He tried to make sense of her words. “A man appeared before the Hieros in the Merciless One’s temple by Olossi. He demanded she turn over to him a slave, a ‘ghost girl,’ they called her. He was dressed like an envoy of Ilu, but he claimed to be a Guardian, and the Hieros believed him. He had with him two winged horses, and when he spoke, she said, ‘Every heart listened.’ As it says in the tale.”

He knew Marit as well as he knew any woman, though that knowledge was twenty years’ gone. For months, each least variation in her expression had been his most intense study. That cast of face—mouth slack, gaze drawn inward as thoughts raced—and the tension in her shoulders marked surprise and shock as a clever, powerful mind reassessed what it thought it knew.

“A man dressed in the manner of an envoy of Ilu, claiming to be a Guardian? On the trail of an outlander? Seen at the Devourer’s temple in Olossi?”

He nodded, but she was already turning her horse, moving for the edge of the promontory. She looked back over a shoulder. “I saw a woman and a man, traveling together, with three horses, camped in the ruins beneath a Guardian altar right where the Soha Cutoff begins its descent into Sohayil.”

“Marit!”

The horse opened its wings and sprang into the sky. A gust raked through the overhang, and he woke to find rain spraying over his blanket and boots.

“The hells!” He scrambled out from under the overhang, right into the teeth of the wind. Rain spat into his face, and he wiped his eyes as he stared into the darkness, but there was nothing there. By the time he crawled back into the shelter, found a brand, lit it, and searched the ledge, the rain had wiped every track away. He knew he would have found nothing anyway, no mark of a horse’s hoof. It had only been a dream.

The rain passed, the last drops splattering on stone. Scar chirped, rousing, and Joss saw distant objects in the east, evoked by the lightening that presaged dawn. He shook his head like a dog shedding water, and shook out his cloak, then rolled it up. In the dim light he picked his way carefully down the slope. There, sitting on the stone where he’d left him, was the farmer, Pash.

“Greetings of the day,” Joss said.

“Morning is coming on,” agreed Pash, who seemed remarkably alert for a man who had, presumably, stayed awake all night. “Whether it will bode good, or ill, I can’t say. You’re up early.”

“Where did you say you came from?”

“A little hamlet, you wouldn’t have heard of it. We call it Green Water for the particular color of a pool there, a holy place dedicated to the Witherer. It’s a day’s walk from Candra Crossing.”

“Know you anyone here in the haven that’s out of Candra Crossing? In particular I am looking for any person who might have served, or be serving, in the temple of Kotaru there.”