The oily expiration of young cathedral trees filled Djola’s mouth. The grove must be around the next bend, beyond a rocky outcropping. New red leaves fluttered in the wind, catching the last of the sun. Trunks and ferns undulated in the shadows, a trickster’s dance. Gray forms with granite teeth, smoky hair, and spark hearts floated between the trees. Haints.

Djola’s breath grew shallow; his eyes burned with unspent tears. Samina was the chill at his neck, the cold in his bones. Kill nobody in my name. Using Samina’s spell to open a wise-woman corridor had been foolhardy, and then singing from The Songs for Living and Dying … Bold haints broke from the forest of shades and taunted him for reckless conjure, whispering with the leaves.

“How else could we escape the deluge?” He yelled in Anawanama, what his mother’s people used, before the Empire and after, to talk to the stars and trees, to ancestors and spirits. “I couldn’t choose death on the Narrows Bridge. Not time yet.”

“Why shout in words nobody remembers?” the transgressor girl asked in Empire vernacular—once a minor trading language and these days filling everyone’s mouth.

“I remember,” he replied in Empire talk, glad to focus on her. “We’re not all dead to this world.” The transgressor girl twisted around to face him. Haints ventured closer. He almost made out a round familiar face. The crack in his heart throbbed. “So much I cannot say or see unless I speak Anawanama.”

“Ancestor tongues conjure other worlds.” The girl followed his gaze. “What?”

His eldest daughter, Tessa, wavered in front of him, a shaft of evening mist with blue-violet eyes like Samina. Tessa was wide-hipped and forthright like her mother and arrogant like Djola. She chastised him for leaving the way open to scoundrels and fools. Quint, a smoldering ball of ash, echoed his sister.

“No time to close the wise-woman passageway,” Djola told the haints in Anawanama. Opening corridors was easy, no danger of getting caught in a collapsing fold; closing one could take a month. “The enemy snapped at our heels.” Tessa and Quint hissed at his excuses. Djola had never seen his dead children so clearly. As he marched from the coast to Holy City, they’d come as blurs, torment, as wishful thinking. He’d dispelled them easily. In the shadows of Mount Eidhou, on ground they’d walked and near rivers they’d tasted in life, his children claimed the power of ancestors to challenge him. Where was Bal? They should all be together, unless Bal was ashamed of her father, unless Bal refused to haunt a monster. “I’m not a common murderer raining down terror on the Arkhysian Empire.” Speaking this lie in Anawanama burned his mouth. What was he then? “Tell your sister.”