was hard, quick. “I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Jasen.

  “Mother and Father, they’ll know. The assembly—”

  “No one will know. Look how dark it is. No one will see us.”

  “They must wonder where we are. Maybe someone saw—”

  “Then turn back,” Jasen said. “Go home. I can do this alone.”

  Alixa looked torn. Her mouth worked up and down, and for long seconds no words came. Then she croaked, “I can’t.”

  “Where did I cross, Alixa?”

  She scrutinized. Her lips were downturned, and she looked like she might cry as she pointed and said, “Just there. I recognize the broken spot.”

  Less than a dozen steps away, Jasen spied it too: a broken stretch where a miniature trench some eight or nine inches long split the stone. He didn’t recall noticing it this morning—but then he’d been tracking Tery on the way to it, hadn’t he, and keeping watch over the lingering scourge on the way back to Terreas, not paying attention to the wall itself.

  He moved to it. Resting a hand on the wall, he looked out.

  A gentle breeze shifted the rye. Still no scent of decay, the rancid musk the scourge carried with them, which surely meant he was in the clear.

  He placed a hand on the boundary. Inhaled.

  “Jasen.”

  He looked to Alixa.

  “Be careful.” She was pale in the gloomy light, but there lingered no trace of argument on her face.

  He nodded. Swallowed hard past the lump in his throat.

  And then tossed himself over.

  This time was harder. It should not have been: the amulet was his most prized, treasured possession. He could not—would not—lose it. Yet now, with time to think, and so many voices in his head all decrying this very thing, the wall felt larger somehow—and the world beyond it far more terrifying.

  He stepped into the rye. Turned back for a second to check that Alixa had stayed put—she had, clutching her hands in front of her and pressing nails hard into her palms, her expression a mask of outright terror—and then the stalks swallowed him.

  He pushed through, resisting the urge to look for the amulet before he needed to. Doing so would only waste time, and the quicker he was done here, the better.

  He strode, trying to count paces. How many had he gone before he felt that sharp tug? A dozen, perhaps? But he’d been running then, and the steps would’ve been longer, carried him farther into the field.

  He pushed, heart hammering. Stalks clutched at him from all sides. Great clumps of them were bent, snapped in the middle, destined for death, the grain scattering the earth before it was ripe to reseed it. These were the places where the scourge had come down hard in its frenetic chase. Half of Jasen was filled with relief that he was indeed on the right track. The other half couldn’t help feeling dread. Its smell still resided here, faint, but sour.

  He felt sick.

  Deeper he pressed … and then he slowed. This must be about the spot.

  He began to scour, sifting through with his hands. The grain was so long, though, so tall and dense. He had to stoop, grimacing as he used hands to part it. The earth was nigh impossible to see, and so he raked his hands over it, clawing frantically, finding only dirt, loose clods he turned into fine powder. Then he pushed forward again, flattening the rye down underfoot carelessly, the way he’d never dare to in the grain fields back inside the boundary.

  It was somewhere here. He was certain of it.

  An image sprung up from nowhere: the scourge catching it on a clawed toe, and the chain clinging. It would bound off, taking the amulet untold miles from here, and Jasen would never, ever see it again.

  A cry warbled from his th
roat.

  “Jasen?” Alixa called from someplace behind … or maybe that was just the movement of the rye against the wind, because though he listened for her voice again, it did not come.

  He edged forward, groping, still finding only earth …

  Something skittered by his fingers.

  He retracted them.

  Only a mouse, he told himself. And if a mouse were content to be here, in the realm of the scourge, he could be too.

  Though I don’t think mice draw their attention quite so well as I would, he thought.

  He pressed on.

  Had he missed it? His fingers raked and raked, but how did he know he’d been thorough? He might’ve missed a spot, a few inches square and no more … but that might be where the amulet lay right now, missed and forgotten.

  The breeze whispered again. Rye swayed overhead.

  Jasen gritted his teeth.

  Come on.

  Raked. Edged forward. Raked again. Edged forward. Raked.

  Come on!

  He shoved a particularly clumped cluster of rye down, stamping hard on the stalks with his foot as he worked over the top—

  And his finger touched metal.

  He gasped, snatched it, heart skipping—

  It came up in his hand. The chain had not snapped, but somehow the clasp had come loose, because it lay open—but the stone was intact, hadn’t been crushed by the scourge as it rampaged after them, as he now acknowledged he had feared.

  Relief flooded him.

  Another cry warbled from his throat, loud and without shame.

  Now Alixa did cry: “Jasen?”

  “I’ve got it!” he said back. He sounded hoarse all of a sudden, as though he’d spent the day shouting at the top of his lungs. “I’ve found it.”

  “Then come back over!” Alixa said.

  For a moment, Jasen couldn’t bring himself to stand. The sheer happiness that had overflowed him, after such intense fear, robbed him of his ability to stand. His legs felt like ooze.

  “Jasen?” Alixa called again.

  “Coming.”

  He lifted the amulet, about to place it around his neck, then thought better of it. He’d wait until he was out of the rye, lest another nasty stalk grab at him again and tear it free. Then he’d never, ever cross this boundary—because this world outside the bound was dangerous, cruel.