Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Seven

~7~

Ninety-two days before the destruction of Nutharion City

The stabbing pain started in Dil’s chest.

She was dreaming, lost in darkness and shadows and blurry, pastel ghosts, but the pain felt real. It reached out from the space between her second and third ribs, just to the left of her breastbone, and it trickled backward until it pierced her entire torso. Her heart broke open, and blood poured into her chest cavity. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. There were hands on her arms and loud voices screaming mournful sounds in her ears.

It’s ok, said a voice in her mind, calmly detached from the chaos.

It’s ok…

Dil woke soon after. Her mouth felt cottony. The space between her ribs still hurt, but it was a dull, quiet whisper of the thing she’d felt in her dreams. Next to her, bundled up under a blanket on the cold ground, Cole was snoring loud enough to trouble the stars.

Dil envied him. It had been a long day—a long five days, really. They’d walked dozens of miles with Zahayr’s tribe over windy, trackless reaches of mountain and valley, heading southwest toward a place Zahayr called the City of White Bones.

Cole snuggled up against Dil’s hand without opening his eyes. She smiled.

Dozens of Quiet Ones—the Lost Ones’ name for themselves—lay around them, wrapped up in blankets on the ground. They were Zahayr’s followers. Drawn, he’d told her, from those in his tribe who believed most deeply in his visions.

The pain in Dil’s chest flared again and disappeared.

She sat up. She found sleeping difficult, surrounded by so many strangenesses. There were sounds in the mountains she couldn’t place—deep howls and the hooting calls of creatures she could imagine but couldn’t see. And there were smells she’d never encountered before.

She pulled her hand away from Cole’s neck. Several campfires burned amid the sea of sleepers, and in the center of them was a larger pit. Those on watch sat around it, staring into the flames or up at the stars.

As Cole rolled back over and continued his snoring, Dil got to her feet and walked toward the fire.

There, seated on a log, she found Zahayr.

The chieftain was wrapped in his cloak of feathers, and a gnarled staff he walked with lay across his lap. He was staring into the flames, and when Dil approached, he smiled.

“Knhew yhu would cuhm,” he said. He swallowed heavily after the sentence, like it hurt him to speak.

“You did, huh?”

Zahayr nodded. “S-haw it en mhy dhreems.”

Dil sat next to him. A hollow gourd with water in it was on the ground near the fire, and she scooped out a little with a wooden ladle and drank. It was sweet with the taste of a flower that grew in this part of the mountains—like a mixture of apple and orange and clove.

“What else do you dream of, Zahayr?” she asked.

His eyes flicked to her and then back to the flames. She caught the ghost of sadness in them. “Mhany things,” he said.

It was his usual response, and it seemed to be true. When they asked where they were going on any given day, he would tell them of his dreams: To the space between a beaked mountain and the prone body of its younger sister. To a lake shaped like an orchid, with an island of crying switch-trees at its heart. To a valley guarded by a granite giant with a scar across his nose.