Lilia staggered back onto her own feet. She spit the man’s flesh out, tasted blood. She made to run and fell into a stout woman. The two of them collapsed, a tangle of limbs. The woman had a heavy blanket around her shoulders.

Lilia tore the cloak away from the woman and ran through the clutter of houses. She ran past banked fires, skirted around a refuse pile and what she suspected was a corpse. She ran and ran.

Her chest felt tight and her breath was heavy. She darted left, then right again, and slowed her steps. She heard voices behind her and kept walking. She twisted the ends of the cloak over one shoulder, knotted it at her hip. Her legs were trembling.

Breathe.

Breathe, Li.

She had no mahuan powder here. An asthma attack would kill her.

Lilia slowed her pace and slunk deeper into the camp. She wandered until the graying of the sky found her at a large rectangular building propped up in a cleared square of trampled mud. The building’s entrance had no doors. Lilia saw the carving of a great eye above the mouth of the entry. Faint light trickled from two lanterns set high up on the interior walls.

Lilia lingered at the entry, expecting to look inside and see altars to the gods, a Sanctuary. Instead, she saw battered benches facing a raised stage. The floor was smooth dirt. She walked to the other end of the room and squeezed into the corner between the raised stage and the wall. She rested her head in the crook of her arm, meant to doze, but she must have slept, because she dreamed.

She dreamed of a cold stone hall, not the sinuous circular halls of the temples but a long, straight hall built on the assumption of sharp lines and angles. She went to the windows and gazed down from a great height across a black city. She saw a jumble of jagged buildings capped in snow, peaked roofs carved with grotesque faces at the eaves, above the doors, all of them laced in a fine, powdery snow. The snow collected in immense drifts along the streets. Tall stone walls ringed the city, three walls deep. The city sloped downward to the wide bay, a bay ringed in old, old mountains, their tops worn smooth, blanketed in white. The bay was a rolling landscape broken by the jutting pillars of ice jams along the coast. Farther out, the bay was a tumble of dirty ice floes and black water, seething with something else: ships. A hundred – a thousand – ten thousand? More than she could count. From her vantage, Lilia saw movement outside and inside the walls, an immense black tide of figures. She caught the smell of smoke.

She turned away–

And looked into her mother’s face.