“Days. I worried you might never return from the border-void,” Vandana whispered.

Orca rubbed Djola dry and held him till he was warm. He asked a hundred questions about frost in Djola’s mustache, the wound in his back, and the raintree aroma on his hands.

“Samina is the chill at my neck, the cold in my bones,” Djola said.

Vandana nodded. Orca blinked, confused. “From now on I live for change,” Djola declared and with the last of the brew poured a libation to the crossroads gods.

BOOK
III

1

If the Way Is Open

Amplify now

Every yesterday lives in today

We have many futures and each changes the past

Don’t lose possibilities in the void

Imagine freedom and it is yours

Djola was patient, methodical, relentless. He let Samina’s chill sink into him, and every day he pulled more fire without burning himself. Calling on Elder discipline, he glimpsed the crossroads of crossroads, a haven of possibilities. In sick bay, he brought more rogues back from death than ever before. Only a scar moon put him in a foul temper. Otherwise he was calm, a landscape smothered in snow.

The plunder pirates acquired using his conjure lulled Pezarrat. The captain praised ingenious weapons that took out defenses, killed nobody, and left survivors who urged quick surrender. Djola joined victory celebrations. He ate fire, called behemoths to sing, and disappeared in bright light. Everyone enjoyed the carnival display and the tonics he brewed from fermented herbs and roots. They marveled at his transformation.

Pezarrat hounded Orca for secrets, threatened to find a prettier boy to replace him, but other whore-spies were afraid of Djola’s bed. “What if you turn them into rats, or worse make them wind in the sails?” Vandana chuckled. “At least a rat still lives. Who knows about the wind?”

Djola taught Orca shadow-warrior tricks and told him to sneak off in the night to a real lover. “I lust for no one,” Orca said. “I want to study at night with you.”

After every village or city raid, Djola spoke humbly with local conjurers and toured libraries that he’d saved from a pirate torch. He deciphered stone tablets until fingers blistered and bled. He read music cloth and memorized singing books until he was hoarse and wheezing.

Vandana filled her small bag with books, maps, and clown acts for when I finally go to home. She wrote scrolls that she never showed Djola. She was on a secret mission too, another snake in Pezarrat’s house. Djola could hold her danger. She could hold his. Orca was a diligent student since being touched by a star-demon in a sky window. He catalogued everything in Vandana’s small bag. He invented a spell that let her find any scroll, seed, book, or weed root. He even sorted her weapons.

“We almost have a good life,” Orca said, yet—