“I need to see Larn’s priest, the one she gets all those nice things from,” Lilia said. “The ones who are new to camp. The ones you keep on the side of camp you won’t take me.”

Emlee and Cora exchanged a look.

“I’m going to find them with or without you,” Lilia said.

Cora handed her baby over to Emlee. He fussed.

“I’ll take you,” Cora said, “but I don’t know what you’d want with him. Him and his priestesses are a secretive bunch. Larn has to–”

“I know what Larn does,” Lilia said. “Take me to them.”

Cora looked up at Taigan. “Him, too?”

“Yes… him, too.”

Lilia asked one of the orphan packs to guard Taigan’s bear. They would make enough of a stir without the bear.

Cora led them through deep mud, around dark hovels stained in smoke, to the far edge of the camp. She pointed to a large round hovel thatched in everpine and mud. “That’s the place,” she said.

Lilia strode toward the door. Taigan stayed silent.

She entered unbidden. It was dim inside, but she could see the women’s seamed faces, their broad frames and hands. An adenoak staff with a jeweled knob at the end rested near the door.

All talk ceased as Lilia entered. Someone pulled back a curtain at the other side of the room. Larn was lit in profile, sitting up thin and disheveled in the bed.

The man who had pulled back the curtain stared at her with dark eyes in a very Dorinah face.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“They’re gifted,” Taigan said.

“Dorinah’s gifted,” Lilia said. “Soon to be my gifted.”

The faces of the Empress of Dorinah’s Seekers stared out at her. “What are your names?” Lilia asked. They told her: Voralyn, Amelia, Laralyn. Their leader – they called her a Ryyi – was Tulana. Tulana sat on a raised bench on the other side of the room, combing out her hair. Their clothes were tatters, their faces smeared in grime.

“And you?” Lilia asked the man.

“Sokai,” he said.

“Zezili says hello,” Lilia said. “And you’re all going to help me. You’re going to bind yourself to me, and you’re going to come back to Dhai with me.”

There was nervous laughter.

But Tulana did not smile. Lilia saw a soft red mist begin to suffuse the woman’s body.

Lilia pushed out her hands, throwing her own web of red mist. She bound a skein of Oma’s breath around the woman, cutting her off from the satellite.

Tulana’s face paled.

Taigan nodded. “That was very good,” he said.

“So, you have omajistas too,” Lilia said. She kept the woven breath that held Tulana taut. In the back of her mind, she recited the Saiduan Song of Binding.

“I am many things,” Tulana said. “Dangerous enough for my own Empress to try to kill me, in fact.”