Bound by Blood and Sand
Page 54

Elan held his hand out to Jae to help guide her, and she pulled Tal with them. Her stomach churned with guilt, bile burning at her throat, because she knew the sun would just make Tal worse. She wanted to rest, to wait, but the Well was somewhere ahead, and their supplies wouldn’t last. The Well was their only hope. Moving was hard, but they had to reach the Well. They had to.
Jae focused on the magic in the distance to make sure they were heading in the right direction. Tal vomited and was too dazed to resist when she handed him the water skin. Elan was starting to stumble now, too, and worse, to mumble to himself. She could only make out a little of his quiet rambling, but it sounded as if he didn’t really understand where he was anymore, as he said something about his sister, Erra.
Later, as the sun set the sky on fire with late afternoon orange, Elan all but yelled, “I don’t doubt you. I only…If there’s another way, shouldn’t we…But I don’t doubt you!”
It was a conversation he’d already had, Jae realized. Something he’d said to his father, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else that he believed what he was told. But he didn’t, not anymore. Or else he wouldn’t be here, now. Maybe none of them would.
“Jae,” Elan said abruptly, loudly.
She stumbled to a halt, and he turned around to look at her. He frowned.
“Jae?”
“I’m here,” she said. “Tal and I both are.”
“I don’t know where we…Where are we? What happened to Shirrad?”
He sounded so confused that she couldn’t even resent the question. “We left her behind—”
“She’s so strange.” He began wandering again. “So backward. I feel bad for her. My father will never understand Aredann. The people there are too odd. Even the Closest.”
“Elan,” she tried again.
“You are odd,” he told her. “You’re strange, and strong. I’ve never seen anyone so strong.”
She tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry. He wasn’t really talking to her anyway. He was talking to someone else, far away.
“I think there’s magic at Aredann,” he said. “It sounds mad, but there must be.”
He repeated it over and over, and eventually Jae didn’t even hear it anymore.
—
It was well after dark when Jae finally paused to rest. She’d taken the water skin from Tal, just to be safe, and there was barely anything sloshing inside it now. All she wanted was to lie down and sleep, but she didn’t dare. She could feel how close the Well was. If they stopped, they might never manage to move again, but if they just kept going…
She pressed the skin into Elan’s hands, guilt flaring up when she had to tear it away after a moment to give it to Tal, and again when she took it from him. She finished the few precious mouthfuls left in it.
“We have to keep going,” she said out loud, even though neither Elan nor Tal was really listening to her. Forcing herself to start walking again was hard, and dragging the others forward, step after weary step, was harder. But this was their final push. Either they would make it to the Well or they would collapse.
The magic felt closer and closer, and the very air around them seemed different. Heavier. Thicker. She’d almost never felt air like that before, but something deep inside her remembered. She couldn’t truly call the air damp, but the air was no longer so dry that it ached to inhale, and there were bushes around them now, clawing their way up through the sand and rocks.
“We’re close,” she said, stumbling, then dragging herself back to her feet. “We have to be close. We have to be.”
It was Tal who finally fell and couldn’t climb back up. Jae reached for him, tried to drag him to his feet, but he just shook his head and wouldn’t move. She knelt on the ground next to him, shoulders shaking even though she didn’t have enough left in her to cry. She felt far too brittle, her body ready to give out, her limbs like clay dried too fast.
But they had to keep moving, or they’d die here. So close to the Well.
Looking at Tal, thinking of him lost in the desert forever, drove her back to her feet. It took all her strength to haul him up, get him moving again. Tal had risked everything for her—Tal and Elan both—and she couldn’t stop now. She couldn’t.
We have to be close, we have to be….Her steps echoed with the mantra, repeating over and over in her mind even when she could no longer speak.
—
Dawn found them. Jae wanted to sob, to curl up and let the heat take her and turn her to dust, but the magic was so near now. She didn’t even need other-vision to feel it; she just had to look around. She just had to keep moving, to keep dragging Tal and Elan, and hoping.
She fell again, and this time she couldn’t get up. She only managed to rise to her knees, to crawl forward—
The world fell open in front of her, revealing the edge of a cliff. And beneath it, down at its base, sheltered by cliffs as far as she could see, was the glittering blue jewel of the Well.
 
 
Something in the three of them changed with the sight of the Well. Jae could sense it in the way Elan went quiet, the way Tal went still. All of them just stared.
She had never seen so much water. The only scale she had to judge by was Aredann’s reservoir. If that was a brick, then this was a wall, dozens of bricks high and hundreds of bricks long. She couldn’t even see across it as she scanned the horizon and tried to follow its shore with her eyes. If there were mountains on the far side, she couldn’t see them from here.
But she could see that there was a problem. The deep, glittering blue of the water nearest them, at the base of the cliff, met the pale shoreline almost cleanly, but farther away Jae could see shore that had turned to gray, chalkier tones. It was mud that should have been underwater but wasn’t. Judging from just how much dried mud she could spot, the problem wasn’t just that reservoirs at small, outlying estates were going dry. The Well itself was shrinking. There used to be much, much more water here, and something had happened to it.
Which meant it wasn’t just Aredann and other estates like it that were in danger. It had nothing to do with population. Water was missing, and if this kept up and the Well continued to shrink the way Jae thought it would, eventually the central cities and their reservoirs would be dry, too.
“We can reach it,” Elan said. “There has to be a way down.”