They crossed forty miles in under an hour, and none of it was easy ground.
Jian took the lead because Galewrought made him the fastest over broken terrain, wind carrying him across ravine mouths that would have cost anyone else a twenty-minute detour. Kira followed close behind, her own Gale Fang matching his pace without much strain. Emma kept up by simply refusing to fall behind, and by the twentieth mile she'd stopped pretending it wasn't costing her.
"How far?" she asked, breathing hard.
"Close," Jian said. "You can smell it."
She could. The air had changed somewhere in the last five miles, gone thick and grey and gritty, and by the time the Ashfall Basin finally opened up beneath them, the reason was obvious.
Ash fell across the whole basin like snow. Not from fire. From the breaches themselves, three of them hanging open and unguarded at the basin's far end, each one venting a steady grey fall that had already buried the lower half of the valley knee-deep.
