At the very end of the heart’s exhaustion lies a kind of resignation, a point where resolve and surrender become indistinguishable. Wavering requires alternatives, and she has none. The world is in rout. To leave would be to embark on a flight without refuge, to lead an itinerant existence, aimless, with nothing to credit one far-flung road over another, since despair has become all directions. She has no choice because all her choices have become the same.

A broken tree, as her brothel-master once told her, can never yield.

Two days become three. Three become four. Hunger makes her dizzy, while the rain makes her clay-cold. The world hates you, she thinks, staring at the broken tower. Even here.

The last place.

And then one night he simply comes out. He looks haggard, not just like an old man who never sleeps, but one who never forgives—himself or others, it does not matter. He bears rank wine and steaming food, which she falls upon like a thankless animal. Then he sits opposite her fire and begins talking. “The Dreams,” he says with the intensity of someone who has waged long war against certain words.

She stares at him, unable to stop fingering food into her mouth, which she swallows against the sob in the back of her throat. The firelight seems to have grown shining porcupine quills. For a moment, she fears she might swoon for relief.

He speaks of the Dreams of the First Apocalypse, the nightmares that all Mandate Schoolmen share thanks to the derelict memories of their ancient founder, Seswatha, and the long dark horror of his war against the Consult. “Over and over,” he mutters, “as if a life can be writ like a poem, torments fashioned into verses …”

“Are they that bad?” she asks in the lame silence. She can scarce see him past the combination of her tears and the fire’s glare: an old and rutted face, one that has seen much—too much—and yet has not forgotten how to be tender or honest.

He winks at her before gazing down to fiddle with his pouch and pipe. He stuffs the bowl, his look both pensive and sealed. He picks up a twig from the fire’s edge; a small flame twirls from the end of it.

“They used to be,” he says, lighting the pipe. He goes cross-eyed, staring at the touch of fire and bowl.

“I don’t understand.”

He draws deeply on the stem; the bowl glows like a molten coin.

“Do you know,” he asks, exhaling a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, “why Seswatha left us his dreams?”

She knows the answer. Her mother always resorted to talk of Achamian to salve the abrasions between her and her embittered daughter. Because he was her real father, Mimara had always thought. “To assure the School of Mandate never forgets, never loses sight of its mission.”