He was accustomed by now to riding almost everywhere, but he still preferred to walk. You saw things when walking—the blade of grass, the bee’s feet tickling a flower petal, the last tear of a wronged woman who has resolved to seek revenge—that the height and power of a horse might hide from your senses. She was at home in the saddle. Aloft, her aspect changed. Her eyes opened wide, watching everywhere as they winged over the sea. Even after all this time, each least bobble or hole of turbulence in the air made him gulp and grip and hope he did not tumble. She simply rode.

Eiya! What to do? Where to go? He dared not take her to one of the altars, because there they would easily be spied out. And once she touched her staff, she would likely be out of his control. Yet it wasn’t safe to give the staff into her hands until she understood what she was. It wasn’t safe to give it into her hands until he was sure she would walk the path he had chosen and not the easier path, the path that begins in light but soon enough crosses under the gate of shadows into corruption.

“WE TELL STORIES to make the time pass between birth and death,” Bai was saying.

“I thought the gods gave us stories to help us understand the world,” Joss replied.

“So we are taught in the temples,” she agreed. “But think about it. What is a story?”

She would chatter on so, flirting with that cursed reeve. Even huffing and puffing up the switchback trail that, incredibly, they’d had to climb back up, those two had talked and talked in the way of people showing off for each other. Kesh wished they would shut up.

“It’s not the truth, and yet there’s truth in it. It’s a way of ordering the truth, just as we order days and weeks and years, as we order guilds and colors and the Hundred itself. Did the gods create the tales? No. People like you and me made the tales and told them to others. Even so, the ten Tales of Founding are not like other stories. We made them because the gods commanded us to. Because they help us order the world, just as worship does. And what is the world except that time between when we enter this place and when we leave it?”

They reached the ruins where he and Bai had sheltered last night. Here, Kesh thought, they might decently pause to rest, but the other two would keep talking.

The reeve answered her. “As it says in the Tale of Discovery, ‘Where did we come from, and where do we go?’ ”

“That’s right,” she said with such a flattering smile that Keshad actually gave a disgusted grunt. She glanced at Kesh and for an instant resembled the child she had once been, his little sister, as she rolled her eyes at him to say, Don’t ruin this for me.