My original lot had me joining the local battalion, the so-called “Fifteen Milers,” whose rallying point was in Qul Elboe, about three miles down into the river valley on this side of the mountains. The lot I was then holding assigned me to an entirely other army, “Red Expedition Chapter,” rallying three hundred miles away in Tref. I was dealing with agents of an offended spirit or capricious god.

I eat, and step out onto the streets, nearly colliding with a pale man. He is lean and tall with a small head and blazing round blue pinpoint eyes, staring up at the sun in amazed ecstasy, and oblivious to me. His thin red hair hangs lifelessly down in ragged locks, his arms hang down at his sides, and his smocked outline seems to wobble in the intense, chilled light. Behind the man, an Edek emerges from her underground den. The Edek is taller than this tall man who is her helper, and like all Edeks she wears a close hood of dun cloth with two holes for her eyes, fitted into a bandage of thin gauze tape wound many times around the long neck. This one is dressed in a uniform of velvety brown corduroy, with the straps of her binoculars criss-crossing the narrow chest, and knee-high boots of soft laced pigskin. The rooty, gloved hands glow a little, one reaches to pinch a bit of material at the back of her helper’s smock, and her helper, whose eyes are the Edek’s to use, leads her past me. The Edek’s head swivels in my direction as she goes by, and the fierce thrust of her gaze nearly knocks me against the wall. I rub the sparks from my eyes, and when I look again, the two are gone. Too late—she saw me!

Train to Qulo, shrugs, bored looks from the officers I spoke to there—you will have to go on. With regret I went back and forth in broad daylight lanes, brightly-colored cottages outlined in gleaming silver ice, and then the sky was swept with glowing indigo clouds. I wrote to my uncles, to Dull Hill Bramble, and to Found Horse Whistle. Two days of black soda bread and stewed fruit soup, then I sat on the train pulling out again in dusk snow flurries; dark blue light closed over the landscape as the station slid by, snow bearding the rough mortared edges of its bricks.