I knew I’d never have to seek him out. Instead, he walks around the ranch like he’s in mourning. Twice around the empty pastures, circling and circling before the sun’s even up. I warm some old coffee and watch, knowing how hard it must be, how lost he must feel without Imelda. My eyes roam the dark, checking for others, but he’s alone. The Empire’s too busy to have much interest in a kid like him. All the better.

I throw on a coat and head out to meet him. He’s pulled himself up onto a fence by then. He sits, thumbing a hole in his jeans, acting like he’s seven again. Poor kid.

“Farian,” I say. “This is unexpected.”

He barely looks up. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

“She’ll be back. You know that, don’t you?”

For a while, he doesn’t say anything. Which is fair. I’m not sure I believe it, either. Every whisper carries war with it. There’s talk of conscriptions. Imelda’s name might get forgotten in all the mess, but there’s also talk that she’s the one who started what’s coming. One newspaper claimed she actually fought in the first battle. Sounded like a load of wash until I saw the location of the fight: Gig’s Wall. Just a few miles north of where she was planning on heading. It didn’t sound so impossible then.

“Why’d she do it?” Farian asks. “Why not just try to win the right way?”

“She wanted to break the rules. That was the whole point.”

Farian shakes his head. “So now we look like cheaters. Ashlords can point at her and say, ‘Look what the Dividian do with what we give them.’ ”

“Oh, wake up, Farian.”

He looks a little shocked by the exhaustion in my voice.

“Did you ever wonder at our people’s name?” I ask him, pressing. “The Dividian. It originates in Ashlord documents. It’s the history they gave us. A simple meaning: the divided ones. We arrived at their shores divided. We live in their land divided. It’s become second nature to us, almost like breathing. And I have no doubt it is how the Ashlords like us.”

My eyes trace the distant land, hills that were never really ours.

“Imelda took something back from them, Farian. We don’t live high and mighty. We live in their world, by their rules. One of those rules is that we’re never allowed to rise too high. They’ve been stealing who we are from us for centuries. Imelda defied that. For at least a few minutes, she united all of us. On their biggest stage, with the entire Empire watching, a Dividian outdanced the Ashlords. Don’t look down on her for changing their rules.”

Farian breaks beneath the weight of that, shaking his head, on the verge of tears.