“Your Dorinahs have far greater priorities,” Taigan said, “and far fewer gifted people. It’s not your petty militia they fear, but your ability to call on the satellites.”

“So, you’re saying the Dhai are good at something?” Lilia said.

“No,” Taigan said, and began to lead the bear off the road.

“Where are you going?”

“Around Liona,” Taigan said.

“But… they interview any Dhai going in or out. If they don’t have a record that you left, you can’t get back. They’ll think I’m an exile.”

“You won’t be returning,” Taigan said. “Or have you forgotten your oath to me?”

Lilia gazed up at the hulking stone of the hold and felt a renewed burst of fear. She had agreed to leave Dhai forever. Twice now.

“We’re going around,” he said.

“You can’t go around the pass,” Lilia said. “It’s… impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” Taigan said. “Simply not pleasant. You’ll need warmer clothes. Or perhaps I will cart you there in the belly of a bone tree.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Lilia said.

“It will give me time to train you privately,” he said. “Some place no one will get hurt.”

“I would never hurt anyone,” Lilia said, but then she remembered Gian.

“It’s not other people I’m worried about,” Taigan said.

Taigan couldn’t say how one spotted the difference between a person who could channel the satellites and a person who couldn’t. The old woman who’d mentored him spun great stories around seeing some bright essence about a person, but he had never seen it. Most teachers, he suspected, did as he did – probed at a person with the breath of the satellites and looked for resistance. Those who could channel had a natural inclination to resist the power of the stars. Many had drawn on that power from their birth – a function as innate to them as drawing their first breath. If one was lucky, the child might be able to draw on the same star as those who tested them. Then they could see the breath of the star when the child drew on it.

But this girl, this little scullery girl… she resisted his every effort. Perhaps she was too old to train. Or simply not as skilled as he had hoped. He had a week to break her, provided the way across the mountains progressed as well as he expected. But as he watched her huff her breath into her cupped hands that morning in the mountains, shivering despite four days of concentration exercises meant to take her mind away from such things – he didn’t think it would be enough. He began to wonder if it was worth it to find her mother, if all she had passed on to her daughter was this poor display.