Awa was ready to fall over and not get up when smoke from cook fires made her stomach howl. The smell of nut bread, yams, and fish brought water to her mouth. A clearing surrounded by houses on wooden platforms was a welcome sight. Palm-leaf roofs dripped water from a recent downpour. Brawny men in clown masks brandished rattles and spears. Warriors.

“Greetings!” Yari spoke—she recognized vie’s voice if not the shadow-warrior face. “Anawanama are never lost. They find each other in the dark, in a storm. They feel a heart beating in a prison cell and reach out with comfort. I need a story to guide me.” Yari hugged the warrior-clowns.

“I was in Arkhys City yesterday. Council sits.” One clown took off his mask, a gray-haired man with a blade chin and a deep voice like a djembe drum. He wore luxurious mudcloth robes, a chief perhaps. “A sad spectacle.” He looked from Yari to Awa. “You bring new Sprites into an enclave. Djola wastes himself at Council, wrangling thugs and cowards, and every day more poison dust blows through our lands.”

“We do what we can, Nuar,” Yari countered.

“We must do more.” A woman spoke. She wore mudcloth and a beaded headdress decked with feathers. “Azizi has no women at his stone-wood table. How can you chew your food with only one tooth? How can you speak truth with half a tongue?”

“No vesons since you walked away, Yari,” Nuar added. “Azizi says you abandoned them.”

“Azizi could follow me,” Yari replied. “Why should I decorate his Empire table?”

“You could persuade Djola,” Nuar insisted. “He’d listen to the griot of griots.”

“Perhaps. But who would listen to him? Too much fear in the air.”

Awa looked around, fascinated more than afraid. Village dwellings were tucked into a hillside. Naked children and old people came out with the stars. Women dropped from branches. Men stepped from under bulging tree roots. Brown people with sculpted features and black waterfalls of hair. They did Empire talk at first then switched to Anawanama. The Elders used savage talk too—words that never stopped rolling into one another.

Awa was dazzled by the musical language and carnival clothes, by parrot and orchid people and a moon girl with a star headdress. A boy in a hawk mask gave Awa mushrooms stuffed with something that tasted like fishy bird meat. Cooks must have roasted a big lizard from the swamps. Mother said swamps were disappearing and big lizards too, so northlanders starved. People in this village looked well-fed and they shared a feast with the Elders and new Sprites. Mother worried about everything before it happened.