She trudged past the triple-gated entrance to a temple dedicated to Ilu, the Herald. The gatekeeper slouched on a wooden bench under a thatched lean-to, staring disinterestedly at the road. His dog whined, ears flat, and slunk under the bench. She wrapped her cloak more tightly, but no one—not the gatekeeper and none of the folk walking along the road—paid the slightest attention to her. Salt spray nipped the air. Fish ponds lined the rocky shore. The bay gleamed gray-blue in late-afternoon light, waves kicking against the seawall.

On the seaward edge the land rose into a series of high bluffs while the road curved inland past rice fields lined with reeds and salt grass. As the sun set, she found an empty byre to shelter in against the night rains, its straw mildewed. She didn’t really sleep; she lay with eyes closed and thoughts in a tangle, never quite coming into focus.

She woke at dawn and rose and walked, and at last saw the stout stone pillar carved with a hood and feather in relief and the huge wooden perch, freshly whitewashed, that marked the turning to Copper Hall. She was home.

Wiping tears from her eyes, she plodded up the long slope toward the high ground, feeling more and more winded, as if all the life and spirit were being drained out of her. As if she was afraid. How would she be greeted by her comrades at the reeve hall? She had broken the boundaries. She would have to accept punishment.

Aui! She had to find out what had happened to Joss, protect him if she could or back him up on his reckless decision to investigate the Guardian’s altar in Liya Pass. Hadn’t he been right? Wasn’t it true that something was terribly wrong?

No person in the Hundred had stood before a Guardian at an assizes since her long-dead grandfather was a boy. Anyway, an old man’s memory might be suspect. The meticulous records stored in Sapanasu’s temples recording the proceedings of assizes courts where Guardians had presided might, in fact, be explained as a conventional form used by the clerks and hierophants of the Lantern to account for the decisions made by wandering judges who were otherwise perfectly human.

Many said the Guardians had abandoned the Hundred. Others said the Guardians had never existed, that they were only characters sung of in the Tales. Yet on the Guardian’s altar up on the Liya Pass, she and Joss had discovered bones—the bones of a murdered Guardian, maybe, because a pelvis could have been splintered in that way only by a tremendous fall or a massive blow.

But all the tales agreed that Guardians couldn’t die.

The reeve hall was a huge compound surrounded by fields and orchards and open ground where a pair of reeves—relatively new ones, by the look of their tentative maneuvers—were learning to harness up under the supervision of a patient fawkner. She didn’t recognize the young reeves, but she was pretty sure the fawkner was her good friend Gadit, although she was holding her body at a canted angle, as if her right shoulder was stiff from injury.