They’d traveled in stony silence as the stars disappeared, the growing day revealing signs of strife that had plagued Yem and its people: a broken wagon left to weather on the road’s edge, a distant cluster of blackened huts in the lee of a craggy hilltop. They passed an abandoned farmstead, its windows broken out, the once-tilled land gone over to weeds and spiraling dust. Remnants of a windmill lay in a heap on the house’s south side, the sails torn and fluttering on the breeze.

The Hawk had bothered to speak only once, when Anji had stopped to gape at the remains of a man long dead, sitting tied to a fence post. A sign had been looped around his head, the word “debtor” spelled in bold letters. Under the letters was the same strange symbol Anji had seen on the wall in Silverton, the hollow orb over an downturned semicircle. Anji’s insides squirmed at the sight of a black bird pecking at the poor man’s intestines, which hung like blue-gray rags in the dirt. Mouth dry, Anji had asked what happened, but the Hawk had only muttered something about the Sun Wardens and ordered her to get a move on.

Now Anji lay shivering on the ground, curled on her side and listening to the lap of water on rock.

They’d stopped on the shore of a lake so perfectly circular it seemed drawn by a child. Its water reflected the cloud-speckled sky, not a ripple stirring its glassy surface. A copse of stunted trees pocked the lake’s far side, bisected by a rocky stream that weaved into the larger body of water. The road, still visible from their camp, wound like a brown snake into the mountains ahead, so large now Anji felt she could reach out and touch them.

The Hawk slid off her horse, removed the tent and bags and set them in a neat pile, then trudged to the mare and began unbuckling the saddle, seemingly unaffected by the hours they’d been traveling. Anji pulled her coat tighter, the thin leather doing little to warm her trembling limbs.

Must have been out of my mind, she thought, fleeing into the north.

On top of being captured, she was being dragged through the coldest part of the country. Through ceaseless, frigid wind that cut at her cheeks and clutched at her fingers. Here, the sun hung in the sky like an ornament rather than the warm orb it was in the south, soaking the back alley above her childhood home. She longed for afternoons spent on the basement steps, basking with her mother in the warm golden glow with books and cups of tea. Now, however, returning to the city’s warmth would herald only her torture and death. At least she wouldn’t be shivering when she was set into with the knives. Probably. She closed her eyes against the thought.