A dare returned from the evening’s sermon both weary and wary. The days were long enough—waking before dawn, walking half a dozen miles, a brief stop for lunch, then another five or six miles—without having to listen to some petty priest for the first half of the night. When the caravan finally halted, Adare wanted nothing more than to roll into her blankets and pass out. Nira, however, had pointed out that Adare was dumber than a dead ox for skipping sermons while posing as a pilgrim, and so, night after night, she went, stumbling over the uneven ground in the gathering gloom, squinting to see through the blindfold, trying to avoid the dark shapes of the wagons, all to sit on the fringes of the fire, juggling the contradictory hopes that the others would note her attendance without paying her any special attention.

It hardly made for easy listening. One night the young priest lectured on the sinful excesses of the Malkeenians. Another on the ideal of an Intarran state, free from secular meddling. The most recent harangue—an extended eulogy for Uinian IV—struck even closer to home. It was impossible to read the faces of her fellow pilgrims in the flickering firelight, but the mood was clear enough. She thought she had managed to kill both the priest and his reputation when she revealed him to be a leach, but while the man stayed dead, his good name was proving frighteningly resilient. Most people hadn’t been at the temple on the day Uinian burst into flame, the day his own congregation tore his burning body apart. They knew what they believed, and regarding the Malkeenians in general and Adare more particularly, they were willing to believe the worst. By the time the tirade was over, Adare had worried a gash in the side of her thumb with a nervous fingernail.

She picked her way back slowly through the wagons and cook fires, wanting nothing more than a few bites of Nira’s fish, a few moments warming herself over the flames, then sleep. As soon as she returned to the cook fire, however, she realized something was wrong. The old woman had spent every night for the past two weeks over an iron pan, grilling up carp from the canal with pepper and rice purchased along the road, muttering over her cooking as though the words were spice. Now, however, she stood atop the wagon, peering into the darkness. Her hair, a white haze around her head, had broken free from her bun. The cane trembled in her hands.

“Oshi,” she shouted, voice twisting up at the end, then cracking. “Oshi!”

As Adare approached the wagon, the old woman turned to her.

“He’s gone,” she said. “I came back to the fire, and he was gone.”