How can you know this is only a worn stone? she said. You know precious little of the Noreela we live in now, and what of the past? It's said by some that a great shaman once cast such stones. He molded them from his own seed, and clay from the shores of the southern sea that you now call Sordon Sound. He was the first charm breather, and he breathed goodness and health into the clay before it hardened. When all thirteen pieces were firm, he strung them on a rope of twisted hawk gut and hung it around his neck. The weight of the charms bore him down, but he didn't take off that necklace until the day he died. And when he died, he was almost three hundred years old. He had friends in life, but in death they coveted what he had possessed, the talents and charms, the shreds of early magichala which none of them could begin to understand. And they tore his body apart, seeking to make their own charms from his bones and organs, knotting his guts to string his toes around their necks, and his fingers, and his incorruptible eyes. The necklace was destroyed, each individual stone carried from there by the people who had proven themselves no friends at all. And in their betrayal lay their doom. Some of them lived almost a year after the great shaman died, but certainly little more than a year later all thirteen were dead. Rotting into the land, eaten by carrion creatures, taken apart just as they had taken him apart. And the stones that gave him such long health sank into Noreela. Sometimes, they're found.

The Widow had held the stone out to Ramus, but he smiled and shook his head.

Don't believe me, Ramus? she had asked.

Those same words echoed in his mind now. He held the stone up and viewed the darkening sky through the hole at its heart. The life moon was out already, low to the horizon and half-full, and he turned until he could see it through the charm.

It was superstition, a story of a story, and he was a Voyager. Committed to truth and fact, science and discovery.

He breathed through the hole three times. Nothing felt different.

“I'm not sure, Widow,” he whispered. “Not anymore.” He placed the stone gently on his knee and took the bone charm from around his neck. The militia had denied any knowledge of what the charm was for, but it had called to Ramus as it swung from the ceiling, set spinning when the man nudged it in passing. Now he unknotted the leather thong and fed it through the hole in the stone.

It was no bother wearing something like this. If it did not work, he had lost nothing. If it did, then perhaps he could maintain his health until they reached the Great Divide.