“You must take better measure of yourselves.” Yari, carrying lesson scrolls and nut bread, dropped down beside them from a jagged overhang. “You two know how to listen and, without losing yourselves, hold anyone or anything in your heart. This is grace.” Yari wrapped long arms around Awa and Bal. Cloud-silk robes smelled of sugarbush and desert rose. “Grace is how you fashion something from nothing, Bal, and why you can traverse Smokeland’s border-void, Awa.”

“I thought it was spiders and bees, guiding us.” Bal giggled.

“Laughter is good. So is sweat.” Yari set down the nut bread and pulled out a double-headed drum decorated with Aido cloth and sweetgrass. Squeezing brown and gray leather cords that connected the black goatskin heads, vie modulated tones and made the drum talk. Ancestor words shook Awa’s bones.

“Dance, read, and think on the measure of your spirit.” Yari could drum a child into this world or reason out of a person’s mind. “Move!”

Awa tripped over her feet trying to catch the beats. Even Bal groaned at tricky polyrhythms.

“Make your own music,” Yari commanded. Bal sang several harmonies with herself and worked her feet like a stampede. She pulled Awa into a furious dance. “Fill yourself with now,” Yari sang, “tomorrow may not come.”

Awa kissed her teeth. “If the world ends, we won’t be here to be sad.”

“Are you sure? Basawili—not the end, more breath to come.” Yari took off into the laurel trees. Songbirds flew from the berry bushes, grumbling. Yari was fast and relentless. Awa and Bal resigned themselves to being out of breath all day.

Good Empire citizens believed life in an enclave was dull and brutal: wandering, camping in drafty tents, eating grass and worms, chanting. People told many lies on the Elders. Where were the raggedy savages, liars, thieves, and perverts living like it was yesterday? Garden Sprites never had to walk on coals. Father had gotten those ugly purple scars on his feet somewhere else.

Father also claimed they bashed his head with jumba jabba. But Awa loved the discipline and adventure, the poetry and history, the animal lore and number play. Yari taught her ancestor tongues—Zamanzi, Anawanama, Lahesh—and signs and ciphers to map the everyday or hold tangled Smokeland memories. Awa practiced writing and drawing three times a day while Bal sang and sword danced.

Awa stood once in a herd of wild horses, memorizing hoofbeats before they vanished to who knows where. She drew a history of bees, tracked fish flight, and calculated the distance to the moon. Wherever the Elders made home, by the sea, in the desert, or on a mountaintop, Awa and Bal memorized the sky. Awa’s torment over her family faded to an occasional ache, and Bal always hugged these sorrows away.