She knew it wouldn’t last forever, that one day Kaden would return, that one day her father would die. The knowledge had done nothing to prepare her for the event. Now, with both her parents gone and her only home vanished down the long road behind her, with nothing ahead but fear and uncertainty, she wondered how it might feel to have a brother, two brothers, siblings who understood something of what it meant to grow up in the Dawn Palace, whom she could talk to about her father and mother, whom she could trust. We wouldn’t even need to talk, she thought, stealing a glance at Nira and Oshi, if they were just here.

She felt her eyes filling, and, forgetting about the cloth for a moment, tried to scrub the unshed tears away with an angry swipe of her sleeve. There was no telling where Kaden and Valyn were, no way to know if they were still alive, and no promise she could rely on them even if they were. Wishing was all well and good, but if her brothers were still alive clearly they were in no position to do anything to help either her or the empire. They were strangers, absent strangers. Despite the hundreds of pilgrims walking the road before her and behind, despite Nira and Oshi sitting on the wagon a few paces distant, she was alone.

10

The smoke was gone, and the shouting, and the rough stone beneath his feet. Kaden had walked from darkness and chaos into daylight, the sun shining hot overhead, warming his face, his hands. But the sun was wrong. At Ashk’lan it never rose so high in the sky, not even during the summer solstice. And the wind: warm and wet as a cloth drawn steaming from the wash and heavy with salt. The sounds, too, wrong: a keen skirling of seabirds; a scrape like rough steel across stone that Kaden recognized, after a moment, as waves. Gone, the spice of juniper. Vanished, the chill stillness of the granite peaks.

In the emptiness of the vaniate he registered the impressions one after another but felt no alarm, no surprise. These were facts, nothing more, details of the world to be noted, tallied. This is the earth. This is the sky. No fear attended the strangeness of the sight, no excitement its novelty. Here are the small, fork-tailed birds darting into the waves. Here is the sea.