I stepped out of the maze just as the lower rim of the sun touched the horizon and walked back to the Orshaneisei’s main building among the long shadows. They welcomed me placidly, not commenting on my tear-reddened eyes, and I supposed they were accustomed to having pilgrims come out of the maze in all sorts of conditions. A different sister showed me to a washroom, where I washed my face and hands and felt more presentable for it.

Dinner with the Orshaneisei was much as I remembered it, cheerful and noisy and with a plentitude of food: a stew of mutton and root vegetables, bread still warm from the ovens, and a firm yellow cheese that was mild and sharp at the same time. Conversation was general, and I did not know what prompted me to take out Tedoro’s pilgrimage token and ask my neighbors if anyone knew the pilgrimage it came from.

My immediate neighbors had no more idea than I did, but they passed it down the table, and at the end nearest the kitchen, an older elven brother took it, frowned at it for a moment, and said, “This is a token from the Pilgrimage of Stairs in Ezho. Where did you find it?”

A dead girl’s pocket. “A secondhand clothes store in Cemchelarna,” I said, since that was most likely where Tedoro had come by it. “What is the Pilgrimage of Stairs?”

“It’s also called the Unfinished Pilgrimage,” said the brother, “because the man who was carving the stairs died before he reached the top of Mount Kezrinin, and no one has been called to finish it. So it’s a staircase that winds about halfway up a small mountain and stops. Someone was called to widen out a landing there, and to carve a hollow for tokens in the side of the mountain, but it is not a pilgrimage to take if heights make you at all dizzy.”

“I’m out, then,” the elven woman next to him said cheerfully. “But is it a pilgrimage to Osreian?”

“No. To Cstheio. The quartz is to symbolize clear seeing.”

And it seemed suitable in its own way that an unfinished staircase would be sacred to Cstheio, who was a goddess of the lost and the broken. Like Tedoro. Like me.

They passed the token back along the table to me, and I put it away carefully. Secondhand pilgrimage tokens might be nothing more than pretty bits and bobs, but they could also be useful as reminders, and this one would serve to remind me of the truth I’d found in the corn maze. I could not lay down the grief I carried, but I could name it for what it was, and by naming it ease the burden; clear sight was the gift of the Lady of the Stars.