Vah stared at the child clinging to its mother—conceived in peace but born fatherless into flight and starvation. If the babe survived, it would never know of the life before, when things had been as they were supposed to be, when songs still rang in the treetops.

  No one sang, now.

  He reached out his hand and offered the mother his meager find of rockwort—some kind of vegetable that grew along the desolate shore. She needed it more than he, which was saying a lot. The babe was still nursing, and he could see the lines of the mother’s bones and the worried light of fear in her eyes. Yet it was dimming every day as exhaustion clutched. She took the wort without a word and stuck it into the pocket of her cheek.

  Whether the rockwort had much nutrition in it, Vah wasn’t sure, but it was the most abundant edible they had discovered in this desolate spit of sea-blasted land—besides seaweed. Somehow, the wort managed to survive the salt-crusted rocks near the shore, and it had not poisoned them.

  Vah had gone searching for food, but now upon his return he found his brothers missing. They were not in the shallow depression where the rest of the survivors sheltered from the winds. The refugees must move again or die.

  “They went that way,” one of the vien said, pointing over the north rim. Vien was their word for a male, as opposed to vienu, but Vien also meant “people,” as opposed to an animal. It was how they referred to themselves. Vah’s legs complained as he climbed the rocky slope, hands on his knees for support. Such an easy climb should not have even bothered him, let alone proven difficult. They were dying. It was all he could think about. That and food. Many months had passed, and their situation had only grown worse as they travelled, the land more desolate. There was barely any soil here for anything to grow, and they had no seeds to begin with.

  Findel and Isecan were just beyond the rim, standing side by side and staring north. Isecan turned as a rock shifted below Vah’s feet, making a noise, but Findel stared on.

  “We have to move,” Vah said. “There is no food. We should go back south.”

  “We cannot go south,” Isecan said. “They are there.”

  “They are not following us anymore,” Vah said. “It has been months. We can try to follow the coast when it turns to the east. Stay out of the trees. To stay here is certain death. At least that would give us a chance.”

  “We must continue north,” Findel said, still without turning.

  The resemblance was strong between Vah’s brothers. It always had been. They were tall and had the same angular chins. Both had bright eyes, though Isecan’s were quicker to wrinkle in mirth. Their hunger and trials had not completely robbed them of their strength, though sinew and muscle stood out taut against waxy skin. Though younger, some said Vah looked older. He certainly felt more worn.

  “Look!” Vah said, pointing north.

  After fleeing their warm forests far to the south, they trekked for months across rocky grasslands dogged by the beasts. It was only by walking night and day for most of a week that the reduced survivors had finally outpaced their pursuers—or the monsters had lost interest. Now, the vien found themselves traveling up a narrow swath of rocky land between two coasts. They had zig-zagged across it, searching for food but always heading north. The further they’d come, the more desolate and barren the land had grown. There was little to forage and no trees. At most, thorny bushes grew in clusters out of the wind that constantly beat across the low neck of land. Vah kept expecting the land to run out, but it just kept on, sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing, always growing harsher and colder.

  Findel and Isecan followed Vah’s finger as he pointed north, but there was nothing to see but more of the same. That was Vah’s intent. Standing in open ground was an unnerving feeling, without the shelter of the tall jungle trees they had known.

  “With every step we take north, I feel stronger,” Findel said at length.

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  “What?” Vah had struggled even to climb the slope. They were all starving. In the grasslands there had at least been patches of wild legumes and grains, but not here.

  “Don’t you feel it?”

  “What?”

  “I do,” said Isecan. “Something I’ve not felt before. . .well. . . Maybe. Just not so. . .”

  “Thick,” suggested Findel.

  “Deep.”

  At that moment, Vah considered that his brothers might be slipping into some kind of delirium. He’d heard of such things. Sickness was not common among the young in their home, but there had been fevers in the past, and worse since their flight. Yethrin had eaten a plant a few weeks ago and had sworn for two days that there were spiders crawling over all the rocks.

  “You don’t look stronger,” Vah said.

  Findel looked down at his arms.

  “It’s not in my body.”

  Great. That left the mind. His brothers had been leading their people all this time. They had kept them together over the past months, even as their numbers dwindled down to a few hundred. They had done so by personality alone, each in their own way.

  They had been a prosperous people in their southern jungles, thriving on the fruits and vegetables and nuts in that warm land. They had known no greater enemy than the bears that wished to steal their honey and the occasional jaguar or snake. But Monsters had come from the dark—devouring demons that feasted on flesh like the panther, and yet they were intelligent. They even spoke words in some vile tongue. The vien were not warriors, and they neither hunted nor defiled themselves by eating flesh.

  But Findel and Isecan had fought, and for days and nights they held the beasts back. It was not enough. The groves were trampled, their trees cut and burned as the monsters flushed them out. Findel had lost a wife and Isecan a daughter.

  “We must continue north,” Findel said, turning at last to look at Vah. “We will gather the people for another march.”

  ***

  It was a bright night though the wind was brisk. At home, they had understood the change from the rainy season to the dry season. Here, Vah and the others knew little of what weather may befall them at any time. They walked a little ways inland away from the coast to avoid the spray of the sea as it crashed upon the rocks and threw its frigid spittle into the air.

  “Look,” Isecan said, pointing east. Moonlight reflected on the water. Vah looked at it and then turned west. Water again. Were they coming to the end of the land? He hoped so. They could not go on much longer. He heard a babe wailing somewhere behind in the dark. Without a response, Findel led them on as the seas drew together. At one point, the land was no more than half a mile wide, but then a curving line of darkness swept to the northeast.

  “It goes on,” Isecan said, just loud enough for Vah to hear.

  “Which coast do we follow?” Vah asked.

  “Neither,” Findel said, and pointed straight into the heart of the opening landscape. “It is there.”

  “What is?”

  “The fountain.”

  “Fountain?”

  “Do you not feel it?”

  “I feel it,” Isecan said. “Churning and flowing out in every direction.”

  “What is this you speak?”

  “Follow and see.” Findel set out again.

  “How can you know what’s ahead?” Vah called after him. He was more certain than ever that madness had overtaken his brothers. Perhaps it was the result of their failing bodies, for wasn’t the body the temple of the spirit? Vah noticed that his brothers’ hair looked yellow, as if malnutrition was changing its color. He glanced down at his shoulder. His hair was still clear.

  ***

  Dawn found them marching in file through a broken landscape of rocky hills and shallow depressions. They had left the sea behind, for the land had opened out once again as if they had come across a narrow bridge. Bushes with strange sharp silver leaves and long spiny thorns grew in thickets behind rocks that sheltered them from the wind. Isecan and Vah walked down and back up the line of their people, counting and making sure none had been left behind in the night march. Yet Isecan looked distracted, and he hurried back toward Findel at the head of the line as soon as the count was over, sparing no words for anyone and barely seeming to notice the pitiful state of the refugees. Vah jogged to catch up, but he stumbled and fell.

  “Isecan, wait!”

  His brother slowed and looked over his shoulder, an annoyed expression growing on his face.

  “No, we’re so close.”

  “We have to stop and rest!”

  “No!”

  The voice was not Isecan’s. Vah looked up, startled. Tessiel—the mother with whom he had shared his rockwart the previous day—was passing by, carrying her babe who was crying for milk. It was she who had spoken. “We’re too close,” she said.

  “To close?” Vah asked. “To what?”

  “Life,” she muttered and passed by.

  Vah watched in confusion as the line of his people flowed past. They stared ahead with an uncanny fixation, hardly even looking at the broken ground in front of them. They stumbled, but rose with dogged, unfaltering expressions and a strange light in their eyes.

  Were they mad, or was he?

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