“Go away.”

Prevna gave me a knowing look that stopped me from taking the excuse Juniper’s words offered. She didn’t want us here, I didn’t want to be here either, so why not listen for once?

But I couldn’t leave. Not after Prevna’s look made it feel like losing or running away. So instead I crossed my arms and took in our surroundings while I waited to see what Juniper would try next to get us to leave her alone.

She was curled up in a little hollow that might have fit three people if they really didn’t mind being cozy with one another and, based on the furs that had somehow made their way into the space, this wasn’t the first time she had used it. Pine roots kept the space open like the hollow we had used to hide from the festerlings. We were on the back edge of the upper lake, about as far from the cliff as you could get and still be in the Rookery. No other tribe members were nearby and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only time someone went through the area was when Tufani made us run around both lakes.

I gave Prevna a look that asked how she knew Juniper would be here and she shrugged, unconcerned. “Sometimes you want to be alone and I get bored. Not my fault if I saw them while up on a rib.”

“Why would you ever want to go up there?”

“Milwa always said we should know the land better than everyone else if we wanted to survive.” A Picker band would need to the area to know where to ambush tribes. Prevna added, teasing, “Did you think I could see everything from up here?” She still wasn’t over the fact that I wasn’t tall enough to ride a bird properly.

I scowled back at her grin. She wasn’t that much taller than me yet and she was the one who was going to hit her head on everything.

“Go away,” Juniper repeated, more forcefully.

We focused back on her—which I think was exactly what she didn’t want—and she shrunk in on herself again. She didn’t have her normal sullen air of homesickness and worry and resolve; instead, this time it was all embarrassment and disappointment and resentment.

I knew the taste of the second depressing air much better than the first. Her normal air I could ignore because I didn’t want to get involved and I couldn’t ever remember being homesick. For the healer’s tent, maybe, but that was more for the skill than the actual place of the people inside it.

This new storm of emotions though…it brushed against all sorts of memories. Juniper wasn’t taking well to feeling incompetent over and over again, and she wasn’t using what I always had to push through: spite and the knowledge that no matter what she said I wasn’t a failure.

I glowered down at Juniper. “Why are you cowering in a hole?”

She hunched in tighter and refused to look at me.

“You’re not the only one who had trouble flying and we all know you’re scared of heights. That doesn’t matter.”

Of course it mattered. Juniper wasn’t a prideless, spineless fool. I didn’t like my own flying trouble or the way the memories ambushed me in small spaces, didn’t want anyone else to find out about them who didn’t already know. But that wasn’t the point.

The point was to not give up just because things kept being hard. Giving up meant no progress, no way to improve or get over the difficult things. Giving up meant someone else could decide everything that mattered.

Juniper was better than that, but if she thought hiding in a hole would solve anything I’d show her just how wrong she was. If she was determined to be a failure after that then Prevna couldn’t say I hadn’t done as she asked.

“Are you just going to stay there forever?” I pressed. “Ignore us and everything else until you freeze solid?”

She stubbornly kept staring at the fur covering her so I reached down to grab some snow and lobbed it at her face. It hit dead center on her nose and she jerked her head up. It was easy to tell she’d been crying as she spat, “What was that for?”

I threw more at her. Prevna stayed off to the side looking conflicted between joining or stopping me.

“Stop it!” Juniper demanded.

I kept throwing the snow. “Being frozen isn’t easy or fun. I should know.”

Juniper turned her attention to Prevna. “Make her stop!”

“I think only you can do that,” Prevna picked sides just like that.

“Nothing ever works!” The words exploded out of Juniper as she flung the fur away and scooped up her own snow. Then she flung it at me as she advanced, throwing more snow to punctuate her points. “I can’t fly! Can’t shadow walk! Can’t even use a sling or aim properly!”

It was true that more of her shots were missing rather than hitting me in the face and chest like she no doubt intended. The petty part of me desperately wanted to point that out but the rest of me realized I’d be stuck in this situation a lot longer if I made her burst into tears or go mute again.

“I don’t want to be here! I should be home—protecting the waterways and killing fish and learning how to lead the tribe!”

She stopped throwing snow and stood there glaring at us. Like we were the ones who put the bless mark on her and condemned her to become one of the vaulted whisper women.

I stopped edging toward Prevna so that more of the snow could hit her and glared back. “So you’re just going to give up? Stop trying because things got tough? You really are weak.”

“I shouldn’t be here.” Juniper jabbed a finger at the pearl dangling over her forehead. “This proves it! Only those destined to protect the waterways can wield the pearl.”

That sounded to me like anyone from her tribe could use it, but I knew what it was like to define myself by a thing on my head. Beads for one and a pearl for another. A position I could no longer have. A position she had to let go of too.

I raised my eyebrows. “Last I checked you had a bless mark and a special power to go with it. Did that change in the last hour?” Her return look was more than enough of an answer. “Then you don’t have much of a choice.”

“I bear the pearl of the Water Frond Snake. I’ll return to my tribe.”

I rolled my eyes. “The goddess’s authority beats everything else.” She started to protest again but I kept speaking right over her, “So you’ll become a whisper woman and that means you’ll be up high again. Or you’re going to have to shadow walk. Are you going to do anything about it to make it easier? Practice? Or are you going to let someone else make the choice for you?”

Juniper’s jaw worked as she started several different sentences before she finally settled on, “It’ll never be easier,” and turned her head away. “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.”

“So if you were magically back at your tribe everything would be perfect right now?”

“Yes!”

I scoffed. “You’d still be a terrible shot with a fear of heights who can’t travel through the shadows if your life depended on it.” Prevna nudged me on the back in warning but I ignored her. “The only difference is that here you have do everything yourself instead of having others trip over themselves to help you.”

“You don’t know what it was like!”

“Then prove me wrong.” If that didn’t make her blood boil enough to stop sulking then she was a lost cause.

She sulked, “I don’t care what you say! I’ll do my duty and protect the waterways from the Lady’s creatures.”

I crossed my arms again. “Who said you couldn’t do that as a whisper woman?”

“I’ll return to my tribe. That’s where I belong.”

“If you think you can argue with the goddess, be my guest.” Part of me wanted to leave it at that, cut my losses, and let her bury her head in the snow. She obviously had settled on the hill she wanted to die on, but I knew the tantalizing pull—the need—to do the thing you dedicated your childhood to, only for a bless mark and the goddess’s unknown plans to get in the way. The sheer panic of looking up and realizing that you had nothing else to lean on, nothing else that even remotely came to knowledge you had built up around that one thing.

But I had the benefit of Rawley’s practical instruction and the myths and I was more than halfway decent in a handful of the skills we were supposed to learn. Juniper, for all her stoic posture, didn’t have the same number of successes to lean on. She had failed at weapons training, especially with the sling, but that could expected from any real beginner. She had all the theory down but for all her focus on fighting fish somehow those skills had been overlooked. Perhaps they had spent all her time on training her special ability with that pearl. And she had done better when we went to the shore until we faced the giant water snake and she got knocked out of the fight nearly right away. Now she was failing over and over again between her fear of heights and her inability to shadow walk between trees like everyone else.

It didn’t make the best mixture for success, but she’d never get better as long as she thought she was useless and terrible and in the wrong place.

So I marched over to her and got much closer than I would have preferred. “You can’t be a failure if you keep working on getting better. Pick one thing to improve, one you’re already good at, and make it so you’re better at it than everyone else. Then no one will care about the things you suck at.” I flicked her pearl and she flinched back, affronted. “Do it well enough and make it related to your precious waterways and you might be able to protect them even as a whisper woman.”

Then I turned on my heel and left. I still had to decide on my own distraction that I could throw my entire focus into but I doubted we’d pick the same thing.

Prevna caught up with me as I finished walking up the little slope that led down to Juniper’s pity party. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

I gave her a sidelong look. “Does she seem more motivated?”

“She stopped crying.”

“Good enough.”

I could tell Prevna wasn’t ready to let go of the whole idiotic situation like I was. “Why’d you press her now about the fact that she can’t return home?”

“She brought it up first.” Then I added, “She’s not committed. She was on the shore when we were fighting the fish, but now that we’re away from what she grew up with she can’t focus. All the things she sucks at she doesn’t really care about improving, not deep down, because in her head she won’t need them once she’s back in her cozy little tribe.”

“So what?”

“If she can’t get over that then nothing anyone says will help her. We’ll just get to watch as she builds her own funeral pyre.”

“Gimley!”

I shrugged again. “I told you I didn’t want to talk to her.”

Prevna considered me. “But you told her she might be able to do what she wants as a whisper woman.”

“She can’t return home and go back to her tribe like nothing has changed, but if she really can’t let go of the idea that protecting rivers is all she’s good for then she might as well lean into it to get motivated instead of sulking.”

Prevna gave me a look I didn’t like. Her eyes got a little soft in a way that said she thought she saw that same softness in me. Which was ridiculous. I didn’t care if Juniper picked herself up or not. It was just the…principle of the whole situation. No one should give up just because things got difficult. You couldn’t be defeated if you just kept trying—an unintentional side of that mantra she liked to spout. I had ambition and discipline enough to make sure I kept learning healing despite her attempts to convince me to cut my beads.

Now I’d have enough to become a top whisper woman, no matter what anyone else said or did. If Juniper had any sense she’d do the same. If we couldn’t decide about becoming whisper women, we might as well hold tight to the decision about deciding what kind of whisper women we’d be.