bed.
The mud between them was soft and warm, and he let it absorb his form until it was also dry. Then he opened his eyes. He stood amid hills of red-brown clay, in a shallow vale with a stream running through it. Pevan lay on her back on one side of the stream, her foot trailing right to its edge. Chag was curled up tight, knees clasped to his chest, on the other bank, a little further from the water.
Trees rose from the beyond the low hillock that embraced them on one side. Where the vale opened - to a series of similar nooks, stacked end to end down the hillside, he knew - Atla could see for miles across a sweeping autumnal landscape to the dark, jagged outline of the Court. It was close enough, for Second Realm values of 'close', that he could make out the walls as well as the six spires, sticking up into the verdant, flower-strewn sky.
Pevan sat up behind him. He felt her voice scattering turbulence through the Realmspace, well away from him and Chag. An ungifted human would have thought she spoke to thin air, her voice absent and careless, as she said, "I'd forgotten how much easier that was with a Guide. Good work."
He nodded thanks, and knelt to check on Chag. The little man was starting to come round, though Atla could feel his pain like the frantic twitching of a drowning fly, right at the back of his neck. He resisted the urge to scratch at it, and instead squeezed Chag's shoulder.
Small comfort that it must have been, it had the desired effect. Chag uncurled a bit and shook his head, then tensed as a shudder ran through him. Again, Pevan did a masterful job of making herself heard despite speaking to the stream. "Is he alright?"
Atla looked up to see the tail end of the words burrowing into the clay, leaving tiny molehills. He caught Pevan's eye, then looked away to speak. "Just some entry shock, I think. He's coming round." The words shot a bow-wave ripple across his mind, leaving his mouth as a cluster of red-orange darts aimed at the sky.
Pevan pushed to her feet and walked over to crouch beside him. She looked down at Van Raighan, then twisted to stare out toward the Court. "Af haunts him." The words became a tiny bird that flew circles around the glen before disappearing. "I think it got into his mindwalk somehow."
She didn't say more, and Atla didn't press the issue. It was tempting to say the thief deserved it, but Pevan had ordered him to give Van Raighan a chance. And the Second Realm meant anything could be the reason.
At their feet, Van Raighan stirred again. His eyes opened, but his gaze wandered for a while before it focussed on them. Pevan reached down and pressed a hand to his lips until he nodded. Then she stood, and Atla had to scramble backwards out of the way as she hauled the little man to his feet. Wordlessly, she embraced him, and he hung almost limp in her arms.
Atla's jaw clenched. Sometimes, there was an intimacy between the two of them that made no sense at all. At least when they bickered they seemed more like siblings. Pevan pushed Chag away, holding him upright by his upper arms until his face tightened into a glare. Then she grinned briefly, turned to Atla and gestured Find us a route.
He looked over at the Court again, reaching up to feel the lazy ripples across the surface of his Gift. Trying to hold his voice below the water, he said, "Any preference?" The words flew like a bolas, trailing a streamer of rainbows in an arc that carried them well out of the vale, but they didn't trouble his Gift at all.
"We've spent most of the last month in the Second Realm." Pevan's sentence shot past him, bright violet coils straightening as they faded, but she didn't notice the incredulous look he turned on her. "We can probably handle anything, but better if we can avoid conflict. Oh, and Chag doesn't like heights."
Atla didn't need to see the way those last few words danced around each other to hear the playfulness in the detail. He closed his eyes, wondering if he could find a flat path. Most routes to the Court ended with either a climb or a fall; that was just how the Gift-Givers had had to twist Realmspace to get the stability it needed.
His Gift stirred, coasting along beneath the fastest channels in the surface of the Realm. Herds of lower-order Wildren, most dangerous but few predatory, made submerged mountain ranges in the landscape. There was a low path with only a little bit of climbing at the end, but from the way it squeezed among the foothills, it probably wasn't safe.
So much for that idea. He cast out again, found a knotted route that would bring them to within striking distance of the black walls. It promised to be quick, but there was flying involved, and he still wasn't sure he could face that himself. There were low routes aplenty, but they all ended at long ladders or high cliffs.
Pevan and Chag watched expectantly as he turned toward them. He lifted his left hand, then pantomimed flying, followed by his right and climbing, with an exaggerated spread of his arms; We can fly, or a lot of climbing. Even before he'd finished the gestures, Pevan's face had lit up. She raised her hands to sign for flying right as he finished.
Chag flicked her an unhappy look, then frowned at Atla, but he nodded. Atla returned a grim smile. He signed for them to follow, but not worry about matching him exactly, then led off along the stream. The water visibly flowed, but there was no gurgling to give it reality, nor any birdsong or rustling of trees for counterpoint.
Underfoot, the clay was firm and reliable, sticky so that their feet never slipped, even as they descended the sharp slope into the next little glen. The stream spread a white, pleated skirt of tiny waterfalls over the hillside, gathering back together into a small pool at the bottom. The ripples on its surface kept time with the currents swirling through his Gift.
They descended again and again, and a carpet of green rushed across the ochre of the clay, like the shadow of a cloud on a windy day. With it, the autumnal haze went out of the world, replaced by brilliant colours of summer, none of them in quite the right places - sapphire trees with white, fluffy foliage, a sky patterned with wildflowers. Here and there, shadows and what looked like miniature versions of dark thunderheads scampered through and around stands of long grass.
Still he followed the stream, until it met another, the pair swelling as they knotted together. He paused, sent Pevan and Chag a follow exactly, and waited for them to fall into line on his heels. His Gift sent rippling welcome to the currents of the stream, and he felt the ripples turn and echo back.
A slight delay, an unevenness in the answer, made him glance up at the shoulder of the vale. Something up there was denser than it should be, attentive and waiting. He narrowed his eyes, breath frozen in his throat. The ridge was crowned by azure bushes whose limbs splashed outwards and upwards to form a bewildering complex of 'V's. Slowly, he mapped the shape, feeling the turbulence where his Gift flowed through the branches.
There. It took a moment for sight to make contact with Gifted sensitivity. Some of those branches were not landscape, but conscious creature, cowering as it felt the brush of Atla's attention. No threat, then. A simple awareness, sensitive enough to tell that the humans were interlopers but also recognising them as far above its level. Curiosity, not predation, had kept it watching them.
Pevan's fingers sent a fresh ripple out through the Realm as she snapped them, just behind his arm. He glanced over his shoulder, came face to face with her frown. She gestured Is something wrong?
He shook his head, twisting so she could see him walk three fingers across his palm, then pinch two of them together. He finished with pressing his palms flat against one another; Small Wilder, peaceful. At Pevan's nod, he returned his attention to the route.
There was harmony, now, between his Gift and the stream; the stream's voice was far higher, haunting and sharp, but it bent itself to notes set by rich tones from the churning deeps below Atla's mind. He closed his eyes and stepped into the water.
It was cold, so cold he could feel near-solid pieces slithering past his ankle. He ground his teeth, held his jaw shut by force of will, and took another step. The water rose halfway up his shin, and it was hard to tell himself there weren't ghostly claws in it, sinking into his calf. Another step, and he felt the splash through
his Gift as Pevan's boot landed in the water behind him.
Another Wilder had joined the first on the ridge, from the way something stirred behind his throat. He ignored it; already, the glen was falling far behind. The water rose to his waist, and he leaned forward, stretching out as if to start swimming. This was the point where real care was needed, and suppressing the urge to gasp as his chest met the icy current took all his attention for a moment.
He ducked his face under the surface, feeling the impact as a small eruption in the sea bed below his Gift. A deep breath reassured his protesting mind that, despite appearances, he wouldn't drown. The water ran up underneath his shirt, tickling and sending odd cramps across his ribcage.
Opening his eyes, he had to blink a few times before the fuzzy light resolved properly and he could make out the iron bar lying along the riverbed. It nestled between glass pebbles which sparkled in the bright daylight, and he reached down to press a finger to it.
Only then did he allow himself to fall forward and fully immerse. The hard, lumpy surface of the iron dropped away, and the streambed parted, glass beads becoming vast bubbles that wobbled as they rose past him. He followed his finger, still held die-straight and pointing, down towards what was now a