But this was not the Alu I remembered. A dark, somber silence had settled over the citizens like a funeral cloak. We passed thirty handsbreadths from where my family’s hut should’ve been, but it was a blackened pile of ruin. There was nothing left but the top of my abum’s broken healing table, which was partially buried in the ground. Nanaea stopped and put a hand to her mouth.

“Kammani.” Her eyes welled.

“Come on.” I tugged her away from the memories of the times we’d spent in that old hut together. “No use thinking too much about it. There’s nothing we can do.”

We trod past a spot near the wall where my abum had planted a row of yellow chamomile, and my heart fluttered. I ran my fingers over the sunshiny buds that still struggled for life as Nanaea sniffled behind me. This strain of chamomile used to be my father’s favorite flower because of its uses. The feathery stems soothed. The color, bright and cheery, pulled moods into the light. When ground, the leaves relieved storms in the mind.

For me, they would be forever tied to my mother’s cold, dead face as she lay prepared for burial, cradling baby Bellessa. My father had covered her body with the flowers after I’d tossed the first mound of dirt into the grave, and as the stems landed on her, I’d expected her to laugh and swat them away. Her stillness shocked me. It was as if she’d been carved from sandstone. Her features, certainly hers, looked like those of another woman. Never before had I realized how important the soul was to the face’s shape until she lay there looking like herself, yet unrecognizable.

All at once, Iltani pushed me down into the grasses along the wall. I tugged Nanaea after me, and Dagan dropped to his belly.

“Iltani, what—”

She held a finger furiously to her lips and pointed. A torch bobbed along the pathway, illuminating a pair of guardsmen armed as if going to war. Maces and sickleswords swayed at their sides as they checked their surroundings. Daggers gleamed at their waists. They even wore helmets like the Manzazu army, something they’d never done in the city while in service to our former lugal.

My hair stood on end as they marched by, weapons clinking with their footfalls, mere handsbreadths from where we lay in the scrub. After they retreated into the gloom, we got up but stayed low, ducking and crouching toward what would be our base camp in Alu.

We scooted past Iltani’s home before we ducked into the fields. She let her gaze linger hungrily on the little hut that looked as though it bulged at its sides, too many people stuffed inside to be comfortable. But after a moment, she looked away and hustled up to Dagan. Iltani had been flippant about leaving her mother and father in Alu. She never had any siblings, and never seemed to care that we’d left. In fact, not until this moment did I realize that she had any feelings about leaving them at all. Whenever I’d asked, she’d waved her hand and said that “of course” she missed them, but she’d always planned to leave Alu anyway, and felt fine about never seeing them again.