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of sleeping beside the stream. Running water, even a small brook like this one, is noisy. The water jabbers, changing constantly, like it’s having a private conversation of its own. Or like it’s whispering. Maybe talking about us. The longer I listen, the more sinister it sounds.  I can’t hear much else over it.
    The farther away from the Myuna we travel, the less the water around us can be trusted. It will poison us, poison our minds, and make us believe things that aren’t true. What will we do when that happens? We are knowingly walking into madness.
    I think of the sick ones, of how miserable they sound, and I shiver and pull the cloth up to my chin. Cool air seeps over from the stream, wrapping its damp arms around me until I can’t stop shaking.
    “Want my extra shirt?” Peree asks.
    “I’ll be okay. You wear it.” My teeth chatter as I speak.
    “Fenn, take the shirt,” he says.
    I give in. “Thanks.”
    He scoots closer, lending his own body heat.
    “You can warm my bedroll any time, sweetheart,” Moray says. “I won’t turn you away, even if you aren’t my type.”
    “Shut up , Moray,” Peree says.
    “Make me, Lofty."
    “Please stop it,” I say wearily.
    “Myall, I have heard you are a very good storyteller. Would you tell us one?” Amarina quickly asks.
    “Thanks, but not tonight.” Peree still sounds annoyed. I locate his hand, kiss it, and hold it in mine.
    As the night closes over us, I shut my eyes and listen hard. If the Sisters and the children are in the forest, they’re as silent as spirits.
    “ I have a story,” Kai says after a minute. “But it’s not about animals or flowers or other pretty things. It’s about the Sisters.”
    Her voice rises, disembodied, out of the dark—flat, emotionless, distant—like she somehow floated away from the group. It reminds me of the ghostly voices I heard in my head when I was in that hole, suffering from dehydration, after being banished by Adder and the Council of Three.
    “The Sisters call it Gathering, when they take the children. The one who came for me was young and so beautiful, so… exotic, that at first, I thought I’d imagined her,” Kai says. “Her face and hair were painted white, and she wore a short, leather dress and a bright feather tied to her waist. She captured me at the Myuna and took me away, deep into the forest, to the river and beyond, to their home. My father followed, but he couldn’t catch us.”
    Only the water interrupts the hush of our little group.
    “I lived with the other girls, training to fight with knives and staffs and spears. I wanted my father, and I missed my home, but they would not let me go, no matter how many times I asked. They told me I was lucky to be there.” Kai laughs, a hollow, haunted sound. “They said, ‘You are a daughter of the Fire Sisters, now.’”
    The hair all over my body prickles as Kai tells her tale. Her voice is guarded, but it’s easy to hear the scared little girl she was. A girl maybe only a few years older than Kora.
    “The Sisters wanted us to learn to defend ourselves above all else. We trained all day long. They gave us lessons in hunting and how to survive in the forest. In the evenings, if we had any strength left, we could play. But there weren’t any hugs or kisses or bedtime stories or love. Only training and sharp words and more training.”
    Kai pauses so long I think she won’t say more.
    Finally, Conda asks the question we’re all wondering. “So… what happened?”
    “I escaped.”
    Silence.
    “That’s it? You escaped?” Moray says.
    “No, that’s not it. It took me months to get back to Koolkuna. Months of… of freezing and starving and… suffering.”
    She quiets again. There has to be more to the story, but it’s clear she’s not going to tell it tonight. If anyone else had shared something like that, I’d try to comfort them, but with Kai, it’s more likely to make things worse.
    “I will keep watch tonight,”