Read Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar for Free Online Page B

sinking heart, she recognized them as being more akin to spiderwebs than ironwork. Her Pathfinding told her there , that is where they must go. “I see something,” she began to say, but her heart rate surged when she saw, despite the rain, that there was something in the water. Moving. A serpentine distortion in the rainsplashed surface, sending a wake behind it, angled towards the patch of yellow, and it was—it was bigger than the Spirit Horse, by far. Her other Gift almost physically hit her, and she spoke without thinking. “We need to move, Vesily, we need to get over there now, right now!”
    It was a bad thing to say to a Companion that was wound up too tight already about her Chosen, and Sherra regretted it right away, because Vesily lurched up from the muck and took Sherra with her. Sherra’s “Wauuuugh!” would probably not be mistaken by anyone as a war cry, but Vesily seemed spurred on by it. The hertasi managed to hang on as the Companion plunged desperately for the tree, but right now she couldn’t tell which direction was even up for what felt like a day of being pounded by water, mud, debris and reeds on one side, and Companion on the other. It was less than a minute, it turned out, and Sherra regained her senses when Vesily finally slowed alongside the patch of yellow she’d spotted.
    The patch of yellow was a woman, in Hawkbrother clothing, or rather, it had once been. Face down, on the arched, forked root of an ancient tree, the woman appeared to be on her knees with her belly between the fork, though the waterline obscured anything below the waist. Every spot of exposed flesh was ravaged by insects, her clothing torn away and used as makeshift bandages. Sherra jumped off of Vesily’s side onto the tree itself, then scrambled down to where the woman was. Sherra braced for the worst, but discovered the woman was alive. Carefully, Sherra lifted her head up from the moss and found the woman’s eyes opening, and turning towards Vesily.
    In her mind, Sherra heard the words, :I Choose—: and then got a profound sense of confusion from Vesily. :Wait.: Sherra got a mental impression akin to a case of mistaken identity.
    “Chosen or not, we need to get her out of here,” Sherra snapped, and pulled up on the woman’s shoulders. Sherra’s footing slipped, and she tried again, and finally backed off to rig a rescue noose with her waxed rope. Sherra became aware of a taste in the air, something like the bleach the Tayledras used on cloth and cookware but with a tinge of copper. It was a little anesthetic, in fact, numbing the hertasi’s tongue the longer she was near the latticework. She blinked, realizing that she was standing on some of this glowing latticework, and looked up, following the lattice from one joint, to another, to another. They made a platform, three horse-lengths wide, that was in turn caged in by many smaller strands. Every part that glowed was warm, like a living thing.
    Sherra couldn’t stop herself from looking. She had to see what was in the cage of strands, even while her intellect screamed at her that she didn’t really want to know.
    She pulled herself up on the strange resinous links of the platformed cage, finding that the stuff wasn’t like spiderwebs; it didn’t flex in the slightest. The stuff was as hard as any wood she’d ever felt—even when it was as thin as an arrowshaft it might as well have been a roofing beam. Sherra’s claws held firm and she pulled herself up to peer into the cage. Inside she saw, lit in that mysterious orange glow, a single egg as large as Sherra. It was so ornate in design that it was more like an artwork of an egg than it was like any egg she’d seen before. Whorls and pits and bands of color repeated around its circumference, and it was on a nest of sorts made up of smooth riverstones. It sat, as if it was a display, in the center of a dished platform of tiny resin rods woven so tightly Sherra probably couldn’t have wedged a finger