She woke Gian. Gian opened her pack. Lilia washed her own face. Gian helped her take off her clothes. Lilia knelt on her dirty clothes to keep her knees out of the mud. Gian unpacked Lilia’s white dress. It wasn’t as white as it should be, and it would look terrible up close, but from a distance, it would do. Lilia pulled the dress over her head. Gian tied the white ribbons she had gifted her at Lilia’s wrists and on her fingers. They had already re-bound her hands in white bandages.

Gian moved her hands through Lilia’s long hair and oiled and combed it. Lilia could not remember the last time she had long hair. The Woodlands, maybe. A long time ago. Her hair was ragged at the ends and needed a cut, but like the dress, it would do.

Gian braided back Lilia’s hair into an intricate swirl of knots and bound them in white ribbon. She used a fine stick of charred wood to outline Lilia’s eyes in black.

Gian helped Lilia to her feet and regarded her in the graying light.

“Are you afraid?” Gian asked.

Lilia looked over her shoulder at the height of the wall. “No,” she said.

They walked to the gate where Taigan and the Seekers waited.

“You have sworn to her,” he told them, “and to disobey that word forfeits your life. Remember that.”

“She’s gifted,” Tulana said. “I still don’t see why she can’t do this herself.”

“Faith Ahya wasn’t gifted,” Lilia said.

Taigan shrugged. “There it is.”

“Superstitious Dhai nonsense,” Tulana said.

Distant cries sounded behind them.

Taigan nodded to Lilia.

Lilia moved to the front of their half circle. Some of the Dhais and dajians camped around them had woken. They sat up and stared.

“All right,” Lilia said.

Taigan held out his palm toward her. She felt a prickling across her shoulders. The air in front of her shimmered bloody red. She took a deep breath and shouted up at the wall, “I am a Dhai, and I demand entrance through Liona!”

The funnel of air Taigan shaped carried her words to the top of the wall. Her voiced boomed through the pass. She clapped her hands over her ears. The shout was deafening.

Cries came from the top of the wall, shouts, sounding small and plaintive after Lilia’s cry.

“Who’s there? What’s happened?” someone called from the

wall.

“Open the gate! I ask passage!”

“What right do you have for passage?”

“We are Dhai! That is enough!” An echoing call, the voice

of a god.

Something in her hesitated before she said the rest – and committed herself to blasphemy.

Lilia closed her eyes and shouted, “I am the rightful Kai, and by the laws of our country, you are bound to open these gates for me and all those I harbor!”

Banging on the door.