“True enough, my love, but I am blind, and I don’t like it because I don’t know what it means.”

“What it means to be blind? Like those of us who are not as gifted as you?”

She looked sharply at him, hearing the pinch in his words. “That isn’t what I meant at all! Eagle’s Sight gives us an advantage, nothing more. It gives a sense of surety that perhaps makes one overconfident. It’s as if a curtain has fallen across our vision, and we can catch only fragments and glimpses through a rip in the cloth. Was it the cataclysm that blinded us? Is it the haze and the clouds? Is it magic, woven by the Ashioi to cripple us? Was the Eagle’s Sight woven into the great crown in ancient days, and is it clouded because the crowns are fallen? I don’t know, and what 1 don’t know I can’t solve.”

‘Are the crowns fallen?”

She rubbed her eyes, yawned, and he caught her under the arm. She leaned against him, eyes shut.

‘Anne is dead. That’s all I know. Anne and everyone with her are gone.” Her sigh shuddered through her body. “I felt those who wove the other crowns until the moment Anne died and the crown she wove was destroyed. I cannot say if the others survived the fire and the storm. They may have, or they may be dead, too.”

“You don’t think every person at the other crowns died, too?” asked Hathui. “You said that you … that you destroyed everything—all life—within a league of the crown where Anne was.”

Liath pushed away from Sanglant, and when he reached for her, she shook her head, needing to stand alone. “I don’t know if the fire reached through the weaving to touch the others. Without Eagle’s Sight, I may never know. I am sorry for the sake of Meriam. I liked her.”

“She treated me with respect,” muttered Sanglant, “unlike the rest of them.”

Her gaze flashed to him, and a smile lifted her lips. “It is true, my love, that they did not treat you as you deserved. Yet consider that they are likely dead now, while we have survived.”

“I cannot regret their deaths, considering all we have suffered.”

“Nay, that’s not what I meant. Only that I never thought about what would happen afterward. Aren’t we blind in that way, all of us? We march toward the gate, but it’s the gate we see, not the land lying beyond. We can’t see that landscape until the gate is opened and we’ve stepped through. Then it’s too late to go back.”

Around them, folk stirred as they rose and made ready to march. They had crossed the Brinne Pass in fifteen days. The northern air had invigorated the sullen and the exhausted, who could see how much closer they were to home. Certainly, less dust plagued them. In the early days it had filtered down constantly to coat hands and faces with a film of grit that they hadn’t the leisure or water to wash off.