“We are mad,” Norit said, having captured half a breath, “we are mad because we have these creatures in our blood. And they have them inside, too. Luz has them, very, very tiny, so tiny no eye can see; but they move through our blood and through our ears and our eyes and they make us have the visions. They make the fever. They heal us. They make the sound and the pain and they build the lines we see in our eyes: they trace them on our eyes, and they whisper them into our ears. They take words out of the air, from the tower, to a place in the sky, to us, wherever we are.”

“Why?”

“They’re our gift.”

“A gift, is it?” He pushed Norit back to look at her, to see within her eyes whether he could see any trace of these engravings on her eyes. “Is it a gift, to be outcast from every civilized village? Is it a gift, to be whipped across the desert and die within a day of a village?”

“I am Luz,” she whispered, this woman almost within his arms, this body he had held tenderly at night and held now at arm’s length, like some venomous animal. “I say it is a gift. A gift we give, Marak Trin Tain, risking our lives!”

“Damn your gift!” he said, and shook her, and then was appalled, because it was Norit he had hurt. “Damn your gift. We’re the ones who die for it. My mother and my sister will die because of your gift! I’ve sworn my life to the Ila because of your gift! Take it back! Let us go!”

“You need it.”

“For what?”

“Life,” Norit’s lips said, whispered. “Life, if you’ll take it. Life for more than the ones you’ve brought if you’ll listen.”

There had been a time he had chased the truth. He was not willing to find it in what this Luz dictated things to be. He would not take her word for the truth, not her desires, not her rules, not her half promises like some seller in the bazaar. None of it. He rose up off the bed, or began to, but Norit reached for his wrist.

He would have rejected the effort. It was the fumbling, desperate character of the grip that restrained him and reminded him that Norit, too, was there to suffer for what he said and did.

“She wants you to listen,” Norit said. “Please listen.”

There were many, many hostages, in the Ila’s hands, in Luz’s hands.

And where could he go? What could he do, to find Hati, and to rescue Norit?

“Listen to what?” he answered not Norit, but Luz.