As the sun grew fat and red on the horizon, a moist breeze began to blow in Jason’s face. Plodding up a long incline, he debated whether he should fish out his remaining energy berries. Cresting the rise, he finally saw the sea, a blue-gray immensity stretching to the edge of sight, still at least a few miles off down a long slope.
“Low tide won’t hit until noon tomorrow,” Jason said. “Looks like we’ll have more cover up here than we will down there.”
“The woods really thin out on the far side of this ridge,” Rachel agreed. She crouched and studied the hard-packed dirt lane. “I can see traces of our boots. We should walk down the path a ways, maybe leave it a few times, then double back cross-country. In case they’re tracking us.”
“You’re right,” Jason admitted, thinking of Aster’s fate. “We should probably take precautions.”
Jason followed Rachel farther along the path, stomping his feet. She glanced back at him. “Don’t step harder than you were earlier. It might alert them that we’re making a false trail.”
“Have you done this before?”
“Whenever I escaped from juvie.”
Jason chuckled. “Right. You know, we’ll have to trade off keeping watch tonight.”
She nodded. “Weird that we haven’t seen anybody. Nobody using the road, no houses.”
“Yeah, it’s isolated. I’m going to miss my bed at the castle.”
After leaving the path several times, Rachel gingerly followed an improvised route that took them back up the slope into the woods. She selected a spot a good distance from the road, with plenty of trees and bushes to screen their presence. Despite the cover, the location still afforded a view of the lane.
Following a hasty meal, Jason offered to take the first watch. Bundling himself in cloak and blanket, cushioned by flattened weeds, he rested his back against a tree and fought to stay awake. As the light of day faded, the rhythm of Rachel’s breathing, the chirping of the insects, and the sensory deprivation of the darkness overcame his fears, and Jason sagged into a deep slumber.
Jason jerked awake. He felt damp. Predawn mist shrouded the landscape, intensifying the morning chill. As he uncurled and stood, his shins felt sore, probably from all the jogging done in boots the day before. The noise of his motion disturbed Rachel. Wiping her bleary eyes, she sat up.
“What time is it?” she asked. “What about my watch? Did you fall asleep?”
“No,” Jason lied. “You looked tired. I wanted to let you rest.”
“Then why do you have leaf prints and smudges of soil on your cheek?” Rachel asked. “Were you on guard with your face in a leaf pile?”
“I didn’t try to fall asleep,” Jason apologized. “It got dark and really boring.”
“Boring is the goal,” Rachel said, pulling her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “The opposite of boring might be somebody cutting our throats.”
Jason winced. Back home several of his classes had bored him. He’d spent tons of late nights trying to find something on television. Much of the time his life had felt planned for him, lacking real purpose, and his boredom had emphasized the problem. But Rachel was right. Boredom was now their friend.
Jason squinted into the mist. “I can’t see the lane.”
“If somebody is tracking us, the fog should work in our favor,” Rachel pointed out.
“I wonder when the mist showed up?” Jason mused.
“Hard to say,” Rachel said wryly. “We miss that kind of information when we’re both sleeping.”
“Don’t be that way. At least it worked out. Now we’ll be well rested when we throw ourselves off a cliff into the ocean.” He stretched his arms wide and groaned. “Want some breakfast? We should probably get going while we have extra cover from the mist.”
“Okay. Maybe just a bite before we start.”
Jason sorted through their food, selecting some dried meat and tough bread. When he found that the remnants of the mushrooms the loremaster had given him were beginning to smell funny and had fuzzy patches of mold, he threw them out, wondering whether he would regret the loss once their rations ran out.
Munching on bread and meat, Jason and Rachel tramped through dewy undergrowth back to the road, their cloaks wrapped tightly about them. Jason shivered. The damp cold seemed to seep through all layers of clothing.
“Let’s check for hoofprints,” Rachel suggested.
In the growing light, breathing foggy air, Jason searched inexpertly for fresh signs of a horse. “I don’t see anything,” he finally announced.
“Then let’s be extra ready for our enemies to approach from behind,” Rachel replied.
Briskly they followed the lane toward the ocean. After cresting the rise from the day before, the lane wound down to the coast, snaking back and forth to offset the steeper portions of the slope. The farther they descended along the path, the denser the fog became. Jason threw a stone as far as he could and watched it disappear into grayness long before it thudded against the ground, rustling the brush. Before long he could see only a few paces ahead. At any moment he expected a fearsome horseman to lope out of the murk.
As they approached the cliffs, the view of the ocean returned. Low sunlight spread over the water from off to the left, texturing the surface in striking relief by shadowing the troughs between swells.
“Pretty,” Rachel commented. “But I miss the cover of the fog.”
They reached the point where the road elbowed left, paralleling the cliffs as far as Jason could see. As Galloran had instructed, they abandoned the road, continuing south. They soon reached a gentle trickle of a stream.
The stream flowed toward the cliffs, slurping away into a narrow crack not ten paces from the edge. Unhealthy tufts of scraggly weeds flanked the feeble rivulet.
Jason cautiously approached the rocky brink of the cliff. The view was spectacular. He stood more than seventy feet above the churning surf, at the center of a curving amphitheater of cliffs bordering a wide inlet. At either hand sheer faces of dark stone towered above surging bursts of foamy spray. No reef or shallows slowed the swells as they rose up and flung themselves in frothy explosions against alien formations of rock.
Rachel came up beside him, her stance casual, a hand on one hip. Then she stepped even closer to the edge, leaning forward to gaze straight down. Her proximity to the brink gave Jason chills, but he kept quiet.
“Looks like suicide,” Rachel said, drawing back from the edge.