“The captain saw me. He thought I would bring ill luck down on them because that’s what demons do. He gave me a fair choice. I could walk into the storm of my own will, or he would make sure I died some other way before the journey was over. That was the first time since I walked into demon land that I got to choose.” She hid her face behind a hand, and then, finding that the voices of her lost tribesfolk did not call to her as they had in the storm, she lowered the hand and looked at him.

He smiled gently.

“I can’t go home, Uncle. I am a different person, not that one who lived before.”

He sighed and said nothing, by which he meant he agreed.

Yet Rats can’t stay quiet for long.

“Do you know the tale of how the wide lake came to rest here, caught between the mountains and the cliff? It happened in the Tale of Change, when the delvings captured a merling and decided that in order to keep it from escaping back into the sea they must dig a prison far from the ocean and joined to no stream or rivulet down which it could slip and slide. So they cut a path deep through the earth and under the watershed—”

“I missed you,” she said.

For a breath, two breaths, and then five, he could not speak.

A rippling movement flashed above the drowsy waters.

“Look there!” she cried.

A rocky islet lay surrounded by the lifeless waters. The islet, too, revealed no sign of life except for the desiccated remains of flowers draped over a series of crude stone pillars. A horse flew gracefully over the sea and circled the islet, and then the rider noticed them standing exposed on the ridge.

They waited.

At length her mare clattered to earth on the ridge, and Marit dismounted. She halted a prudent distance away and drew from a leather sheath a serviceable short sword, nothing fancy to look at: plain, good steel. “The sword, called death, cuts the strand of life.”

“Where did you find it?” he asked.

“The place no one else thought to look,” she said with a grin. “I’m Marit, as I said before. Kirit I already know. Will you tell me who you are, ver?”

“No one who ever did a cursed thing in his life to deserve good or ill, verea. But my mother, who has long since crossed the Spirit Gate, gave me the name Jothinin.”

“ ‘Foolish Jothinin, light-minded Jothinin.’ An old-fashioned name. Just like in the tale.”

He smiled but said nothing.

“What is a Guardian?” she asked, but answered herself. “It’s not a thing already made. It’s what we become of our own shaping.”