Page 65 of Minor Works of Meda

“Oraik,” I mumbled. I opened my eyes.

But Oraik lay two feet to my right. There was nothing on me except a thin blanket.

And a wall of magic.

It was dim out, first light at best, but I could see the shadowed fog above me descending slowly from the ceiling. I choked on air as panic slammed into me. Still senseless with sleep, all I knew was that we had to get out of there immediately.

“Oraik,” I yelped. He stirred, and I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get up! Horns, get up!”

“I’m up,” he said, even though he wasn’t. I grabbed my bag, and then I grabbed him and started trying to drag him to the door. Obviously, I couldn’t; he was twice my size. But yanking on his arm had the desired effect after all, since he wrenched it free and then finally sat up, blinking.

By that point the fog was only a foot or two over my head, and still sinking slowly. I could see flickers in the darkness of other spells. All I knew was that we had to run, blindly if need be, dumb as a tuna racing from a fisherman’s net with no knowledge of the knives or fire that would await her if she failed.

“Come on,” I yelled. “Keep low!” He’d caught on to my panic by then. Oraik scrambled up and threw himself outside.

The fog was outside too, like a blanket sinking over the whole town. It was later in the morning than I’d thought: not dark because the sun was still under the horizon, dark because the sun was muffled.

“What’s happening?” Oraik said, spinning to look around.

“I don’t know. Come on. Don’t let it touch you,” I said. He bent over and we ran towards the docks, down the slope of the hill where the fog sat higher above our heads.

“We have to help them,” Oraik told me as we passed more houses, these ones low enough towards the water that the fog just clipped past their roofs.

“We can’t.”

“But—” his steps slowed. The idiot was actually thinking about it.

“It’ll be you they’re after,” I snapped. “We can help by leaving.”

The sky was brighter in front of us. The fog thinned by the beach, torn apart by the ocean wind. I didn’t slow down.

There was a huge ship in the distance, far enough out and so big that it seemed to sit on the line of the horizon. I squinted at the forest-green sails. Another ship further out was just a shadow.

“Colynes?” I asked, gasping for air as we reached the docks and slowed.

“I think so,” Oraik said. He was gasping for breath, too.

I weighed our odds for a moment. I didn’t trust a Colynes warship, but we couldn’t stay on land.

“We’ll keep as close to the coast as we can,” I said, mentally charting a route around Montay and, hopefully, to somewhere the fog hadn’t reached. “Come on.” There was a stitch in my side, but we managed the last dash to the little sailboat. I dumped my things and started to unwind the rope holding my boat to the dock.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Oraik said. He was standing, holding onto the mast and staring back at the town with a grim look on his face. “We should go back. We should—”

“We can’t,” I told him. I almost had the boat free. I looked up to see whether the wind still kept the fog back.

It was a sight. The colorful little village was cloaked in shadow, as if night still lingered there. I thought about Cliantha, and the couple who’d let us sleep on their floor, and hoped the spell was not one of death.

Above the fog, two massive ravens circled like vultures above carrion.

“Strange,” Oraik said. “I could swear, I keep seeing those birds.”

One of the ravens screeched, a broken guttural call. They turned towards us, growing closer, larger.

And then they dove.

Chapter 29

So this is it, I thought. This is how I die.

---