The obvious answer, of course, was the lake. But that was absurd. Zezili pulled off her coat and wrapped it around the girl. In the darkness, it was difficult to make out her features. If she bore some resemblance to a family Zezili knew, it might give her a clue as to why she was out here. Most likely, she was some desperate person trying to murder herself. Zezili had no patience for that sort of thing. Death always came soon enough.

Zezili commanded Dakar to sit. She pulled the girl up in front of her and wrapped her arms around her. She was a little thing, no more than a hundred pounds.

The girl murmured something.

“What’s your name?” Zezili asked. “Who’s your family? Did someone push you into the lake?”

The girl didn’t respond. Zezili whistled for Dakar to increase his pace. The girl had begun to tremble violently, which was good. When she stopped shivering, things would be bad.

It took another twenty minutes to get to the inn. Zezili called out for help, and a meaty innkeeper came to the door carrying a flame fly lantern.

“Found a girl in the lake,” Zezili said. “You have a physician here?”

“No, but I have a tirajista,” the innkeeper said.

“That’s not much help.”

“She is if you’ve brought something from the lake. Come in.”

Zezili tied off Dakar and took the girl into the inn. The innkeeper led her up to a room that already had a fire lit. Zezili lay the girl down in front of the hearth. One of the innkeeper’s dajians came up to help her strip off the girl’s wet clothes.

In the light of the fire, Zezili noted that the girl was a bit dark for a Dorinah, and she had the low forehead and broad cheekbones of a Dhai, covered in strange puckered scars, as if someone had taken an ice pick to her face. Not all with Dhai features were dajians; if this girl’s mother had claimed her as Zezili’s had, she would be free. Being marked like that made self-murder an even more likely reason for her jaunt across the lake, though. When they undressed her, Zezili saw old bruises mapping across her legs and torso, as if she’d been abused by some foul master. A runaway dajian was a more likely scenario than some parajista catching her up in a vortex and throwing her in the lake.

They wrapped the girl in a large blanket.

“Is this the girl?” said a woman at the door.

She was an older woman, forty at least, with long, lustrous black hair and the same broad Dhai cheekbones as the girl on the floor. But this woman was more clearly Dorinah, pale and gray-eyed, with a high forehead and bold nose.

“Found her in the lake,” Zezili said. “You’re the tirajista?”