She saw no rice fields, but a few agricultural strips recently plowed and planted. Orchards and pastureland made up the second ring, and beyond that—as she had seen before—the valley had once been forest, but it was all hacked down, leaving gouges in the earth and serious erosion where the rains had cut unprotected dirt into a hundred destructive channels. Charcoal heaps smoldered under caps of dirt.

They headed for the bulwark of the Orator. The stony peak lay directly ahead, her three daughters clustered close. The sun’s last rays glinted on the spires, and as the disc slipped below the western horizon, the shadow of twilight grew. A wind out of the northeast thrummed in the spires like a voice too deep for its words to be understood.

Although the sun had set, a dazzle glimmered atop the rounded head of the shortest daughter. There they trotted to earth on a dusty top ringed by boulders any one of which might topple from the peak and crash down the steep face to the tree line below.

They had arrived at a Guardian altar.

She released the mare before setting her own feet on the labyrinth’s entrance. She paced its measures, seeing how the different landscapes passed through late afternoon all the way into night and back again, depending on how far west or east they lay in the Hundred. She paused, recognizing the overlook onto Sohayil.

Twilight lingered in the west, surprise evident in his tone. “You’re above Walshow!” he said through the crossroads that linked them.

“Hari! I hoped to find you.”

“Why are you in Walshow? Just where you shouldn’t be.”

“The army has moved out. There’s no one here but the folk they’ve left behind.”

“Lucky for them.”

“Maybe for the locals. There are others who are little better off than fish left to gasp on the shore. You’re on the western edge of the basin of Sohayil.”

“So I am. Lost and lonely and, fortunately, not with the others. Although I must soon join them. I have made of my assigned task an utter fiasco for which I will suffer, I guarantee it. Lord Radas sent that pervert Bevard to gather up the dregs of the broken army, and has called me back to him. Thus I linger in the west, and travel as slowly as I may.” He laughed as he spoke, but the edge in his voice was sharp. “Where will you go now?”

“I’ll ride the Istri Walk south, on the army’s track.”

“Why go after them?”

“Because I must. Just like you.”

“Eiya!” But the lament sounded sweet spoken in that slurred foreign accent.

Saying no good-bye, she left him behind. She walked the labyrinth to its center, where she found Warning had already drunk her fill from a basin chipped out of rock, clear liquid seeping out of the stone to form a pool so still that she saw her own face as in a mirror.

She looked the same, brown face, brown eyes, black hair clipped short so it wouldn’t get in her way. But she was no longer the reeve who had partnered Flirt. She was someone else now, a stranger with a face and heart she recognized but whose purpose remained in shadow.