I kept walking and gradually felt a sort of equilibrium returning, as if I’d shed some measure of the weight simply by acknowledging it was there. It was not, after all, so heavy that I could not carry it, and while it was unwise to hope the damage might miraculously be repaired, it was also unwise to forget that I had thought myself destroyed once before and been wrong.

I was surprised to reach the middle of the maze. I took a pebble from the bowl of tokens and put it in my inner waistcoat pocket with the token I’d found in Tedoro’s clothes and still did not know the meaning of.

And I probably never would know its significance, for I could not ask Tedoro. She was dead and I was deafened.

I walked the second half of the maze more mindfully, aware now of the cold, of the broad sweep of the cornfield around me, of every careful twisting step of my path. Nothing was resolved or changed, and the memory of the revethavar still waited, like the ogre in another old wonder-tale, but acknowledging my grief made it easier to bear, now that I was not wasting strength on denying it.

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?”