“But we do,” her voice chimed from behind him—so like her mother’s that chills skittered across his skin.

He paused, lowered his head to curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, “It’s not me you remember. What you believe is your affair.”

“But that’s not what I mean.”

Something in her tone, the windy suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose contours smuggled light and dark this way and that. The wilderness rose behind her, far more pale but likewise divided.

“I can distinguish between the created and uncreated,” she said with something between embarrassment and pride. “I am one of the Few.”

Achamian whirled, scowling both at her and the brightness.

“What? You’re a witch?”

A deliberate nod, made narrow by a smile.

“I didn’t come here to find my father,” she said, as though everything until now had been nothing but cruel theatre. “Well … I thought you might be my father, but I really didn’t … care … that much, I think.” Her eyes widened, as though turning from the inner to the outer on some invisible swivel.

“I came to find my teacher. I came to learn the Gnosis.”

There it was, her reason.

There is a progression to all things. Lives, encounters, histories, each trailing their own nameless residue, each burrowing into a black, black future, groping for the facts that conjure purpose out of the cruelties of mere coincidence.

And Achamian had had his fill of it.

She sees his face slacken, despite the matted wire of his beard. She sees his complexion blanch, despite the sun’s morning glare. And she knows that what her mother once told her is in fact true: Drusas Achamian possesses the soul of a teacher.

So the old whore didn’t lie.

Almost three months have passed since her flight from the Andiamine Heights. Three months of searching. Three months of hard winter travel. Three months of fending against Men. She travelled inland as much as possible, knowing that the Judges would be watching the ports, that their agents would be ranging the coastal roads, hungry to please her mother, their Holy Empress. It seems a miracle whenever she recalls it. That time in the high Cepalor when the wolves paced her step for weary step, little more than feral ghosts through the soundless snowfall. The mad ferryman at the Wutmouth crossing. And the brigands, who tracked her only to turn away when they saw the caste-noble cut of her clothes. There was fear in the land, fear everywhere she turned, and it suited her and her needs well.