Zezili curled her lip, disgusted at her own sentiment. She left the room, closed the door. She would have Daolyn lock it until Anavha’s return.

She walked back to her room, went to the window, and stood leaning out into the air, inhaling cold like a drowning woman first tasting air, her head thrown back, fingers gripping the sill.

She wanted her husband. She wanted the world back the way it was. She wanted the Tai Mora dead and their mirror smashed to dust.

Chapter 32

32

Anavha was lost. He had passed the previous two nights in dodgy way houses along dark roads. The dog was hungry; whenever Anavha dismounted, it pushed its nose into his hand. He hadn’t shaved in three days, and his face itched. Daolyn would have had time to alert the priests and the enforcers by now, and he trembled to think of what would happen if they found him before he found Zezili.

He got back onto the dog and turned it round the way he had come. He had no idea what direction that was. Didn’t the moons rise in the west where the sun set? He had located himself by the cobbled road in the beginning, but he didn’t know a lot about roads. He had never seen a map of Dorinah, and his schooling had been limited.

He urged the dog down a dirt track. He clung to the dog with numbed hands and prayed to Rhea to help him find the right way. The moons moved across the sky. His dog halted once, to sniff at the frozen body of a big spotted rabbit lying in a ditch.

Anavha nodded off in the saddle sometime later and woke to find that the dog had paused again at the edge of a vast snowy expanse ringed in jagged mountains. He thought perhaps he had come to Lake Morta at last, but it was too small and not the right shape. Where on Rhea’s face was he?

Anavha saw a flicker of light on the other side of the crooked lake. His dog barked. The sound echoed eerily across the lake. Anavha whistled the dog forward. They followed the snowy path around the circumference of the lake.

It was another hour before Anavha reached the porch of the inn, but by that time, the thought of finally finding Zezili had invigorated him. He would need a bath, a shave, a change of clothing. He could not allow her to see him this way.

He slid off the dog’s back, so sore he could barely walk. No one came out to greet him. He pulled his hood low over his face and walked up to the porch, tried the door. It was open.