There is a mellowing that takes place over the third week, settling over each camp site as all minds turn toward their next destinations. By midweek, half of the crews have dispersed. By the week’s end, there are only a handful left.

  At sunset on our last night, Finch leads me up the walking route to the top of Star Point.

  “Probably should have showed you this sooner,” he says, “But it’s better when it’s dark, anyway — no campfires around.”

  The path to the top of the point is easy, but long. There are something like shallow stairs worn into the roots that lead around the side of the point. They are uneven, determined by the trees more than by human ideas of appropriate distances up or between steps, but they are mostly clear of the usual tripping hazards. Then the path twists almost a full hundred and eighty degrees, and it is no longer tree roots but mossy rock under our feet and inclining to the southwest.

  The tree branches are little more than silhouettes against the fading glow on the horizon. We are much nearer the treetops here, and well above the light from the campfire, the weak flame of our lantern barely enough to see by. And the sky…

  The sky is filled with an ever-brightening mass of utterly unfamiliar stars.

  I know enough, from half remembered astronomy units and the rare camping trip, that the Milky Way is recognizable as a thick band of stars crossing the night sky. Here, as the horizon dims from orange to pale blue, I can pick out two narrow stripes and a wider third between them. The middle band skews closer to one stripe than the other. An irrational frisson of terror crashes up my spine and sweeps my words away on the undertow.

  This really is a different planet. A different star system. A different galaxy.

  It is suddenly too much. I have been under deep forest canopies for so long now that this clear view of the sky and its alien starscape is overwhelming. My knees buckle, unable to stand on the thin line that borders awe and terror.

  Finch crouches beside me, hand hovering uncertainly by my shoulder. “Hey, are you all right?”

  I can’t tear my eyes away from the firmament. “I don’t recognize these stars.” Then, remembering he was trying to share something beautiful with me, I say, “It’s incredible.”

  He sits, crossing his legs, extending his arms behind himself to rest back on his palms as he gazes up with me. “I always like coming to Star Point. Every time, I tell myself I’ll spend more evenings here, but I usually spend most of them at the heart fire anyway. The last night, though, I come up. It’s the best night. Best view. It always looks a little different at the end of the quarter meet than at the beginning. Coming up at the beginning, you’re excited about seeing everyone, but at the end, the tension is gone. It’s calm and content and you feel all wrung out. Like going to bed after swimming all afternoon. Sometimes I doze off watching them.”

  “Is this the only place to stargaze?” I ask.

  “It’s the best spot. In the forest, anyway. When we go into town there are open skies, but the view isn’t as good. Too many lights.”

  The idea of a less visible sky sounds kind of good — more comprehensible, anyway. Safer. I am too rattled to be enchanted. I ask, as lightly as possible, “How often do you go into town?”

  “Usually more than we have, lately,” Finch remarks. “Things have been pretty different since you arrived. Not that it’s been bad — just not like usual. A lot quieter, a lot less traveling. Time to get back to it, I suppose, now that you’re doing better and the quarter meet is passed.”

  This is the first indication I’ve gotten that the usual pattern is anything other than picking a spot in the woods to hang out for a while, hunting and foraging. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Why would they stay in one place for weeks on end? I saw Puck trading a lot more stuff than just her tinctures, and it was all the kind of thing you would get from human settlements. Looms don’t usually travel well. Nor does a smithy. Finch has mentioned going to towns before, too.

  Finch says, “I can see you, Thirsan.”

  I finally look away from the sky, neck immediately protesting after craning so long, to see two green flashes aimed at us over the edge of the point like a cat’s eyes in a dark room. Thirsan finishes scaling the rock face and pulls himself up to join us.

  “You only saw me because I wanted you to.”

  “Sounds like you’re mad you got caught.”

  “I told you —”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  Thirsan sits with us irritably, knees up, heels on the bare rock, slouching back on his hands like he’s here under duress. This doesn’t make him seem any more innocent; if anything, I suspect he pretends he came to join us so he can avoid owning up to spying.

  I haven’t seen much of him since he found me trying and failing to stand in a rooted posture. I am not sure this means he hasn’t been sneaking around, watching me from a safe distance when he hasn’t been with his friends.

  “You all packed?” asks Finch.

  Thirsan snorts. “Are you?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we leave tomorrow and I don’t want you keeping me up while you bang around before bed.”

  They continue bickering. Thirsan is already packed and maybe he doesn’t want Finch keeping him up; Finch says he’s basically done; Thirsan suggests Finch is trying to get rid of him, and Finch denies it so urgently that it’s clear Thirsan nailed it. I look back up at the sky, daring myself to keep staring and not freak out.

  Stars twinkle. It’s what makes it obvious they’re stars; they emit their own light in pulses. This makes it easier to tell if what you’re looking at is a star or a planet — planets are only reflecting the light of the nearest star, not sending out their own. So I can tell, when I see a greenish point of light with no pulse, that what I’m looking at is a planet and not a star. This star system has at least one other planet in it. If I scan the skies long enough, I wonder if I will pick out more.

  Every time I think I’m adjusting to how different the sky is, a fresh round of chills creep in. I’m the alien here, aren’t I? An alien consciousness transported to a distant part of the universe, shocked by how far from home I’ve gone. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it, or if the night sky will always leave me feeling like this.

  It’s not like I felt a sense of belonging, before. Everything about living felt like I was clinging to what I had not because I loved and cherished it, but because an ill-fitting job and ill-fitting place in the world was better than having no place at all. Even so, I recognized it. Streets and cities and trees and animals and even the goddamned stars overhead — it was familiar. Ill-fitting though it was, homesickness begins to mingle with the cold distress that comes from this beautiful, horrible sky.

  The devil you know, right?

  Thirsan’s voice, laden with judgment and disbelief, yanks me out of the stars. “Are you crying?”

  I stare blankly at him as Finch’s head whips around to look at me, and then he’s hovering again, pulling an embroidered handkerchief from his pocket, fretfully uncertain if he should hand it to me or start drying my tears himself.

  “Are you all right? Did something happen?”

  I take the handkerchief. “Thank you — sorry — I don’t know — I’m fine. I just got kind of sad, all of a sudden.”

  “Did you remember something bad?” Finch asks, worried.

  “No,” I say, muffled by the handkerchief as I scrub it over my face. “I just missed home. But I don’t know where that is anymore, so…” I shrug, then hiss in pain. The right side of my neck cramps up miserably, the muscles running between the base of my skull and my shoulder agitated by all the skyward gazing.

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  Thirsan says, “You know, if you put Puck’s pain tincture directly on your skin, it’ll help with your shoulder.”

  He tells me this like I am the tiniest bit stupid for not figuring this out sooner, but I still say “Thanks” as tonelessly as possible. At his age, I don’t think he can avoid being kind of a dick — and he’s at least sort of trying to help. Dickishly.

  “Maybe we should get ready for bed,” says Finch, standing. He sounds like he’s trying to be kind despite his disappointment.

  “We don’t have to,” I say, clutching his handkerchief, sure this is my fault for being so unpredictable. They’re just stars. “It’s a really nice view, I don’t know what came over me —”

  “It’s all right, Akasha,” he soothes, taking my hands to help me to my feet. He holds them just a little bit longer than he needs to. “I’m glad I got to show you. Who knows, maybe this will shake something loose in your memories after all.”

  I almost confess right there — there is nothing to shake loose, there is only me, and I am a consciousness from a planet on a star so distant it spins in a completely different galaxy so my homesickness is not for anything forgotten but for something I don’t even want back, because homesickness is like that sometimes. You miss things even when you hated them. But Thirsan is standing a few feet away, scrutinizing our exchange, and this is a vulnerability I’d offer in a moment of weakness to Finch alone. So I nod, and say, “Maybe I just need some rest.”

  We walk back down the way we came, Thirsan following a couple paces behind. I say a quick goodnight and return to my wagon before realizing I’ve still got Finch’s handkerchief in my fist.

  *

  We begin the trek back to the west side of the river in the morning. My wagon is again filled with trunks, which are brushed free of dirt and bits of plant before going back inside. Ma places an empty one next to the bed, pats the lid a couple times, and says, “This one’s all for you.”

  I thank her, a little shy and bashful at being gifted something I haven’t somehow earned. “Are you sure you don’t need it for other things?”

  Ma shrugs. “The point of them is to use them. You need a place to keep your things.” She glances around. “Once you have a few more things, that is. Which reminds me… here.”

  She pulls a folding knife from her pocket and hands it to me. I take it. The handle is made of pale, polished wood and quite slender, suited to smaller hands. It feels heavier than it looks. I wouldn’t call it dainty, but as knives go, it’s rather ladylike. It wouldn’t look out of place on a table with a robust tea set. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little enamored.

  “There. Everyone needs at least one knife. We can go over some defense moves with it later, but it’ll help you cut your food properly. We’ll look into getting you a belt with a pouch or a knife pocket on it, too. In the mean time…” she gestures at the trunk. “Can’t lose it in there.”

  I flip the knife open, admire the blade, and close it again. “Thanks, Ma.”

  “Don’t think of it, Akasha.” She smiles, small and sincere. Then she leaves, back to securing her and Puck’s wagon.

  I put my knife in the corner of the trunk, and put my spare clothes on top of it, and my cloth pads in another corner. I survey my inventory with a kind of satisfied optimism. There is so much trunk space left. I can’t imagine what I’ll fill it with; I hardly know what I might need to fill it with.

  Brand hitches up the hibbovins and leads the wagons around to head back the way we came from three weeks ago. I sit with Finch, and am much less alarmed by the hibbovins than I was the last time we were setting out, which I’m a little proud of even though my fear of them has been absolutely about me and not anything the animals have done. They’re all right, actually. Kind of pleasantly vapid, despite looking like something that came out of Satan’s personal barnyard.

  “Feeling all right?” Finch asks.

  I settle in beside him and smile. “Yessir. Sorry again about last night. I didn’t mean to spoil the mood.”

  “Not at all! You were fine, it was still a nice night. Perfect weather for it.” He looks up at the patchy sky, more cloud than clear. “Probably going to have rain today.”

  It hasn’t rained much so far, and when it has it’s been at night, or we’ve been so deep in the trees that it’s been more drippy than rainy. The canopy here is sparser. If it rains, we might actually feel it.

  Brand starts the procession. We wave to the last few stragglers still camped out, and as we pass the safety markers that define the boundaries of Star Point, Finch begins telling me about the interpersonal dramas of the people who have made up the blur of new faces. “So Fawn and her sister Letha — Fawn’s that first woman who came to sit with us, the crew leader, and Letha was the white-haired woman who came to get her — they picked up Letha’s fellow, Sig, upriver from one of the southeastern crews a few quarters ago. He’s mellowed out some, but he used to bring up the south end of the river a lot, how much better it is. It’s mostly because Coritha’s there; winters are beyond freezing, but the fur trade is unmatched because the city’s also surrounded by” — he says an unfamiliar word — “and they’re huge and everywhere. Sig’s spent time hunting them, so he’s also kind of an ass about the superiority of his hunting skills, but Letha’s enchanted by his stories so everyone in their crew has been stuck listening to it. He’d never seen the ocean, though, and so this past quarter, Aggie and Millie — that’s their other two crewmates, Aggie had the two braids and Millie wore hers in a crown, they were usually with the children — they insisted on taking him to see it. Got lucky, too, there was a whale” — I’m impressed when this word is no problem — “visible from the bluffs. Sig finally shut up about the” that other word again. “Finally realized there’s something bigger out there.”

  This is how we pass the time, Finch catching me up on the gossip, adding physical reference characteristics so I can place drama to faces for future reference. It reminds me a little of being in college and getting drawn into a new friend group; at least one person would self-nominate to explain, as neutrally as possible, the back story behind why two people started arguing at a party. Depending on how close they were to the combatants, sifting through months or years of conflict could take a few hours, and named people who didn’t even go to our school anymore.

  Finch has been part of this for at least ten years. He knows a lot of dirt.

  The air gets heavy and warm right before the rain starts falling. Finch shakes out a cloak folded next to him and drapes it over the both of us. It’s wide enough to wrap around like a blanket, although the hood hangs awkwardly over our heads, the neckline riding high. We lean toward each other so we don’t strain the material.

  “Have to get you one of these,” he says, tugging at the hem.

  “A cloak, a wash basin, a belt… At least I’ve got a knife, now.”

  “You’re already coming up in the world.”

  Since he’s been so talkative, I decide to ask, “How is it that you’re down here? Brand said you were sixteen…?”

  Finch sobers. “I was. We’d run away from home.”

  “Oh.”

  The conversation dies so thoroughly I’m about to apologize for asking, but he isn’t done. Just collecting himself. He lowers his voice, as though we might be heard over the sound of the rain. “Our dad didn’t think Thirsan was his. He was a bit of a bastard to begin with. He was strict, and he’d hit when I broke a rule, but it wasn’t something anyone would speak up about. Most people won’t tell someone how to parent their own children. Mom got pregnant with Thirsan. Dad was traveling when she gave birth to him, and he rejected him on sight when he got home. Mom insisted Thirsan was his; Dad was sure he wasn’t. He would get me alone to ask questions about whether Mom had any visitors while he was gone, or if she’d gone anywhere. But I was six, so I didn’t understand what he was asking about and the way he was asking it made it hard to answer at all. I didn’t give the answers he wanted.

  “Dad got unpredictable. He’d have good days where he was who I remembered, and then other days he was demanding, pleading, trying to shake the truth out of Mom or shout it out of her. He would threaten to leave and spend the night somewhere else. Then he’d come home and act like he was disappointed but going to let it go. He’d be all right for a little while. Then he’d start staring at Thirsan like he was a riddle Dad was too stupid to solve, and he’d get angry all over again.

  “Thirsan got a little older, started walking and talking, and all that shouting and shaking he’d put Mom through, he turned on Thirsan. I always knew what the rules were, I knew what to do if I didn’t want to get hit; Thirsan couldn’t do anything right if he tried. I couldn’t protect him.”

  Finch lapses into silence.

  It’s easy to forget how much smaller I am compared to him. I mostly don’t notice my size unless I have to, and Finch never makes me feel small. But he is sitting next to me, clouded over as he remembers things he can’t bring himself to talk about, and I sense keenly just how little reach there is in my arms. Like trying to protect someone from a hurricane with a dishrag. I want to hold his hand or his shoulders or his whole body, if it would help. I would wrap myself around him if it would make what he’s remembering any easier.

  But I don’t have the shape for it. As an afterthought, I don’t want him to feel pitied, either.

  I lean into him, my weight sinking against his arm, and hope it feels reassuring.

  As the fog clears from his eyes, Finch sighs heavily. “When I got older, I got a little better at hiding Thirsan. Dad started drinking, and that made him a little more predictable. He sometimes hit Mom, but he stopped hitting me and started confiding in me instead — like his ideas on why Thirsan was actually someone else’s son. She must have slept with another man and then with Dad to make him believe the baby was his, and Thirsan wasn’t actually born early — or she’d slept with someone as soon as he was gone. But one time… There was one time, blind drunk, he admitted he’d slept with someone else. Maybe the whole thing was just a guilty conscience.

  “Mom must’ve heard him, too. She’d spent years trying to convince him, crying over him, trying to figure out why her husband wouldn’t believe her, but around that time she stopped taking his shit. If he hit, she hit back — he was so surprised that, for a while, that was all it took. But then he got some idea about how she had no right, and the fights got worse. After she caught him threatening to drop Thirsan out a window…” Finch goes briefly mute. “She told me Thirsan was going to die if I didn’t take him and run. I think she had planned to go with us, at first, but she gave me some money and some clothes and told me to take him as far from home as I could. So I did.”

  “At sixteen,” I breathe, remembering the kind of idiot I was at that age, trying to imagine surviving like an adult with the added responsibility of a nine year old.

  “Fourteen. We made it a couple years alone. Then we ran into some trouble. Orphanage wouldn’t take me, sixteen was too old, but they were going to take Thirsan. Ma claimed him as hers, signed the adoption papers, and…” He gestures at the rainy forest. “Now we’re here.”

  I think carefully before I risk asking, “What happened to your parents?”

  “Mom was convicted of murder.”

  “Oh.” I fill in the rest myself.