In the long June dusk, he sits on the forest floor, too weak to go on, and peels bark from the branches of a wayfarer shrub. He chews the bark until it is a paste, and with his last remaining energy, smears as many branches as he can with the sticky lime, as Grandfather used to do.

The girl helps him gather firewood, and the sun drops, and three times he gets up to check his traps, and each time they are empty. All night he drifts in and out. When he wakes he sees the girl tending the little fire, her face pale and dirty, the hem of her dress torn, her eyes as big as fists. He sees a shadow separate from his body and fly off into the forest, over the river, over the house of his family, herds of deer running through trees high on the mountain, and wolves slipping through the shadows behind, until he reaches the place in the far north where sea dragons slither between mountains of ice and a race of blue giants holds up the stars. When he comes back into his body, shafts of moonlight are falling through the leaves and touching the forest floor in bright shifting patches. Beside him the girl has the sack in her lap and she is running fingers along the lines of the book and murmuring words in her strange language. He listens, and when she stops—as though she has summoned it with her magical book—a flock of stone-curlews comes flowing through the underbrush, clicking and nattering, and Omeir hears the panicked flutter of one caught in a snare, then more, and still more, and the night fills with their shrieks, and she looks at him, and he looks at the book.

The hummocks become foothills and the foothills mountains. They are close to home now, he can sense it. The varieties of trees, the texture of the air, a smell of wild mint halfway up a climb, the bright round pebbles in a streambed: all these are memories, or run parallel to memories. Like oxen, pulling through the rainy dark, maybe there is something in him too, some magnet pulling him homeward.

By the time they come over a ridge and descend a trail to the river road, news of the fall of the city has reached the villages. He keeps the girl bound at the wrists with the rope attached and to each person they pass he tells the same story: victory was glorious; all honor to the sultan, may God keep him; he has sent me home with my rewards. Despite his face, no one seems to begrudge him, and though many eye the dirty bundle and sack he carries, no one asks to see what’s inside. A few carters even congratulate him and wish him well, and one gives him cheese, and another a basket of cucumbers.