But this night he finds himself sitting up, still sheltered beneath the wide overhang. Scar drowses. The rains haven’t yet come. Mist billows in the air, and she emerges from it. A death-white cloak spills from her shoulders, enveloping her. She rides out of the air as if the air is a path. She can ride on the air because the horse has wings. Its hooves ring on rock as it halts a short distance from him and furls those impossible wings, tips hiding the length of her legs.

“Joss,” she says.

“Marit!” To hear her voice is agony, because he still misses her although twenty years separate them. “You’re dead,” he adds, apologetically, because it is after all a dream.

“Yes.” Her smile is sad. “Don’t carry this burden. Don’t mourn me, Joss. Let it go.”

“Is that you telling me, or me telling myself? Why do you haunt me?”

“I bring you a warning. At dawn, they’ll try to kill you. The guards you’ve agreed to meet by the ironwood trees are not guards but outlaws who have infiltrated this haven to murder you. Beware!”

“They’re just lads!”

“Look into your heart, Joss, and you’ll see their story doesn’t hold water.”

“Everyone is talking about how the temples have ordered it done. As it says in the Tale of Fortune: ‘Their spirits were buried.’ ”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re a reeve. Investigate!”

“Yes, and you’re a reeve, too.” The only woman he had truly loved, his first and only lasting passion. She was the only woman he had truly betrayed, and in the worst way: He’d never meant to abandon her to her cruel fate. “So why do I see you in the form of a Guardian, with a death-white cloak and a winged horse? What are the gods trying to tell me?”

“I don’t know what the gods are trying to tell you, Joss.”

“I wish you were here to tell me where that cursed woman Zubaidit and her brother are got to. Taken some side trail into the Soha Hills, but Scar and I haven’t found them.”

She looked away abruptly, breaking eye contact. “There’s a black tide trickling north and east through the Soha Hills, the remnants of the army.”

“Is it true a Guardian commands this ‘Star of Life’?”

“Lord Radas commands them.”

“Lord Radas of Iliyat?” He remembered the lord’s strange behavior, years ago, on the Ili Cutoff. Then he shook his head. “Maybe so. That doesn’t make him a Guardian.”

“How can any of us know what a Guardian is? They walk abroad, hiding themselves in plain sight. I see with my third eye and I understand with my second heart that they are corrupted, so I dare not approach them. They will destroy me if they find me.”

“Because you are a Guardian, or because they are? You speak in riddles.”

She looked back toward him without truly meeting his gaze. “I’m alone, Joss. You’re the only one I know I can trust.”