“I was born in a village in southeast Farhal. Very isolated, quite poor. My family was too poor to keep me, so they gave me a month’s worth of rice and put me on the road. I walked to Toskala looking for work as a laborer. But I became a reeve, instead.”

“Where’s your eagle, then?”

The memory was still fresh. Marit shuddered. “My eagle is dead. She was murdered. By men under the command of Lord Radas of Iliyat.”

Sediya showed no reaction to the name, her gaze still bent on the grass she was winding around her deformed fingers. At last she said, to the dirt, “I’m a Black Eagle. Born during the season of the Flood Rains.”

Marit shut her eyes. “That’s the year I—” But she could not say That’s the year I was murdered. Ghosts didn’t sit on the ground with the damp soaking through their leggings and have conversations with brutalized young women. “I’m a Green Goat.”

The statement made Sediya’s eyes flare as she murdered the earth with her gaze. “You’d be counting forty-seven years. You can’t be that old. You don’t look it.”

“Did you serve your apprentice year with the Lantern?” asked Marit, laughing. “You sorted those numbers quickly.”

“I did not, though everyone thought I should,” said Sediya with a grin. The change of expression betrayed a friendly spirit with a lively manner, hiding beneath the grime. “I served my year with Ilu, because I liked the thought of getting to walk to the nearby towns and see a bit of the countryside. Afterward, the temple wanted to keep me for the eight years’ service, and my brother would have tithed me out to them in exchange for freedom from the yearly tithings, but I wouldn’t go.” Her expression darkened, cutting to a dull gray bleakness with the speed of a machete hacking off a rains-green tree limb. “This is the gods’ way of punishing me for not taking the service.”

“What was done to you has nothing to do with the gods.”

“Doesn’t it? What are you, then? What are the others like you, the ones who see into your heart, who ride the winged horses? The cloaks are the Guardians, the servants of the gods.”

“That can’t be. Guardians bring justice. That’s what the gods decreed.”

“The gods turned their backs on us.” She pulled the grass off her finger and pressed it into the dirt, pushing and pushing until earth buried that frail strand of green. “The Guardians aren’t people. They’re demons.”

Marit remembered—felt to her bones—the poisonous air that swirled around the quiet voice of Lord Radas, speaking to her across a Guardian altar.

“Don’t be angry, I didn’t mean it. Don’t hurt me.”

We’re both afraid, thought Marit. Fear drives us.

She rose. “We travel at night. Can you ride?”

Sediya rose awkwardly. A trickle of liquid slipped down her ankle, and shook out as a drop to vanish on the soil. “It’s easier to walk.” She drew the back of a hand over her eyes. Healed scratches laced the skin of her arms. Her right shoulder had a gouge in it, knotted with scar tissue. Using the movement as hesitation, she straightened her taloos, which had gotten twisted. She bit her lip, puffed out breath, found her courage and her strength.