“What are you doing, monk?” she asked carefully. Tan had caught her in an awkward position, half lying, half seated, but her body showed no strain. Her voice, frayed with panic a moment earlier, didn’t waver. She might have been reclining on a divan in the Dawn Palace.

“What are you?” Tan asked again.

“I’m Triste,” she replied, though she did not sound like Triste. She sounded older, braver, more certain. Kaden stared, studying her face as she spoke. “We escaped from Ashk’lan together. We went to Assare. Someone was attacking us just before I fell through”—she gestured with the barest nod of her head—“your gate.”

“I know your story, but it crumbles here. The Blank God is exacting. He does not permit emotion, and yet you fell through thrashing and screaming.”

“Your theories are wrong and so you put a blade to my throat?” Triste asked, arching an eyebrow. “It’s somehow my fault that you don’t understand the kenta?”

It was wrong, Kaden thought. All wrong. He studied her face. Where was the girlish innocence, the terror, the utter confusion that had poured off her moments earlier? Why did Kaden himself feel a shudder of fear when he met her gaze?

“I understand the kenta,” Tan replied, voice flat as a file. “It is you I do not understand.”

“Tan,” Kaden began carefully, “maybe the gates have . . . weakened somehow over thousands of years. Maybe anyone can pass now. It’s possible they don’t work the way we think.”

The monk paused. Behind and below them, the waves continued to gnaw at the cliffs. Sweat had begun to soak Kaden’s robe.

“They have not weakened,” Tan said finally. “My order tests for such things. Only Shin can pass the gates, and Ishien. And Csestriim.”

“No,” Triste said, shaking her head despite the blade at her throat. The fear was suddenly back in her voice, blood-raw and rank, as though she was just now awakening to her predicament. “I’m not Csestriim.”

Kaden tried to sort and assemble the new information—Tan’s accusation, Triste’s confusion, her lightning-quick shifts from terror to steely defiance back to terror, the sheer impossible fact of the gates themselves. For the second time since stepping through the kenta, he felt he had come unmoored from reality, lost on this fragment of land adrift in the sloshing sea with a monk who was not a monk and a girl who might not be a girl locking eyes over the haft of a spear left behind by a long-extinguished race.

“Tan,” he began, “what we need to do is—”