The Second Stone

Kai woke to the sound of the stream and the absence of stars.

The cold-season constellation had crossed the sky while she slept and was sitting low in the west now, fading into grey. The fire was ash. The stream ran beside her in the dark.

She listened, and the dark was closer than when she'd fallen asleep.

Tomin was already sitting up. He'd rewrapped his ankle in the dark, tight and clean, and he was looking east with the expression of a man who knew what the day was going to ask of him.

"Ready?" she said.

He tested the ankle by turning his foot in a slow circle. The swelling was the same. The bruising had spread past the wrap's edge, mottled yellow-green. He put his weight on it and breathed once through his nose.

"Ready."

They broke camp in the grey light. Kai scattered the fire ash and buried the broad leaves under rock. Ace's rule: leave a place worth returning to. She filled the water skins at the stream and brought one to Tomin and he drank without speaking. She looked at the water one more time before they left. The early light caught the surface and held there, a thin silver line running south through the fold. She would remember this place.

They walked east.

The old Rac'i road climbed out of the fold and ran along a shelf that rose gradually, each layer of rock a step higher than the last. The drainage channels thinned and disappeared. Wherever the road had been going, its builders had stopped maintaining it here. The scrub was thick on either side, waist-high in places, and the flora she'd seen yesterday was everywhere now. Dark leaves, unremarkable. Waiting for the constellation.

Kai listened as they walked. Foundation, steady, east. Mother's call at the bottom of everything.

"Your father walked like that," Tomin said.

Kai looked at him. "Like what?"

"Head down. Arms loose. Covering ground without looking like you're trying." He was watching her with something between amusement and sadness. "Ace could walk all day and never look tired. Drove the other shipyard men mad."

"He still does that."

"Good."

They walked in silence for a while. The shelves rose. The air warmed. Tomin's limp had settled into a pattern, two clean steps and then one short one, repeating. He hadn't complained once since the ankle.

"You knew my mother better than I did," Kai said.

Tomin didn't answer right away. He adjusted the strap of his pack where it crossed his chest and looked at the scrub on either side of the road as if something in it required his full attention.

"I knew a version of her," he said. "Everyone did. Your father knew one. Mary knew one. You knew one. They were all her."

"Which one did you know?"

"The one who played Stones of Fate like she was reading a language nobody else could see."

Kai felt something tighten in her chest that had nothing to do with the signal. She let it sit there.

By midmorning her jaw ached. Behind the molars, the kind of clench you don't notice until it's been there for hours. The foundation was harder to find. The dark practitioner had been working while they walked.

The forest stone's practitioner had been a presence. This one was a grip.

"Tomin. Stop."

He stopped. Ahead, the shelf dropped into a shallow depression. At the center, fifty paces away, the brush thickened into a ring of dark low growth. The relay stone sat inside it. Pale, waist-high, smooth on one face.

She reached. Her jaw locked and she pulled back.

"Different," she said.

"How?"

"The forest stone was bound. This one is held harder."

Tomin reached. She watched his jaw work, the muscles loosening and tightening as he reached.

"I can barely find the foundation," he said. "It's buried."

"I know."

She looked at the stone sitting in its ring of brush. Fifty paces. A minute's walk on flat ground. A lifetime if the practitioner decided to fight.

"Same as the forest," she said. "Foundation only. Together."

"And if it doesn't let us pass?"

"Then we find out what happens."

They walked.

Kai listened to the foundation and kept walking. Tomin walked beside her, limping, silent. Twenty paces. Thirty.

At thirty paces something swept through from east to west. It passed over them, identified them, and moved on.

It had known since the stream.

"Keep walking," Kai said.

Forty paces. The brush thickened. The flora near the stone had changed. It had grown toward the dark, bent inward, adapted to it. Kai pushed through and the relay stone was in front of her.

Same size as the forest stone. Same pale warmth. Same origin. And underneath everything the practitioner had bound, Mother's call ran thin and strained and clear.

The practitioner studied them. Not tested—studied. It moved through her with a precision that felt clinical. It measured everything.

Three breaths.

Then something opened. A narrow corridor above the foundation, clean and untouched, running straight through the stone from west to east. The binding pressed tight on all sides, but the corridor was open.

"It opened a path," Tomin breathed.

"I see it."

Kai studied the corridor. Narrow. If the practitioner closed it while they were inside, the binding would hit them from all sides at once.

"It wants us off the foundation," she said. "Into its space. Where it can reach us."

Her breath caught. She'd felt this before. Tomin's Earth stone at the corner of her configuration. A move that looked generous. A move that required her to respond in the one way that exposed her.

"Foundation only," she said. "Straight through. Ignore it."

They walked to the stone.

They listened to the foundation where Mother's call ran thin and walked into the binding and it came down from every side. Kai's vision dimmed. Her jaw locked. She held.

Tomin made a sound beside her. Low, involuntary. He held.

Ten paces past the stone. The binding eased.

The corridor snapped shut.

If they had been inside it, they would not have walked out.

Tomin stopped and bent forward with his hands on his knees. Sweat ran from his hairline and dripped onto the stone. His ankle trembled and he shifted to the other leg and stayed bent.

"It was a trap," he said between breaths.

"Yes."

Kai turned and looked back at the relay stone. The practitioner was already back to its pattern. It had tried something. The something hadn't worked.

But it had learned them. The forest practitioner had power. This one had comprehension.

Tomin straightened slowly. His face was grey but his eyes were clear. He looked at Kai and something passed between them that neither of them needed to name.

"What's ahead?" he said.

Kai turned east and listened. Mother's call pressed close. Closer than yesterday. Closer than it had ever been.

"Clean signal," she said. "Open ground."

Tomin looked back at the stone, then east. His ankle bore his weight again. Whatever the second stone had cost him, it hadn't cost him his direction.

"Then we walk," he said.

They walked east. The shelves dropped beneath them, broad and flat and warming in the morning sun. The scrub thinned. Behind them, two bound stones. Ahead, the chain running toward its source.

Kai listened to her mother's call and followed it.