We eat the meat charred this time. That wasn’t the plan, but Finna made the pot red hot. The bird was large, with a long neck and brown plumage almost the same color as the earth. When it noticed me, it tried to run away instead of taking flight. Made the shot actually harder, but not too hard.

  So far, we have eaten well on the trip. Water would become a problem at some point, but the maps show multiple springs with drinkable water along the way. And with the amount of Kertharians we seem to have to fight, there have to be waterskins we can find. Though we still don’t know what is causing their madness, I’d hate to poison myself right after surviving a battle. No one has said anything about that being a possibility, but everyone has also kept saying we have no idea of what is going on with them.

  Mandollel had to cool the pot somehow before we could leave. It’s amazing that the metal didn’t warp with the amount and speed of the temperature change, but it didn’t.

  We’ll reach the next spot early this morning. I’m worried about how tired we will be when we get there. “Did anyone get any sleep?” I ask as we keep jogging.

  “No,” Rworg says.

  After listening to his story, it’s going to take a moment to get used to him speaking only in single words. He did have to search for some words, but otherwise he told the story like he had been telling stories for his whole life.

  “No,” Finna says.

  She spent the time sharpening her daggers and stretching. After heating the pot, she looked like she would try to eat the meat raw. Mandollel said it’s because she’s wasting so much energy, channeling mana all over the place. After she had heated the pot, her cheeks were flushed and eyes bright. I had to focus not to stare. It’s lucky she still has a personality of a rusty hinge, or it would be really hard not to notice her.

  “Of course. Didn’t you? Being able to sleep is a vital survival skill. You should learn it,” Mandollel says.

  Because of course he does.

  The rest of the time, he pored over the maps, planning routes and strategies. Tonight, we move fast to reach the location for the second stake. That one is furthest east. Much too far from Tenorsbridge for my liking. The distances aren’t long, as no distance on the continent really is, but the landscape changes on the map in a way that makes me think the mapmakers must have been drunk or high on their artistic vision. Forests bleed into plains that bleed into deserts.

  Our route cuts us right through the middle of Kerthar, east, to touch the deserts. It’s weird how the land becomes dried the closer it reaches to the sea. In Rworg’s story, the rains flew over the desert. I wonder if seeing the desert will make him feel homesick.

  Once we have set the second stake there, we travel south. The lands there are dotted with lakes and called “desert wetlands” on the map. I have a feeling I’ll hate traveling through them. At least there should be less Kertharians around, as there’s nothing in there. Just empty forests and marshes and wet sand. We won’t go far enough south to reach well farmed lands around Krakkea, the capital of Kerthar. Going there would be suicide.

  We stop, set the third stake and, finally, circle back towards Tenorsbridge, heading north and west. The final location is almost touching the border and there we will also activate the device. Only thing left after that is to rush across the border to avoid skipping the next 30 years. I promised Gran that I’d be back and it wouldn’t count if she’d be buried for decades when I did.

  Mandollel checks our position and traces his finger on the map, drawing a line east. He taps a spot near the desert. “Depending on when we’re there and what the situation is, we’ll either use the stake immediately or rest for a while to prepare to leave for the third location immediately after the stake is ready. No priming it this time. We’ll play it safe.”

  “I wanted to try the stake too,” Finna says.

  “I grant that you have a gift for channeling, but you doing it would alert every mage on the continent. We’ll practice more first.”

  We run and jog and run. The environment around us changes slowly. The trees get smaller and the dirt has more and more sand in it. Out here, the different types of nature are pressed and crushed against each other. You could throw a rock from the shade of a forest and hit a cactus. The history of Kerthar is even more of a mystery than the history of areas around Tenorsbridge. We only know as much as we do about our own history, because the mages in Tenorsbridge have catalogued and written everything down for nearly a thousand years. And when they haven’t, the elves have filled in the gaps.

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  I don’t know if the Kertharians themselves know their history, but we don’t. I wonder if they know anything, anymore. Their rage seems all-consuming. I wonder if they just scream and shout at each other when there’s no one but the other Kertharians around.

  We stop to rest. The hard tack we brought doesn’t taste like anything, but it keeps us going. Mandollel has some yellow fruits, and he makes each of us eat half of one. They are bitter like nothing I have tested before. Sweet too, but I’m still happy that I didn’t taste one back in Tenorsbridge, as there were some on the fruit platter in the room we sat in with Lictor, so many times, such a long time ago. He would have let me bite into it and called it educational. Mandollel calls it healthy.

  We haven’t seen any settlements or lights. There are occasional buildings on the horizon, but no lights on any of them. No travellers on the roads. Rworg says that nearly all Kertharians live in Krakkea and even farmers don’t stay out in the countryside when there isn’t work to do. Still, even he seems to be weirded out by how quiet it is.

  “Ominous,” he says.

  I agree.

  No one wants to tell any more stories and we’re moving too fast to speak or listen, anyway. Mandollel jogs lightly, Rworg stomps, rhythm keeping steady from hour to hour. Finna bounds ahead, moving over the landscape less elegantly than Mandollel, but with surprising speed. She has the hardest time keeping up the pace. Maybe she’s tired from the channeling or just less used to running long distances over terrain.

  I’m fine.

  This is what I have been doing since I could walk. The shrubberies and rocks, sands and fields of dry grass flow past as my legs carry me ahead.

  “The Kertharians must have levied everyone to the capital. The fields should have farmers, the roads travellers and merchants,” Mandollel says. He fiddles with his hair. “I don’t like it. This is supposed to be a well-travelled area.”

  “Why worry? They are off getting killed somewhere back west. Better than here trying to kill us,” Finna says.

  Mandollel twirls a lock of hair around his finger, tighter and tighter. “There’s some truth to that. Yet I fear the rest of the war won’t go as well for Velonea as it did on the first night. Every day our mission hasn’t been completed, more people will die, more land burn. I fear what we’ll see once we head back to the border.”

  “We keep running, then,” Rworg says.

  We do.

  “Lights,” Mandollel says. He stands in place, hand reached out to the side to stop us.

  The area ahead is turning more and more inhospitable. The land is drier, the vegetation stunted. The trees look angry they have to grow in such a terrain, twisted and spiky and dark brown. I’m amazed at how fast the climate has changed around us. We can’t have travelled further than it is from our village to Tenorsbridge, a day’s journey unless you hurry, but here the surroundings seem to change with each step.

  And we have hurried. We can’t keep up such a pace for a second day. At least now we have stopped, but it’s because of what Mandollel is pointing out in the distance.

  “They are camping right next to the location where we need to set the stake,” he says.

  The lights are orange and red and yellow, torches and fires of a camp. I can make out shapes of tents if I squint. It’s larger, much larger than any camp or settlement we’ve seen thus far.

  Rworg leans his arms on his knees. He squints his eyes toward the camp. “Maybe the locals are there. Being trained for war, perhaps?”

  “That is a possibility,” Mandollel says. “It would mean they all have left their fields to go to war. Come winter, they would all starve.”

  Finna drops to sit on the ground, then falls on her back. “Maybe they don’t plan to be alive that long. Or they just plan to kill us and eat our food afterwards. Or eat us, who knows?”

  “We haven’t eaten people in years,” Rworg says.

  Finna’s head snaps up.

  Mandollel clears his throat. “Centuries, more like it. Come on. We need to get closer before it gets too light to do so.”

  Finna groans. Rworg reaches down to pick her up by the straps of her backpack. She’s lifted into the air, legs dangling down for a moment before he puts her down.

  This time, he even manages to dodge the kick.

  The Kertharian camp is huge. Tents lined up one after another, horses, cattle, groups of people drilling and practicing on sand stomped flat. There are more people visible than live in my village.

  “What the hell are we going to do now?” Finna hisses.

  “What we came to do,” Rworg says.

  “I’m not sure if you’re joking or not, but the answer is still no. Any ideas, you two?”

  Oh, seems I’m included in the people who might have a plan. That’s actually really nice to know. I want to live up to her opinion and start speaking before Mandollel does. “If we don’t pump mana into the stake, how secretly could we do it?”

  Mandollel rolls to his back and scratches his chin, gazing to the skies. We’re all lying on the ground, watching the bustle of the camp. “At about half way through, the auroras start to show. Mages can notice something is up a bit sooner, but not much.”

  “And we have to get the whole stake done so we can leave? They can mess with it if they find it while it’s still cooking?”

  Mandollel lowers his hand to rest on his face. “Are you hungry or where did this come from?”

  Rworg slaps me on the back.

  “But yes, that’s right. Mages could pinpoint the stake too easily if they could concentrate on it properly,” Mandollel continues.

  “An arrow to the throat seems to break their concentration a lot,” Finna says.

  Despite the sun blazing down on us, I shiver. “Can they be used multiple times? How long does it take for a stake to causing a disturbance?”

  “Minutes, if I force it,” Mandollel says, shading his eyes with his fingers, wiggling them in the air. He lowers his hand to press down on his nose and pouts his lips to meet its tip. “Hmm, you know, that’s actually not an awful idea. It might work.”