The island was small, not quite a mile from end to end.

I halted at the foot of the incline; it seemed a private spot.

I had only the tribal ways to fall back on. I had seen no religion or reverence in Eshkorek, save for the spitting of men at the name of Uastis. I cleared a space in the rough weeds, and piled up a mound of stones, leaving it hollow at the center.

Into the hollow I pushed dry stems and stuck a flint to kindle them. The fire flared, quick and too hungry, an ephemeral blue. I took my knife—it had drunk her blood in my dream—and stuck it in my arm, and let my own blood sprinkle the blaze. I cut off a piece of my hair and gave him that, too.

I thought I knew what he wanted, my father. I recalled how I had woken once before, dreaming of his death and said, “I will kill her.” Now all the uncertainties, the powers of healing and slaying and all the rest, came together in one ferocious urge I recognized as another’s. The gifts were his, the wish was his, the deed was his. Vazkor, unquiet in his death; my unquiet life showed me the manner of it.

I said aloud, soft into the crackle of the brittle, already dying flames, “I swear it, Vazkor, on the fire and on my blood. Vazkor, my father, she has cheated both you and me, and she shall pay the price of it. I will strive to find her. When I do, I will kill her. You have revealed it to me. Now I know. Be still, Vazkor my father, wolf-king, Javhovor, only leave it with me.”

It seemed to me then, the brief ignition faded in the stones, a shadow oozed from the fire and rested flickeringly against the slate wall. The fire’s shadow, a sort of shadowfire itself, resembling the dark reflection of a brightness and a strength burned out what was lingering, with a faint dull luster, in me.

“Believe it,” I said to the shadow.

At that the flame dropped to nothing. I was left with the empty sea-rocked night, and my iron future.

Near dawn, Hwenit stole through the weeds and discovered me sitting there against the slate.

“Why are you here, Mordrak? Are you sick?”

“How can a demon be sick? I’m unused to your tender care. Go back, girl. The sun’s not up yet.”

She slipped close and put her fingers on my neck in a touch that made me shiver.

“You do not understand your powers,” she said.

“That’s true enough. Yet I think now I begin to comprehend the seed that planted them.”

“I mean,” she said, “you have no way to master your powers. They master you. You heal without being aware of it. Perhaps you kill as rashly.”

I looked at her. The sky had paled enough to show me her face, which might have been the face of another girl, steady, clever, and compassionate. I saw then what her priest-tutor had seen, the day he singled her out for healer and witch.