“You look terrible,” Taigan said in Dorinah. He had a new scar running from his left cheek to his left ear, and there was something different about him, something in his voice and posture.

“So you can fly after all, can you?” Taigan said.

“I can,” Lilia said.

“I’d very much like to see that,” Taigan said. “There are legionnaires outside the gate. One of them is passing about a picture of you. It won’t be long until someone turns you over.”

“They won’t,” Lilia said.

“Won’t they?”

“No,” Lilia said. She looked at the wide-eyed children and remembered her mother’s hands and her mother’s face back at the lake, when she said Lilia was not her daughter.

Lilia said, “These are my people. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

“The woman with your picture says she’s your mother,” Taigan said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I think you may be mad,” Taigan said.

“No,” Lilia said. “I’m a bird. And we’re going to fly away from here.”

Chapter 44

44

Zezili rode Dakar into the camp at the mouth of the pass to Dhai with Jasoi and two pages close at her heels. Isoail and four more legionnaires met them on the muddy field outside the sprawl of stinking tents and blocky housing. Monshara only gave her an hour before every purge to find the girl, and they were already forty minutes into it.

“They say they don’t know her,” Isoail said, “but their eyes say differently. They also say there’s a sanisi in there.”

“Dajians will say anything,” Zezili said, “especially to legionnaires.”

“There’s only one more camp after this,” Isoail said. “If she isn’t there, then we’ve come–”

Zezili shushed her and pointed. A small group of dajians was moving toward them from the camp.

Isoail sat a little straighter. Zezili felt the air shift. “Gifted are culled from the camps,” Zezili said, “and shipped off to your Seeker Sanctuary. The most they’ll do is throw stones.”

“A well-thrown stone is equally deadly,” Isoail said.

Zezili shrugged. She was cold and tired and more than a little sick of Isoail. They had spent all winter slaughtering dajians across Dorinah. Every public-owned dajian from here to the sea was dead. It was just this camp at the base of the Liona Mountains and another farther south, close to the range that separated Dorinah from Aaldia. With every dead dajian and every cold day, Zezili lost a little more hope. She had nightmares about Anavha being swallowed by a great winged beast, and Daorian burning.