“I wonder what happened to Keshad and his sister,” Avisha said when the little ones were asleep, wrapped up in the blanket, and she and Nallo lay on the ground sharing the cloak against the damp night air. “They should have been ahead of us on the road.”

“They’ve gone off the road. There could be a dozen trails, a hundred, leading through the fields and woods. We should take to the fields, too. If an army marches, it’ll be on this road.”

“You said we’d be safer going this way than east on West Track and walking into Sohayil by the Passage.”

“Safer. Not safe. I’ll decide in the morning.”

In the morning, Nallo identified a trail that ran more or less parallel to the main path, seen as a berm beyond fields and coppices. Walking on this trail, they spotted clusters of buildings that marked hamlets or villages, but they kept their distance.

That night, they camped under a scrawny Ladytree growing at the edge of a meadow. Its canopy was dying. Bugs ate at them all night, a cloud of annoyance. A nightjar clicked, so that she’d start dropping off to sleep and then startle awake. Late in the night it rained again, dripping through the branches.

By morning, Zianna was sniffling. They slogged through intermittent rains all day, drying out when the sun shone.

By the next morning, Zianna had started to cough. Although Nallo explained that they had not yet begun to climb into the Soha Hills, this was rugged country, sparsely inhabited, and rough walking on a path that sometimes was smooth and easy and sometimes little more than a gouge barely wide enough for one foot. Several times Nallo stopped and, pointing aloft, marked the passage of an eagle high overhead.

After some days they reached the outlying hills and began climbing. As they toiled up the first slope, slick from the rains, Avisha slipped. She lost her hold on the washtub, and it slid downslope and spilled its contents every which way on the wet hillside among trees and scrub.

She scrambled down through thornbush and prickle-berry to retrieve their belongings and the precious bag of rice while the others huddled under such cover as the woodland gave them. Her father’s cordmaking stand—the one special thing of his she had salvaged from the ruins of the house—had broken in half. The fire had weakened it, and the fall snapped it. Just like her life. She sobbed, holding the pieces. Papa had handled this so gently, and now it was gone. It couldn’t be fixed. None of it could be fixed.

“Vish! What are you doing down there?”

Of course Nallo had no idea how sharp her voice sounded.

“Almost got everything,” she called back.

A length of bright orange cloth, not theirs, had gotten stuck among prickleberry. She pushed over to it, careful of thorns. The cloth was stained, wet, torn. Below, tumbled into the bush, lay the corpse of a young woman, freshly killed: blood stained her thighs and belly. She’d been raped and had her abdomen cut open in a jagged line.