“WHY DO YOU follow me?” asked Kirit.

“I’m the hells unlikely to follow them.” Downstream along the bank of the River Istri, Marit indicated distant lights sweeping northward through the sky out of the Toskala.

“They are looking for us,” said Kirit. “It is safer if we do not travel together.”

“You don’t trust me.”

The girl shrugged.

“I thank you anyway,” continued Marit, “for not joining them. I’m not your enemy, Kirit. But I have a cursed good idea that they’re headed back to their camp, to see if Hari has woken. To give him his staff. Then they’ll be after both of us.”

“He will betray us?”

“I like him. But that doesn’t mean we can trust him.”

“Or that I can trust you,” said the girl. “Do not follow me. Maybe you are their spy.”

“I’m not,” said Marit more with weariness than heat. “But I’m not going to debate that now. At the turn of the next month—when Lion falls into Ibex—I will walk the shore of the Salt Sea where the spine of the Earth Mother cradles the birthing waters.” The girl stared at her, devoid of emotion. “If you don’t know of it, you being an outlander, the Salt Sea lies northwest beyond Heaven’s Ridge, where the gods cleft the Hundred from the lands beyond. When a new reeve finishes her first year of training, her circuit of the land, that’s the last place she visits: to lay an offering of flowers at the Earth Mother’s womb. You’ll know the place when you see it.”

“You go back to them, now?”

“I am not one of them, Kirit. Surely you saw they meant to destroy me. If you won’t trust me enough to ally with me, then what if they find you in the end? Five, to judge one. They’re after you now, just like they’re after me. And most likely they’re after the envoy, wherever he’s hiding. As for me, I’m going to find my staff.”

REEVES PATROLLING OVER the Liya Pass had once commonly met at Candle Rock to exchange news and to replenish wood for the signal fire kept ready in case of emergency. But the fire-pits were half filled with dust and debris, the white stones that had once ringed the hollows tumbled out of line. Under the craggy overhang, spiders and rock mice had made comfortable homes in the depleted woodpile.

What a bright day that had been, Joss waiting for her, him so young and her so eager. Where had that young woman gone? What we have lost we can never get back again.

Marit stood where she and Joss had so long ago shared the embrace of the Devourer. With the setting sun behind her, she looked east toward the ridge of hill held by the hierarchs to be sacred to the Lady of Beasts, to whom she had served her year’s apprenticeship as a girl of fifteen. Ammadit’s Tit could be mistaken for no other landmark.