Yasuo looked back at the distant inn. The round stitches of stone had sewn the path shut and blocked off any oncoming approach. It had bought them time, but dawn would be coming soon. And with it, more men for them. For him.
"They knew you." Taliyah's voice was quiet. "Yasuo." She held on to the last word.
"We need to keep moving."
"They wanted you dead."
Yasuo let out a breath. "There are a lot of people who want me dead," he said. "And now some will want you dead as well. If it matters, they named a crime I did not commit."
"I know."
Yasuo was not the name he had given on their journey, but it did not matter. She had not asked about his past in the time they'd traveled together. In truth she had not asked anything of him except to be taught. She watched her mentor now, it seemed her trust was almost painful to him. Perhaps more than if she had thought him guilty. He turned and began walking away from her.
"Where are you going? Shurima is to the west." Confusion rose in her voice.
Yasuo did not turn back to face her. "My place is not in Shurima. And neither is yours. Not yet." His words were cool and measured, as if he were steeling himself against a coming storm.
"You heard the merchants. The lost city has risen."
"Tales to scare the tradesmen and drive up the price of Shuriman linen," he said.
"And if a living god walks the sands? You don't know what that means. He will reclaim what he has lost. The people who once served him, the tribes..." Taliyah's voice strained with the emotion of the evening, her words boiling over. She had journeyed so far to protect them and now she was a world away when they needed her. She reached out, a hand's breadth from pulling on his arm, anything to make him listen, to make him see.
"He will enslave my family." Her words echoed off the rock around them. "I must protect them. Don't you understand that?"
A gust of wind picked up, stirring pebbles on the ground and whipping Yasuo's black hair about his face.
"Protect," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "Does your Great Weaver not watch over them?" The words now came through gritted teeth. The man, her teacher, turned toward his lone student, anger flashing in his dark, haunted eyes, the raw emotion startling her. "Your training is unfinished. You risk your life returning to them."
She stood her ground and faced him.
"They are worth my life."
The wind swirled around them, but the girl was immovable. Yasuo gave a long sigh and looked back to the east. A hint of light had begun to break the blue-black night. The last of the turbulent gusts calmed.
"You could come with me," she offered.
The hard lines of the man's jaw relaxed. "I have heard the desert mead is quite good," he said. A soft breeze tugged at the girl's hair. And then the moment was gone, replaced again by a memory of pain. "But I am not finished in Ionia."
Taliyah studied him carefully and then reached inside her tunic, breaking a long loose thread. She offered the length of handspun wool to him. He looked at it suspiciously.
"It's a tradition of thanks among my people," Taliyah explained. "To give a piece of yourself is to be remembered."
The man took the thread gingerly and tied back his wild hair with it. He weighed his next words carefully.
"Follow this to the next river valley and that river to the sea," he said, gesturing toward a lightly worn deer path. "There is a lone fisherwoman there. Tell her you wish to see the Freljord. Give her this."
The man withdrew a dried maple seed from a leather pouch at his belt and pressed it into her hand.
"In the Frozen North there are a people that resist Noxian rule. With them you might find passage back to your sands."
"What is in this... Freljord?" she said, testing the word in her mouth.
"Ice," he said. "And stone," he added with a wink.
It was her turn to smile.
"You will move quickly with the mountains beneath you. Use your power. Creation. Destruction. Embrace it. All of it. Your wings have carried you far," he said. "They may even carry you home."
Taliyah stared at the path leading down into the river valley. She hoped her tribe was safe. Perhaps the danger she imagined was just that. If they saw her now, what would they think? Would they recognize her? Babajan said that no matter what color the thread, no matter how thick or thin the draft was as it was taken up on the spindle, a part of the wool always remained what it had been when it started. Taliyah remembered, and took comfort in that.
"I trust that you will weave the right balance. Safe journey, Little Sparrow."
Taliyah turned to face her companion, but he was already gone. The only sign he had been there were a few blades of grass that rustled in the new morning air.
"I'm sure the Great Weaver has a plan for you, too," she said.
Taliyah tucked the maple seed carefully into her coat and started down the path into the valley, the stone beneath her boots rising eagerly to greet her.
