“Hush, now! Sit!” Lagi towered over the dog, scolding. “You cursed beast! What’s gotten into you?”

Mokass hopped, waving his hands as though batting away a swarm of wasps. “Aui! Aui! Her eagle is copper. I was born in Iliyat, did you know that? But I won’t tell any tales. They’re all lies.” He did not look back over his shoulder, and his companion crooned soothingly as they walked away.

Marit sank into a crouch and covered her head with her arms, just sat on her heels and rocked. But it did no good. Nothing changed. The cursed dog kept barking, and finally the youth whapped him a single hard blow to shut him up, and that was too much for Marit. She jumped to her feet and ran off, not wanting the poor dog to be punished for doing its duty just because the only person who could see her was an old man not right in the head.

She walked through the night with its scraps of clouds and a Sickle Moon fattening toward the half, and at last she fumbled with the clasp and tore off the cloak and flung it aside with a scream of frustration and grief and fury and fear. She ran, as if by sprinting she might churn Spirit Gate into being and race through it to the other side, where she could find peace.

The running caught up with her. She began to cough, and could not take in air. A wind rose off the bay, howling up the road and over the fields. She staggered to a halt and fell to her knees, bracing herself on her hands as she gulped and hacked and gagged, her vision fading in and out. The world tilted and spun. She pitched forward, hit the gravel with her shoulder, and tumbled onto her back. A white mist rose off the road, rippling and billowing. Blown by the raging wind, the cloak slithered along the ground. Rising to envelop her, it molded itself to her face until she could not breathe. She fought and clawed, but it devoured her.

There was no pain.

SHE WOKE ALONE, sprawled naked on a Guardian altar with only a cloak for a covering. Her eagle was dead, so she must be dead, because no reeve survived the death of her eagle. Since it was too much trouble to try to make sense of the world, she slept.

In her dreams she trudged up hills or slogged through swampy coastlands, searching for the man she loved or for her eagle or for an answer. She wandered, lost and alone, and kept falling, falling, until she woke again with the cloak wrapped around her. She found herself in a new place, one she did not recognize except it was high and exposed and the stone ledge on which she lay glittered with a twisting pattern grown into the rock.

It was a Guardian altar, just like the ones before.

She had a headache as bad as if she’d been sucking sweet-smoke, drugged and dazzled for days, as good an explanation as any although how she had gotten up to a Guardian’s altar she could not figure. It seemed she was only now truly waking up. Probably she had dreamed the entire journey to Copper Hall.