For watch after watch, Sorweel lay rigid in his cot, holding his own hand, pressing the impossible blister on his palm. Porsparian slept across the ground in the near darkness, his breathing broken by a periodic cough and wheeze. When he at last learned their language, Sorweel decided, he would tease the man for snoring like an old woman.

The sounds of the Great Ordeal subsided, drew out and away until the young King could almost believe that only his tent remained, solitary on a trampled plain. There was, it seemed, a moment of absolute silence, a moment where every heartbeat hesitated, every breath paused, and the numb immobility of death fell upon all things.

He asked it to take him. It was as close as he had come to prayer since the day his father had died.

Then he heard something. It was almost too broad to be distinguished from the quiet at first, as if wings, spread too wide, simply became the sky. But slowly, contours resolved from the background, a kind of porous roar, something without a singular origin, but rather born of many. For the longest time, he could not place it, and for a panicked moment he even imagined that it came from the city, the combined screams and cries of his people, dying beneath the swords of their dark-skinned conquerors.

Then in a rush he realized …

The storks.

The storks called from across the nocturnal hills. They always did this, every spring. Legend said that each of them sang to a different star, naming their sons and daughters, beseeching, cajoling, guiding the gosling descent of innumerable stick-limbed souls …

Sorweel finally dozed, warm with thoughts of his mother and his first childhood visit to the Viturnal Nesting. He could remember her beauty, wane and pale. He could remember how cold her hand had seemed about his own—as though fate had begun prying loose her grasp on life even then. He could remember gazing in wonder at the storks, untold thousands of them, making white terraces of the hillsides.

“Do you know why they come here, Sorwa?”

“No, Mama …”

“Because our city is the Refuge, the hinge of the Worldly Wheel. They come here as our forefathers once came, Darling …”

Her smile. It had always seemed the world’s most obvious thing.

“They come so that their children might be safe.”

Later that night, he awoke in jerking horror, like a guard caught napping on the night of a great battle. Everything reeled in alarm and disorder. He sat up with a breath that was a cry, and at the foot of his cot he saw his father sitting, his back turned to him, weeping for his dead wife.

Sorweel’s mother.

“It’s okay, Da,” he rasped, swallowing against his own tears. “She watches … She watches over us still.”