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When I reached the second pinnacle of stone, I clawed lanced back at Dewara then, but he had sunk his hawk’s head down upon his hunched shoulders and perchedin his bird’s eyes, and his arms were clapped to his sides There was no help or advice for er path separated it than the two I had trod That next resting place looked smaller, too, and evenweb of plants Tiny white flowers, sernail, blossomed thickly on the matted vines Suspicious, I pushed hard on it with h roots held When I poked at them with my sword, they browned and shriveled away That would not do I had no desire to weaken the path by killing the plants I placed h my belt This path ider, also, and the roots of the plants seeup the trunks of trees and the walls of houses

I set out across the path more boldly than I had the previous two It bore h vines crunched underfoot as I stepped on therance of the crushed flowers and foliage was oddly pungent, but surely a smell could not harm me I was halfway across before my hands burst into tiny white blisters They itched painfully and I longed to scratch the my hands into fists caused the tiny blisters to burst The liquid that flowed from them seared my skin and left a second crop of white blisters in its wake I heldpain How grateful I was that I wore boots and not the low, soft shoes of a Plainsman If the plants had affected one on As it was, an to burn and my nose to run It took stern discipline to keep my hands away from my face I stumbled on, and when I reached the next stone support, I found it as small as it had appeared I stepped away froer than a dinner platter

Alonies ceased The sores onI still dared not touch my face, but when I turnedeyes on an to clear I would have felt much better had I not been perched on such a tiny island There was not rooh to sit down and rest, and so I e was ether with fine thread ligalittered in the network Perhaps they had been bracelets or necklaces before they had been rewrought into a suspension bridge The tiny bones clicked together as I ventured over theility of the fine white bones, none of the under ed atand whispered past e and distantof flutes and rattle of bone castanets n to nificance I looked down at the bridge beneath my feet and suddenly knew the bird bones were parts of a e I al I think if I had truly been a Plains in its efforts to lull me As it was, I was able to shake off its influence and walk on I coer pinnacle of stone

This refuge was as generous as the last one had been mean; I could have stretched out and slept upon it with no fear of tuainst it I had finally sensed soes that I should have suspected all along This pathas not for me Dewara had done all he could to make me think like a Kidona, but I was not truly Kidona I traversed stretches of nificance to each crossing, symbolism and subtext that did not reach my Gernian soul For some reason, that made me feel diminished and ashamed, like an uneducated nificance of a lovely poenificance of the challenges I faced, and thus they did not truly challenge lance back at Dewara, but crossed the capstone to where the next bridge began

This bridge was all of ice, not the solid ice of a frozen pond in the dead of winter, but the fantastic ice that festoons glass into a garden of fern fronds It seeh it into the deep blue distance below me I was only a few steps out onto it before the cold bit deeply intocracks I shivered as I went, andwas slippery and uncertain Memories not reat hardship, a ti faced desperate decisions in order to survive Had I truly been Kidona, the heartbreak of those recollectionsBut those horrors had happened to a people not my own in a distant time I could sympathize with their sorrows, but they were not my sorrows I walked on, past that season of heartbreak, and reached the next pinnacle of respite