“This doesn’t seem to suit,” Kadaan said. He leaned over and took Roh’s chin in his hand.

Roh sat absolutely still.

Kadaan pressed his mouth to Roh’s, so both his lips covered Roh’s bottom lip. The gesture was so startling that Roh was afraid to move for fear the sanisi would cut him in two. Kadaan’s tongue licked away the smear of red on Roh’s lower lip.

Kadaan still leaned over him. When he spoke, his voice was low. “You have a gift, boy. Without that gift, we would all of us be dead tonight. I don’t mean to forget that.”

Kadaan left him.

Roh stared after the sanisi. He did not move again until Kihin shook him.

“Roh?”

Kihin’s face was stricken. “Tira! Is this your blood?” Kihin was staring at Roh’s hands.

“No, no,” Roh said. “None of it’s mine.”

“We need to get back,” Kihin said. Roh saw Aramey standing behind him.

“Ora Dasai?” Roh asked.

“He’s fine. He sent us back for you. Me, Aramey, and Ora Chali. Ora Nioni is just outside the door. We were afraid–”

“I’m fine,” Roh said. He stood. He bit his lower lip. “Kihin?”

“What?”

“Why did those men look like Dhai?”

Chapter 34

34

Taigan couldn’t say when she decided to go back for the girl. For two days she walked west, back to Dhai, feeling nothing but the churning of her insides and the throbbing intensity of a blinding white migraine that forced her to bed down in the dirt, in the dark, for six hours until it passed. When she emerged from the duff and bracken, she squatted to urinate, and pissing was painful and bloody.

Sometime in the last few days, Taigan had decided it was time to change the way Taigan thought of himself… hirself… herself… yes, herself, again. The gods had a grim sense of humor, because though she could knit her flesh and bones and organs back together at will, she had never learned to cure something as simple as a cold or a urinary infection. “They are not of your body,” the old woman who trained her once said, “they are in your body. Interlopers. You must wait for them to pass.” But a skilled tirajista could cure pox and blight and every sexually passed disease from Dhai to Saiduan, so why couldn’t she?