“Tal!” she shouted. “Tell me what’s happening!”

Elan grabbed for Tal’s arms, but Tal was moving now, scrambling back the way they’d come. He collapsed after a few feet, panting, and managed, “It’s here. We can’t— Jae, the Curse, you must be able to feel it.” He stared at the horizon in terror. “It won’t let me— I can’t go any farther. I can’t.”

Elan held out his water skin. Tal took it, his hands shaking.

“Drink,” Jae said, though Tal already was. “And breathe. Then tell me more, if you can.”

Tal took a few gulps, then handed the skin back to Elan. His voice was still shaking as he said, “It was…One moment, I was fine, and the next, the Curse hit me. I couldn’t move forward at all. It wouldn’t let me. It’s here. You must be able to feel it.”

Elan shook his head. He’d been disavowed, but not cursed.

“The barrier,” Jae said. She peered at the desert in front of them, frowning, her eyes going vacant again. “It’s…enormous. It does feel like the Curse, but not…not quite….Something is happening. It’s in the air, but it’s the land, too.”

Elan had no idea what that meant, but peered in the direction she and Tal were staring. He didn’t see any kind of barrier, just more sand in front of them, sky above.

Sky and…Oh.

He grabbed Jae’s arm, and her eyes snapped back into focus. He pointed at what he’d seen: a dark spot in the sky, small but getting larger—closer. Coming out of nowhere, impossibly fast; deep brown, almost purple.

“A cloud,” Tal said.

Elan shook his head and reached to haul Tal up. “No, no, we have to go. We have to find shelter. It’s a storm.”

“Rain…,” Jae started, but they were all realizing that wasn’t it.

“No.” Elan pushed Tal to start him moving, yanking on the camel’s lead, panic so thick that he could taste it, and he admitted what they all knew and feared most: “A sandstorm.”

Jae stared at the cloud in horror. It was dark against the horizon, growing larger as the wind howled in the distance. It hit them only moments later—innocent, small gusts that would grow stronger until they were large enough to knock her down. Sand was already pelting them, and the wind would bring more with it, dumping enough to bury all of them.

Jae had only ever seen one sandstorm before, and that had raged far out in the desert, only its edge reaching as far as Aredann. Even so, it had destroyed their fields. Lord Savann, Lady Shirrad’s father, had been searching for the Well, and had died out in the desert.

Something tingled in the back of Jae’s mind. Lord Savann searching for the Well, and a sandstorm—

“Run!” Elan screamed, pulling her out of her fear-induced daze. He grabbed her hand as Tal scrambled for the rope attached to the camel. Tal grasped her other hand, and they ran, clinging to each other, back the way they’d come. Everything else fell away as they ran, even the ache in her limbs. But it was useless; they had nowhere safe to go. There was no shelter around anywhere, nothing to protect them once the wind really hit.

Within a few minutes, it was on them. Jae clutched both of the hands in hers, stumbling as she ran, her limbs too tangled up with Tal’s and Elan’s, desperately trying to keep the group together. With no shelter, all they had was each other, and it would only take a heartbeat to lose even that.

The wind howled and shrieked around them, invisible hands trying to break them apart, battering their bodies. It shoved them forward and then sideways, pummeling them with so much sand that it felt more like rocks or bricks.

Jae faltered and barely caught herself, yanking at Tal’s arm to get her footing back. As long as they kept moving, they couldn’t get buried, but the moment they stopped—

Elan stumbled, tripped, his hand wrenching away from Jae’s. She yanked Tal’s arm, trying to stop him, but the camel broke away on Tal’s other side. He dropped her hand to reach for the camel, and she fell, knocked off balance when Tal let go. She pushed up, trying to find her footing, but the wind smashed her back down, crushing the breath out of her lungs. Wind whipped the veil from her face, and she screamed, then coughed, inhaling sand. Eyes shut against it, she flung her arms up, trying to get the sand off her face and out of her mouth, but there was no way she could even stand up, let alone run.

Elan yelled something from nearby, but the wind was too loud for her to make it out. She turned toward him, groping in the air to try to find him, but it was useless. The wind itself was a blur of orange, as much sand as air, and she couldn’t make out anything else. Not even the rising sun.

After that, all she knew was the ache in her lungs and the crushing wind and sand, pressing her down, and worse, starting to build up over her limbs. She thrashed, trying to pull herself free, and heard Elan shout again. He sounded farther away, but she made out a word this time—“magic”—and everything fell into place, clarity driving away the panic.

Lord Savann had been caught in a sandstorm when he’d searched for the Well, and this storm had hit only minutes after Tal’s fit at the barrier. Both storms had been caused by magic, the same magic. Jae finally managed to get up to her knees, hands still blocking her face, and took the deepest breath she could manage. Then she fell into other-vision, and instead of the orange wind around her, she saw the pulsating glow of energy being twisted into magic.

If magic had created the storm, then magic could end it. Jae tried to shut out the wind’s shrieking and instead concentrate only on other-vision. The storm around them was bright, active, but not the heart of the magic. That was closer to where Tal had fallen. Jae cast her mind out, trying to find it, and spotted a blinding line across the desert. It stretched farther than she could see in either direction, curving slowly. A long line, maybe wrapping all the way around the Well. But how?

She threw all her energy at it, and it stung, the buzzing prickles growing sharp and angry as she grabbed for them, tried to find a way to tear the streak in half. There were no weak points to attack. Giving up on that method, she sank deeper into its magic.

She plunged into it, but it felt—different. Something at its core was the same, almost identical to the earthquakes she’d caused, but infused with something strange that tingled like a limb left in one position too long. The two were tied together, the solid, familiar glow of land and the prickly energy of—