green - he had to work to get that colour; Dora’s feathers were an exquisite iridescent blue naturally - drifted to the floor as he flexed, then sprang forward, straight at the cliff.
Air caught his pinions as the cliff ghosted past, as solid as mist, and he swooped with the feeling of great bags of wind hanging from his shoulders. For a blessed moment, there was no Second Realm, no Clearsight, no headache; just a slow, spiralling glide down to the Court. Rel fought the desire to climb a little and prolong the flight. There wasn’t time. There never was, but someday...
Landing snatched the thought away from him, as he stretched his feet down towards the weathervane on the Tower of Birds. Boots struck iron, wings became arms, and swoop became fall. He tumbled down the sharply-sloping tiles and caught the edge. His head chose that moment to throb, and he dropped to the walkway with enough force to drive him to his knees.
Doubling over, Rel pressed his forehead to the cool stone and clamped his hands over his ears. He didn’t have time for this. Rissad could already be freeing himself. He clenched his teeth, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. Focus returned enough to get him back up to a sitting position. Did he need to go inside? No, the battlement would be enough. Would have to be enough; he was too close to losing his battle with the Second Realm’s logic to risk the impossible maze of the Court’s halls.
Clearsight spreading around his eyes was ice, but it failed to soothe the ache just behind them. The two sensations warred over Rel’s consciousness as he tried to pull Van Raighan’s Witnessing from his memory. Images came and went; Rissad’s hungry face, Dora’s eyes, still diamond-hard but wide with pain and fear, a group of Wildren talking to the younger Van Raighan.
There were other pictures too, either too strange to recognise or gone too fast to place, but Rel pushed his groaning brain through the haze and confusion, chasing Rissad. His eyelids tightened, fighting to close against his flagging drive to keep Seeing. Then he caught Rissad’s trail in a glimpse of the man walking through a ruined city. By the language on the signs, not old Federas.
The image skipped along as Rel tried to force his way forward in time. In fits and jerks, Rissad moved through the city, in through the shattered glass doors of a monolithic concrete tower, down into the basement. And from the basement into a cave. Rel could see the outline of the huge rift through the stone of the passage Rissad took; it ran clear under the city, thousands of feet deep, miles long.
Rel’s head pounded. His eyes felt like they were about to burst. Dimly, he was aware of stone against his cheek; he must have fallen over. In the Clearviewing, Rissad turned a corner and a Wilder, a brutish four-legged creature Rel didn’t recognise, grabbed him around the waist. Rissad kicked and thrashed, but the Wilder didn’t even flinch. Silence made the struggle comic.
There was a second Rissad in the thing’s arms, too; one that hung limp and compliant, smiling. Still nothing told Rel when this was happening, but the Wilder had to be taking him to the strange door. Rel pushed forward again, but his mind was numb, a useless lump of damp fluff refusing to break new ground.
He changed tack, pulling back in time, searching the city for clues. None of the old clocks worked, of course, but there were weeds grown to large bushes whose leaves were bright green with new growth; Clearsight picked out a lone daffodil growing in a park as Rissad walked past. Spring. But spring was just hovering on the edge of breaking, and Rissad couldn’t have survived starving for ten months.
Further back, and the pounding in his head became a thrashing, writhing thing, knifing between his frontal lobes. He couldn’t feel his eyes anymore. He couldn’t see anymore. No, he had his hands clenched to his face, holding his eyelids apart. But he pushed back, and suddenly he was seeing the ruined city from the crest of a low hill, the sun rising behind it, and Dora skipping - skipping?! - down the hillside towards it. She turned as if listening to someone out of sight, and laughed.
He fought for a last moment of focus as his brain tried to escape his tortured skull, but there was a swirling distortion around Dora that stacked image on top of image to a depth beyond even what Clearsight could sort out. A single detail remained; Dora’s hair bounced and swung from the crown of her head in a ponytail, bound by a bright yellow ribbon.
Dora had never had hair that long. Everything he’d seen was the future. How had Van Raighan Witnessed it?
Logic fatigue became a saw, rasping through the centre of Rel’s skull, and he released his eyelids. The end of the Clearviewing was a hammer to the forehead and a kick to the guts all at once, and still blessed relief for all that. He rolled onto his back, clutching at his head.
It took a minute before he could open his eyes again, and even then light was all prickle and heat. The grey shapes around him might have been the dark stone of the battlement and walkway, but he felt like he was standing on air with a wall at his back. Which way was up? The fragile image of the Court as a building shattered as Rel’s internal logic failed.
He squeezed his eyes shut again, and sensation ceased. At least if he couldn’t feel anything, he couldn’t feel the chaos around him. Even the feeling of sinking below the murky waters of sanity faded and he became nothingness. Stable.
Without using anything so substantial as hands, he found a short rope. It hovered in the void where Rel should be, and he began tying knots in it, looping one end over-then-under the other. The first thing any Gifted learned; tying a Four Knot. The first three knots were easy. You tied them just like you would in the First Realm. The splitting ache hovered at the edge of consciousness as he manipulated first-realm logic into those first three knots.
The last knot was pure Second Realm, though. You tied it backwards, then pulled the whole thing through itself, and somehow the ends of the rope joined inside the knot. What remained was a loop of rope with four knots in it that could never be untied, short of cutting. You made a four knot to summon the Four Knot. Dora would come for him. She was in the Second Realm anyway. Nearby. Rel let Rel go and waited for the Sherim to carry him back to himself.
Dim awareness marked time poorly, but suddenly there was a second nothing next to the first. The dividing line was the skin between two pairs of eyes, one flint-grey and hard, the other green but icy cold. Someone knew something about those eyes. They looked a bit like his sister’s.
But the eyes looked nothing alike, so whoever the sister was, it wasn’t either of them. Besides, none of these eyes glittered with malice. No, the malice was in the Van Raighans, and he needed to stop Rissad.
‘He’ was a good start, he knew. He had a sister, with green eyes. And a... friend? Could eyes that hard ever be friendly? No, Dora was a friend, definitely. Not a nice one, but a friend. Just like his sister was a sister but not a nice one. Even if she did have nice hands.
Somewhere in the tension between Dora and Pevan, Rel found himself. Slowly, he began sifting the jumble of mental noise for sensations that belonged to him. The splitting headache was obvious, and the damp cheeks felt right, too. Gritty eyes went with that. Overusing Clearsight tended to make you tear up. There was a stiff ache in his neck and something uncomfortably pointy poked into his cheek.
He brushed water off his face - more than just tears - and opened his eyes. They immediately filled with rainwater and left him blinking and spluttering. It was hammering down; he could hear the splashes and trickles up and down the cliff he was apparently lying at the bottom of.
Wherever he was, it wasn’t anywhere near the Sherim. He lay on the gravelly bottom of a narrow gorge, his boots and calves in the swelling stream. The sky above was grey, dark with fading light. Dora lay half on top of him, her head on his chest and her leg tangled with his. Her hair, normally so wild, was plastered flat against her skull, and her robe was dark with moisture, almost black in this light.
“Dora? Where are we?” Gently, Rel touched her shoulder.
She lifted her head and their eyes met. Rel’s headache flared and his eyes stung as they widened; where Dora’s eyes had been grey, now they w
ere closer to silver. Even in the dim gorge, her irises shone gently, revealing a tracery of red on white. She’d been crying too.
“Rel?” her voice was hoarse and thin. “Your logic... Does it hurt?”
“What?”
She blinked at him and lifted a hand to his face. She touched his forehead, and jerked her hand back. More firmly, but still distant, she said, “Your head. Right.”
“Dora, what’s going on? Where are we?”
She looked to one side, then back at him, and quickly pushed herself up to half-sitting. Her head jerked nervously as she looked around. “I’m not sure. How did we get back to the First Realm?”
Rel frowned, “You don’t know? You did it.”
“I..?”
“I went to the Court for another Clearviewing, but fatigue got the better of me. I managed to tie the knot, but I was nothingness by the time you came.” As Rel spoke, he watched Dora’s lips thin with a sinking heart.
To his endless relief, she said, “As soon as we know what’s going on, we are going to have words about that, young man.” As if she was his mother. Her eyes flashed in the gloom - literally - and she snapped, “Don’t give me that look, Relvin.”
“Just provided you wait until we’re safe,” he grumbled, pushing to his feet. His head