“You are right to wish to know details.”

He sketched the scene: night on the river, the demon he had faced, the battle that came afterward, the old villager who had died. Anji had been very brave, and foolhardy, she supposed, but perhaps he would not measure it as foolishness but rather as prudence. Know your enemy if you want to defeat him. It had worked out this time. That was all you could really hope for.

The Lantern’s one-room counting house was ringed by twenty-seven stone cups filled with oil, the last one taking fire as Avisha and Jagi touched the wick with a burning stick, an offering of Sapanasu’s fire. A new song rose as the procession descended to the gate, everyone clapping.

“ ‘Empty your basket! Don’t carry stones! Heya! Heya! Today we celebrate.’ ”

“Our children will know these songs well,” said Mai, “even if we stumble through them.”

Beyond the gate, laborers from the fields and reeves and soldiers from the barracks joined them, the sung responses turning deep with so many male voices. They marched to the Witherer’s altar and draped the thatched roof with curtains of green leaves strung on fishing line while Mai and Anji observed from a distance. Priya offered Mai juice. Sheyshi held an umbrella over her head to keep off the sun. Anji tilted his head back to watch the eagles overhead, marking, Mai supposed, the pattern of their sweeps. Chief Tuvi watched the crowd.

“I thought we made it clear that we wanted no temple raised to their Merciless One, not in our settlement,” said Anji as they walked behind the procession toward the irrigation ponds. The singers formed up on either side of a walled garden.

“It’s only a garden, planted with useful medicinal herbs and other spices. And it’s all the way out here by the irrigation ponds.”

“Near the training grounds and the laborers’ camp.” He frowned. “It’s trouble, if you ask me.”

She snapped open her fan. “Would it be less trouble if a merchant opened up a brothel? There are plenty of men here, just like in Kartu.”

“Has that old woman been to see you? She’s dangerous.”

She laughed. “Anji! No, the Hieros has not visited, although I am sure I would enjoy her conversation, since so few interesting people travel to the Barrens. I am bereft of company, which I was not in Olossi.” She fluttered her fan.

“Hu! I am struck.”

Her belly tightened. She sucked in a breath and let it out as the contraction released its grip.

“Mai? Are you well?”

“It’s nothing. It comes and goes, not often. Priya says it is perfectly normal.”

“She is a trained midwife?”

“She attended births in our household in Kartu. Before that, she read texts written about medical matters.”

“I am sure she did, but I will breathe more easily when you are shipped off to the Ri Amarah. Tomorrow, at first light.”

So suddenly he changed his mind! She might have spent the last months in company with Miravia, and yet as she watched the couples enter the garden and pour rice wine onto the soil, she could not regret seeing the settlement expand and ripen. In the months to come, more Qin soldiers would cycle through and, she hoped, find wives, while meantime Anji had told her that another dozen or so men at other forts and stations looked ready to marry. Now they could truly say they were building homes in the Hundred.