After I uncurled from my uncomfortable spot on the ground and Fellen let me know that her watch had been uneventful, we started walking. Her demeanor was more brusque than it normally was, but I didn’t comment on it. The night’s events and bad sleep had shortened my temper as well.

We didn’t try to hunt. Without our slings it was practically impossible to catch and kill one of the speedy inhabitants of Flickermark, and the effort would have wasted more energy than the food gave. Instead, I focused on finding plants for us to gather and eat as well as signs of water we could reach. We didn’t stay in a designated area until the sun fell. Finding food and water, now that we no longer had the bit that we gathered or a way to take water with us, became more pressing. Fellen’s knowledge was also sparse enough that during the night before we had to rely more on my knots in the thread than on the constellations we could see. The constellations she knew mainly spanned the eastern sky, so they were little help in guiding us to the south—now that we had to find our way to the Statue Garden—other than as a reference that if a path that we were following pointed towards them we were no longer going the correct way. Heading south meant we would more than likely end up entering a bane pack’s territory and both of us also silently hoped that if we did so in the daylight, we would have a better chance of slipping past the nocturnal creatures.

Nor did we give up navigation completely. We gathered what small rocks and pebbles we could find and used them to mark which way we went whenever we reached a new pathway. It didn’t help us that much going forward, but if we ever needed to backtrack we wouldn’t be completely lost. It was odd traveling deeper into Flickermark with the sunlight lighting up the ravines’ sharp edges around us and without the stars creating a second path overhead. Harsher. It made it more difficult to focus on the bit of the maze in front of us rather than feeling the sprawl of Flickermark pressing in around us. Though the warmth of the sunlight, when in it did reach down far enough to directly fall on us, did help to combat the chill bite of the wind that gusted occasionally past.

”We should have prayed to goddess to thank Her for Her averted gaze while we had the chance.”

Fellen didn’t look at me as she spoke. Kept her gaze on the ground before her feet and her arms crossed in front of her chest, one hand holding a fistful of rocks. Her body slumped slightly with fatigue from sleeping poorly and the lack of food. She kept rubbing at her eyes.

I felt the fatigue in my limbs as well. We had been pushing ourselves for days without eating nearly enough to recover the energy we spent and the cost of that was catching up with us. My mouth was dry from the lack of water, but not terrible enough that I couldn’t speak.

“You know why we didn’t.”

“I know why you convinced me not to. We should have listened to Grandmother and prayed as soon as we stopped at the end of that first night—but oh no, we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves, let’s try to slip beneath Her notice.” She twisted to glare at me. “No one can slip beneath the goddess’s notice. She’s always watching! I should have listened to my gut and Grandmother and not you.” She didn’t say it outright this time, but Fellen’s meaning was clear. She should have listened to proper members of society and not someone life-ridden like me. “If we had done the normal traveler’s prayer we wouldn’t be in this mess! We would have our slings and supplies and be headed for the exit, not walking into the most dangerous part of Flickermark empty handed with our only other choice being to risk the goddess’s wrath!”

“Keep your voice down. Or are you trying to let all the predators in Flickermark know where we are?”

“I’m trying to say that this whole situation is stupid and it’s your fault!”

She wasn’t looking for an apology, not exactly. Apologies were useless more often than not and only given to those with high enough status to deserve them. Giving as good as you got was more common as when Fellen punched me in retaliation and I had to make her a new sling. What she wanted was an admission of guilt and I wasn’t about to give it to her. Not completely.

I tried for a reasonable tone. “Like you said, you agreed with me, so if we’re in a stupid situation it’s as much your fault as mine. Besides, I’ve been the one keeping us alive—keeping you alive, so you have a situation to complain about instead of dying and becoming like that shambler we saw.”

Fellen stomped faster down the ravine. “You’re the one who put that stupid line in about the Beloved—if anything you’re the one who doomed us!”

I caught up to her. “Doomed us? Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic? And you could have been the one to say that line as easily as me!”

She rounded on me, face blotched red. “Fine. Doomed me! You know how infrequently someone completes even one trial. You can’t die, right? That’s what you think? So I am going to be the one who dies without ever leaving this place—and you won’t be able to make me a funeral pyre—so I’ll become a creepy shambler and I’ll never be able to enter the Silver Forest!”

Her words were like a physical blow to the chest. I understood that we were in dire circumstances, but I had accepted them as an inevitability and moved on. I could do something to alleviate them or I couldn’t. That was it. Either we found food and water or we didn’t. Either we ran into dangerous animals or we didn’t. Either we made it to the Statue Garden or we didn’t. I had general plans for each of the situations, but after that there wasn’t any point to worrying about them further.

For Fellen, things apparently weren’t that simple. She worried and then she got dramatic and then she kept worrying until the situation wasn’t a glaring possibility anymore. And losing our supplies seemed to be a breaking point for her.

She had stuck by me when I broke.

I couldn’t give her an admission of guilt, but I could do what she had done for me.

“Fellen.” I caught her gaze. “You’re going to prove that you’re a worthy rival, right?”

She blinked at the change of topic, but her heightened emotions carried her through. “Yes!”

“Well, you’re not yet.” She looked like she was about to snap back a comment, so I kept going before she could. “I still don’t like you, but I’m not going to let you die until you are—and we need to have hundreds of more contests before you’ll have had the chance to win enough contests to become one. You won’t die in Flickermark.” I took her by the shoulders. “I won’t let you.”

She didn’t look convinced, but the tension running through her also seemed to deflate a bit. “You can’t promise that.”

I dropped my hands from her shoulders and shrugged. “I already did. It’s not like you’ll be able to become a worthy rival during the few more days, at most, we’re here.”

I started walking again.

“But—” It was her turn to catch up to me. “How?”

“I’ll keep finding food and water. We’ll keep going south and find the entrance to the Statue Garden. We run if we met anything dangerous.”

Simple and flexible and true to Rawley’s lessons.

Fellen frowned. “That’s not much of a plan.”

“The best plans aren’t complicated.”

She didn’t look completely satisfied with that but she let it go in favor of another point. “It won’t take me hundreds of contests to become a worthy rival.”

I made a noncommittal humming noise.

“It won’t!”

“We’ll see.”

--

It was after dusk when Fellen couldn’t hold back her questions about my flashback anymore. “What happened when we were in the thin ravines?”

I wasn’t ready to give her the whole truth, but I could give her the general gist of what had happened. “I don’t…like small spaces, and a rock fall had made it so there was only a very small opening for us to crawl through if we kept going. That reminded me of a bad experience I had and it affected me badly. So I wasn’t keen on going forward.”

“Oh.” She thought of another question. “Will it happen again?”

The possibility was like a bad taste in my mouth. “It might.”

“What should I do if it does happen again?”

“Don’t touch me. But calling out to me helped. You could do that again, and then let me recover like you did before.” I considered before adding, “There’s probably not a lot more you can do.”

She nodded, very serious. “It was really odd. It felt like you weren’t even in the ravine with me anymore.” Fellen hesitated before gathering up the courage to ask her next question. “What was the bad experience it reminded you of?”

I didn’t give her any quarter with that question. “A bad experience.”

She pressed her lips together, but didn’t press me further. I think she didn’t another argument so soon after our last one. Shortly after we fell silent, I spotted a night bloomer flower growing next to the ravine wall, its large white, cone shaped petals reflecting a subtle scale-like pattern in the moonlight. A mature plant, then. Its stem and leaves looked gray in the dark, but sunlight would reveal them to be a deep purple. Night bloomers liked damp places like Hanli’s Lament did, so there had to be a source of water near. The hope was that it was above ground and not below.

I told Fellen about what the night bloomer could mean and we both started to look for other night bloomers or signs of water. As we searched our stomachs rumbled, but we couldn’t eat the flower as it was poisonous unless prepped correctly, and we didn’t have the necessary tools.

Fellen spotted the second flower a little ways down the ravine, but we didn’t find any other flowers in the area or signs of an above ground river. After a quarter of an hour I was ready to move on and not waste any more of our energy on something we likely couldn’t reach. Night bloomer roots stretched deep. Fellen was on a mission though, and rebuffed my attempt to get us to move on. After at least another ten minutes of pacing back and forth along the same section of ravine she did find a hint of what we were looking for.

Wide eyed, she turned to me. “I can hear something rumbling.”

Instantly, I was on alert. “What do you mean?”

She turned back to the wall she standing in front of and pressed her hands against it. “Not like a growl, but like…”—I heard the triumphant glee in her voice as she finished her sentence—”like a waterfall.”

She glanced back to see my reaction, but I was already striding up next to her and copying her pose. It was very faint, but I feel the vibration in the stone and, when I pressed my ear to the wall, I could hear the rumble.

“Doesn’t it sound like a large waterfall?”

I nodded. “We need to get to it. If there’s a big enough waterfall that it can support the night bloomers here, it’ll probably have a lot more plants around it. This probably our best chance at finding food and water.”

Fellen’s fingers twitched to where her sling would be. It was a nervous habit that hadn’t broken even with her sling being gone. “How?”

I looked around us, but no path leading directly to the waterfall opened up. “We follow the sound.”

We began to press our ears intermittently to the ravine wall and did our best to go in a direction where the sound got louder. Often we had to back track as it turned out that instead of getting louder, the rumbling was getting fainter. That continued for the better part of an hour before we had to admit that no matter which way we went the sound didn’t increase. Like I had originally thought, the waterfall—and the river that fed it—were likely underground.

We didn’t have a way of reaching the waterfall. Fellen slapped her hand against the wall.

“But we need it!” Her voice echoed down the wide, twisty ravine we were in.

“Keep your voice down. We’ll find another one, or a stream.”

She made a sound somewhere between a whine and groan and started forward again. I didn’t try to talk with her again; I had no desire to be snipped at. We kept going, and while I didn’t find either a waterfall or a stream in another ravine I did find a shaded pod crawler. We ate our fill as we had the first night we got separated from the tribe and Fellen perked up again. The night was wearing thin at that point so we started to look for a sheltered nook to bed down in.

In the end, we never got the chance. We had already gone further south than I thought and a low growl emanated from the shadows around us, several turns after we left the shaded pod crawler behind.