He could get nothing more out of him—the raven only croaked in terror. “I do not understand!” Vansen cried. “Where is the smoke coming from? Has the forest caught fire?”

“Gyir says no,” Barrick said slowly, and now even he sounded uneasy. “It is from fire someone has made—he says it stinks of metal and flesh.” The prince turned to look at silent Gyir, whose eyes were little more than red slits in his blank mask of a face. “He says it is the smoke of many small fires…or one very big one.”

7

Chasing the Jackals

Twilight had been jealous from the first of his brother���s gleaming songs, and when Daystar lost the depth of his music and flew away, Twilight climbed into his brother’s place among the Firstborn. He made children with both Breeze and Moisture.

From the womb of Breeze came the brothers Whitefire and Silvergleam, and Judgment their sister. From the womb of Moisture came Thunder, Ocean, and Black Earth, and though their mothers were twinned, from the very first these six children could not find harmony among themselves.

—from One Hundred Considerations
out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

EVEN THE WEAK MORNING LIGHT seeping in from the high, small windows was enough to tell Briony that she was not in her own paneled chamber in the royal residence. In fact, she was surrounded by white plastered walls and dark-skinned women in loose, soft dresses, all busy making beds or darning clothes, and talking in a quiet, musical language Briony could not understand. For a long moment she could only stare, dumbfounded, wondering what had happened.

The truth did not wait long, though: as she rolled over and sat up, clutching the blanket close around the flimsy nightclothes she had somehow acquired, memories began to leak back.

“Good morning, Bri-oh-nee-zisaya.” Briony turned to find a slender middle-aged woman standing beside the bed. The woman smiled, showing a flash of unusual color. “Did you sleep well?”

Of course. Shaso had brought her to this place in the back alleys of whatever this Marrinswalk town was called…Lander’s something…? They had taken refuge in the house of one of Shaso’s Tuani countrymen, and this was the gold-toothed mistress of the house.

“Yes. Yes, thank you, very well.” Suddenly she felt shy, knowing she had been lying here sleeping, perhaps snoring, while these dark, delicate women worked quietly around her. “Is…I would like to speak to Shaso.” She remembered the reverence with which the women had spoken of him, as though Princess Briony should be his servant instead of the other way around, something that irritated her more than she liked to admit. “Lord Shaso. Can you take me to him?”

“He will know you are waking and will be expecting you,” the older woman said, smiling again. Briony could count half a dozen other women in the large room, and she seemed to recall there had been even more the previous night. “Let us help you dress.”

It all went swiftly and even enjoyably, the women’s talk mostly incomprehensible, a continuous dove-soft murmur that even in the waxing morning light made Briony feel sleepy again. It was so odd, these women and their foreign rooms and ways, their foreign tongue, as if the entire house had been lifted out of the sandy streets of some distant southern city by a mischievous god or goddess and spun through the air to land here in the middle of cold, muddy, winter’s-end Eion. Somebody was definitely on the wrong continent.