“Where can I find a man like that?” demanded Kesh.

A cool wind chased down from the heights. The fading light cast a warm glow over peaks whose ragged contours were softened by the change of light. Over the sea, scraps of cloud drifted into shadow, but here there was no rain.

“Where, indeed? ‘How?’ is the question you should ask.”

A spark can touch off a conflagration. Kesh boiled with anger, not even knowing why. “What makes you think there is a single honorable person in this world?”

The press of darkness swept over them, the bright fire their only beacon in an empty land. Anji spoke in a quiet voice that was nevertheless perfectly clear.

“Because I am married to her.”

18

No one disturbed their encampment in the wild lands bordering the northeastern shore of the Olo’o Sea. As one day passed into the next, the envoy of Ilu figured out how to help the girl in her work. He’d not grown up in the country, with country ways and country skills. He was a city boy by birth and training, accustomed to buying what he needed from the shops and artisans and craftsmen of Nessumara. Yet after so many years of wandering alone, he’d learned to survive.

He cleaned hide, a task he detested. Really, it was so unpleasant to get one’s hands so slick and stinking. He wove a crude shelter of green saplings, and built a fire of greenwood to smoke the deer meat. He spent an entire afternoon scouring the stench of glue-making out of his precious iron pot, which had accompanied him for so many years he sometimes thought of it as a congenial friend. He left the horses to stand guard—for they would be sure to alert him if they sensed an enemy approaching—and ranged wide, gathering edible plants. He walked the shoreline until he found a place where salt pans had formed. The deer’s hooves were boiled, and antlers polished. When she vanished one day with Seeing, he took from Telling’s calm manner a message, and he waited for her to return, which she did late in the day bearing the deer skin wrapped around a slimy collection of cattle parts: four horns, raw hide, intestines, sinew, heart, and the best cuts of meat. He asked no questions. She volunteered no answers.

She carved and shaped hooks and drills and points from bone; she chewed sinew to make it malleable, then rolled it into thread. She glued side strips of a denser red wood to the backbone of silver-bark, and in the shallow channel along each face, glued strips of horn. She carved out and smoothed a ring of bone to fit her right thumb.

He sat beside her. She showed him with her hands what she wanted him to do, and he did it: scraping, polishing, grinding, twisting, oiling. Talking, for he could not bear the lack of words.

“As it says in the Tale of Beginnings, ‘We tell ourselves stories to make the time pass between birth and death’. But it’s more than that. We tell tales to try to understand the world, the gods, and ourselves. Let me tell you a tale.”