Starfall Ford ran cold with spring. Overhead the spring sky hung thin and bright, and the light on the current gave nothing back. The water pressed against her legs and held at her knees, patient and insistent, pulling her a little downriver with every breath she took. She stood in the knee-deep crossing where the flat stones lay slick and rounded underfoot, and she shifted her weight from one to the next the way she might have tested ice, because a fall here was a price she could not pay. Lei Yi slept against her shoulder, one day old, his face turned into her neck, his breath small and warm against her skin each time the cold took hers.
The demonic cultivator had come as far as the alder screen and no farther. The pursuer stood among the pale trunks and the first new leaves, motionless, and did not enter the water. She did not know what that stillness meant. She knew only that the distance behind her had closed and then had stopped closing, that a stopped pursuit was not an ended one, and that the longer she stood in the cold the less of her there was to spend. A length of driftwood rode the current and caught against the stones and rode again, going nowhere. The reed beds leaned and straightened and leaned, hissing where the water combed through them.
Three ways out of the ford, and every one of them started where she stood.
The city road. She looked at it until the looking cost too much. A road holds whoever walks it out in the open, and open had stopped being something she could afford.
The forest trail, and the threshold where the trail began. Eternal Spirit Forest. The only name she had left to go toward, and her legs were in the river, and the river was drinking the feeling out of them an inch at a time.
The downriver channel. The water going where the water went, and her in it, carried instead of carrying. The channel asked her to trust the current, and the current had already shown her, with the driftwood, how it treated the things it held.
Lei Yi stirred. His fist opened against her collarbone and closed on nothing and held, and he seemed heavier than he had been when she first lifted him, as if even here, in the cold middle of the river, he was busy at the small work of growing. She settled him higher on her shoulder, and the current answered by pulling harder, or her legs answered by giving less, and she could no longer tell the difference between those two things.
Among the alders the stillness held. The pursuer had not entered the water. The pursuer had not moved at all, and that was the thing she could not set down, that stillness, worse than any step forward would have been. The cold climbed. The water went by and went on going by. Three ways waited on a woman standing knee-deep in the ford with her son in her arms, and she weighed them, and weighed them, and she had not chosen yet.
The stillness broke.
A step entered the water behind her, unhurried, and then another, and she did not need to look to know that the alders had given up their watcher. The pursuer was in the ford. Each slow splash came across the current with a patience that said the river between them was only an inconvenience, already being spent.
That patience chose for her.
She turned her hip against the pull of the water and went toward the forest-trail threshold. The first stride was the hardest. Her legs had gone strange and heavy in the cold, and the current leaned its whole weight against her shins, and for a breath she only rocked in place, unsure the body would answer. Then the flat stones were under her soles, slick and tilted, and she found purchase on one and pushed off it and found the next, and after that there was only the work of it, step and step and step.
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Lei Yi rode her shoulder. His fist was still knotted in the cloth at her collarbone, and when she stumbled he startled, a small stiffening that ran through him and out again, and his grip held. He made no sound, and she would have given anything she still owned for him to keep it that way. He was warm. However cold the river made the rest of her, the small weight of him stayed warm, and she held to that simple fact as she moved.
Behind her the wading went on, steady as a heartbeat. She risked one glance. He was through the alder shadow and into the open water, and the river that had fought her for every step did not seem to slow him at all. Where she had crept, he simply walked, and the distance the ford had been keeping for her grew thinner with each of his strides.
She put her eyes back on the threshold. The water shallowed. Her knees came free of the surface, then her shins, and the current that had held her so hard let go of her ankles all at once, and she came up dripping onto the shingle, the stones bright under her feet, the reed beds whispering along the bank. A driftwood trunk lay lodged at the shingle's edge, pale and smooth, and she stepped around it without stopping.
The trail began at the threshold, a worn line of earth running in among the trees, and the trees stood close and went back farther than her eyes could follow. Eternal Spirit Forest. She crossed the last of the shingle with the water falling from her hem and her son warm against her neck, and she stepped onto the trail's first earth, and the ground took her weight like any other ground.
She stopped there, at the beginning of it, and breathed.
Behind her the splashing went on without hurry. When she looked back, the pursuer stood knee-deep in the crossing, water sheeting from him, closer than he had any right to be after so short a walk, and still coming, one patient step at a time, while the river carried on around them both as if none of it were the river's concern.
The trail did not wait for her to be ready. It ran on beneath the trees, a worn line of earth, and after two breaths she gave it her weight and went.
The first trees of Eternal Spirit Forest received her without comment. Their trunks rose out of the damp ground wider than her arms could have circled, and their branches met overhead and wove the sky into small bright pieces, and the light that came down through them fell in pieces as well, pale green, across her shoulders and across the small weight of her son. The air under them was cooler. It smelled of wet earth and old leaves and bark.
Behind her. She listened, because listening was the one thing she could do while her legs worked. The water went on taking his steps, one and then one and then one, patient as rain dripping from a roof edge. Not faster. Not slower. The river had thrown its whole weight against her crossing, and he walked through it as through a mild shower, and the sound of that patience carried farther under the trees than it had any right to.
Her son stirred against her neck and made a small sound, not a cry, only a breath with a shape to it. His fist remained knotted in her collar. She touched her cheek to his hair, shifted him higher, and kept walking.
The soft-earth trail climbed toward its first low rise. Her shins ached from the current's shoving, and her wet hem dragged at her knees, but she kept her footing beneath the trees. At the crest, trunks and the folding ground closed behind her. The river vanished. She could no longer see the ford, the shingle, or the man pursuing her.
She listened instead.
Water marked his last strides through the crossing. Then came the scrape of a foot leaving the ford, followed by shingle shifting under measured steps. Then silence. That silence was worse.
She did not look back. The ridge and dense trunks would show her nothing, and turning would cost speed. Behind her, one twig broke beneath a deliberate foot at the forest-trail threshold. He was on the trail.
She did not speak to the child. There was nothing she could say that the sound behind them would not overhear.
On she went beyond the first rise, beneath the close trunks and into the green dim, her son breathing against her neck. The ford was silent behind her now. The forest hid the pursuer completely, and that was worse than seeing him.