For her own part, Marit thanked the envoys properly and retreated, alone, to the glade where Warning rested out of sight.

But when she unclasped the cloak to take off the rags and put on decent clothing, the cloak slithered back to clutch at her calves as if it were a living thing. She began to heave, sucking and coughing. She could not get air. The cloak poured up her body, wrapping her until she was too tangled to stand. She sprawled, vision fading . . . choking, she grasped the clasp and fixed the cursed thing around her neck. She lay for a bit, skin clammy and hot by turns. After a while, she got to her feet. The cloak swagged around her like ordinary cloth, draping to mid-calf.

An ordinary piece of cloth in every way, you might think, except it never became grimy. It never stank. The clasp did not rub raw her skin. Magic infused it. Death’s cloak, she might call it, and it was true enough. Death’s cloak had risen off a Guardian’s bones to smother her that day up on Ammadit’s Tit when she and Joss had broken the boundaries and invaded a Guardian altar. A day later, death’s cloak had claimed her in truth, when the knife had pierced her heart in the woodsmen’s camp. If she was dead, then it was appropriate that death’s cloak wore her and would not let her go.

“What are you, if you aren’t one of them?” Sediya had asked.

Maybe she was just asking the wrong question. Not “Why did the Guardians vanish, and where did they go?” but “What is a Guardian, after all? Therefore, what am I?”

SHE RODE TO Olo’osson and made her way via back roads and isolated irrigation berms to Argent Hall, the westernmost reeve hall, on the shore of the salty Olo’o Sea. She released Warning to fend for herself, as the mare had done for an unknown time before Marit found her. She hid the harness and saddle in an abandoned shack and walked to the gates to ask for work in the lofts as a fawkner’s assistant’s assistant. Remarkably, they took her on.

They assigned her to the most menial of tasks: sweeping, cleaning, hauling. Maybe later, they told her, if she proved herself, they might let her start working with the harness.

She had to keep her eyes lowered at all times, so no one could possibly suspect how much she could really see. She pretended to be a woman fallen on hard times who had become suspicious and unfriendly because of the beatings she had endured from an angry husband and his unsympathetic relatives. It was a situation she’d encountered all too often as a reeve. They accepted her odd manners because she did her work, and because they were so poorly supervised and understaffed that many of their long-term hirelings had recently quit. Because the reeve halls tended to attract people who didn’t fit into the daily life of the village.