He moved around the desk, took the tray out of her hands, and closed one hand around her pale throat, his palm coarse and warm against her skin.

“If you speak of such things again,” he said, “I will kill you.”

IN DEMON LAND, anything can happen. In every meaningful way, she is already dead. Except for the one last angry spark that has reawakened.

THERE WAS A shrub whose name she did not know but that produced beautiful five-petaled pink flowers to adorn most every garden in Kartu Town. The old woman at the brothel had taught the girls to brew it for a purgative that would loosen their wombs if they inconveniently caught a man’s seed. It had to be brewed in just the right proportions: too little, and you would just vomit; too much, and it would kill you, as it had killed the second-best-earning girl in the brothel, the one whose death had precipitated her sale to the caravan.

They were accustomed to her presence in the kitchens. Late in the evening, it was easy to take Girish a cup he was too drunk to recognize as different from his usual tea. Because the brew sickened and weakened him, he suffocated on his own vomit as she held him down. But his thrashing death throes woke others. Her back was to the door of his chamber when it opened, and a woman screamed in a panic. Holding a lamp, Mountain stamped into the chamber while she sat beside the dead man and the half-empty pitcher. He blocked the door, so she could not escape. When the master’s wives arrived, staring in shock and horror at the scene, she turned a calm gaze on them and, raising the pitcher, drank the rest.

PART FIVE: MIRRORS

28

IN THE HUNDRED, in the season of the Flower Rains, the rains bloomed and withered in erratic patterns that depended on the topography and how far west or north or east or south you stood. If you knew your geography, you could anticipate the weather. In the Barrens, a person could lie in a stupor out in the open for days, and still not get wet.

When at last the girl roused, she stared at the envoy of Ilu with a changed look. Sometimes a person knows who they are and wishes they did not. Ignoring his tentative greeting, she saddled Seeing and rode away without saddling Telling in turn.

“The hells!” By the time he got Telling saddled, she’d flown out of sight into the wispy clouds crowding the mountains.

He flew in sweeps, even near enough to survey the campsite where outlanders and local hirelings were digging a ditch and berm around a pair of hills. He searched but did not find her. Long after the light failed, he returned to the altar. With fumbling hands, he cared for the horse and released it. He collected firewood to augment an old stack piled here by another reeve, possibly himself. Disturbed by this activity, rodents and spiders fled.