Her viper stirred. Was it Berri’s exhausted longing for his missing friend that roused it? Or did his still-living sorrow resonate in her heart, for didn’t she herself smile in just such a way when her grief for Ao rose sharply to the surface of her thoughts?

Yet his story made her wonder: Could her viper hunt down a missing man like Rotho through a shifting and deadly landscape?

“Will you ever go search for him again?” she asked.

Berri shrugged resignedly. “I’d have gone ten times, or a hundred. But it’s no longer allowed. All told, our order lost nineteen surveyors to the Desolation before the ban.”

“That’s an astounding number. How did that happen?”

“Our maps were wrong, the ones that were drawn of that province before the rise of the Pall.”

“How can maps be wrong?”

“It’s uncanny. I say that as the last known surveyor who went in and got out again, when I went to look for Rotho. Wherever an old map showed a hill, there was no hill but some other feature, a canyon, a lake, a mire, a pile of monstrous bones. Sometimes terrible creatures would crawl out of the wilderness, creatures never before seen or recorded in the archives. Or so it was claimed, but no one who saw the monsters survived for long, after their report of the encounter. Almost as if seeing a monster was enough to curse a person into an early death. I never saw any such creatures. The Hibiscus Emperor allowed aivur to settle along the border of the Desolation, thinking to protect the borderland with their presence. In the last year of his reign, the Lily Emperor put a stop to all surveyor explorations because of the death toll. When the Magnolia Emperor banished the aivur from the heartland and the provinces, she signed a treaty with a council of aivur. The treaty allows aivur communities to remain in the border country around the Desolation so long as they never pass the Whispering Fence. Some say the aivur patrol the dead lands, that they hunt monsters, or search for ancient treasure. We stay out.”

“A Whispering Fence! Huh. I’d like to see the Desolation.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” He rubbed his face wearily.

Elen recognized now that the loss of his old friend—brother, lover, whatever the man had been to him—had broken him.

Elen called Cavna over and asked for more drinks, then a second round, and managed Berri into eating a bit. Eventually she got him laughing over a famous comedic play they’d both seen. How many full buckets had the despicable captain tripped over in the course of the play? Seven, or eight? What had been in each one, and in which order? Wine. Water. Fermented apple peelings. Coals. Urine. Feces. Spiders. They couldn’t remember the eighth. Not Spore, because that wouldn’t have been funny.