They traveled until midday and stopped for a rest on a scorched patch of ground that had been prepared for the purpose. The sanisi tried to feed her some kind of meat, which she refused. She foraged for fleshy tubers and the fat rose cones her mother had taught her to find. The sanisi turned up his nose at her fare and ripped into his meal of dead animal flesh. After letting the bear graze, they moved on. North. To the sea.

In the early afternoon, they came to a crossroads. Lilia only knew Dhai by maps. She hadn’t left the temple since Kalinda dropped her there. But maps told her that northwest lay Clan Sorila, populated mostly by timber farmers and plant sculptors, and northeast was Clan Garika. She knew from the letters she received from Kalinda that she kept a way house on the road to Garika.

Taigan began to pull them northwest, to Sorila. She bit her tongue, wondering if he would uncover the ruse. She waited a few minutes before she said, “I’m glad we’re going to Sorila. I have family there.”

“You said you have no family.”

“My mother is dead. But I have an aunt and cousins in Sorila.” Lilia had told many lies in her life, but telling that one, to a sanisi, felt the boldest by far.

He drew the bear to a halt.

“Never lie to me,” Taigan said. “It is a useless endeavor.”

“You could be nicer,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Everyone could be nicer,” she said.

“And what a world that would be.”

“You build the world through your actions,” Lilia said. “Yours are very poor.”

“You argue like a mewling toddler,” he said. “The last girl was less talkative.”

“What girl?”

“Let me sit a moment in peace.”

This was the second longest conversation they’d had. She wondered what a rollicking noisy night in Saiduan sounded like.

“How did you know about the symbol on my wrist?” Lilia asked as Taigan started forward again.

“I can see it.”

“How?”

“Because I draw the breath of the same star as the person who made it,” Taigan said, “the blood witch you call mother, yes? Blood witches, ha. Only one people calls them that. Wards are complicated things, stitched together with litanies created just for the purpose. But yours is one I recognize. It’s a simple hazing ward. It makes it difficult for people to see and remember you. Useful, I imagine, in your state.”

“What’s my state?” Lilia asked.

“Don’t you know by now, little bird? Why would anyone try and protect you, a little nameless drudge?”

“Because she loved me,” Lilia said. “My mother put this ward on me, and she loved me very much.”

“Your mother wanted to save you for someone else,” Taigan said. “She was an omajista, based on the color and composition of that ward, and she likely suspected you would be the same.”