“Kalinda brought me to the Kai. I live at the Temple of Oma where the Kai lives. Kalinda never saved me from anything. She delivered me to her door!”

Gian stood. “I need to prepare his heart and liver,” she said. “Do you like dandelion greens?”

Lilia pressed her fists against her eyes. “Why won’t you tell me anything?”

“You’ll understand when you meet the others,” Gian said. “I did what you asked and brought you here. Now you fulfill your end. You join me.”

Lilia watched the hourglass of the suns begin to set in the blue-lavender sky above her. Lavender, not amber. The leaves here were just beginning to turn, far up in the forest canopy.

Lilia struggled to her feet. The sky. The leaves. The village.

“What is it?” Gian asked.

Lilia walked back down to the stone outcrop. She gazed toward the clearing where the thorn fence had been, and stared at the sky. The blue-lavender sky. She covered her mouth.

“Lilia?” Gian asked.

“Oma,” Lilia said. “The sky. It’s the wrong color.”

Gian’s expression was unreadable.

Lilia persisted. “I thought it was because Tira’s descendent now. But the sky here, right here, wasn’t this color when I lived here. When the village was here. It was amber, and it caught fire at sunset, like a crimson cloak. Oh, no; oh, no…”

“Lilia, I’m sorry,” Gian said. “I can explain–”

Lilia’s legs gave out. She leaned against the rock outcrop. Terror squeezed her insides. “That’s why everything is different here,” Lilia said. “Dhai has no conscripted army here. The Kai wears no armor. This isn’t where my village was at all, is it?”

Gian shook her head.

Lilia burst into tears at the sad expression on Gian’s face. It was pity. Pity for a foolish child piece on a kindar board who suddenly understood the whole world was make-believe.

“I’m not from this world, am I?” Lilia said. “And neither are you and Kalinda. That’s why you put me with the Kai in Oma’s Temple. It’s not this Kai you’re fighting.”

“No,” Gian said.

“You’re fighting a Kai somewhere else,” Lilia said. “You’re fighting a woman who looks just like her, from a world with an amber sky.”

Chapter 17

17