When dawn touched the sky, and Para’s fiery blue essence flooded the world, Taigan was still walking. It wasn’t until then that she realized she wasn’t going west, back to Dhai, but east, back to where she had left the scullery girl.

By the time she reached her, Lilia would have been without water for four days. It was quite possible Lilia hadn’t even survived the fall. Taigan had spent a lifetime doing as others told her. The oath she broke to her Patron, the betrayal that lost her the title of sanisi, had shaken her more than she realized. Before the betrayal, before she was Maralah’s instead of the Patron’s, she acted on blind faith, following the call of Oma, the Lord of the Dawn, the Lord of Awakening, the Lord of Change. It was not Maralah who moved her now nor her Patron, but her rising star, her bloody, glorious god.

She stopped to urinate again, braced against a tree, and hissed out a prayer to Oma to relieve her from pain and want and confusion, and to deliver calm and clarity.

Her star was rising.

It was the scullery girl’s star, too.

Oma help them both.

Chapter 35

35

Snow bathed the world in pearly silence. Zezili found something very comforting about that as she walked Dakar across the clean stretch of silent white. Few travelers were on the roads to Lake Morta this time of year. As dusk fell, she finally saw the approaching stretch of the vast lake. Blessed by Rhea, all said, it was a lake full of stories – and tourists during the summer. But the peak of summer travelers had passed, and the first snows were on the ground.

The road took her around the lake. The falling snow began to taper off. Clouds roiled across the black sky, revealing the moons and the tiara of satellites that circled the largest moon, Ahmur. The world seemed to glow.

Zezili saw no tracks on the road, but the snow was new. It didn’t mean Anavha hadn’t gone this way. Unescorted men were generally picked up very quickly. Her fear was that someone had already found him and turned him in to the enforcers.

She could see the spill of light from the inn on the other side of the lake, a sprawling hulk amid the snow.

Dakar halted suddenly and let out a low whine. He turned his head toward the flat, snowy expanse of the lake. The teeth of mountains called the Cage reared up behind the lake, chewing at the dark sky. Scraggly everpines peppered the mountains.

Zezili kneed her dog and whistled at him to move forward. He twitched his ears toward the lake.

“What’s out there?” she asked, patting the dog on the shoulder.

The dog yelped.

The quiet stretched. Dakar yelped again; a cry that echoed.

“What-” Zezili began.