Her skin felt hot. She did not look at her arms to see if the divine glow had become a blistering flame. She could not look at anything but the top of the wall and the figures rushing back and forth as her glowing body shot up through the air.

Lilia crested the top of the wall with the blinding glare of the suns-rise. She alighted on one of the big parapet stones.

She looked down at the walkway atop the wall and the dozens of skirted militia staring up at her in fear and awe.

Only one woman had not shielded her eyes. She was small and slight. She was familiar, though Lilia could not place her.

“You will open these gates,” Lilia said softly, but Taigan’s amplification of her voice set the militia to covering their ears. All but the little woman.

“I have come to free these people,” Lilia said. “You will open these gates for them.”

Lilia’s skin burned. The heat of the suns throbbed at her back. Her fingers were numb from holding the ribbons. Her shadow swallowed the form of the woman in front of her. Her shadow was a great thing, a massive specter burning along the battlements.

Lilia dropped her arms. She had run out of words.

The little woman stared up at Lilia. Her jaw hardened. Her eyes were black under the length of Lilia’s shadow.

Ghrasia watched Faith Ahya land lightly atop the parapet. The breath left Ghrasia’s body. She had the absurd urge to kneel. Streamers of white cascaded from Faith’s fingertips, like wings. How many times had Ghrasia wished for a world where she could take back everything she had done twenty years ago?

She remembered the little feral girl. Remembered the screams of the dying during the Pass War and the screams of her people slain by the shadow-men in Liona. Oma help her, she thought of the dead shadows, too.

“Am I any better than them,” Ghrasia asked the girl, “if I slay you here?”

“Only you can answer that,” the girl said.

Ghrasia thought of the woman in the tapestry. The woman her country thought she was. That woman would not open these gates.

But she was not that woman.

She turned to Arasia. “Open the gates,” Ghrasia said.

“But you said–”

Ghrasia did not raise her voice. “Open the gates of Liona.”

Arasia shouted at the militia on the parapet, relaying the order.

Ghrasia watched the girl. The suns’ light was harsher now, and Ghrasia could see scars on her face. She saw how tattered her white garments were, some shoddy patchwork piece. The ribbons in her hair had obviously been salvaged from some other, finer garment. She leaned awkwardly to one side, and her left hand was a twisted little claw.

The girl was little more than a child – a child desperate enough to fly.