Volias sighed and rose. “I guess I’m too late.”

“No,” said Nallo, without pulling away from Arda’s pleasant touch. “Just to be clear, I don’t want any other kind of proposition from you. But if I go to Clan Hall, then maybe it’ll seem like I’m starting new, of my own choice.”

Thunder boomed overhead, and the rain pounded harder. Laughing reeves and hirelings dashed in under the cover of the canvas hall. Even Pil slouched in, looking like a drowned Rat, and with arms folded across his chest sank down on a bench alone, brooding.

“To be up there like that—I can’t imagine never going aloft again.”

“Jessed,” said Volias, without heat or mockery. He was just speaking the truth.

Tumna had chosen her, and now they were bound.

THE BOOM OF thunder and the downpour that followed came as a relief to Mai after weeks enduring the dusty heat and dreary isolation of the Barrens, all too similar to the days of her childhood in Kartu Town. How far away the markets of Olossi seemed now. She pressed a hand over her swollen abdomen. The baby lay quiet, undisturbed by the storm. But she sighed, clutching a message brought midday by a reeve from Argent Hall.

She sat on a humble bench on a raised porch in the shelter of one of only four proper buildings in the entire settlement. From this vantage, sited advantageously on the slope, she watched rain make a haze of air, listened to its drumming on tile roof, on canvas, on dirt. Water tracked runnels into every crack and low spot, headed for the flat plain beyond the lower berm where in years to come fields would flourish if the massive irrigation project proved successful. An eagle spiraled in, battered by turbulence as it made for the training ground on Eagle Hill to the north. The rain was so dense she could not even see the hill where ancient ruins surrounded a rich vein of naya sinks. Water rushed down the gully, a muted roar rather like the thoughts in her head.

Soon it would be too dark to see. But since she could not read, it scarcely mattered. Priya had twice read out Miravia’s message.

“ ‘Strangely, the terrible situation in the Hundred in which so many suffer works to my benefit. Contracts can be delivered by paying a fee to reeves flying between the halls, but bodies must travel by land. The uncles will not risk bodily harm coming to me by sending me on unsafe roads, even if they think nothing of those other harms that may come to me when the marriage is finally sealed. It’s true that it says in the law that a girl must not be forced into marriage against her will, but were I to refuse, that would ruin my hopes of marriage forever, since no one else will want me because I will have proven myself to have a rebellious temperament. It will furthermore put a stain on my family’s trading contacts with other Ri Amarah houses, and in the hopes my cousins cherish of contracting respectable marriages. For me to refuse would be to betray my family. My despair must remain in my heart. Yet while a person may hope to hide their face from the presence of the Hidden One, we are not hidden from that gaze even if we believe that because we cannot see that which is hidden, that it therefore does not exist.’ ”