“When you forget your history and where you came from, you might forget where you’re going. That’s what Ora Gaiso always said.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen, almost.”

Taigan shook his head. “Too old for magic,” he said. “It’s a shame. You looked much younger.”

“What are you saying?”

He kicked the stones away. “Only that I wish we’d found you ten or twelve years ago, so we could have shaped you into something useful.”

Taigan sat above the camp several nights later, perched on a massive boulder that still retained the suns’ heat. Below, the scullery girl tossed and turned in her bedroll. By all counts, she should have been so exhausted that sleep came easily. But her stamina was better than he expected for a cripple.

He saw a swarm of long-tailed swallows dive toward him in the semi-darkness. He held out his hands and dismantled them. They broke apart into the wispy tails of Saiduan characters. He smelled burnt bread and something more pungent: mold, rot.

Over the last few days, he had run the scullery girl through a number of famous battles, using stones as markers – battles the Saiduan had fought against the Dhai while they warred for the continent for a thousand years. Taigan considered himself fair at strategy, and he had the advantage of already knowing both the best and actual outcomes, but the girl seemed to have a knack for it. He played through multiple scenarios and watched her trounce him in three out of every five. This from a pacifist with no training. What could she do with instruction? With actual knowledge on the field?

The Saiduan characters unfurled into Maralah’s message, a response to the update he had sent her two days before. It was a much shorter, simpler message than he expected.

We have enough war heroes. I need an omajista. Break her or kill her.

Taigan stirred the characters with a breath of wind for a long time, watching them swirl and pull apart until they were completely illegible. Then he crawled down from the boulder and walked back into camp.

“Was that Saiduan writing?” Lilia asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Was the symbol the man wrote on the stone a Saiduan character?”

“What, in the riddle?”

“Yes, the one about the illiterate men.”

“Yes, the symbol he wrote was a Saiduan character.”

“It was his name, then,” Lilia said. “If you’re illiterate, you still have to sign documents. Agreements. Papers. Those sorts of things. You do those in Saiduan, just like here. We’ve had treaties with you. So if you were illiterate, the one symbol you would know for sure, the one with the most power, was your name. The young man knew that.”

“And how did he get it into a bladder trap, then?”