But cursed if he’d let it go this time. Grunting and straining, he climbed to the top. By the time he flopped down on level ground, his hands were bleeding and the knees of his leathers were badly scraped. He lay there for a while, the wind blowing over him, and panted until his head stopped whirling and his muscles ceased quivering.

At last, he regained the strength to raise his head. Not a stone’s throw away, Scar slumbered. As for the rest, the altar lay exactly as he had left it, glittering but empty. Forbidden ground, it had cast him away.

The Guardian had vanished.

49

“Recite again the hundred and one altars.”

Marit laughed. “My head hurts from everything you’ve taught me.”

Her companion, the nameless woman wearing the cloak of night, smiled. “A rest then, before we walk. This is a particularly lovely view.”

They sat at their ease at the edge of a rock altar ringed by a thorny tangle of flowering purple and white heart’s ease. The rocky ledge overlooked the vale of Iliyat, Lord Radas’s ancestral home. Under clearing skies, neatly tended fields surrounded tidy villages, everything in order and no one moving on the roads.

“It’s very quiet,” said Marit.

“No trouble disturbs those who labor and build. Isn’t that as it should be?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you frown, Ramit?”

She could not speak her thoughts aloud: A pleasant woman with an agreeable philosophy and a concerned demeanor ought not to be marching with an army that burned villages and “cleansed” folk by stringing them up from poles to strangle under the weight of sagging arms.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, testing a dozen phrases and discarding them all. “I see that the vale of Iliyat lies at peace, which Haldia surely does not. Yet how do I know those who live below have peace in their hearts and justice in their villages? How do I know that the folk in High Haldia deserved to be overrun? How can an army bring justice? Isn’t that the question the orphaned girl asks in the Tale of the Guardians? Didn’t the gods agree with her?”

“So they did.” The woman nodded. Her hair was pulled back and braided without ornament, suggesting a woman of simple tastes but a complex mind. “We must never forget that the gods came because of her cry for justice. But there are many forms of coercion. Brute force is only one of them. It’s not always easy to know which form of coercion causes the deepest harm, today, or next year, or when a child who is a toddling child now is stooped with age. Is it better to live quietly in servitude or die seeking freedom?”

“Why should those be our only choices?”