From childhood they had had the lines of fire building structures in their vision, as if lines were engraved on their eyes like patterns on a pot: the same lines repeated and repeated, sometimes enlivened with fire, sometimes not. And the vision when it came was in red.

From childhood they had heard a noise in their ears, and that noise sooner or later had become a voice calling their names.

So it was not their madness that made them unique. In fact, their affliction was a leveler, and it made them much the same.

Sometimes, they confessed, their hands and bodies moved involuntarily, in small twitches. In some it had affected their trade or their craft. One, the farmwife, Maol, had learned to draw strange symbols, the same that he saw behind his eyelids.

Marak had had the twitching affliction, to some minor degree, when he was resting; he had labored from boyhood to conceal it, tucking his arms tightly as he slept, blaming it on nightmares.

Sometimes his head ached; that was so for the lot of them. His had ached fiercely in his early years, blinding headaches, but so did his mother’s.

Was she mad? He had never thought so.

There was a gift, too, to being mad. All the mad, when they suffered small wounds, healed without a scar, and they all suffered brief, sometimes quite high, fever when they did so.

Ontori, a stonemason, said he had broken both legs falling as a boy. He walked demonstrably without a limp.

Hati showed him her hand at their next setting-forth. “I cut this badly when I was a child. Across the palm. I was trimming gola root and the knife slipped. There is no scar.”

He had taken sword cuts, too, one egregious one, which his father had dealt him in practice. He has good skin, his mother had said defensively, when all trace of it vanished in a month. He always heals, his mother had said, and said it fiercely: she knew it was not right.

He had healed of everything but the clan mark, which was dye. High fever had followed the tattooing, however, and a great deal of swelling had ensued. It had healed and come out faded within the month, as if it were decades old. Some men had always thought him older than he was because of it. His mother had said maybe the fever had broken up the color. His father thought the dye had been weak, and blamed the artist.

“Some say we can’t die,” Hati said. “But I know we can. Three in my group died on the march. I’m sure those who left us the first night both died.”