“Isn’t it beautiful?” her mother said. She wore a long robe of white. Her skin glowed with a faint luminescence, like Faith Ahya was said to glow. Her black hair was knotted with white ribbons. “You were meant to lead them.”

Lilia woke so suddenly, she knocked her head against the wall. She yelped. Cold morning light seeped in through the doorway. I didn’t come this far to die in Dorinah, she thought.

That woman hadn’t been her mother. What she had done didn’t matter. Lilia rubbed her wrist, where the ward had been. She was alone now, but in truth, she’d always been alone. She would die alone in the mud if she didn’t act.

From the stoop, she gazed out at the hovels ringing the meeting house. Figures tended fires. She heard the low wail of a child.

She went to the first woman she saw, a stout, middle-aged woman who bent over a banked fire.

“Pardon, mother,” Lilia said. “Do you know anyone looking for a healer, a midwife?”

“You look more like you need a healer,” she said.

“I’m a temple-educated Dhai,” Lilia said. “I can read and write, Dorinah and Dhai. Do you know anyone who needs letters written or read?”

The woman turned her attention back to her fire. “Move on.”

Lilia went to the next fire. She asked every woman if they needed a healer, a midwife. These people knew nothing of her, and there was some freedom in that. It meant she could be anything. Their language was a strange patois of Dhai and Dorinah. Lilia picked it up quickly. She could be a good mimic, when she needed to be.

“A healer or midwife?” Lilia asked.

“Go on,” another woman said. She wasn’t much older than Lilia, and she had two young children at her skirt, another at her breast. “We got Emlee for all that.”

“Where can I find Emlee?”

The woman pointed. “Go to the place with the purple awning there, left, then a right when you see the orange flag. House with the big dead snapping lily out front.”

“Thank you,” Lilia said. She turned away. Her feet were numb. The sky was gray, brooding, threatened snow.

She found the healer’s house after doubling back twice. An old woman ducked out almost immediately, nearly knocking Lilia over. Her face was a map of wrinkles in a face of mottled flesh the color of river clay. The woman’s hair was a tangle of white knotted atop her head with ragged black ribbons. She held a stout staff of adenoak and wore a sturdy but well-used dress, Dorinah cut, practical, very long at the sleeves and hem. The hem was soaked in mud.

“Are you the midwife?” Lilia asked.

“Midwife, healer, sorceress. I’m all that and more. Do you have need of skill?”

“I was educated in the temples.”