Javaun Helios's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

By morning the storm had thinned to a gray drizzle. Javaun and Ilandra left the fairy grove and walked into a stand of tall pines. The trees stood close and old, their trunks straight as pillars. But the road ahead ended in a wall of black cloud. The storm had not passed. It sat on the path like a living thing, swallowing the way to the city where Fatisto waited. Javaun stopped at its edge. Cold air pushed against his face. He could not see three steps into it. "We can't walk through that," he said. "We won't see a cliff until we're over it." Ilandra pulled her pink gown tight against the wet. She was a princess, raised for palace floors, not forests. Yet she had begged to come, to guard him, and she studied the cloud now with sharp eyes. "Then we don't walk through it," she said. She pointed left, where the pines climbed a low ridge. "The storm sits in the low ground. Higher up, it thins. My father hunted lands like these. Water pools in the hollows. So does bad weather." Javaun trusted her. They climbed. The pines grew thicker, their branches dripping. As Ilandra promised, the black cloud sank below them, and open sky showed ahead. They had beaten the storm. But the climb had cost them daylight. Dusk came fast among the trees. Then a low sound rolled between the trunks. A howl. Then another, closer. Yellow eyes moved in the dark. Wolves circled, drawn by the smell of two lost travelers. Javaun drew his knife. It felt small against a pack. "Stay behind me," he said. "No," Ilandra said. "Fire. Wolves fear fire." She snapped dead branches from the pines, the dry ones sheltered under the boughs. Her hands shook, but they did not stop. Javaun struck sparks with his flint into the tinder she piled. The first flame caught. Ilandra fed it, and the fire leapt high. The wolves shrank back from the light. Their eyes flickered, then slid away into the dark. The howls faded. Javaun let out his breath and looked at his cousin, her braids full of pine needles, her gown ruined, her face proud. "You've done this before," he said. "Never," she said, and almost laughed. "But I've read about it." They built the camp around the fire and kept it burning through the night. Javaun did not sleep much. He watched the flames and the trees and thought of the stone in his pack, and of Diamond, waiting somewhere behind him. Sunlight found them stiff and cold. The storm was gone from the low road now, blown out overnight. They walked down from the ridge and rejoined the path. By midday the pines opened, and there it stood below them: a city of iron towers and rising steam. Fatisto's city. The way was clear at last.