Djola allowed himself several belly laughs. Mirth banished ghosts and cleared his head, but the hairline crack around his heart widened. He exhaled slowly and pulled a travel cloak from Vandana’s small bag. He’d done what he could, more than he thought possible.

“The trees weep,” the feisty young transgressor said. She held a withered arm close to her body and dragged a wounded leg. An Aido bag hung at her waist, barely visible. Crystals cut her bare feet. Wiry black hair was filled with straw and clumps of mud or worse filth. Red rivulets streaked a once-green shift. Priests had bled her recently. The black mare lifted her head and neighed. The girl staggered toward her.

“What are you?” Djola squinted at dangling seed earrings and an anklet fashioned from catalpa pods, beetle carapaces, and dead bees. “A Garden Sprite?”

“They don’t see”—the girl’s wide nostrils flared—“but I know what you did.”

The last of Djola’s audience grumbled useless death threats at her for desecrating the sundial courtyard. Hezram hushed them with a sweep of his arms. An acolyte stuck out a foot to trip her. She stomped him and, from the crunch and yelp, broke bones in his leg. Djola grinned at this emaciated young survivor. She hobbled to the mare’s nose, getting a tongue across her cheek and a nip on her ear.

“Everyone should run.” The girl’s voice cracked. “The mountain falls to its knees and poisons the Amethyst River. The air turns bitter.” She clung to the mare’s luxurious red mane, wheezing. Her body was weaker than her spirit. “You make a wasteland. Across the meadow, trees moan. The dirt dies and honeybees are wailing.”

High priest Hezram took a sharp breath, and Djola nodded. This was proof Council could not deny. This Sprite saw what others could not. “Was your transgression flying with bees?” Or smoke-walking like Samina? No. The girl would be dead or somebody’s spirit slave. Maybe her crime was withered limbs and a sharp tongue.

Hezram lurched into the green-land meadow. He hugged muddy blue robes to heaving ribs and spoke priestly nonsense. His prayer couldn’t stop disaster that he and good citizens had begun years before this festival of reckoning. Hezram scurried from encroaching sand onto still green grass. His ankles were red and blistered. “What have you done?” Fruit trees crumbled.

“Don’t blame me,” Djola replied. “Not a curse or weapon-conjure, but what you’ve been doing for years, what everybody does across the Empire and beyond, only faster.”

Hezram gazed down at dying grass. “What do we do like this?”

“You know better than I do.”

“Escape!” Tembe led drummers along the edge of the stone altar square and through Green Gate rubble. Barbarians, priests, and cook women stumbled behind her toward the Empire Road. “Our world comes to an end.”

“The wise woman speaks truth,” Djola said. “The end of days. Change or die.”