tively, passed between them, but she didn’t catch their meaning,
didn’t care to. Faun leapt from the pathway to her arm, clinging
possessively, but she shook the Tree Squeak off roughly. She
didn’t want to be touched. She could barely stand to be inside
her own skin.
She broke free of the trees.
“Lady Wren!” she heard Triss cry out to her.
Then she was scrambling up a lava slide, clawing and digging
at the sharp rock, feeling it cut into her hands and knees. Her
breath rasped heavily from her throat, and she was coughing,
choking on words that wouldn’t come. The Ruhk Staff fell from
her hands, and she abandoned it. She cast everything away, the
whole of who and what she was, sickened by the thought of it,
wanting only to flee, to escape, to run until there was nowhere
left to go.
When she collapsed finally, exhausted, stretched flat on the
slide, sobbing uncontrollably, it was Triss who reached her first,
who cradled her as if she were a child, who soothed her with
words and small touches and gave her a measure of the comfort
she needed. He helped her to her feet, turned her about, and
took her back down to the forest below. Carrying the Ruhk
Staff in one arm and supporting her with the other, he guided
her through the morning hours like a shepherd a stray lamb,
asking nothing of her but that she place one foot before the
other and that she continue to walk with him. Stresa took the
lead, his bulky form becoming the point of reference on which
she focused, the steadily changing object toward which she
moved, first one foot, then the other, over and over again. Faun
returned for another try at scrambling up her leg and onto her
arm, and this time she welcomed the intrusion, pressing the
Tree Squeak close, nuzzling back against the little creature’s
warmth and softness.
They traveled all day like this, companions on a journey
that required no words. The few times they paused to rest,
Wren accepted the water Triss gave her to drink and the fruit
he pressed into her palm and did not bother to ask where it
came from or if it was safe to eat. The daylight dimmed as
clouds massed from horizon to horizon, as the vog thickened
beneath. Killeshan stormed behind them, the eruptions un-
checked now, fire and ash and smoke spewing skyward in long
geysers, the smell of sulfur thick in the air, the island shaking
and rocking. When darkness finally descended, the crest of the
mountain was bathed in a blood-red corona that flared anew
with each eruption and sent trailers of fire all down the distant
slopes where the lava ran to the sea. Boulders grated and
crunched as the molten rock carried them away, and trees
burned with a sharp, crackling despair. The wind died to noth-
ing, a haze settled over everything, and the island became a fire-
rimmed cage in which the inhabitants bumped up against one
another in frightened, angry confusion.
Stresa settled them that night in a cleft of rock that sheltered
on three sides amid a grove of wiry ironwood stripped all but
bare of foliage. They huddled in the dark with their backs to
the wall and watched the holocaust beyond grow brighter. They
were still a day from the beaches, a day from any rendezvous
with Tiger Ty, and the destruction of the island was imminent.
Wren came back to herself enough to realize the danger they
were in. Sipping at the cup of water Triss gave her, listening to
the sound of his voice as he continued to speak quietly, reas-
suringly, she remembered what it was that she was supposed to
do and that it was Tiger Ty alone who could help her to do it.
“Triss,” she said finally, unexpectedly, seeing him for the first
time, speaking his name in acknowledgment, making him smile
in relief.
Shortly after, the demons appeared, Morrowindi’s shad-
owen, the first of those that had escaped Killeshan’s fiery
flow, fled down out of the hills toward the beaches, lost and
confused and ready to kill anything they came upon. They