“I’ll go.” The voice was soft and female, and not a bit tentative.

Marit turned. A woman crouched in the low entrance to the henhouse. Her hair had matted into clumps now streaked with white droppings; her face was patched with muck and dotted where wood shavings had stuck to the damp. The color of her cheap hemp taloos was concealed beneath a coat of red clay and paler mud, sprinkled with more droppings.

The woman looked right at her.

An assault of images: a weeping girl with hands bound; the ruins of a village smolder as the line of captives staggers past, but they’re too exhausted to do more than cover their noses to ease the smell as the soldiers drive them on; an unexpected moment of laughter when eight of the captives, wary comrades now, splash in a pond; stumbling in mud while somewhere out of sight a baby cries and cries. She had lied about her name, because then all the things that happened to her were really happening to someone else, someone she was not.

Marit said, “Your name is Sediya.”

Wearily, the woman said, “You’re one of them, one of the cloaks who pin us. The soldiers are their slaves, and we’re slaves to the soldiers. Now I guess I’m your slave.”

“I’m not one of them,” said Marit fiercely.

“You’re not going to kill me? Punish me? Take me back to Walshow?”

“The hells! Did you walk all the way here from Walshow?”

“Not really. I was swapped out to a scouting patrol, to service them while they were ranging, cook their rice, pound their nai. We walked for weeks and weeks, and I was too scared to run away. Then I got to seeing places I recognized, and that’s when I ran. They’ll kill me when they catch me. That’s the promise they make you.”

Marit swiped a hand through her grubby hair, and cursed, the biting words taking the edge off her anger.

The woman had the numb gaze of a person who has learned to gauge how close she is to the next time she’ll be hurt.

“Stupidest cursed thing I’ve ever done,” muttered Marit as she turned back to the gate, but she thought of the Devouring girl in the temple up on the Liya Pass and she couldn’t take back what she’d offered.

“Here, let me.” Sediya had a funny way of walking, favoring both legs, trying to hide that each step pained her. But she had clever hands; the knot fell away.

The door to the house scraped open. The shopkeeper stuck his head out, saw his sister, and blanched. “Sedi! If they see you, if they know I sheltered you—you’ve already brought trouble down on us. Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?”

Sediya wrenched open the gate. “I’m leaving.” She bent her head just as Marit caught a flash of dull fear. “May the gods allow that you fare well, Brother.”

Marit took a step out into the alley and glanced up and down the narrow lane. “No one’s moving. Let’s go.”