He looked over to Marin, who was biting her lip, seemingly concerned about what had just happened. She had her head tilted to the side, and she was whispering to the wind. Lathan could not tell what she was saying. She seemed to be distracted, though lately Marin often seemed distracted. When she finally turned to him, the wind swirled ever so slightly around her.

  “What do you think he wants us to do?” Marin asked.

  “He said to find the shadow. But I don’t know how.” There was a strange quiet to the shadow compared to what he would expect to feel. He looked over to Jef, who was staring back in the direction that they had come. Jef had a look of concern on his face, and then he squeezed his eyes closed, as if trying to remember something. “What was he talking about with you?” Lathan asked him.

  “He didn’t work with me separately, Lathan. There’s nothing that I know that you don’t know.”

  “Maybe you don’t remember it,” Marin said.

  “I think I would remember if he was working with me.”

  “What kind of things did he teach both of you?”

  “He tried to teach us about the elementals,” Jef said. “He wanted us to know how to follow them. He wanted us to know how to detect them.”

  “Were there aspects that one of you was better at than the other?”

  “Why?” Jef asked.

  Marin shrugged. “Mostly because there has to be something he thinks that you might know that Lathan doesn’t. If there’s anything there we can piece together, we might be able to dig through it and see what it is.”

  Lathan thought about it. “I was always the one he worked with trying to understand the elementals, but Jef was there with me the whole time, as well. He taught us both.”

  “Did he teach you both, or did you both learn the same things?”

  “I don’t see what the difference is,” Jef said.

  “Well, what if he taught Lathan certain things because of what he is and taught you different things because of what you are.”

  “And what am I?” Lathan asked.

  Marin turned to him. She clasped her hands in front of her, and her blue eyes seemed to flash with some of the reflected daylight. “We don’t need to go into this again and again,” she said. “Your father is an elemental, right? And your mother is not, at least not that we know of. But it seems to me that there is something she can do, right? There has to be something that brought them together.”

  “You think my father intentionally sought out my mother?”

  “Maybe not quite like that,” she said. “But I do wonder if your mother has some connection to the elementals.” She looked over to Jef. “And you. You obviously have some skill that intrigued him, otherwise he wouldn’t have worked with you.”

  “My skill was that I was Lathan’s friend,” Jef said.

  “And how did that come to be?”

  Lathan looked over to Jef and started to laugh. “How did that come to be? Well, we grew up together, and we generally had the same sense of humor, though Jef was often getting into more trouble than me.”

  Marin glowered at them. “I remember what the two of you were like when you were younger,” she started. “I don’t know if you will remember this, but I grew up in the same town as you both. What I’m asking is how did the two of you come to meet.”

  “You get to meet quite a few people in the town,” Jef said. “How did we meet you?”

  “I went looking for you,” Marin said.

  Jef started to smile, but when he saw that Marin was not, his smile faded, and he frowned. “What do you mean you went looking for us?”

  “Well, you were known to have an interest in elementals, and considering how my own interest in elementals had started to develop, I thought that it made sense for me to try to get to know the two of you. I didn’t realize that Lathan’s father was the one teaching you about the elementals, but maybe I should have. So that’s the point of my question. How did the two of you end up spending time together?”

  Lathan tried to think back. He had memories of Jef his entire childhood. It seemed as if they had always been friends.

  “Do you remember?”

  Jef shook his head. “I don’t really remember how it came to be. I thought we just grew up knowing each other.”

  “Even though you lived in different parts of town,” Marin said.

  “What’s your point?” Jef asked.

  “My point is that the two of you have no reason to have grown up alongside each other, right? What if there was something that Lathan’s father recognized within you, Jef, and searched for it? Maybe he thought you had some ability that he might be able to use.”

  Jef started to laugh, but when he saw Marin wasn’t laughing, he trailed off. “You can’t be serious. But you look like you are. Well,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it out, “I suppose, to get back to your first question about what we know, it is not much. I don’t remember. I just remember working with him when it came to the elementals.”

  “That was when we got a little older,” Lathan said. “He wasn’t working with us when we were younger.”

  “We weren’t doing anything when we were younger,” Jef said. “We liked to get into a little trouble.”

  “I remember,” Marin said.

  Jef shrugged. “Well, if you remember, then maybe you can come up with a reason why.”

  “I don’t have one. Other than a curiosity as to why Lathan’s father would say Jef knows the way. There has to be something he taught you that would help explain that. And maybe if we can come to terms with what that is, we can use it to help make sense of what he wanted you to know.”

  Lathan squeezed his eyes shut, and he tried to think back to what they had worked on. His father always tried to understand the elementals, what they were and what they could do.

  There was something that his father had always wanted him to understand, though at the time, Lathan had thought his father was far more detailed about the elementals than he needed to be. In hindsight, Lathan wondered if everything his father taught him had a reason behind it that was tied to what Lathan might be able to do with the elementals.

  “Did he ever teach you about the symbols that we saw?” she asked.

  Jef shook his head. “Neither of us learned about that, did we?”

  Lathan glanced down at the book in his hand and tried to think about what they had experienced with it. He did not recall anything like that. “Not that I remember.”

  “Did he teach you anything about listening to the elementals?” Marin asked.

  “That seems to be your specialty,” Jef said.

  “Did he?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Lathan said.

  “Well…” Jef said.

  Lathan looked over. “What do you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t call it listening to the elementals, but he did talk to me about how there are different currents, as he would call them.”

  “Currents?” Lathan said. “The elementals don’t have any current to them.”

  “I’m not even sure if he was talking about specific elementals, now that I think about it,” Jef said. “It was a long time ago, Lathan. The last time we both worked with him was years ago, before the two of us went off to start our own hunt. So I don’t know what it was.”

  “What do you remember?” Marin asked.

  Jef shrugged. “Nothing. At least, nothing useful. Maybe there was something that I was supposed to remember, but I just can’t.”

  “You don’t have to keep it from me,” Marin said. “And I’m not trying to defile the memory of him. I want to use what you can recall so that we can find him. If Jef has the secret⁠—”

  “I don’t have any secret,” Jef snapped.

  “Take it easy,” Lathan said.

  Jef threw up his hands. “Take it easy? I’m just trying to make sense of what we have been dealing with, and now we have Marin trying to tell me that I know something? None of this makes any sense, Lathan. It’s hard enough to believe that your father was an elemental.”

  “Is,” he said quietly.

  Jef blinked, and he tipped his head to the side, frowning. “What?”

  “I thought he was gone, but if that was some way for him to show us to find him, maybe he isn’t gone. Maybe he’s never been gone.”

  “Fine,” Jef said, and he shot Marin a look. “If your father is not gone but is an elemental, it still seems to be far stranger than anything else we’ve experienced. But I don’t know that there is any secret that he taught me.”

  He stormed away, heading back out onto the plains, leaving Lathan and Marin.

  “You don’t have to push him like that,” Lathan said.

  “I’m not trying to push him,” Marin said. “You heard what your father said. Jef knows something. He might not know what he knows, but we need to dig so that we can find it. And how much time do you think we have before the Derithan regroup and return?”

  “But return for what?” Lathan asked. “The binding stones that were holding the elementals have shattered, and the elementals are gone. Unless you want to tell me that they aren’t?”

  Marin looked up. She looked as if she might cry. “You can ask them yourself. I know you can hear them. I know you can listen, but there’s a part of you that is too stubborn to do so.”

  “I’m not trying to be stubborn,” Lathan said.

  “Well… You’re still doing a good job of it.” She started to turn.

  Lathan hurried over to her and caught her wrist. She looked up at him. “I want to find him, but what happens if he betrays us like Tolinar did?”

  “Is that really your fear?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” Lathan said. “I thought I did, and I thought I understood what I was, who I was, and my place in the world. I was perfectly content hunting and trapping elementals.”

  “What if the elementals weren’t perfectly content with that?”

  “You know what I mean,” Lathan said.

  “I don’t know that I do. You keep trying to tell me that the elementals were unharmed by what you were doing.”

  “Because my father taught me,” he said. “And if he was an elemental, it seems to me that he would be the one to know, wouldn’t he?”

  Marin frowned.

  “I know you don’t like to think about it in that way, but if there was something to it, then don’t you think the elemental would be the one to help us know what it is?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “And if there isn’t anything that will harm them, then…”

  He looked back toward Jef.

  “What is it?”

  “Something I thought of just now.”

  “Do you care to tell me what it was?”

  “Let me talk through it with Jef. See if the wind might provide you with some answers. Or water. You can talk to water, right?”

  “Mostly wind, but water answers sometimes.”

  “See what you can find and what they tell you.”

  She looked as if she wanted to argue with him, but she just shook her head, turning away.

  Lathan had gone through quite a few different lessons with his father, and all of them were tied to how to reach for the elementals and how trapping some of that power did not harm the elementals. But there was a reason that it never harmed the elementals.

  Lathan watched Jef meander out over the grassy plain, before hurrying over to his friend.

  “What did the two of you decide?” Jef asked, looking up.

  “We didn’t decide anything. I don’t know what we need to do.”

  Jef grunted. “You believe her?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. About any of this. Your father, mostly.”

  “If we assume that figure in the silvery pool was my father, then we might need to assume that he also left us a way to find him.”

  “But you think he would tell me? I’m not exactly the person that he was most concerned about, Lathan.”

  “Probably not,” Lathan said. His mind worked, trying to understand and make sense of things. Find his father. That was what Lathan’s father said. How was he supposed to do that?

  But his father would’ve known that the Derithan were dangerous and would have known that Lathan would’ve presented a target for them. Especially if he demonstrated some predilection for the shadow, right?

  “Marin did get me thinking about something. What he taught us. Maybe not that he taught us something different, at least not obviously, but he knew that we were close.”

  “Inseparable,” Jef said. “Why? Do you think that upset him?”

  Lathan started to smile. “Not at all. Actually, I wonder if he wanted for us to be inseparable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because maybe Marin is right. But not for the reason she wants us to believe she is right.”

  “You aren’t making any sense.”

  “I know. And I’m trying.”

  “So what?”

  “We assume that he taught me certain aspects of the elementals so I could connect to them. This is, of course, working on the assumption that I’m somehow part elemental.” The idea that he was still left Lathan uncertain what to make of that, and even more uncertain about what to do about it. “And we also have to make the assumption that he knew something might happen to him, right?”

  “I suppose that’s reasonable,” Jef said.

  “And if he knew something might happen to him, and if he knew I was part elemental, what else might he have known?”

  “You think that he might’ve known that the Derithan would’ve come for you?”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” Lathan said.

  “So why wouldn’t he have told you how to find him?”

  “What if he didn’t want the Derithan to be able to find him?”

  Jef looked up at him, but Lathan turned away, looking out over the grassy plain. He struggled to make sense of everything, and though he tried to think of the lessons that his father had taught him, he wondered if perhaps there was a different lesson.

  He had taught Lathan one aspect of it, and maybe he had taught Jef another.

  “What do you remember him telling you about the currents?”

  “Not much,” Jef said. “I don’t really remember why he was talking about it. He would go on and on about the different connections to the elementals, but then how those elementals would connect to something else, as well. He called that a current. If you listen well enough, and long enough, you might be able to find the flow of the current.”

  Lathan felt no sense of any elementals around him. Not even the wind.

  “And he talked to me about when you tap into an elemental, using a binding stone. You are doing little more than drawing a little blood off, essentially. It didn’t harm you, as the elemental was drawing on something else.” Lathan frowned to himself. “Maybe it’s this current that he’s talking about with you.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have just told you. Or me. Why keep that to himself?”

  “I don’t know. We know that he was running from the Derithan, though. At least, as far as we can tell. There has to be something which had him concerned. If he worried about the Derithan and what they might do, especially if they were to capture us, it might be better for us to have a different understanding of things. That way they would not be able to piece it together.”

  “So he kept us intentionally ignorant?” Jef turned to him. “That doesn’t sound like your father, Lathan. He wanted us to understand the world, even if his view of the world was different than everything else that we witnessed. I think there has to be another explanation.”

  “Maybe,” he said. He looked over to the trees. Marin was there, weaving through the trees and pausing periodically so it seemed like she was looking out and around her.

  He didn’t know what she was doing and didn’t know why she was doing it. He wondered if she was just giving them space, or if there was another reason to it.

  “I feel like there is an answer for us, but we just have to figure out what it is. Does that make sense?”

  “About as much sense as anything else that’s been going on lately,” Jef said. “But it still doesn’t help us figure out where we are supposed to go. By the Light, it was hard enough to figure out that he wanted us to run around and free the elementals. What else do you think we are supposed to do?”

  He shook his head. “That’s just it. I don’t know. And maybe the two of us need to try to work together to figure it out. But maybe there something else here that we are supposed to do.”

  “So we do what now?”

  “We know the binding stones connect to something. They help us connect to the elemental, which is in turn connected to something else.” An idea started to form in Lathan’s mind, though it was one that he wasn’t sure made much sense. And, if he were perfectly honest with himself, he wasn’t sure that it would even matter. “So if we can use the binding stones, the elementals, and follow that connection, ultimately leading to the current that he had mentioned to you,” Lathan went on, arching a brow at Jef, “then maybe we can trace that back to wherever he is.”

  Jef looked at him for a long moment before starting to laugh.

  “What? I didn’t realize I was being funny.”

  “Oh, maybe not what you said, but there is something that’s pretty funny.”

  “What is it?”

  “Are you going to tell Marin, or do you want me to?”

  “I think Marin won’t mind.”

  “Maybe not if the idea was simply to follow the elementals, but that’s not what you’re talking about. You are talking about binding the elementals. And we both know how she feels about that.”

  Lathan looked over to where Marin was standing. She had turned, watching them. There was a darkness on her brow. The wind whispered around him ever so subtly. And Lathan realize that she had been listening, using the wind to do so.

  “I think she already knows.”

  Chapter 3

  Lathan wasn’t at all sure how they were supposed to test the elementals as Jef intended. He didn’t know what that would involve or if something like that was even possible. If it was, he still didn’t know if there would be any way for them to connect to that power well enough for him to find anything within it.

 

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