    I pulled away, and she grabbed me tighter and pulled me close. She cooed with the throaty rapture of a pigeon, Don’t go!
    She smelled like dust, sweat, and flowers. I pushed her off of me. I pushed her hard. She clattered on plaster. Ooh.

    A man appeared behind me quick. He pressed a dagger into my throat. He snarled. He walked around my still body with the dagger nibbling at my skin. I could understand him because he spoke Proliuxian slowly. You plague-witch. You damage my girl, I damage you. He had eyes like black stones. His wide body puffed up to his one arm. His one arm pushed out to his dagger. Skin hung on top of those cruel intentions, flabby and loose. Every muscle in his body trembled.

    I knew I could kill him because he was too tense.

    He held a thin, jagged dagger as long as my forearm. He reached his other hand up to my skin and stroked my arm. He moved his hand to my chest. Are you girl or boy? he said. I think you girl. Do you got tits there, girl? Tits as white as your face? What color your little eyes, I wonder?

    I smiled, and touched the hand that held the dagger. I moved slowly. I moved with the eyes of a lover. My other hand went down to his pants.

    He smiled. You goer ain’tchou. Yeah, I looked you and knew you goer. Freaks are always goers. Take what they get.

    I moved before he could stop smiling. His wrist snapped like chicken bones. I tugged and twisted to ruin it forever. I tossed him against the same wall.

    The man held his snapped wrist. I held his knife. I winked and gave him my best, awkward Proliuxian, You are goer. You are goer to not here.

    He stood up with a curse in his heart. He kicked at me and punched with his good hand. I dodged the kick. I stabbed him through his fist with his own knife. His blood was deep purple, nearly red. He jumped back. He yowled.

    The street crowd had parted and watched patiently for our exchange to end. In a city in my homeland beyond the mountains, any man would stop this fight. With Seth missing, I was the only one who could stop this fight. I said, Hand heal, angry heal. Pride — I know not your word, but it never heal. Kill yourself your own pride, and live yourself long.

    He looked at his stabbed hand in wonder. I got him through the palm, with his own knife. It trembled against his chest, and blood trembled down his whole body. He backed away from me, with large, white eyes, and pale skin. Bloodless skin. He moaned in horror. I only wanted scare to you, he said. I, just wanted scare you, girl… My hand… And he staggered away, lumbering like a bear into the streets, muttering in Rhiannan.

    Behind me, the crowd returned to its quick-paced ways.













    I kept the blood on my hands all evening when I wandered. Six blocks left, four right and I was almost in the alley for the night. I’d rinse my hand in the ocean, and slip into my resting place among the cats. I leaned into the water, and splashed the blood away. A woman’s voice said softly, You are a strange one, white girl, and dangerous.

    I turned to her voice. Other voices spoke walking quickly through the darkness of this harbor. A man asked his companion if she had seen that. Someone asked someone else if the market was still open. Someone coughed with laughter at a joke I did not hear. None of these were for me. The woman’s voice was for me.

    A short woman with brown skin splotched by scars like linear freckles smirked at me. She had once burned her ear badly. It was a melted mess on the side of her face. Beneath all that — maybe before all that — was a stern woman, and a steady gaze. She had spoken directly to me.

    She reminded me of my old sensei, when I was still an apprentice rider instead of an apprentice shaman.

    You are strange for me, I said.

    You’d best get off the street, she said. Pimps usually have friends.

    I fear none, I said.

    She shrugged. So come with me to a pub, and I will buy you a drink, and you can tell me about yourself.

    I looked around at the street. My whole time here the only offers for company had been from curious men, or women who thought I was malformed, with spending money and desire.

    I sell not, I said. I buy not.

    I buy only your food and drink, she said. I have never seen one as you, and I would like to know more about you.

    Her hand appeared in the air, held up in a gesture I had seen others do. Her hand was out palm-first, straight toward my face. Her forearm slipped from her loose, green dress. In her skin, etched in silver and black, a sword aimed at me.

    My name is Adel, she said.













    My sensei was old enough to be my grandmother. When sensei smiled, bison fled. When she snarled, cannibals dropped their spears and begged for mercy. At least, her apprentices fled and begged for mercy. I met her when I was just past twelve winters.

    In my village, I looked down to my leg, and I ran in fear to my mother. I showed her the blood, and where I was bleeding. My mother sighed, and told me that it was about time.

    Women die from the inside slowly, she said. Women bleed and bleed. Girls don’t. Girls live forever inside. When they die, they are born again right away. Women, though…

    And that night, I was sent off by my great-aunt. My mother had told her, and my great-aunt nodded and sighed. I was the second born, and I had finally bled.

    Like all the second born who come of age against their will, I had to go. I was sent off to the grassland, three months travel north, and all alone. My great-aunt gave me a spear, a warm cloak, and a hug. And I was sent off north, to find a camp that moves with the bison herds.

    When I finally reached the rider camp, I was led directly to sensei’s leather tent. Sensei looked up at me and grunted. She waved my escort away. Then, she tore the cloak from my back and threw it in the fire. It burned.

    She smiled.

    I burst into tears.













    And I was so lonely, Esumi. I cannot tell you the loneliness of cities.

    I was so lonely.













    I took the scarred woman’s hand. Our clasped fingers swung down to our waists, and then we let go together. My name is Zhan Immur, I said. I am north from far, far.

    Adel pointed down a street. I know a good pub this way, she said. I don’t understand. Are you from far north? Or are you very far north from something important?

    We strode side-by-side down the street. I was no longer walking alone.

    Cold, very cold where from I am myself, I said. I am from far. I am on boats to Proliux. Ride down waters to here with Seth. Seth gone. I am to Seth go.

Adel shook her head. She scratched her skull. This will be an interesting conversation, Zhan Immur. Cold, you say? So you are from the north? She pointed with her hand toward the north star. It had only just emerged in the evening sky, a point of white upon the midnight blue.

I smiled. Yes, I said, pointing, from north.

Adel pointed west. She said, I am a paladin from Rhianna, but I haven’t been there since before the fall. What are your people? Are there many light-skinned folk like yourself?

Yes. Many women with light skin. Many, I said. I go for Seth. He has light skin, too. We go for… one more. Skin like mine.

We reached the pub and stepped inside. The stench of city murmured beneath the stench of drink.

This woman was Adel. Esumi, You have heard of her, from all the skalds’ songs and the rumors that have spread in the decades. I place no stock in most of them, but I know two rumors to be true. She was one of the greatest paladins once, before the fall, and love ruined her, twice.

I learned of those things one night, when we were crossing the cold mountains and she was still awake, staring into the milkweed fire. Seth, Fest, and Korinyes slept hard in the demon dreams, but I woke up from mine. I saw her staring into the intoxicating fire.

Grandfather’s golem listened to us silently from his place beside the flame.

Always death, always Alastair-of-the-Wolf said Adel, quietly, laying her cloak down, sharpening her teeth in men’s bellies, and gnawing on the human hearts.

Always Alastair-of-the-Wolf, I said. I poked at the smoldering flames of the milkweed. Seth never teaches me anything, and he teaches you enough to bring you visions in the smoke.

My demons are my own.

Time passed. Somewhere in the night a cricket sang a hymn to our warm fire.

What was his name? I said.

He’s dead now, she said. They’re both dead and it doesn’t matter anymore what their names were. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s name is.

It matters, I said.

My demons are my own, Zhan.

My grandmother lived in a small house with many children. Grandfather was the only man in our village with red hair, and Seth was the only boy with red hair. I remember that Grandfather’s hair was sun-bleached red and brittle in sweat and snow.

I remember Grandfather smelled like sour leather and milkweed smoke, even before I knew what milkweed smoke was.

I only remember the moment of seeing him once when I was a child. Though I had seen him many times, this ghost digs into the web and screams.

He put me on his lap when I was still young enough for laps. I looked into his face. I pinched his jagged nose. It was nearly as big as my hand. He laughed. And whose little one are you? he said.

I told him. I was the second daughter of his eldest son.

Oh, do you know who I am? he said.

I told him he was my grandfather.

No, not yours, he said. Maybe I am, but probably not.

My father had black hair and a thin nose. My grandmother had brown hair and a strong jaw. Then, she grew old and her hair faded into snow. I did not know what my grandfather looked like after the murders. His skin was tanned and leathery when I was a young child, but it was still too light for the Proliuxian folk.

I looked for him, too, in the city with all my heart. I wished I could find my grandfather and kill him quickly, before I found Seth. Then I could shove Grandfather’s head into Seth’s quivering hands. I could smile at Seth’s gasp of horror.

I was supposed to be a rider. I was meant to drink blood and kill and die in the sudden, surreal thrill of battle.

Instead, I was a shaman’s apprentice, and duty bound to hunt my grandfather with my Uncle Seth below the edge of our world.

A rider never places anyone’s flesh before her duty, not even her own. Neither should a shaman.

My Uncle Seth was only six years older than me, and I never considered him a mentor. He was such a bad young man. When I knew him, before I left for the herds, he was my great-aunt’s quiet shadow and did not listen to a word she said. He burned things, and kissed with village girls, whether they liked it or not. He got in loud fights with Baba all the time. I don’t remember words. Words are never important in arguments, only how loud we shout them.

I never learned my great-aunt’s name — or if I did, I forgot it long ago — because she was so old. We all just called her Baba. Everyone did. I remember her teaching us to read, a little. We children never sat still. She never stopped to discipline us. I think she was too old to hear us. While children grew Baba shrank. She leaned on a cane, and limped around the village.

Her hair was down to her ankles, and white. On muddy days, her hair would brown at the bottom. On dusty days, her hair would yellow.

Seth had long red hair, long and long down to the middle of his legs. Seth hated his hair. I see him in my mind, always tugging at his tangled red hair. I remember it better than his face. I braided it for him when the weather was too hot. That changed nothing. His hair crinkled in red frizz. His ragged braid draped down his sweaty back, and trapped the heat beneath. After he lost me in the city, StafSru Korinyes cut it for him right away. She couldn’t stand how sweaty he got in the afternoons. I don’t blame her. I blame him.

I did not yet have hair like that. The fourth thing that happened to me when I first met my sensei was my hair was cut back above my ears.

You must listen, she had said.

In the city streets, I looked for his red hair, or my grandfather’s white hair. If my grandfather had white hair…

And my hair was longer, but still not long like Baba’s.

I had not seen my grandfather since years before I had gone to the herds. He lived in the mountains, and came back once and a while with mounds and mounds of dead goats piled in a huge litter, tugged by bruised hands.

The goat corpses keep in the cold above the tree line. Sometimes the leather was ruined by cougars, rats, or vultures. Sometimes the body was too long dead, even kept cold. Farmers bought these bodies cheap, and buried them in their fields, hooves and all. The stinking corpses push the offended wheat out of the earth.

Before Baba was the shaman there was another, even more ancient, and Seth was young. When the ancient one died, Baba came for Seth in the mountains. Grandfather tried to send her away, and told her that Seth wasn’t the youngest one.

Baba told her youngest brother, my grandfather, that Seth was both the oldest and the youngest, and it had to be Seth. Laws of paternity and duty are very clear in the holy hymns, said Baba.

My sensei told me she was sorry when the messenger came. I wonder if Baba told Seth the same. Maybe she said it after grandfather had his fit and fled into the hills to hunt away his rage. I can see her, red hair spilling around her like a cape. She leaned close to the boy. They smelled each other. She said it. I’m sorry.

And Seth, the boy didn’t even understand why he couldn’t go off with his father and the hunting forever in the wild world of rock, snow, and giant sky.

Adel bought me the finest liquor I had ever had in my life in the pub that she had so casually led me too.

(I still drink it now in goat milk to help my throat, and it still tastes wonderful, even though I can barely taste it these days and it burns so much.)

She said the drink was called Kahli. It was made with roasted beans and fermented sugar. I did not know what the word fermented meant, but I let it roll over me without question. There are more important things to question.

How did you get to this city? she asked.

On a boats, on a small water, and then a big water. I said, too drunk to speak clearly.

From the north? she said. Her hands lingered around the rim of her cup.

Yes, I said.

I have been north before, she said. She squinted at me. I have never seen your people.

Tall buildings, but not buildings. Made of… what plants go. What children throw, I gestured up with my hands, and painted the mountains in the candle smoke, tall, very tall.

Dirt? Balls? Oh; mountains! Mountains? Adel gestured with her hands. She held them high over her head and spread them wide. Ocean to ocean, our continent has mountains in the north. Dirt, rocks, wolves, and goats. Gigantic mountains. No one lives in the mountains. It’s too cold — too dry. You live past the mountains?

I think… Yes. Far, far north. I felt an insect in my ear, humming and humming. I brushed at it, but there was nothing there. My eyelids drooped. My head looked up at the wooden ceiling. Tall, tall things. Very tall. Very cold. Hard to go on.

Yes, mountains! Adel poured me another drink.

I pushed it away. Mountains…

Adel pushed it back. Mountains!

We fell into laughter. We laughed and laughed. We fell into each other laughing. I realized that she had only had one drink, and I had had many. She pushed me back against my chair and smiled.

She took another sip, and rubbed her neck. She chuckled to herself and said, Past the mountains…

Seth and I broke the tree line on my grandfather’s trail. We climbed a goat track south and south, then up the side of the mountains.

Uncle Seth made a fire from the milkweeds. Milkweeds were the tallest things that grew up here. Small clover hid around rocks, and occasionally a yellow flower winked at us in the wind. The milkweed was waist high and smelled sour. It felt like greasy, limp ligaments.

Seth gathered milkweed in clumps in the mid-afternoon and slashed the sides of them. He dried them on a sunny rock until all the white goo oozed from the slashes. Night came, and no tent or skin could keep away that cold a moment more without the demon fire from the milkweeds.

The mountains are so cold. At night, the wind grows, and the cold seeps into your mouth with every breath. Instead of true tents, Seth set the skins and sticks up as windbreaks, in a leather square around the fire. The wind came up or down the cliff, depending on the time of night. Seth angled the windbreaks to guide the wind a different way, around the fire and around our sleeping bodies. We slept with the stars in our eyes.

Seth piled the brown, dried-up milkweed in a circle of rocks and lit it on fire with two smooth stones. They burned long into the night, and very warm. Longer than pine, longer than cow dung, and warmer than both combined. He had made much milkweed, but only used half of what he had made during the day. The rest disappeared into the pockets of his clothes.

I still don’t know everything he kept in all those pockets. Shamans have so many pockets.

Seth pointed at the fire. My father taught me that, he said.

When? I asked.

You were not the only one who had another calling first, he said, I was going to be my father’s successor until my great-uncle died. I was going to wander these mountains and hunt the goats, like him and like his father. Live in the snow, just like him. He always wanted me to follow in his footsteps.

Seth looked down at the latest goat path we had been following his father on. Dried-up shit squatted beside a milkweed bush just off the path. The old man had used the milkweed to break the wind where his body was exposed, and hadn’t bothered to bury the remains.

Funny, isn’t it? said Seth. That’s what we’re doing now.

What? I said.

He yawned when he answered. He spoke through the yawn and it stretched his voice like wind. Following in his footsteps.

The wind changed and the milkweed smoke poured over my face. It was like breathing spirits. My eyes watered. I coughed and coughed.

Get out of the smoke, he said.

I barely heard him. He was far away. I looked at stars, not him. I looked at thousands of stars. All of them moved. They dashed away like fleeing fireflies. Now the sky was black.

He appeared in my face. Up close, his skin was a patchwork of pinks and browns. I don’t remember if he was handsome or not. I remember he had blue eyes.

Are you okay? he said. Are you hurt?

What? No.

You passed out, he said. I told you to get out of the smoke.

I did. I think I did. Is it morning? I said. It isn’t morning? Where is the moon?

You passed out a few moments ago. The milkweed smoke takes getting used to. The weed will burn hot all night, he said, but the smoke can get to you if you’re not used to it. That’s why we can’t have a tent over our heads. The smoke would kill us if we got it too strong. The wind will blow it up or down the mountain. He paused. He examined my head for bruises or blood. He said in a whispered afterthought, You should sleep next to the fire, not above it, or below it.

Is it morning? I asked.

No, he replied.

When do we leave?

Tomorrow, he said. It’s not morning, yet. You will become accustomed to the milkweed. It’s just your first time.

His face was close enough to kiss. He had pulled me out of the smoke. He slowly lowered my head and returned to his side of the fire. He said, You will dream of demons, too. You will not sleep well this night.

I never sleep well, I said. Riders don’t sleep well. I didn’t sleep well last night at all I have a headache, too.

In the pub, I didn’t tell Adel that, but I was thinking it.

There are more eyes in the city than just yours, she said. Why do you hunt your grandfather?

I took a sip of the sweet Khali. I grimaced. He has to kill men, women, and babies, I said, and the shamans to hunt them down them who to kill.

Wait. What? Who is the killer?

My grandfather has to kill many others north of mountains, I said. My father was to kill, my mother, many others. My grandfather to kill them.

Adel sighed and pressed her hands into her temple. A murderer, then. You and your uncle came here to kill a murderer.

I shook my head. No murder I do. We kill for Alastair. We are holy man, holy woman. We obey our Alastair word. We to kill a man who to kill.

Adel cocked her head, and sipped her Khali. She put her drink down. Her empty hand touched a sword tattoo. Justice, then. Law and justice, she said. I think I understand. I hope I do. I will help you. I know how to help with these things. Law and justice. Touch. A sigh, as long as winter. Law and justice.

We were feasting, all the riders together. It was our last feast as apprentices. I drank sweetened blood wine, and devoured the boiled liver of a slaughtered buffalo. I sat between my two closest friends, also apprentices on the verge. Esumi, if the Goddess permitted me to tell you of our lives in that camp. If I could tell you how happy I was there training and hunting…

In the morning we would have all risen, despite our hangovers, to bring down a buffalo with only knives. It would be our last rites as apprentices. Then we would have received our saddles, and would have sung songs and would have rode out to war with the cannibals on the western shores this time of year.

No other holy duty could fall upon me, then. I would be a rider at last and forever, until my death in battle and ascension to the arms of Alastair. Once last rites occurred, my fate was set in stone.

Then, a messenger arrived at the far edge of our camp. We who feasted did not see him, since he was over a small hill along the plain. The guards did. Two riders circled the camp to guard our pleasures and they saw him right away.

The messenger was a tall boy about our age. Men of all ages were forbidden in our camp, especially tall boys about our age. The guards lifted their spears, but he held a scroll out instead of bare hands. The guards saw the scroll’s green sash in the fading light, and snatched the scroll from his fingers. They told him to sit or die. He sat. A guard stayed with him, with her spear near his throat.

The message went to my sensei right away. She read it and frowned. The table silenced.

Zhan Immur, go home to your village right away, said my sensei, You are not to be one of us. Alastair has chosen a new path for you. Your family has been murdered — all of them — except your uncle, Seth Immur. You are to be a shaman now. You are to be Seth Immur’s apprentice, not mine, and not a rider after all.

The words sank into the silent, mostly drunk crowd. I sobered.

Sensei pressed a finger into her temple. She closed her eyes. She said, You came to me with a spear, a bow, and a cloak, You will leave with only these things. Alastair exists in ways we cannot foresee, and cannot contain. Her law is greater than our desire. Go now.

The whole table numbed in those words. A hand appeared on my back. For a moment it was comforting. Then it pushed me.

I fell. I jumped to my feet. I said, What?

Sensei frowned deeper. She opened her eyes. Go now, shaman. Only riders live here. You are no longer welcome.

Then she said, as a soft afterthought, I’m sorry.

When I arrived at the rider camp as a young girl, I cried and fainted. Now, I didn’t cry. Now, I didn’t faint. I left with the guard, who took me to the messenger.

This messenger was the first man I’d seen in five years. He sat cross-legged in the grass, and picked his nose. He had the numb face of a farm boy, or a shepherd, or an unpleasant memory. He didn’t know how close to death he came this holy night.

I nodded sadly at the guards. I knew the secret names they called themselves in the white heat of battle. They had taught me how to live, how to find my own name in that same heat. They and their sisterhood had taught me how to be a woman.

The two guards turned their backs on me, and left. They didn’t look back. In the raucous distance, an apprentice laughed. Someone sang a song too loud while someone else banged a drum without any rhythm:

My spear is your key to the afterlife,

I shove it in your hole and turn!

Kiss good-bye to your kids and wife,

And bend over for the burn…

The messenger was a shepherd’s son, near my age, and tired from the journey here. He stood up. Seth said to get you back right away. I came as quick as I could. You think we got time to eat. I’m pretty hungry, myself.

I fell into his arms. He staggered backwards in surprise. My legs collapsed, and I collapsed into him. I cried and cried, and howled and howled. I dug my fingers into his back with my agony. Goddess, I was in agony. Goddess, I can still feel that pain. I can still feel it…

The farmboy remembered at last the news I had just heard. His hand came up to my back. He let me buck and kick my pain into his body. He stroked my back as if I were a spooked sheep. He said, Shhh…

Uncle Seth and I spent a whole morning trying to communicate with the small town. We pointed north. We spoke. They looked at each other, and at our weapons. They pointed at a river boat. They shouted at us slowly in their harsh language of angry cats.

At the boat, a sailor grabbed at my cloak. Seth pushed him off. He fell back and laughed. He shook his head at us. He removed his own jacket and held it out to us. He smiled a toothless smile, and took it back. Then he gestured to the boat.

Uncle Seth took my spear and used the tip to draw a picture in the dirt. Two circles. He pointed at one of the circles and pointed at himself. He pointed at the other circle, and pointed at me. Then, he drew a third circle. He slammed my spear into the center of that circle.

Seth pulled the spear out of the ground, and then he struck the circle again. He pulled the spear out. The sailor cocked his head. Seth drew small lines from the two circles that represented him and me, and he pointed them at the circle he had attacked.

The sailor nodded. He smiled, and muttered something. He hopped onto his small skiff, and pulled out a goatskin cloak.

He held that, and pointed at the third circle. He pointed at the cloak, and the circle, and then the boat.

I think we understand each other now. Give him your cloak, said Seth, It’s what he wants.

Give him yours, I snorted.

He doesn’t want mine, said Seth.

Offer it to him, and see if he takes it.

Seth harrumphed and took off his cloak. He held it out to the smiling sailor. The sailor snatched it with another toothless smile. He gestured onto his boat. Seth and I followed him on.

That night, I shared my cloak with him, both of us pressed together and my arm over his shoulders, to keep us both warm. Are we going the right way? I said.

If the Goddess wills it.

We traveled with six bags of grain, a large hog, and three sleek black birds in cages. The birds sang only one note in the morning mists, a long note like a dark bell.

What bird is there that does not hate the cages? he said. What man is there who lives in such a small world as that cage so happily?

The sailor looked at us with a big, stupid smile. He said something unintelligible.

He does, I said. I nodded at the man. I shrugged. I pointed at my ear and turned away from him. I looked Seth in the face.

Yes, said Seth, the man who owns his own cage will sit in it and even die for it. Just like the cage of flesh. We would do anything to protect our fleshy cages because we think we own them.

Duty owns my flesh, I said, and it owns yours, too, oh magnificently brilliant shaman. This journey is our prison, and it is not of our making.

He smiled and snorted a small laugh. If this is your cage, he said, give it up. No jailer will stop you here. You hold your own keys.

I shook my head. No, I said, tell me a joke instead. I’m sick of all this gloomy, important nonsense you always talk about. Riders laugh in the face of death, theirs and everyone else’s. Tell me a joke.

Right, he said, what do a flea and a man have in common?

I don’t know, I tossed a small pebble at the birds. It bounced off a beak. The creature shook its head and squawked.

They both hop from one bitch’s back to another, said Seth.

That isn’t funny, I said.

You just said to tell you a joke, he replied. You didn’t ask for it to be funny.

Can you tell me a funny, joke? I said. I threw a pebble at Seth this time. It hit him in the throat. He ignored it.

I don’t know any, he said.

The pig ambled up to the cages. It snorted at the caged birds. The birds flapped their wings, and the pig pulled away from the wind. Neither do I, I said.

I didn’t talk to the dull-witted messenger the whole journey to the village. He spoke and sometimes he told me to do something. I did what he asked of me or not without explaining. The journey that took me three months when I was twelve and alone took him and me four silent weeks.

My baby sister was supposed to be the shaman. If she died, I had a younger brother. If he died, it was only me. My youngest sister was six months old when I bled and left. I had held my mother’s hand when the pangs came, and the tiny lump of flesh broke through to life.

My mother’s groaning, twisted face and wild screams were like someone else’s face and voice.

I held my mother’s hand even though my mother nearly broke it, and I mopped her face dry of sweat. Baba was between my mother’s legs. Baba sang hymns to the Goddess. Incense burned in a corner softly. Seth stood there, next to the incense, boiling water, and handing over warm, wet blankets. He looked at my mother bucking and kicking and screaming. He yawned.

I had watched my mother’s belly grow for months like a miracle, and now the miracle was only pain. Even the baby girl was in agony. She emerged, screaming into the air, kicking and angry and cold.

I stared at stars at night during my journey back to my old village. I felt that same pain inside of me. That same pain. I bucked and screamed. The shepherd boy held me, and let me buck and scream. I felt a black ball in my stomach pushing through and pushing and pushing through.

And then, sleep came for us both after, and nothing at all had come out. My flat belly was as empty as my aching heart.

He drooled in my hair while he slept.

At least he snored, too. I could sleep a little when he snored.

My grandfather had murdered that same child I had felt connected to by a distant vein of life. This was my bond with my baby sister: I was there when she arrived.

I didn’t even know her. She was too young when I left. Agony, I cannot describe for you, still I cannot though years have turned. I cannot. Goddess, agony…

Somewhere in the vast northern tundra, where the grass grows low and dense above the permafrost and day and night take monthlong turns in the sky, my friends with my sensei charged into battle. Some of them died. At the end of the battle, the warriors of all the united lords came together to drink and dance and love because all of them were warriors, and might not have lived another moment after that one.

You were there, Esumi, and we could have drank and loved without the weight of empire on our backs.

Perhaps I would have died, in the kiss of a javelin thrown by a cannibal. My body dragged away, tossed into a pot and stirred with my sisters and brothers or eaten raw in the fields.

The beastmen cannibals would eat me, head first, and use my sharpened bones to kill my sisters. Or I would live, to train a new wave of sisters, and ride bison until my bones would be too brittle and I wouldn’t be able to move.

It was the life I had grown to believe. My family far away was only a dream I dreamt at night under the darkness.

My mother’s voice called to me in the wind, with the weight of the farmer’s wife, whose child is bound by duty and birth to die far away, in a war she knew nothing about. Hands that smelled like challah bread. The mysteries of yeast and the mysterious wonders of winter in a small village and women’s quiet solitude among the children’s private worlds. Watching children grow. Waving the second-born off to war. Praying for a good harvest. A gentle husband with a strong back and heavy hands.

I dreamed about my childhood. Stirring pots in the morning with boiled milk to feed my father before he went to the farm. My father’s veined hands — the strongest hands in the world — with the two missing fingers from a sick cow that bit him one bad day in spring. Those hands that ran down my head and were so huge. His tired smile at night, drifting in and out of sleep before the fire.

My mother laughed at his same old jokes all through the winter. They chased my younger brother and me around the tiny house when we were really snowed in. They pretended to be scary bears.

We giggled at them. My older brother scoffed, and sharpened his hunting tools. He killed wolves all winter with the other older boys, to keep the wolves away from the livestock. My younger brother and I giggled and giggled. We pretended our fingers were arrows.

My mother’s thick face shook when she laughed. She had such a hearty laugh. At night, she snored to knock the snow from the eaves. When I first came to the rider camp I couldn’t sleep, no matter how exhausted I was, because I couldn’t hear my mother snoring. In the end, I listened to the singsong snoring of the crickets, and this worked enough until my sympathetic tent-mate picked up the snoring habit for herself.

And my grandfather had come down from the mountains after three years away.

He came down from the mountains with clothes on his back and nothing else. The village had believed him dead, at long last. The day — the very day — that my grandmother was declared free, the old hunter arrived to wide eyes and not a single smile in the whole village. Not even his sister, Baba, smiled at him.

My grandfather came down and saw the many children in his house, who had no goat to eat this time. Some of the children had been adopted by other families.

The younger children heard that the adoptions were a mercy. This poor woman had too many mouths to feed, no land to farm, and no livestock to raise. Her older children barely got by themselves. So many children to feed.

Two weeks journey south, seventeen winters old, and staring at the cold stars. Staring at Alastair’s blind eye: the moon. I saw for the first time that my grandfather was not truly my grandfather.

He had killed everyone that was not of his blood, but of his name. He left behind only my Uncle Seth and me. I was too far away to kill, and surrounded by riders who kill uninvited men on sight. If he even remembered I was alive at all.

And Seth was his only true son.

And my whole childhood fell into a box the color of the night sky, and the box slammed shut. The dream fell to pieces, and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I stared up at the cold stars and felt the rising and falling agony like a sickening ocean.

All of my dreams — all of them — had died.

I did not tell these things to Adel, yet. I couldn’t. We did not have the words between us. We would when we would be dashing across the white tundra to Ilhota in the winter darkness. We would in the dungeon. In the dungeon all we could do was sit and wait and listen to Partridge singing the same songs over and over again.

Until then, we did not have the words to tell each other our own stories. All we did was look for Seth, and grandfather. Then, we carried the urgent message of imminent invasion to a land that did not even know Proliux existed.

Adel got me a room in an inn next to the pub. I took a bath. I hadn’t bathed in months. I complain of city stench, but I smelled like the city. I was a walking pavement stone, covered in muck and puke and dust.

After I bathed, the water was as brown as the dusky skin of the locals. I imagined how skin could get so dark, and I thought it was cinnamon. The cinnamon seeped through the body, and out of the skin, and the skin turned brown.

(Is your skin brown yet, Esumi?)

I dipped my finger into the soapy water, and collected some small flecks of dust. I sniffed it. I touched it with my tongue. It tasted like soap.

I slept in a bed behind a locked door, and I tossed and turned all night. My back swelled up like an over-used tongue, and I slept worse than if I had gone back to my alley. I was unaccustomed to beds.

In the morning, Adel knocked on my door. Neither of us had a hangover. I don’t know why we didn’t. Maybe we both never really slept. Adel wore loose, cool clothes, and threw a dress at me. I think this is your size, she said. I just had to guess.

It wasn’t but I wore it anyway. The dress was brown and rode high on my legs and hung loose in my chest. We had sweet rolls for breakfast, and drank cool cinnamon tea. Adel paid for everything.

In the street, people stared.

Adel stopped a street walker, and lifted a coin in the air. Pardon me, Madame, but I was wondering could borrow your eyes for a moment, said Adel. We are looking for two men with light skin like my friend’s here. One has red hair.

The woman rolled her eyes and snorted at us. Always you people asking us what we have seen. Would anyone find wayward sons if not for the scorned women? Go away, ugly. I don’t serve your kind.

In an inn, the innkeeper pushed spectacles up his fat nose. He shook his head, sadly. A good man is hard to find, these days for sure, he said. Ran off on ya, huh? I’ll keep an eye out for ’im, for sure.

A beggar sipped an unidentifiable liquid from a filthy cup. He shook his head and cautiously took the coin. No.

Adel and I walked around, asking people who tend to notice people. We talked about food while we walked, because I could speak of little else yet.

She hated cinnamon in everything but tea.

So did I.

I loved the Khali.

She smiled. Everyone does, she said.

Seth and I ate goat in the mountains. He had a rope that he used to lasso them around the horns. The goat jumped back every time, testing the power of the strange rope, and then jumped forward to the source. Seth held a spear out. The goat collapsed when the spear burst into its chest.

We did not have time to strip and clean the skins. We dug into the meaty bellies and legs. We cooked the flesh over milkweed fires, and the meat tasted burned and sick. We left a trail of goats for the wolves.

My mouth went numb, eating the milkweed smoke in the meat. At night I had visions of a darker world.

When we reached the other side of the mountains — after the canyon — the trees returned, and we stopped using milkweed. I had a headache for days.

Seth said it was… the angry ghosts of the mountains that never want you to leave.

He said that after we found the trees, though. We wandered the mountains first. We found a canyon first.

We found the canyon before we found trees. Seth and I stood on a small outcropping of rock. We had just followed the trail over a ridge. Grandfather marked his path with dislodged roots and rocks, and the refuse of eaten goats. He marked his path well. I touched Seth’s arm. He wants us to follow him, doesn’t he?

Seth shrugged. If he even thinks he’s being followed.

Mm, I said. Neither yes nor no. A word I learned from Seth.

If it is the will of the Goddess… said Seth. Then he stopped and pointed down below us at a cliff. He said, We seem to be following him to that rift in the rock, I don’t remember ever seeing a canyon like that with my father.

How long has it been since you were here with him?

Long, said Seth, Perhaps he never took me here. I don’t know. Look at that thing.

We stood on an outcropping that formed a goat path. My right knee was bent high because the path was steep. My left leg was tired and sore. I kept thinking about all these angles, and how easily it would be to misjudge a rock and break an ankle, and fall, and fall, and fall.

If it is the will of the Goddess…

Below us, the mountain dropped away to a steep slide of pebbles and rocks. A patch of milkweed clung to the rock face alone, like green acne on the white. The goat path wound around the middle of the jagged peak. Then, the path followed the stone skin between two fat fingers of mountain. The path looped down to the valley, a day’s journey at least, and down and down into an even deeper place.

A canyon.

From where I stood, I could see how jagged it was. A single sliver of igneous rock that cracked and held apart two great, sharp peaks. A canyon that moved in a direct line into the center of the mountains, like a thunderbolt of Alastair carved into the stone.

Grandfather had moved in as straight a line as he could through the mountains for the last few weeks moving to this strange path. Weeks ago, he did this since we were weeks behind him and his shit had time to harden like white stones.

I followed Adel in the city for days. We learned to speak to each other. We talked of anything we could, and I taught her pieces of my own language. Fish. Winter. Night. Run.

We traveled all day long and talked to beggars, hookers, and innkeepers. All through time, the same stories over and over again. The same contempt or the same sadness poured from the mouths of the brown faces. Cities are full of people who say the same things to strangers. I wondered if there was a conspiracy.

Adel and I stopped a woman in a bright red dress. She had a feline face, and a squishy body that pushed against the seams. Her brown skin spilled over the green fringes like a flood.

And this woman smiled and said, I never discuss my customers for free.

Adel smiled and lifted a small coin in the air.

This prostitute reached for the coin. An old fella with the oddest round eyes, she said. He wears nice clothes and he always has a little money to throw about. He talks to me in a weird language. He is a rough fella. You say he has white skin, and I reckon he do. He do underneath his clothes. I stopped seeing him, though. He tired of me.

I clutched Adel’s shoulder. My knees trembled. All this talking and walking, and this one disgusting person.

Where did he go when he was done with you? said Adel.

The prostitute smiled. You couldn’t pay me enough to tell you that, deary, she said. I will tell you he is unfaithful, one woman to another, but I will not tell you where he goes after. I have a neck to worry about, too, you know.

Adel lifted another coin. She said, Are you sure?

Aye, deary. My neck is priceless, no matter what the rest of me happens to go for. The prostitute looked past us.

Then do not tell me exactly, said Adel. Tell me how big.

She walked away without the coin. She looked over at a man passing by with his mercenaries and fine silk robes and fine, thin jewels. She coughed at him.

Adel nodded.

In a riverboat, riding downstream, three men sat above us all.

Sometimes the river was wide, and a sail captured the morning breezes. Other times, men with long poles walked up and down the deck, pushing us along from the river bottom. The world was no longer sweet pine. It was short oak. It was long grasses. It was strong winds in the mornings and evenings, and dead calm in the afternoons. The world smelled like the muddy, yellow water beneath us.

We passed thousands of other boats, too. Like ours, but piled with different things or different people. We passed small villages and farmlands. Large dikes sprouted up around the villages, and men walked up and down the dikes with long poles in their hands, measuring I guess. Past the dikes, fields of corn and wheat. Farther south, we saw rice fields for the first time in our lives in muddy swamps full of mosquitoes and alligators.

The three men above us all sat up with the captain of the riverboat — if a riverboat of six sailors can call themselves captains. Those three men on the high deck wore blue and red, with intricate graffiti sewn into their sleeves and necks.

They spoke little to us, except for one. One was curious about us. He was a military commander once, and liked to get to know new kinds of people.

At the shipyard where we had negotiated passage, he had watched us from the bustling herd of man and agriculture.

I had only seen him because the crowd had parted for him. I don’t know if it was respect or contempt. Maybe both. The crowd had split, tugging at their pack animals and crates of possessions, falling over themselves into the street mud. Burly men with sacks of grain on their backs had dropped the grain into the mud instead of standing in this one man’s path. This man had passed by us casually enough, but he had stopped and had taken a second glance at us. He had heard our strange accent attempt to negotiate passage on a river boat. He had seen our strange eyes, our strange skin, our strange clothes.

He had made a brisk motion to his companions following in his wake. A mustached man had nodded. He had dashed forward to the riverboat captain.

On the ship the scorned one liked to talk to us, but Seth and I didn’t really understand him. This encouraged his desire. He tried hard to make us understand. We learned as much as we could from this stranger. He never sat with us, or ate with us. He just talked to pass the time while he was still sober enough to talk. He stopped when he got too drunk. He smelled like damp flowers and bad alcohol.

I learned that he was the youngest son of Proconsul Argarax, and he had been thrown from the army for cowardice. I learned this from the captain. The captain stayed with the men on the raised deck, laughing and drinking and talking. At night, he joked about the special guests with his five sailors. I listened. I could hear better than I could speak. As the days passed, I pieced it together.

This Lord Argarax was guilty. He smelled of drink, and his body had recently disintegrated. Once strong arms now only got exercise under the heavy bottle of cheapest wheat liquor. His round belly pushed against his fine cloth. His fat face was sweaty and pimpled. His eyes were deep brown, and very sad.

Mid-morning, and Argarax, was slowly turning red where he had collapsed on the deck. Brown skin takes long to turn red. No one had pushed him into the shade. Seth and I kept to ourselves in the shade beneath the walls of the riverboat.

I mentioned the sailor’s laughter to Argarax sometime along the journey. They to laugh by you, I said.

He sighed and held his head in his hands. I know, he said.

Seth placed a hand on young Argarax’s back. Argarax stood over us on the raised deck and it was awkward for Seth to touch the young man. Argarax pulled away from Seth’s hand. He walked to the other side of the raised deck, and another jug.

I can still see him, leaning against the rail, drinking and singing war songs with his two somber companions, who together drank less than half of what Argarax did alone. They were young men, like Argarax, but they rarely spoke. When they did it was usually to the other, not Argarax.

(One of them had a mustache. We would see that one again, in a café in Proliux. I wouldn’t recognize him until years later, and I awake in the night with a start at what I know now. If I know now. The web drifts and faces merge and fade and a man in a boat is a man in a street café is a man in a castle is a woman in a red dress tossing filth from a window and it isn’t a mustache at all but a line of soot and messy hair…)

One of our last nights on the riverboat, Argarax drank himself into another wild stupor. He shouted battle cries at sailors and tossed broken jugs like spears. He staggered around the top deck. The captain tried to calm him down. Instead, young Argarax jumped back from the captain’s touch. Do you know who I am? Do you? How dare you touch me! How dare you!

And at the rail, at the back of the little boat, he took one long drink of his last bottle. He threw the bottle at the captain. The captain knocked it away with his hands.

And young Argarax fell back over the rail.

Seth and I ran to the edge of our deck. We leaned over and shouted that he had fallen overboard, in our best imitation of Proliux. We could not swim, so we did not dive in after him.

The captain shrugged at us in the moonlight. He wants it, so let him have it.

A sailor touched our backs and pulled us from the edge. Seth and I didn’t understand.

The rest of the journey was a day passed on in silence. We slept. We woke. No one spoke unnecessarily. Every day is like this on the languid riverboats.

The men who had been with young Argarax disappeared fast, and no one really spoke to us while we journeyed to the city, on the trail of my grandfather.

Adel and I looked for Seth the same we way we had always been looking, with beggars, prostitutes and businessmen.

Adel and I found a beggar’s corpse in the evening. We approached an alley because we saw a beggar in it, and we had not found another beggar on this particular section of street. The beggar’s body sprawled in a long heap like a forgotten statue. The low fog of flies forever at the ankles clumped over the corpse. The hands had been gnawed by larger beasts.

She prodded the foul-smelling heap with a stick. The body rolled over. The body was stiff as stone, and crawling with ants. The ants had already removed part of his face. His skull was whiter than my skin.

Adel and I gathered water from a nearby fountain, and we carried it to the body. We dumped it all onto his face and chest. Ants shipwrecked in the little flood.

We pulled the body away from the ants’ path. Back in the street, Adel stopped an older black man passing by. I didn’t understand how we could get this man, of all the men passing on the street, to help us with a corpse, but he would.

The black-skinned men did these things. They were all mercenaries, from the distant deserts past the western sea, who had migrated east.

Adel paid the man to take the beggar’s body to the nearest temple and pray for the lost soul to whatever God was convenient.

The man nodded at the corpse. Why is he so wet?

Ants, she said, we washed them off.

Do you know his name? he asked.

No, she said, do you?

He shook his head sadly. No. Poor man, to die alone. A long pause. The mercenary blinked. My name’s Fest Fasen.

Adel, she said, pointing at herself. Zhan, she said, pointing at me.

I will help you with this man. His voice was as deep and rolling as ocean thunder. But he was from the desert. All mercenaries are from the desert. He has been stabbed. Fest stuck a finger into the man’s chest, and showed us the wound. The blood had dried it solid days ago.

Fest wrapped the body in his cloak. I will buy another cloak with my fee, he said. This is an honorable thing to do. I applaud your honor, Adel and Zhan.

The corpse crackled when it moved. Fest hefted it onto a shoulder. He sighed under the weight and carried it down the street. People parted at this sight of the cloak-wrapped body on black shoulders. A stiff hand bobbed like a fishing rod behind Fest. The hand was tinged brownish-green. A large black ant crawled over it.

I shivered.

Adel took me by my shoulders. She looked me in the eyes. She said, Sorry about that.

Is good, I said. I am good. Is good for killed man.

Adel had astonishing eyes. From afar they seemed merely blue, or green depending on the slant of the sun or the fire. But close, I saw the individual cells of color, of all colors. Her eyes were kaleidoscopes.

Your eye is very good, I said, yes, very good eye.

She blinked and cocked her head. Thank you, I think.

We talked as we walked. I tried to tell her about the sky of the mountains. Down here, near the ocean, the clouds are gigantic, and far away. In the mountains, the clouds are close enough to touch, if you stand on a tall man’s shoulders. At least, they feel that way.

Adel said that clouds were the same everywhere, and only the ground was different.

As we talked, a low, gray cloud wept gently for the beggar. Fest was praying for the poor beggar’s soul, and the heavens answered. Soon, the cloud wept harder and harder, until the streets washed vacant. We ducked into a public house and drank a little Khali until the storm passed.

After the rain, the city streets seemed a little cleaner. The quick torrent pushed much of the filth into the gutters and the sewers.

I heard a cry from a high window.

Adel and I dove for the middle of the street. Wet slop splattered onto the cobblestone where moments ago we had walked. I looked up and could not see where it had come from. I think it fell from the clouds.

The mercenary we would meet again, after Adel and I found Seth.

When I think of that, I think of how small the city must really be. We pass a man on the street, and we see him again later on.

He told me that his city was small. He lived inside a few buildings, where black skin goes to relax, or to work.

Adel’s city was large, because she was rich.

My city was large but lonely, since it was the docks, and all the alleys, and all the streets, and only the beggars and the prostitutes ever talked to me.

Adel took me to where she lived in the city. She lived in a small building over a tailor’s shop, alone. The old tailor stopped us and demanded to fix my dress. His hands looked like wet tree bark with veins and moldy hair. They trembled when he worked and he pricked me thousands of times, like ants. I didn’t flinch at the pricks, and afterwards, my dress fit well.

His shop was covered in colors I did not know existed beyond the summer butterflies until I saw them here, in Proliux. I had seen in many windows, and all the houses are like that here. Little objects with bright colors cram into the corners of every room. Each blank space on a wall has a picture or a statue. Every citizen was a king in a palace of colors and light. The palaces were small.

This tailor shop was as delicate as a collection of insect wings. I stared at the counter with the window behind me. The old man carefully hemmed my new dress at my feet. A counter with paper and quills. Fabrics upon fabrics upon fabrics.

He turned me to face the window. I watched another rainstorm outside while he worked. Lightning crashed, and the unsteady hands pricked me, and Adel talked of the sudden rainstorms in the long plains of Rhianna. I asked her where Rhianna was. She said, West.

That night, I slept on the floor next to the divan. Adel had offered me a blanket and a better pillow on the divan. I shook my head, and lay down on the floor. I told her that I had spent so much time in alleys.

I dreamed of oceans, and in the morning Adel told me I snored to wake the dead. It took some time to figure out what she meant, so she had to mimic snoring herself. We laughed at that. We sipped cinnamon tea, together. We looked out at the clean city. On this pleasant day, we would find Seth.

A few days with Adel, and I achieved what I hadn’t been able to do for months alone.

Seth did not want to be found.

Shamans are powerful with the mysteries of our faith. They combine the elements of Alastair to create the mysteries of Alastair. I had not learned these things, yet. Still, the mysteries are powerful things. Smoke that burns blue in the spring feast. A pink cloud of dust that spreads through the waters and brings sleeping fish to the surface. A green leaf that stops bleeding. A red stalk mixes with sheep’s blood to kill wolves, or mixes in strawberry pie to taste like sweetened wolf-bites to keep a child from vomiting.

These mysteries I had not learned. He had, though. He abused the mysteries of the Goddess for months, and dreaded my face in the crowd. He wore a mask to hide from me. He had cut his hair.

I lost him — or he lost me — and I had remained in the docks where we had arrived. My docks were at the far south of the island city. He did not stay for me to find him. He followed the surging crowds, and disappeared into the city.

I do not know precisely what occurred. Later on, he told me that he had given up, and I would never give up, and so he had left me. I believe him.

So many brown faces, and so long of a journey south, and he felt the pull of the crowd, tearing us apart, and he decided that he would let them pull. I jumped and shouted and waved my arms. He looked back and our eyes locked for one moment. I knew, then.

Seth followed the people that pushed him. He followed the human herd and discovered himself in a marketplace. Bustling bodies bartering for beautiful and exotic things. Pieces of odd furniture from the wood of new forests. All he had ever seen before of wood was pines and occasional birch, and oak when he had journeyed to the coast.

A gigantic black man waved a fist in the air and shouted. Buy something or move along, friend. If I catch you stealing, I’ll bash your brains in.

We had seen so few of the darkest-skinned men down along the river ships. In Proliux, they are everywhere, and all for hire. Korinyes and Adel told me the same thing. The dark men were an old army, who took over the mercenary deserts and Rhianna, and they were allowed to stay in the city to pay off the debts of the generals.

Seth and I had thought the mercenaries were golems of the wicked gods, until we watched one’s nose explode in blood.

Seth laid his hands upon the weeping black man, featureless in the moonlight. Seth pressed dried-up milkweed against the man’s broken nose until it stopped bleeding. The black giant’s shoulders heaved with sobs, but his eyes stopped leaking. Seth straightened the man’s nose in one, painful crack. The man didn’t flinch. His eyes rolled like drifting wheels.

Seth wiped the blood off the man’s face with bare hands. He had nothing else he could spare for a stranger. Seth placed a sliver of old milkweed in the man’s mouth, and said, Dream well.

The black man’s opponent nursed his hand in a corner of the boat. Seth touched the hand. The brown man frowned, and cradled his hand away.

No move, said Seth, in Proliuxian. I help.

Seth gave a tiny sliver of milkweed to the brown man, and mimicked eating it. Seth said in a soft whisper of our language, Go ahead and eat it. It won’t kill you, but it will certainly calm you down. It will certainly keep you from feeling your hand for a while, too. Seth touched the man’s face like loving. You fight over nothing, like dogs, he said. You are strange folk to fight over meaningless words.

And we left him there, in a corner of the riverboat, holding his hand and staring at the stars.

I had reached into the black man’s purse while Seth was moving away. I slipped out four coins before Seth sat down. Everyone else on our deck of the riverboat was awake and staring at Seth, who had soothed the wild beasts.

I stole again, quickly. Then, I sat down next to the brown man, and wiped drool from his face. With my other hand I stole from his nearest neighbor.

Seth stared at the black man with the broken nose. Seth reached over the boat wall, and washed his hands clean in the murky night river.

The black man drooled, too. I walked up to him. I ran a hand over his strange face. It felt like human skin. I wiped blood from his mouth with my sleeve. Someone handed me a rag. I said, Thank you, and I used the rag to wipe the blood away. When I handed the rag back, the owner tossed it over the side of the boat. It didn’t splash.

I washed my hands in the river, too, and as much of my sleeve as I could.

Then I sat down, and stared at the black man, just like Seth. We studied the dark anatomy as best we could in the moonlight. Golem no more. Definitely human.

Seth, in one of the island city’s marketplaces, heard the giant black man command him to leave. He moved along. He saw piles of fish, in the next stall. The fish had shining scales and a fierce stench in the afternoon sun. Seth moved along again to vast piles of nuts and fruit and vegetables. He held out a small coin, and pointed at a piece of fruit. The vendor took the coin and handed two fruits to Seth without negotiation. Seth placed one of the fruits into his pocket. He ate the other one.

Seth moved along while he ate, his eyes as big as his fruits.

Seth told me about that fruit later on, and said it tasted like moonlight, dark and sweet.

Fest Fasen told us it was a plum. Fest hated plums.

We sat at a table in a public house, eating dinner. The growing hills hunched over the village outside our window. An army of mercenaries ate around us. Some of them stared at us, the only women for miles around them. We were in northern Proliux, at last, near the mountains.

Fest lifted the bowl of soup to his face and poured it down his throat. He puffed up his chest and bellowed out at his brethren whenever he burped.

He slammed the bowl down and it nearly shattered. When he spoke, his steel fangs sparkled in the candlelight. Fest said, Plums taste weak, and rot quick. You need lemons or oranges. Those’ll do you on a ship voyage good. Plums are a waste of money.

Fest took another long drink of wine.

Seth loved burning things. He was thirteen winters old, and setting fire to ants with his own homemade matches. Baba slapped him when he did this. She was too ancient to hurt anyone with her slaps.

Seth burned leaves, too. He burned bushes. He piled pinecones up and set fire to them. He never flinched when the fringe of the pinecones cracked and popped, and the pile fizzled in explosions.

He didn’t smile, either.

He burned outhouses a couple times, but they stank to raise the village against him.

He stopped doing these things, where people could see, after about a year. I never asked why because I was young, and he was old, and I didn’t care. I don’t know if or why, he had stopped.

I just know that he carried those matches and that vial of burning liquid all the way south. He sold his ceremonial hunting gear and his heavy clothes to eat. He did not sell the vial or the matches. To impress a pretty gypsy girl, he breathed fire in her face.

Seth pulled at his curdling red hair. The sweat and heat pushed away the frizz like paint peeling from a humid wall. He had a few coins in his pocket that I had stolen for him, and he thought about buying something. Anything.

A prostitute approached him because of his dreamy eyes. He decided that he was definitely buying. I was not standing next to him to challenge his infidelity to Alastair. His coins were not enough, though. The prostitute walked away.

He saw a building as tall as the tallest pine he had ever seen and he stood at its roots, staring up at the white plaster and black timber that reached up to the center of the sky. He kept walking through this city, eyes as big as the sun, until nightfall.

He didn’t sleep that night. He walked. He told me all about this later, and said he didn’t sleep. He told me that he believed he was dreaming, and if he slept he’d wake up in the mountains and the demons of the milkweed would laugh at him. He walked and walked, until his feet burned like hallucinations. He sat down and watched the purple sunrise warm into the full morning flame through the tall plaster and stone.

Alastair-of-the-Wheat had awoken, but he ignored her eye for all the little things beneath.

Days passed.

In another pocket he kept long matches. Long matches were an item only shamans carried. Everyone else used flint. Even Seth used flint when he traveled.

He saw street performers in the marketplace juggling, performing magic tricks, and dancing. The street performers were mostly gypsies with darker skin, but still slanted eyes. Sometimes a gypsy had the kinked hair of a mercenary. These vagabonds were refugees from Rhianna, the defeated nation. The gypsies danced with whirling ribbons, like painting wind.

On an overturned cart with absent wheels, one gypsy woman danced with red, yellow, and green ribbons. She spun her lithe body like a tumbling cat, and her feet kicked high. Her light dress rippled. Her shoes had hard soles that thumped out a rhythm on the overturned cart that was a steady heartbeat pounding away: ba-thum, kick, ba-thum, kick, ba-thum…

A crowd moved through the marketplace, and paused a little to watch her dance. They tossed coins onto the cart. The gypsy woman spun and whirled and kicked her legs high in the air, and the ribbons painted love letters to the crowd. Sometimes she stopped to catch her breath, but her arms still spun the ribbons. She caught the eye of a man and smiled. She had the thick lips of a mercenary girl, but the high cheekbones of a Proliuxian. Her eyes were huge and round, like river mud crystallized into dark, clean jewels.

(Were they green? Were they brown? Blue? Her eyes are black now, but they used to have a color like clean jewels.)

She jumped down from her cart, and spun wildly at the crowd. Her feet snapped in the air, and the wind of it pushed men back. She found the shoulders of a young man. He smiled and let her guide him into the whirling dance. He let her dance around him. The ribbons licked across his body. When the gypsy girl spun away, he reached into his pocket for a large coin, and tossed the coin onto the cart.

This gypsy is StafSru Korinyes. She danced in spurts, stopping to drink cheap wine, and gather the coins on the cart. The coins disappeared into her magnificent, rippling dress.

Seth pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Instead of tossing coins, he reached into one of his own pockets. He pulled out a vial. He popped the lid off, and poured the liquid under his tongue.

He told me in Tsuin when I asked him about the matches that he kept the matches on him all the time with that vial, because it would scare off thieves.

Really? I said. I didn’t believe him.

He made a sound in his throat: Mm.

StafSru Korinyes began her dance. Her ribbons whirled in the air.

She danced like this for a few minutes, and then jumped from the wagon. Down to the crowd, she moved toward a rich old man, who had paused to watch. He smiled at her approach and let her pull him from the crowd.

Seth stepped in, and swiped the match across the old man’s scabbard. The fire flashed to life. StafSru Korinyes kept dancing, but jumped back and around to get the old man away from the white stranger.

Seth held the lit match in the air. He lifted it up, and blew over it. A ball of orange flame blew next and the sick smell like dry grease poured from the smoke.

The crowd gasped. They had never seen anyone breathe fire before.

StafSru Korinyes stumbled and fell and jumped back onto her wagon. She looked angrily at Seth. Seth smiled at StafSru Korinyes. He blew again and fire shot up into the sky. Then Seth placed the burning head of the long match inside of his mouth. He pulled it out and puffed a giant black cloud of smoke. He bent his head back, and stuck out his tongue. Tongues of fire danced, harmlessly.

Coins flew in Seth’s direction. The crowd cheered for more. Seth gave them more. He turned with a smile to StafSru Korinyes. He gestured with his hand at her, beckoning her closer to him.

StafSru Korinyes threw a sharp rock. It smacked above Seth’s left eye. Seth touched his eye with shock. He pulled his hand down and saw blood. He cocked his head and looked up at her. She threw another rock. Seth blocked that rock with his hand.

During the new moon, shamans dance and breathe fire and belch smoke to urge the Goddess to keep her blind eye open. Did you know that’s why they do it? Seth told me that and I laughed at him.

It never worked on the Goddess. We do it anyway. So many ceremonies never work, but we keep doing them. Seth never had the chance to do that dance.

Seth knew how to make matches from wood, particular kinds of dirt, and manure. He knew how to make the liquid from coal and alcohol and fatty roots.

When StafSru Korinyes ran out of rocks, she tried cursing. Her hands gestured in the air. She approached with flailing arms and a whirling tongue.

Seth tried to speak but he didn’t have the words. He couldn’t remember the Proliuxian words. He tried soothing her with gentle coos.

She punched him in the eye.

Smoke still simmered from his lips. He spat a small spurt of fire, and she jumped away. She took off into the marketplace, and he ran as best he could after her.

He couldn’t run well. He had a whispering limp when he walked, and the limp shouted when he ran. The market crowd pressed in fierce, though, around their fleeing entertainers, and she couldn’t get ahead of him. Her ribbons moved out and in from her body like drapes, never given the chance to fly like a bird’s tail.

And Seth still had enough liquid in his mouth to spurt small bursts of fire in his path. The crowd parted in shock and awe, cheering each little puff of smoke.

Seth grabbed StafSru Korinyes. He remembered enough Proliuxian to shout, Wait!

She slapped him with one hand, and stole his coins with the other. She spat in his face. Seth smirked. He had felt her fingers in his belt, and saw her hand slipping back into her own with the coins.

Even as a young girl I had heard about the older boys. Some will take a no, and leave you. Some will hear no, and laugh at you.

An old friend, whose name I have forgotten, had an older sister. This sister watched out a window to see if Seth was gone yet. She told me, Go out there and see if Seth is still around. Walk around a bit. He’s sneaky.

Why? I said.

Because you’re his niece and he won’t bother you, she replied. You’re too young.

Why will he bother you?

Because I am a girl who is old enough to bother, and I hate what he does.

Seth couldn’t have been older then sixteen.

He wrapped a hand around her waist and pulled her close. His breath still stank of brimstone. Wait, please, he said. Pretty girl.

I am not for sale! she shouted. She slapped him, hard. Seth’s head whipped to the side, but he turned back to her, unfazed.

I buy not, he said. I talk. I talk with pretty girl.

Your breath stinks, she said. Get off of me. She slapped him again. Seth’s cheek was red as a sunset.

I will buy talk, he said. I will buy talk, no more. Just talk. I want talk.

His arms were strong, even if his breath stank of fire.

StafSru Korinyes was trapped in the arms of a dragon from the far north. She knew it, too. We talk then, she said. Let go. She sighed. I do not know how many times an insistent man has demanded her affections, but none had the terrifying breath, and alien white skin.

Seth let go. You are pretty girl, he said.

She rolled her eyes. Can you afford me? she said. Conversations are expensive.

Seth cocked his head. He said, What?

Money, said Korinyes, Do you have money?

Seth smirked. He pointed at her hand. Seth dipped his hand down into her belt. She squirmed and slapped him again.

Seth wanted to tell her that as a man with many pockets, he knew when one had been invaded, and knew where it had gone.

No taking, he said, don’t take me again, just talk. Just pay money for talk.

StafSru Korinyes frowned. You scare me.

You scare me, he said. Seth smiled. I want to show. He opened his dusty cloak. Dozens of pockets with dozens of mysterious objects, sewn into the lining, and the cloak looked like a peacock’s tail in dusty gray. Korinyes was surprised at that. He reached into a pocket and pulled out his vial of fire and another match. He took a small bit of the liquid in his mouth. Then he lit the match with his thumb. StafSru Korinyes trembled at this, and backed away.

Seth wrapped an arm around her, and forced her to stay. He planted his lips on hers. She bucked and kicked. Seth stayed only for a moment.

Korinyes pushed back and slapped him again. She cursed and cursed.

Seth placed the match near her angry lips. Little spurts of fire puffed into the air.

You talk bad, said Seth, You make fire words.

She jumped back. She covered her mouth with both her hands. Her eyes opened as wide as her gasping mouth. Her heart raced in her ears. She cocked her head. She dropped her hands.

Seth held the match in the air, casually. Korinyes leaned forward and blew on the match. Little tongues of fire flew out from her breath. The fire fell like rain on the cobblestones. She opened her eyes in wonder.

You are pretty girl, he said, pretty fire girl.

Seth placed the match into his mouth, and his mouth lit up with fire. He puffed burning rings that drifted away like ghosts. Korinyes took the match from his hands and blew on it. Fire arced out from her lips. It caught the edge of one of her ribbons and began to burn. She yelped and tore it off her dress. It smoldered on the street.

A crowd had formed. They cheered Seth’s display. Seth swallowed fire, and spat it out again, a miracle. More coins appeared.

StafSru Korinyes watched as coins piled up on the ground, more than she had ever made dancing and picking the pockets of the dazzled men.

Money, then. She saw the fire pouring from his lips, and the sparkling fire turned into coins upon the ground. Could a street woman like this see anything else in a man?

Seth looked at StafSru Korinyes and saw something else, though. I don’t know what. A woman can never understand a man’s heart. Maybe he fell in love.

I doubt it, considering what happened later, but maybe he loved her body, dancing. He probably loved that, even in the end. I think she even loved him, if only because he was around, and she wasn’t used to having a man around more than the night.

But this is all a waste of time. Both of them are dead now, and I am forcing meaning on their ghosts so you and I, dear Esumi, can say their love is not like ours. Darling, I cannot write of these two without your face in my heart. I love you, Esumi. I love you so much. And you go away from me. Would you kill me too? I hope you wouldn’t. Korinyes thought she knew he wouldn’t.

And now I think they loved each other, and the world tore them apart. That’s what I think right now. When I get there, I don’t know what I will think.

A man danced awkwardly, with white hands and a black mask, wearing black robes that stood out against his white skin, and breathing fire. A woman as vivid as a beautiful girl danced around the flames in red and orange ribbons. The two kissed and she breathed fire for a time. She wrapped the fire around her ribbons.

I wrap a fire around the cold in my room. I roll over to dream of you and smoke. My chest burns, but I think it is really only that you are away from me, Esumi. It isn’t disease. It is distance.

My cough is thick with blood. I discard a whole sheet of vellum because I cough a gob of my thick, pink blood onto it. Words it isn’t, but a story is told. I may not finish writing all the letters I desire, and the blood tells the story of Alastair-of-the-Wolf, sharpening her teeth on my pages.

We found him — I found him — at a marketplace, in a black mask. He spat puffs of fire into the air as casually as pipe smoke. He hopped about the crowd, splashing weak fire into thrilled, squealing bodies. StafSru Korinyes danced, too. Her fire moved in and out other ribbons. Sometimes her ribbons caught fire. She let them drop from her body, and singe and twist in the ocean breeze. More ribbons appeared from her mysterious pockets.

Adel and I were passing through this marketplace. We stopped at every vendor and asked about a light skinned man, with red hair. The conspiracy of silence continued.

At a nut stand, I turned to watch the street performers. A juggling act tossed flashing blades in the air. A thin man with a fat mustache laughed and laughed with the flying swords.

I looked a little further at a larger crowd down the street. I saw smoke in the air.

Adel pointed at Seth. I saw that one already, she said. He wears a mask and breathes fire. Quite spectacular. I’ve never seen anything like it. A human dragon, they say.

I cocked my head and walked toward the black puffs of smoke. The crowd roared with laughter and gasped with shock. The crowd collected like sediment in the human river. It clung to the fringe of this clump, and other particles drifted away, back to the flow. I pressed forward.

I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd. I saw him. I saw fire. I saw a perversion of our winter solstice ceremony. Him dancing and dancing on his limping leg with the flames and a woman who is not Alastair.

Adel was behind me somewhere, in the crowd. The weight of cinnamon-stained bodies pressed into us both. I shoved and shoved. People shouted.

I shoved.

I fell into an empty circle. Seth spewed a red rainbow into the sky. StafSru Korinyes gathered coins while her feet danced into the sky.

He looked down at the crowd, all of them and him, all smiling.

Not me. I stared with my sensei’s eyes. His gaze fell on me. He dropped the match. He ran.

I chased.

StafSru Korinyes lived at the top tower of a ruined temple, unreclaimed by the amorphous city. She grew up on her feet, I think. She learned to dance from her mother, she had said. She had no father that she knew. All Korinyes knew of her father was her kinky black hair, her deeper brown skin, and her full lips.

Adel might as well be a gypsy, too. Adel left Proliux and their arrogant dragonslayers to Rhianna and the service of the dragon. She joined the paladins and hunted murderers and fought against those black monsters that appeared in waves at the city gates. The swords on her arms tell the story of her initiation, and the scars and the burned ear tell the rest of her work in the war.

Rhianna fell, and Adel was in Proliux, wealthy and alone. That story was too painful to wear. Too painful for me to even attempt to describe to you, Esumi. I can only tell you later about her own words.

Korinyes came to this city for a painful reason, too. Her mother knew too much pride to raise a child of rape in a raped city. She could not bear to kill the child.

This was long ago, before the Rhiannan nobility sold their dragon to Proliux for the arquebuses of the island empire, and the empire’s own mercenaries, at such a high cost of blood. This was a time when the villages kept watch with the temple bells to ring and flee when black bodies emerged from the cliffs. She talked about these times and Adel nodded. Adel’s eyes stared into the fire.

Fest frowned. Your people’s weakness is not our concern, he said. Do you think Proliux never hired their own black men to tear down your villages? And their armies conquer you, and take over, and miraculously the mercenary wars end? Fest balled up his fists and pounded them on the deck. My grandfather’s golem looked up from his bonds at Fest, saw conversational anger, and returned to his blank stare and a small dinner.

Fest shouted in a whisper, Empires are dirty things. Men are dirty things. If you think so sadly of these few bad, black men, you are naive.

Adel brushed hair from her eyes. Empires are only dirty because of the filthy men at the top.

Korinyes touched Fest’s tense arm. She stroked his arm, and his fists relaxed. She looked into his dark eyes. Violence is never an answer, she said. Violence makes violence makes death and sorrow. After so much violence, at least the dragonslayers bring a peace. The emperor ordered his own death, or so we are told.

Seth said nothing through all of this. He ran his hand through Korinyes’s hair. He nibbled the blackened fish the sailors had caught in a net. The sailors had tossed a net over the side of the boat and trailed it around the boat while the ship stayed at anchor. The fish they had captured they sold to passengers. Adel paid for everything we ate. Adel paid for everything.

Seth stared at Korinyes’s flickering profile in the firelight.

My grandfather didn’t say anything either. He stared down at his ropes, or down at his dinner. I had tied him down to the deck enough to paralyze a full-grown bison, even though he would never run away. I did it so the other people on the boat wouldn’t toss him overboard in the night.

He ate fish with his hands lashed together. His purple legs would probably hurt, if he was still alive. He wore a high collar to hide the death blow in his throat. Grandfather’s golem tossed bones into the fire with the flick of a wrist. I asked him why he never spoke.

He looked up at me and grunted. In the mountains, I had nobody to talk to. I lived alone, he said. He took another bite. He tossed another little bone. Leave me be, girl, he said, Kill me for good, or leave me be.

Seth shook his head at me.

I nodded.

The ocean was around us. Other passengers on the sea voyage sprawled around their own fires, having their own conversations. They docked at their little islands of light on the dark night deck, and drifted away, unanchored, into dreams.

I asked Fest why, on every ship, everyone lived on deck.

Too hot, he said. Below deck, it gets too dirty, and too hot. On deck, in shade, we can get by. We toss our trash overboard and stay clean.

Oh, I said.

He looked up at the moon. I used to fight on the oceans, when I was young. An awful place to fight. Nowhere for anyone to run away, he said. Nobody knows what the battle really looks, like. Too loud to hear your own Mardar coming. A horrible place to fight.

I sat against a wall. Fest sat next to me. Seth and Korinyes were on the other side of the fire. Adel sat between Seth and me. Grandfather’s golem was farther back from the fire, between Fest and Korinyes. Fest sat sideways to keep grandfather’s golem in the corner of his eyes. The ocean rolled beneath us. Our ship cut at the night waves like my dagger through black foam.

Adel had given me a dagger by now. I twirled it just to do something with my hands. I sipped very bad, watered-down red wine from a large cask that emerged from belowdecks like a parade float with sixteen sailors holding it on their backs. That is the flavor of sea voyages. Bitter, gritty, and warm. I missed the dagger. Fest had snatched it from the air above my hand.

Fest Fasen looked at me. This is not a toy, girl. Put it away or kill someone, he said. Don’t drink and play with it. You’ll lose a finger.

I snatched the dagger from his hands. His fingers clenched over empty air. I sipped my wine. If you tell me what to do again, or call me a girl again, I said, you’ll be the one losing fingers.

Fest laughed.

I sipped my wine. I twirled the dagger in the air to keep my hands busy.

My grandfather’s golem stared into the fire. He never spoke unless spoken to first. He ate fish and tossed bones into the flames. He smelled like rotting meat because he was dead. This was the last time I remember seeing him eat.

StafSru Korinyes followed Seth out of the marketplace, and followed me as I chased him. She was astonished he had up and left. She was behind me. She saw my brown hair bouncing in the wind, my white skin around the edges of my dress.

Seth ran for the broken tower, Korinyes’s home. I was at his heels. I was so close that I smelled the fire in his wake. I reached out for the seam on his hood. I reached out my hand a little farther. He turned fast. He ducked around a fat woman. My hand touched her hair. She turned. I was gone, past her. He leaped around a cart. I slowed at the side of the cart. Oranges. Seth leaped into an alley. A door slammed in the alley. I jumped around the oranges. I found myself in the same alley. He was already gone.

I was between two buildings, both decayed, both solid stone, both temples, once. StafSru Korinyes placed a small knife at my throat. Who are you?

I grabbed her wrist. I threw her over my shoulder and twisted her hand to release the blade from her grip. I didn’t break her arm. Where he go? I said Seth!

She squealed. I pressed into her wrist more. She pointed at one of the buildings, of decrepit yellow stones. I let go, and dropped her knife. I jumped past her.

I never trust a stranger in a wristlock. I entered the building that she hadn’t pointed at. This one was a crumbling marble tower.

A temple once, to a fertile god. Gargoyles around the rafters had giant phalluses, and horns. They held things in their hands, fruit or animals or people, all eroded together into stone. Some of the phalluses were snapped off and lay on the floor like fossilized caterpillars. White ants carved into the stone covered the walls. Some of them were real and crawled along like tiny black dots. I think they were ants. I didn’t get close enough to see.

A single stone phallus at the altar, in the center of the old temple, was cracked down the center. Half of it lay on the altar; the other half teetered precariously in the sky. Past that, wooden stairs swirled up to a tower. Of course, this temple would have a tall tower.

I climbed the tower up and up. Beneath me, I heard Adel, calling my name. StafSru Korinyes called out, too, to her lover. I ignored them both.

At the top of the stairs, the tower opened up into a wide room, with broken walls. A cool wind blew off the ocean. I could see the ocean over Seth’s shoulder. Past the ocean, I could see land: the continent. Seth stood before the destroyed wall, facing out to a long fall. He had removed his hood. His hair was short and chopped back to barely the length of a child’s thumb. It was rough cut, and un-flattering.

You found me, then, he said. You found me.

A breeze lifted my hair off my head, and around my eyes. It was so cool. I said in our shared language, I have looked for you every day I have been here.

Why look for me? he said in Proliuxian. Why waste your time like that?

It is my duty, I said in Alamedan.

Zhan… Zhan… His lips still stank of fire. It’s hopeless. We’ll never find him, he said. How can we follow anyone’s trail in this gigantic city? We’re already dead to our village. We’re already replaced. Kyquil has already sent to Tsuin for another shaman. We’re dead. Let’s just stay dead. Look at this place. His hand gestured to the gaping hole in the wall. Look at this amazing place, he said.

I found you, I said.

Adel and Korinyes came up from the stairwell.

Get out of my house, all of you! shouted Korinyes. You too, Seth!

I looked around the room. A bed of bright colors. A small fountain of fresh water. Piles of belongings, in messy heaps. Seth looked down below him, on the other side of the window. A small vein of smoke slipped from his lips, dancing like Korinyes’s ribbons into the sky. He coughed fire.

I hate you more than I hate him, I said.

I know. I wish you would just leave me here.

The shepherd boy who was the messenger left, me after we reached the village. Have I ever told you my village’s name? We always called it the village, but in the codices and maps of Lord Tsui’s libraries in Tsuin, our village was called Bear. I had never seen a Bear but once in my life and I saw it with Adel and not with the village.

The shepherd boy walked me past the first house. Then he shouted out that he had returned with me. He sounded like a cow lowing in pain, and he loped ahead with long, awkward strides. We’re here! Seth! Tellis! Kyquil! Da!

People emerged from their little houses. In Alamedan villages near mountains, all the houses of everyone stayed close together, to help each other through the winter. Farmers and herders left in the frigid dark of early morning for their fields far away. Bodies emerged from houses: women. Women stayed home. Women watched me, unwaving, unsmiling. Hearty women, with heavy hearts.

Partridge was here somewhere, tending sheep and singing. I didn’t see him. Later on, when we came back to the village and found him alone sleeping in an empty house and too hungry to sing, Seth would cock his head. Seth would try to make sense of the fool’s words. I didn’t see him until then.

Now, at that moment in time, when I came home to my village with the shepherd boy, and the women emerged from their houses, I looked at the houses where no one emerged. These houses used to be my family’s.

My mother’s house. I walked toward it with heavy feet. My heart bumped into my ribs and rattled to break free into the empty rooms of the house. I could hear it in my ears. My house was a small cabin. Three little rooms, and a door that hung open. It swung gently in the breeze. The hinges creaked like groaning.

I peaked into the house. My eyes adjusted for the dark. I did not enter.

On the wooden floor, old stains. Blood in brown footprints. The large brown outlines walked casually out the back door. I did not follow them, yet.

StafSru Korinyes and Seth lived in this crumbling tower over the city. In a soft feather bed they slept pressed into each other. His hands across her back in the morning. Her hands across his face at night. In the wall, a chipped marble fountain. Once, I imagine priests and priestesses washed their faces in this small fountain. Now, Seth and Korinyes splashed this water on their bodies to wipe the sweat away. They both drank.

The night wind sent shivers up their naked backs. The hole in the wall had a view of the dotting street lamps of the city all the way to the sea. On the other side of the ocean, the land and more dotting lights.

Where do the stars begin? she asked. She wrapped her arms around his waist. They stared out this crumbled hole at the top of the tower.

I know not, he said.

He could smell her everywhere. Long strands of black hair curled like serpents with broken backs and wandered the room in the sea wind. He could smell the ocean, too. He could watch the boats in the morning, before the two lovers went to the marketplaces to breathe fire and dance. He sat near the hole in the wall. He mixed his potent potions over a small candle with pig fat and dried mountain herbs. He had a second vial, for her. She used to keep perfume in it. He had poured the perfume out onto her body one night. In the morning, he had picked the vial up, and had filled it to the brim with his fire potion.

When did love occur? At what precise moment can I say they must have believed in their own love, through this haze of lusty routine? I heard them describe their time together at nightfall in the mountains. We still had Khali left from the city. We hadn’t fought snow yet. We drank Khali and huddled against the biting cold around the first milkweed fire. Instead of demons, Seth Immur and StafSru Korinyes saw love. The fires in their bellies and their noses recalled to other fires. They spoke in pieces, one drifted off into the haze and the other picked up until drifting off. A pause. Then more.

I listened. Fest fell asleep right away, holding the rope of my grandfather’s wide-eyed golem. Fest snored and his steel teeth flashed green in the milkweed firelight. Adel sipped a little Khali.

StafSru Korinyes told me about when she knew. She had wrapped his hair into a long braid, as I had done before, but this time, she had pulled it tight, and had snipped the hair away. Then, she had glued the two ends together with heat and ship’s black pitch. She had created a loop of red hair rope. She had placed it over his shoulders.

He had smiled at her. He had picked it off his shoulders. Then, he had placed it upon hers.You keep it, he had said. I am yours.

Adel listened to StafSru Korinyes tell her story. She sipped her Khali, and stared into the fire with her astonishing kaleidoscopic eyes. They fuzzed and blurred behind the milkweed smoke. Demons. A gift? A little gift is all? she said. You, beggar, fell in love because he gave you a gift, and men did not give you gifts before without wanting your body in return. Had he had you yet? Had he?

StafSru Korinyes frowned at Adel. For a while no one spoke.

Seth whispered something into StafSru Korinyes’s ear. They kissed softly. His hand reached under her shirt. Smoke blew up around us, despite our windbreaks. Demons. I looked away.

Seth spoke so all could hear. I fell in love when I saw you dancing. I fell in love right away, Korinyes, he said. I saw you dancing and I had never seen anything so beautiful. I could see your soul in your dance. I loved it right away.

Adel said nothing. Her eyes fell shut and she fell back to the ground, and slept. I stood up and tossed a blanket over her. She nestled underneath it. In the morning I asked her of what she dreamed. She looked at me with a frown. You told me I’d dream of demons, she said. I did. My demons are my own, Zhan. You wouldn’t tell me of your demons, would you?

I would if you asked, I said.

I never do, she replied.

Kyquil’s wife barely fit through the doorway while carrying a baby on each hip. She wore no sandals. Her hard feet were accustomed to the beat of rocks and sticks. She had a mole on her bulbous nose, with giant black hairs growing out of it.

I choked up when I saw her adjusting through her doorway. She was a mother.

She said that Kyquil and Seth had already started on my grandfather’s track as much as they could. They took it out to the edge of the fields, and journeyed a little farther every day, to keep after his trail. They’d be back at nightfall. I could wait for them in her kitchen, and warm my feet by her fire. I could warm my belly with her food.

I sat at her table. She talked about the funerals. The bodies were all burned together, and Seth sang hymns and danced. He had the old limp that bugged him after a while, but he could dance better than Baba could.

Then Kyquil’s wife hummed to herself one of the songs sung to babies and corpses. Alastair’s lullaby. Her voice was gorgeous. The road had been long. My eyelids drooped while a baby gurgled in her arms. Just before I lost sight of them all, I thought the child was my brother, and still alive. Kyquil’s wife began to sing…

Sleep comes for us all

Eyelids always fall

Make your days thick,

To lose them quick

I hummed the song to Seth to remind him of home. He was still awake. We stayed, all four of us, in that ruined tower. StafSru Korinyes slept in her bed, alone. Her hand lingered over the empty space beside her. Adel slept in a chair near the fountain. I slept on the hard floor. I woke up once in the night, because I slept light and I felt him walking over the floor. I saw Seth at the window, staring and pacing.

I stood up silently. I hummed the melody. He turned to me. He nodded. We have to find him, he whispered, don’t we?

I kept singing. I nodded.

And after that, then what? he said. Will you hound me forever?

I shook my head. No, I said. Just fulfill your duty. Find him. Kill him.

The village has a new shaman by now. Adel and I had a good hint from a woman. She told us he was working with a very powerful family. We can find him.

Powerful family? he said. I’ve heard about the dragonslayers. We’ll get killed.

Dragonslayers? I have not heard of them at all. Maybe we will get killed, I said. We’ll see what Adel thinks we should do.

Where did you find her? he said. He pointed at Adel’s small body. Her face hung loose in her sleep. Her scarred skin hung off her face like it didn’t quite fit on her bones.

She found me, I said. I trust her.

Maybe she’ll kill us first, he said.

Maybe… What’s her name? Orynpis? Yesniriss? Maybe she will.

Korinyes. StafSru Korinyes. He shrugged. I trust Korinyes. I’ll watch your back if you watch mine.

Don’t give up this time, I said. Never give up, Uncle Seth. I’ll kill you if you give up. If you give up, you get in my way, and I’ll have to kill you.

I’m surprised you didn’t kill me this time.

How do you know I won’t?

You don’t bargain with people you’re going to kill, do you? he said. I don’t imagine you would.

In the morning, Seth and Adel were awake, talking in low murmurs. Korinyes had migrated across the bed, into the territory Seth had abandoned. She was still asleep, her beautiful face at peace upon Seth’s pillows.

I don’t think Seth slept at all that night. He had rings under his eyes, and an edge like drunkenness to the tension in his walk.

I woke up from the floor. I frowned at the last sleeper. We needed to start hunting. No hunter dared sleep in so late. I prodded Korinyes. She moaned softly. Seth and Adel looked at Korinyes and me. Korinyes stretched and sat up. Then she opened her eyes and saw us all. Her body sank. She pulled the covers back around her and bit her lip.

We plotted over breakfast and bitter cinnamon tea. We needed a mercenary, because courtiers always had mercenaries — Adel said that, and Korinyes agreed. We would hire the bodyguard to present ourselves as foreign nobility before the courts. Then we would demand knowledge and see if we could find any.

StafSru Korinyes had spent a long time alone in this tower before Seth forced himself into her life. Back then, she woke up alone, with the sun on her face. She stretched her arms and yawned. She bathed herself in the pool of water that poured from the fountain that never ran out. She drank cool fruit juices from the venders’ stalls and ate fresh bread, alone. She was never really alone, because of the things inside of her. She moved around the city, searching for new places and new corners. She looked both ways before placing a hand upon a wall. She left tiny pieces of herself everywhere she traveled, in secret.

I will tell you about her, after you know her like I knew her.

When Korinyes woke up and stretched her arms over her head and saw all these people in her room, she ducked back under her covers. She looked over at Seth. I watched one of her hands slip under the mattress for something heavy. I thought it was a knife. I casually walked over toward her bed to go to the fountain from the gap in the wall. I looked down into the sheets, ready to take the knife from her, but it wasn’t a knife.

Underneath the covers, she clutched a silver hand mirror. When I looked down, my reflection looked back. Around my face, silver ants chased each other in a circle, and down the handle. Silver ants sparkled where the sun slipped through the silk sheets. She looked toward her lap, quickly adjusted her hair, and then slipped the silver mirror back under the mattress. She was hiding it from us, expecting thievery. I suspect that she hid the mirror from Seth, too. He never mentioned it.

Korinyes listened in on Seth and Adel speaking of mercenaries. She agreed that one was necessary to make any appearance among nobility. She kissed Seth. She ran a hand over his short, red hair.

I took a long drink from the fountain, my hands cupped tight. Afterwards, I looked down at my reflection in the rippling pool. It still looked like me. I hadn’t seen my own face in a long time. I ignored the silver mirror where it hid, and I don’t think I ever saw it again through the whole journey.

Adel asked Korinyes for tea. Korinyes frowned. I don’t keep tea here,she said.

Why not? said Adel.

Korinyes leaned into Seth. We don’t need it. No one ever bothers us. This is our little world, and we don’t drink tea.

Adel shrugged. Well, we shouldn’t stay here long, anyway. Please, get dressed and we’ll go get some tea.

Korinyes shook her head. I am dressed. I’m no rich one like you, with many fine clothes to choose from.

Then, we shall leave immediately. We are near a fine tea house.

They won’t let me in, said Korinyes. They won’t let Seth or me in. We’re gypsies.

If you behave, they will let you in, especially if you are with me, said Adel. She looked over at me and gestured toward the door. I’m not going to stand here in this ruin a moment more when I could be drinking tea. This tower could collapse at any moment. Every breeze is dangerous.

It’s fine here, said Korinyes. I’ve lived here for years.

I’m sure it suits your needs adequately. Since it does not have tea, it does not suit my needs at all. Do you even have food here?

I have what I need, and you are not a welcome guest, so I will not share it with you.

Then we shall leave immediately, said Adel. Seth, I presume you will be joining me?

I’ll be right there, he said.

Adel gestured at me. We stepped into the stairwell. We closed the door behind us.

Once in the stairwell, Adel pressed her finger over her lips. I nodded. We both leaned into the wooden door, listening through the cracks.

Who is the girl, again?

My niece.

And the other one?

I don’t know.

Are you leaving me?

No, Korinyes. I could never leave you.

You’re lying.

I want you to come with me. I want to stay with you forever. Forever is a long time.

It isn’t enough time for us. I wish I could be with you more than forever.

I rolled my eyes. Adel did nothing. She kept listening.

Esumi, you have promised me forever, too. Where are you now? You choose an empire over your own heart. This pain that I endure everyday, where you are missing, is more painful than any cough.

We are divided at the heart. When we hold each other, we are slowly healed. When we are apart we bleed to death. I cough blood, and I cough blood, and I cough blood.

Do you remember these lips? They are red all the time, like fresh spring berries because they are always covered in the blood of longing.

In Kyquil’s house I dreamed of blood and blood and blood. I dreamed of all my rider sisters swimming in blood, bathing in it, and diving down below into the red depths of the blood. I don’t know where the blood came from.

I walked on top of the blood with Baba’s walking stick. I looked for the source. Each person I encountered in the sea smiled and laughed at me. They claimed the blood wasn’t theirs.

In the end, I brushed a hand across my stomach, and it was blood from my navel. I was bleeding. The blood was mine.

I couldn’t seal the source. When I woke up, it felt like I was dying.

I had the same dream in Korinyes’s house. This time, though, the sea was full of Proliuxian people. The street vendor who only fed me his worst spat thick gobs of blood at me. The other porters full of spite splashed me with the blood before I could ask them anything. For miles and miles I walked across the blood. I saw everyone angry at me. Seth, Kyquil, the shepherd boy, Adel, Korinyes, and everyone.

I used my hand to catch a dagger thrown by Seth himself, and I found the source of the blood. It was me. I woke up, and felt like I was about to kill Seth for stabbing me.

I saw Seth and Adel standing in the sun, speaking in low murmurs. Korinyes was still asleep.

Korinyes had no tea in her room. Adel took us around the corner and down three blocks to a street café. Suddenly we were in a wealthy neighborhood, surrounded by folk who wore trimly tailored clothes. The women revealed only their faces to the street. The men wore vests, in all manner of shape, size, and color. Each man or woman was followed by at least two others, dressed in steel and black. These jangling dogs were armed. Nearly all were the darkest-skinned mercenaries.

We lounged casually in a café. No one sat next to us.

Adel quickly flashed her sword tattoo to the waiter. He nodded. The swords disappeared up Adel’s sleeves. The waiter offered us a strip of paper with writing on it. Adel glanced at the paper, and pushed it back toward the waiter. That was the menu, but apparently it was rude to order off of the menu. I think it was the menu, anyway.

Bring us all tea, she said. Also, some breakfast. Something light. Whatever you think is best for us, darling.

The waiter brought us tiny sweet rolls with thick fruit frosting on them. They tasted like honey and spring.

StafSru Korinyes sipped her tea slowly. Who’s paying for this, Paladin? she said. And why am I allowed to sit in this café with you?

Adel shook her head. Shh. Drink your tea, she said. Don’t call me Paladin. Call me Adel. That’s my name.

StafSru Korinyes nibbled on a roll. Too sweet, she mumbled, and put the roll down onto a cloth napkin. Is that your only name? said Korinyes. Haven’t you got more to it than that? Just Adel? I mean, my name is StafSru Korinyes, and I’m a gypsy and not a paladin.

Adel cocked an eyebrow. How fortunate for you. Jardan Bosch Adel is my whole name.

StafSru Korinyes leaned back. Jardan, you say? And a servant of the dragon? Her rapturous voice twittered shrill. What do you do with these two strangers? she said. What gain is in it for you, Jardan?

You ask such questions at a meal I provide for you, gypsy? said Jardan Bosch Adel. Drink your tea, girl, before it gets cold.

Korinyes placed the tea on the table. She pushed it away. I’m hardly a girl for at least a decade, paladin. And, I do not like cinnamon at all, said StafSru Korinyes. I only drank to be polite.

At least you are trying to be polite, said Adel. What do you like to drink in the morning?

I prefer not to drink anything, said Korinyes. I prefer to have an honest conversation first thing in the morning. Instead of breakfast, I prefer to wonder at what my morning company is up to.

In your case, I can see how morning company can be a more pressing concern than breakfast, said Jardan Bosch Adel, since your morning company may often desire you for breakfast.

StafSru Korinyes scowled. She stood up and mashed her unfinished roll into her plate.

Seth raised his hands at the two women. He shook his head. Why fight? Why? said Seth. Sit down, Korinyes. She talks of me and true, I do like you for breakfast. I prefer you to food always. Seth gently coaxed Korinyes back into her seat.

Korinyes crossed her legs and raised her hand to the waiter. The waiter with the mustache appeared next to StafSru Korinyes. Is there a problem? he said to Adel.

Adel nodded. My guest does not like cinnamon or things that are too sweet. She was going to eat them anyway to be polite, but I insist on bringing her exactly what she wants.

My apologies, madam, I chose wrong for you, said the waiter. He bowed his head and looked genuinely sad.

Your choice was excellent for everyone else, said Adel. Only she did not like it.

The waiter turned to Korinyes. My dearest apologies, madam. I should have known you would prefer something less saccharine. Here is a menu. The waiter handed a sheet of paper to Korinyes. Please, select whatever you want, he said. I will bring it out to you as soon as it is ready.

StafSru Korinyes took the paper and sat down. She looked at it. She pointed at one of the globs of strange letters. Bring me that, then, she said. I’m sure it will be better.

The waiter cleared his throat. Madam, he said, I thought you said you did not like cinnamon tea.

Oh, said StafSru Korinyes. Her face reddened. She handed the menu back. Please, just bring me something else. Something plain, please.

Seth took her hand and kissed it. What just happened? he said. I don’t understand. You fight, and then you try to order cinnamon tea?

Adel took a bite of her roll and swallowed. Gypsies often can’t read, she said. Now, are we ready to discuss the problem at hand? Seth, you are a holy man charged with the duty of justice, yes?

My father, he said, yes.

I cannot take you into the council myself. I may be able to get you in. Do you have any holy vestments? Any particular uniform?

Not anymore.

Well, we’ll just have to make one up. Nobody’s ever heard of your people before, anyway. You will need a bodyguard, too.

I sipped my tea. The words I understood, but I did not understand enough to speak quickly.

He said, What is a bodyguard? Seth pointed at me. Can’t she be the bodyguard?

A mercenary, said Adel. You will look better in the court if hire a mercenary.

A what? said Seth.

You remember what I told you in the room, yes? The men who are very dark skinned, said Adel. Black. A mercenary. He will protect you and your interests, she sipped her tea and frowned. I cannot buy one for you. He will be loyal to me. He must be loyal to you. How much money do you have?

Not much, said Seth.

Then you won’t get much of a mercenary, said Adel. Still, you need at least one to preserve your life in court. Finish your breakfast. I know where we can find a mercenary. Hopefully, he won’t be too old.

Old? I said.

Adel ignored my question. Korinyes, I’m sorry if I threaten you.

I feel threatened because you are a Jardan and a paladin, said Korinyes, You think me so shallow? I think you are a noble, and you have no motive for this, or for the marks, on your arms. You should be in Rhianna bowing like a dog to an empty throne.

So should you, gypsy. Justice is my motive, said Adel. Rhianna, before the dragon’s death, returned to her. She looked at Korinyes with sad eyes. Always justice. I am a paladin, and I fought for your people with all of my heart and all of my might. It is my hope that my fellow nobility will see past this history and let me in, since the surviving paladins are puppets of proconsuls.

Who is your, puppetmaster, I wonder… Don’t tell me. I know you would never tell me that. Justice is the motive of heartless people, who protect their gold with the sword, said Korinyes, and your might was not enough.

Adel sipped her tea again. She took a long bite of her sweet roll. She chewed slowly. We three looked in her scarred face. She said nothing for a long time. She took another bite. Then she sighed. I will not argue with you a moment more, said Adel. I am tired of the past, and there is so much to do in the present. She turned to Seth. Do you desire my assistance? she said.

Yes, he said, looking at me.

Adel nodded. She sipped her tea. Then you will need a mercenary to do it my way. I know where one or two can be found cheap, said Adel. She put her tea down gently and reached for another roll. He will probably be maimed or old or something like that, she said. He probably won’t have much fight in him.

I do, I said.

Everyone glanced at me and blinked. I sipped my tea.

The waiter returned with something pitch black that smelled like a stronger, bitterer Khali. He plopped it in front of Korinyes. He also had a different kind of bread in his hand, which he placed on a napkin next to the new drink. He looked down his nose at Korinyes. Korinyes looked at the two new things, and frowned at Adel.

The rest of us ate breakfast, and drank tea.

Korinyes’s warm black drink cooled, untouched. Korinyes picked at the roll carefully.

We talked more, until no more food or tea remained. Adel placed large, sparkling coins on the counter and the waiter bowed at her.

I woke up in a bed in Kyquil’s house, after I had fallen asleep at his kitchen table to the mother’s song. Kyquil had solid stone walls — white rock and jagged clay mortar with clean glass windows like a rich man. I awoke, and I reached a hand to the wall at my side. I touched the cool rock.

Seth and Kyquil and two other men talked in the next room. I sat up and looked around. I was alone. My things were on the floor near the door. My spear, my cloak, my bag of food.

I hadn’t seen Seth in years. I crept out of bed. I peeked around the leather flap between the rooms. Kyquil sat like a meaty burlap sack at his table. Seth sat across from him. Seth looked thin next to Kyquil, even though Seth was never thin. Kyquil drank and coughed. Seth ran a finger in and out of the flickering candle flame.

They talked politics in the village. Seth was in charge now, with Baba dead. And Seth had to leave, too. Seth probably would not return.

Kyquil listened to Seth saying these things. He held his head in his hands. He said, And you want me to take over for a while?

Yes, said Seth.

Why me? said Kyquil.

Seth shrugged.Why anyone? he said. The women have talked to me, you know. They seem to think you’re the one who should do it.

Just because other people want me to do it? said Kyquil.

It’s as good a reason as any, said Seth. His fingers paused above the flame until the fire burned him too much. He pulled his finger away. I don’t know. You don’t want to? Don’t do it.

It’s just such a huge…

No it isn’t.

What?

It isn’t a huge responsibility, you know. People take care of themselves, said Seth. All you do is marry ’em, and meet the merchants in spring and fall in Tsuin. If someone dies, you say a few words over somebody’s pyre. People take care of themselves, Kyquil. Nice words is all this is.

What about the ceremonies? he said.

Skip them or have them as you see fit. Do you think the Goddess will frown upon the community for doing its best? You won’t have a shaman, at least for a while.

I leaned back in my room. I leaned against a cold stone wall. I listened.

You’ll catch him quick, said Kyquil.

No. No, I won’t, said Seth. Those are his mountains. He’s had weeks to get ahead of us. I won’t catch him. We have to go, but we won’t catch him.

You’ll catch him, said Kyquil.

No, my friend, said Seth. Don’t wait long for a new shaman. Don’t wait three winters.

I won’t because you’ll be back in one, said Kyquil.

You won’t because I won’t be back said Seth. Don’t be so naive.

Don’t be so cynical. Seth, you’ll catch him. I know you will. And when you come back with his head we’ll all celebrate.

He might come back with mine, you know. I’m no killer. Baba never taught me to fight, if she even knew how. She never needed to. I just hope he lets Zhan live.

Pause.

At that moment, I snatched my spear from the ground. I tossed aside the cloth curtain between rooms.

Kyquil looked up at me.

Seth kept talking, kept running his fingers in and out of the candle flame. Zhan had no part in this mess, said Seth, I hope he lets her…

I threw the spear. Seth blinked. The flame snuffed out beneath his hand, with the top half of the candle. The spear thunked into the wall and trembled.

I scoffed at him. You’re lucky I let you live, I said. We’ll catch him. I’ll catch him if don’t. Get your things. We’re going now. We’ll return with his head soon.

Seth stuck his bleeding finger in his mouth in shock. I had barely nicked him, but I had surprised him.

I stepped into the room. Kyquil said nothing. I tugged at my spear. I had thrown it so hard, that it caught inside the clay mortar between the rocks. It took three hard pulls to remove the spear, and the point had shattered like an icicle. Seth sat at the table. Kyquil lifted his broken candle. He drank a cup of water in one swift swig.

The waiter swallowed the black drink with one sip and then one swift swig. I had looked back at him, cleaning the table. He lifted the drink, and sipped it. Then he smirked. Then he chugged. The bread went down in three swift bites. He saw me watching him and winked.

I looked away.

The story of the waiter who had witnessed the death of Argarax is a story I cannot tell you. His ghost isn’t here. His face slips in and out of the shadows of the city. An alley cat with new clothes and a new face, watching us move through the streets slips between the cracks of the web, immune to the pull of memory.

I can’t remember his skin, or his hands. I don’t know if I saw him everyday and failed to see him, or not.

Maybe I only saw him those two times. After the young Argarax was killed, the man was released from his duties and joined his family at their street café among the rich. A simple story preserves Adel.

But when did she call for Tycho’s carriage? This could be when she reached out to Tycho with new information. Two foreigners just like the gruffhunter, and in Adel’s company, talking about an appearance at court.

I don’t like to think about that, but I can only speak with the words of the ghosts. My teeth sink into the husks in my head, and the stylus moves. I must turn to another song.

Someday, when I am dead, I will know Lady Jardan Bosch Adel.

The wolves howled all the first night. My face was pale and I kept my spear in my hands. Seth tossed dried flower leaves onto the fire. They sizzled. He pared away a root with a small knife, and nibbled at it. He gestured to the fire. That’ll keep the wolves away, he said. Wolves hate the smell of those herbs, you know. If we live long enough, I’ll tell you all about that stuff. Sleep well, Zhan.

Earlier that day he had gathered chunks of dried meat into a large pack that he then handed to me. We stepped into the sunlight. Kyquil offered us some doe elks to ride. Seth shook his head. As much as I wish we could, the law is clear on this. We go on our feet to hunt, he said. Always on our feet because he moves on his feet. We go to the ends of the earth on his trail.

We walked past farmlands, and shepherds. They waved sadly. Some of them offered us things. Seth turned them all away. He did it silently. They all nodded silently. The law is clear on this.

When we got to the edge of civilization, one last hill until the mountains, Seth stopped. He turned around. Look, girl, he said.

Don’t call me girl, I said. I’m not much younger than you. I pressed on.

I was a boy to Baba the morning she was killed, said Seth. He reached a hand to my arm.

I shoved it off. I pressed forward. Baba could call the earth an infant, I said. Don’t call me girl.

Zhan, then, said Seth. Look Zhan. He jumped in front of me and pointed. Get a good look at your home.

This isn’t my home, I said, and I didn’t get to say good-bye to mine. Get your fill of this nonsense. We are on the hunt.

Fine, said Seth, the wolves don’t stop to enjoy the scenery. He fell in stride beside me.

Yes they do. A wolf will stop to savor the wind. I’ve seen it, I said. Wolves don’t discuss it, though. They savor, and they move on quick. After they have captured their prey, they howl and howl. I didn’t look him in the face when I talked. I stared at my boots. That is when the wolf discusses the beauty of the wind. After the hunt.

You are my apprentice, girl. Do not try to teach me of the wolves. I am the wolf. You are the pup.

Don’t call me that, I said. I’m not a girl.

Girl, I will call you whatever I want, he said. He grabbed my shoulders hard. He spun me around. Stop. Look, He pointed at the valley with the village. We will be dead before we see this again. You’re a fool you think otherwise.

I don’t care what I think, or what you think, I said, staring at him. I refused to look back. Our duty does not care either. Let’s go.

Look.

No, I said, I move quick. See if you can keep up with me.

Hunting men is different from hunting caribou, girl, he said. Do you know what to do?

Do you? I said.

I ran away from him. I ran. I rushed past the hill, the whole village at my back. I could feel the whole village watching us leave. I could feel their eyes crying tears to me. I wanted to turn and look and wave. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry, too.

I had caught a slight glimpse of the village through my lens of anger. It blurred from the corner of my eye. Rolling fields of wheat and corn cut into the woods. Sheep drifting like clouds across open fields of grass in the lower hills. Fruit trees with young children plucking apples and nuts from the branches.

I will see this place again, but Seth was right. We would both never see this again. When next we came to the village.

When we next came to this village, Esumi, only Partridge remained, and stone houses with no windows and no doors and no mothers.

In the woods again, past the last hill. The world curved up toward my face. It seemed to urge me backwards. I wasn’t following a trail. I wasn’t following anything. I was moving up hill because it pushed me down to the valley and the village. I cried softly. I was alone. I moved as fast as I could through the forest and up the hillside.

I cried and cried. I ducked around trees. I ducked around rocks. I stepped over roots and lizards and past the chirping birds.

I moved around a white boulder. Seth stood on the other side, and I bumped into him.

You’re going the wrong way, he said.

I choked back my tears. I couldn’t choke back my tears. Where were you? I said. I was trying so hard to stop crying.

Seth put a hand on my shoulder. Zhan, he said, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

I threw it off. I punched him in the face.

He fell. His nose bled. I’m so sorry, Zhan, he said.

Well show me the right way! I shouted, Let’s go! Where is the right trail?

Seth pointed west. He camped out not far from here, said Seth, but then he turns east a bit. It’s easier to move up these hills from a different angle. There’s a wolf trail over there that’s a bit easier. Might find some company if the pack’s around, but the trip is much easier. Baba taught me to hunt in the woods, for moose and for martins. I’ve been doing the hunting for her for a long time. I know how to read the tracks’ of men in the woods and the mountains, too.

What will you be doing with those horrible women?

I… We have to kill someone.

I don’t want to kill anyone.

You can come with me. Everywhere I go, you can come.

What did this one do to you, that you must end their life?

He killed many people, many good people. He slaughtered women and children and innocents. He killed his own family. He deserves death.

But, then you will be a killer for killing a killer. You will become what you have destroyed.

No, I just have to find him. Zhan will kill him.

Who? Why her? I don’t understand. If this is so important why have you been hiding with me? Let’s get out of here!

I wasn’t hiding, Korinyes. I was, but I wasn’t. Do you trust me?

What?

Do you trust me?

Adel gestured at me. Together we walked down the stairs. We knew he would come down the stairs. We knew he wouldn’t try to escape with her. We dashed into the alley outside the ruined temple. We leaned against a wall. We watched the tower for any sign of his flight.

When the two came out from the door, fresh and clean from the little fountain, it was an anticlimax. We took to the streets, and they followed us to the café.

I glanced over my shoulder to make sure he was following us. I watched him walking through the street, unmasked and quiet. Korinyes held his hand, and held my gaze unflinching.

Neither one of them looked happy.

Adel led the three of us to a low building near the docks. She told us that older mercenaries worked on ships, and in the low marketplaces near port. The building was made of cheap pine, and stank of cheap hops. Inside men laughed and laughed, ceramics chinked and shattered. I heard it all through the cracked door.

Adel walked in calmly.

The room did not care, and continued to howl.

Seth and StafSru Korinyes remained in the street. Korinyes shook her head. This is a mistake, said Korinyes. She’s up to something.

She’s helping us, said Seth. You don’t have to stay.

Neither do you, said Korinyes.

I have to stay, he said.

Why?

It’s my duty, he said.

What are you talking about? Let’s just go, she said. We can go to a new town. They’ll love the fire. We can see the whole world with your fire.

No, Korinyes, he said. No. I can’t go. You can. You can go.

Please, Seth…

I stepped through the door and left them arguing.

Adel winked at me. About time, she said. Is our nobleman coming? I shrugged.

Adel was chatting with a sturdy fellow, bald with hefty legs and a round belly. He was familiar to me.

He offered his hand in peace, up in the air. I took it. Our hands swung down.

Fest Fasen’s my name, he said. I’ve met you before. There was a body in an alley covered in ants. You paid me to take the fellow to a temple and pray for him. Those little bastards bit me all over my shoulder. The body was probably infested, and that’s why he was killed.

Probably, but that is no reason to deny some honor for the dead.

Not if you’re in Rhianna, said Fest. Anyway, I hear you travel with someone who needs more strength?

I looked behind me. The room howled so loud. I couldn’t understand anything. Snippets of jokes and languages all alien floated through the air like pipe smoke. I…

Seth stepped through the cracked door. He walked over to us. StafSru Korinyes came in after.

The black men turned and whistled at her as she walked. She cringed and took Seth’s hand.

Seth flipped a match in his hand. It burned. He looked around him. He smiled.

Adel said, There he is.

Seth lifted the match to his lips. The match exploded into the air into a huge fire.

The whole room stilled.

I am looking to hire a man, said Seth. I need protection.

Fest Fasen raised a hand in peace. From what, he said, the water?

Sometimes, said Seth.

Fest laughed. How much?

Seth held up a bag of coins. Not much, he said, but how often do you get to work for a man who breathes fire?

How long? said Fest.

I don’t know, said Seth. Long, I guess. Very long.

Adel placed a band on Seth’s shoulder. This man is a noble from another country we have never heard of, like I told you, she said. He needs to appear at court. He’ll need you to keep him alive there, as well as in other places.

Fest smiled. He snatched the money from Seth’s hand. He pulled out a small, tarnished sword. My body is yours, he said, and so is my blade. I haven’t been to court in a long time. It’ll be nice to give those young bucks a blow or two.

I had a closer look at Fest this time. His skin was tight as leather. His hair was missing. In his mouth, he had bright steel fangs between brown, mottled teeth. I had seen others of his kind with this odd feature, or some other odd feature. I didn’t stare at his teeth.

I looked at his hands. They were ancient hands, covered in veins and white hairs. His knuckles were crooked. They had been used many times. His eyes looked right at me, straight on and declared duty as casually as the next drink with a tarnished sword.

I glanced at the old black wolf, smiling in the streets as we walked, His steel fangs sparkling in the sunlight. He met each passerby with a cold stare.

The sun fell slowly. We had already huddled up against a fire. These summer days, the sun crept across the sky. In winter, the sun will run away from us.

The wolves howled into the fading light. Seth smiled at that. Things that are empty must be filled. The world is full of quests, he said. Our quest, wolf quests, mountain lion quests, bear quests, soldier quests, lover quests, squirrel quests, cannibal quests…

I held my spear close. Seth tossed dried flowers onto the fire and whittled with a small knife upon a root. He kept talking about all the creatures in the world on quests. The wolves howled and howled. Sunlight limped away, and still the wolves howled. Seth ran his mouth while throwing the flowers. (I remember Partridge doing the same with songs. Singing and singing all day long until Fest wanted to strangle him. And in the dungeon, the foolish boy was bruised with Fest’s fist.)

At night, I could feel wolf breath on my face. I could feel their frozen breath off the mountains. The night creatures sang away the fears of darkness. So did the fire. I slept as close to it as I could. I slept as best I could. I still felt the black ball of mourning inside of me. Seth slept silently. I listened for the night noises of the insects and owls.

I felt alone with the stars. I might as well have been alone, I thought.

And I was on a quest.

In Alameda, our castles are made of stone and concrete and mud and they pile high up into the sky. They take generations to build. Each one began as stone walls to keep out the cannibals. They grew and grew. Towers upon bedrooms upon barracks upon storerooms Now a castle can survive two long winters on their stores alone unless an army invades and devours the food. They are all made of gray granite. The wealthier nobles of Tsuin and Ilhota and Pascanus put thick glass in their windows.

Of course, we never had dragons in our lands. Only cannibals. Perhaps someday our nations will cross the oceans and find more of these mysterious dragons, and we will take to the underground as well with the old ones.

Adel tried to explain dragons to us, and we did not share the vocabulary. She shook her head. Korinyes tried. We simply couldn’t grasp what a dragon was. We knew it was large. It was underground. It was old. Proliuxian men killed the dragons and called themselves noble. They usurped the caves of dragons as the palaces of the nation. That is all Seth and me knew. In the streets above, people talked little of dragons. That war was so long ago. Why speak of dragons? Why not speak of dinner, or coins, or the elusive ecstasy of love?

Adel scratched her tattoos while she spoke of the dragons. She looked out to the horizon. Ancient creatures they were, she said. A shame we killed them all.

What is words, I said. I know not the words you speak.

No matter, she said, as long as the words are still true.

I didn’t like the sight of the mercenaries outside our window. I remembered an alley and one of them who would not tell me which castle was to be invaded. He wanted to invade only my own.

And the mountains past them. I hated the mountains, too. The fires and fires of hundreds of tents. Dark mercenaries, polishing arquebuses and preparing for the long journey through the mountains.

I slept in an inn. We were nearly at the northern edge of Proliux. The mountainous dales and valleys pressed into the sky. We would find our way north again with my grandfather’s golem. Seth would speak, and the golem would answer.

Fest never did anything Seth told him.

I touched Fest’s hand. It felt like an old boot, and it looked like veins beneath black leather. When I first saw your skins, I said, I thought you were golems.

When I first saw yours, I thought you were too pale, he said. I thought you were sick, Either sick, or a ghost.

I looked up at Seth. I am sick, I said. I am sick of mountains.

I’m sick of the dead one, said Fest, I can’t wait until we don’t need him anymore. Yet, we will need him a long time. We will need him as long as we fight my brothers.

I took the rope from his fingers. I will guard him tonight, Fest.

He looked at me and saw the killing circle in the dragon’s lair. He let go of the rope.

Really? said grandfather’s golem. Aren’t you scared of me? Everyone else is.

Aren’t you scared of me? I’m the one who killed you.

He smiled at that and leaned back into the wall. His glossy eyes stared at me all night long.

After we hired Fest, we went shopping for clothes. Seth wore a long white robe, with a silver rope around his waist. I wore white leather. I placed a steel belt around my waist.

Adel asked me what my best weapon was. I told her spear. She asked if the spear was hooked or straight.

I didn’t understand that question.

She showed me two spears. I took the straight one.

In the evening twilight, we ate at the street café again, with the same waiter with the same mustache. At night I shared the floor of Korinyes’s ruined tower with Fest. Adel said she had to make some arrangements to get us past the wall.

In the morning she had circles under her eyes and wore a gorgeous green dress. In the street below us she had a carriage waiting, with gleaming white stallions and a gypsy boy at the reins.

She gestured for us to enter. I went in first.

Inside, a thin young man in black velvet robes held a gnarled cane and smiled at nothing. Hello, he said. His nose was jagged. His eyes were brown. He held the metal cane like a delicate flower. He gestured next to him.

I sat down.

Who are you? I said.

He looked out the window. I’m the one who owes Adel a favor, he said. You’ll never get inside without me.

Seth stopped too, when he saw the man.

The man gestured across from him. Please, sit down, he said.

Seth sat down. My name is Seth Immur. What is your name?

Tycho, said the man, and you, Seth Immur, are a lucky man.

Why am I lucky?

Korinyes entered with a cocked eyebrow. She sat down next to Seth.

Why ask such a silly question? said Tycho.

Because I must, said Seth.

Adel helps you, said Tycho.

Adel stepped into the carriage and pressed into me.

Tycho leaned forward to nod at Adel. He turned back to Seth. Adel pulls in the longest nets to save your life.

I don’t understand, said Seth.

It’s an old expression, said Adel. This one will get us in. You won’t get past the gate without him.

I’ve already told them that, and my name, said Tycho.

I’ve told them mine, as well, said Adel.

I know, Lady Jardan, he replied.

Streets passed in silence. Korinyes reached out for Seth’s hand. Seth clasped hers. Tycho stared out the carriage window. His face was flat as moonlight. Adel stared out the other window. I was wedged between them enough to make breathing an embarrassment.

I couldn’t see out the window at all.

If I could I would have seen new city, far inland from my port.

My hands cranked and cranked on my spear. It stood up between my legs and aimed at the sun through the leather roof of the carriage.

Adel touched my hand. Stop that, she said.

I had seen so few carriages in this city. I wondered whose it was. Adel’s, or Tycho’s.

Seth snatched up a flopping fish from the deck. He held it in one hand, with the tail pointed to the sky.

Zhan, did I ever show you how to make golems?

No. You never show me anything.

I don’t, do I? I should show you how to make golems.

He squeezed the fish. Purple blood oozed out onto his hand. Seth placed the fish down on the deck, and wiped his hand clean. Then he pressed a small stick into the gills of the creature. He poured a drop of blue liquid down the little shaft of the stick.

He frowned. It didn’t work, he said.

What?

It should’ve worked, he said. Hm. I’ll have to try it again on something else.

Try what? Making a golem?

Of course.

He dropped the dead fish into the fire.

What was that blue liquid?

Fire water. Made from the fermented blood of a sheep, and the blood of a bug. A few other things, too, each mysterious and rare. It’s supposed to turn things into golems.

You never tried it before?

He smirked. I have tried it before. I have succeeded before.

On what?

A person.

Who?

Not you, don’t worry. I haven’t done it in a long while.

Right, I said. How did you do it?

Magic, I guess. His eyes looked up at the empty sky. Faith, perhaps. I don’t really know how it works. I’m no theologian. I am a simple shaman for a simple little village.

A simple shaman who makes golems.

Yes. A simple shaman who makes golems.

I didn’t believe him at the time

The carriage came to a stop. A sharp knuckle rapped on the window. Tycho opened the window and poked his cane out, handle first. He gestured with it. The carriage continued.

We swayed back and forth. I felt a little sea sick in the carriage because of how it moved. I didn’t puke.

Seth looked at Tycho with creased eyebrows. What are we doing now?

We’re being patient, said Tycho. The trip takes some time, Tycho looked out the window when he talked. He never looked anyone in the face when he talked. She tells me that you are a paladin from a foreign land.

Not quite, said Seth. Yes, in a way, but not quite.

Mm. So do you or don’t you serve the dragon? asked Tycho.

No, said Seth, I don’t even know what a dragon is. I serve the Goddess.

Mm. It doesn’t matter. All the dragons are dead now, anyway. We finally killed the last of them when we took Rhianna.

You didn’t kill that dragon, Tycho, said Adel, quietly. Maybe your armies did, but you were no dragonslayer.

I said ‘we,’ didn’t I?

You had nothing to do with it, said Adel.

I had everything to do with it, said Tycho. The corners of his lips crept up his face. He pushed them down with will alone. And so did my brothers. And so did you, dear heart.

Don’t call me that.

Do you want in my carriage or not, dear heart?

Adel stomped her foot. Please, she said, don’t call me that.

I will call you whatever I please. And I will stop calling you dear heart because it displeases you. Adel, I’m sorry I displeased you. I never meant to displease you.

Please, stop talking, said Adel. Her eyes closed. Her fingers reached for her temples, and she rubbed slowly. I’m so tired of talking with you, Tycho. Let’s just get this day over with and then we will go our separate ways again.

Mm. We’ll see.

Tycho turned out to the window again.

I leaned forward to see past his face. All I could see was a sliver of cobblestone fuzzy in the ecstatic motions of the carriage.

Seth and Korinyes said nothing at all. I quietly swallowed small chunks of bitter vomit. I was sea sick in a carriage. I didn’t want anyone to know.

I would kill my first man soon. His blood would be the reddest blood I had ever seen and it would be splashed all over my face and hands. An old woman would hand me a towel. I would take the towel a and wipe clean. Tycho would say something important to another man. That man would say something important back.

Black skin would fade to ash from my killing blow. His eyes would roll back into his head. His cocky smile would fall off his face like an avalanche of black snow. His voice would whimper out to me, too late. Please…

The carriage came to a halt not long after Tycho and Adel talked. We stepped out into a garden lined with cobblestone. Trees hewn into geometric shapes, and three beach trees merged and crossed and cut to grow together before a large, torchlit cave.

Men moved with a calm bearing of the heavily armed. Many of them had skin as black as midnight, and stepped behind a person of cinnamon-brown and narrow eyes. They moved through the hedges of red roses and purple grass.

Fest stepped next to me. He smiled. I blinked. I had forgotten him from the other dark men. I remembered in an instant.

Keep your feet on, girl, he said. This is a dangerous place.

My name is Zhan, not girl, I said. What is so dangerous here? It’s beautiful.

Adel placed a hand on my shoulder. He’s right, Zhan. The law here is not of justice, but of power. And men kill things they cannot subjugate. At least, they try to. These are the children of the dragonslayers. No one is their equal. Adel spoke without contempt. It was simply a fact. The sky is blue. The ocean is salty. Men kill what they cannot subjugate.

Not even the children of the slayers of the cannibals?

Fest shook his head and cooed. It doesn’t matter what truth is here, girl, said Fest, annoyed, Zhan, I mean. Truth doesn’t matter. Truth is created by the power of a noble word.

Adel nodded. Astute, Fest. You surprise me with your truth.

No I don’t, he said. You told it to me.

Then, I am surprised you listened. Keep an eye on Korinyes, said Adel. I’ll watch Seth and Zhan. I don’t expect anything out here as long as we’re with Tycho, but nothing holds true down below.

Aye, he said.

Seth and Korinyes watched everything pass around them. Tycho stood near them. A dark man stepped from the rose bushes and walked toward Seth and Korinyes. Tycho raised his eyebrow. The dark man smirked and walked away.

I see, I said.

I spun my spear in the air. I lifted my body into the easy air on the balls of my feet. I listened to the sound of bodies passing through rose bushes, and boots on cobblestone. I watched for shadows trying to sneak up on me.

Tycho sighed. Let’s get this embarrassment over with, shall we? If I am to ruin my reputation, I’d like to do it quickly.

Seth and Korinyes smiled at the roses. Did they ever know how close they came to their own death? Only one eyebrow.

Tycho sighed. Please, let’s move ahead, people. They are only plants. You have seen plants before. Have you ever seen a dragon cave before?

Seth and Korinyes walked forward. A narrow-eyed man with cinnamon brown skin pulled a dagger from his sleeve. Tycho, surely you, jest bringing a gypsy here. How do you know she isn’t one of the infested ones? Did you check her skull yourself?

I do not jest, Suli. And I don’t care if she’s infested or not. That’s not how family members treat each other. Put your knife away, dragonslayer. You wouldn’t attack my family over a foolish little gypsy.

The man nodded and put his knife back up his sleeve. I would only attack the gypsy and the… strange ones. Never you, dear friend, Tycho. What a strange family you have these days.

A man may not choose his own family, said Tycho, dear friend. A man may only choose his friends.

Suli laughed too hard at that. His belly rocked and his back bent. No, they aren’t friends. Suli walked away into the garden.

I should tell you about our weapons.

I carried a spear with a straight edge.

Fest carried a sword and various smaller blades underneath his clothes. They chinked lightly while he walked. He had his teeth, too. He had giant steel fangs that stayed as sharp as new talons.

Seth carried a small stick. We had offered him a blade but he had turned it away. I have plenty of fire, he had said.

Korinyes bit her lip and took the dagger from Adel’s hands. I know, she had said to the dagger.

Adel carried weapons, I’m sure, but I don’t know what they were, or where she kept them. I think she might have carried no weapon at all, too. I don’t know.

Tycho carried his gaze like a suit of armor. He walked like he was bored by the mysteries and the honor of the location. I doubt he ever truly approached this place in boredom.

The rest of us were afraid, or astonished, or a strange combination of the two.

In the first passageway stalactites and stalagmites were smothered in jewels. The torchlight flickered in the rubies and the pearls and it was like light teeth chomping up and down. The hall was bathed in the orange light. Bronzed by the light, men and women walked around. They looked at Tycho, and at us.

We went deeper.

We turned a narrow corner. A cold steel brushed my neck. I turned, but too late. Fest already had the offender in hand, pressed into the dazzling walls. The offending mercenary smiled. He had white teeth and his ears were carved up in some ritual symbols. What strange skin she has, he said.

The last skin you see, I said. My spear touched the offender’s throat.

Fest pulled out his sword.

Tycho sighed again. Always sighing we do, at the line between our life and death.

Go away, you, said Tycho. They’re with me.

I shall leave, Lord Tycho, said the mercenary. I didn’t know.

Tell your friends, said Adel. And be sure to let Lord Xaxu know. Send him my regards.

We pressed deeper. The hallways grew taller and taller. Women touched Tycho’s face. He pushed them away with his cane. Not today, my lovely darlings. I am a man on a quest for blood. My wife has returned from the dead in the service of justice, and I wish to show my father.

He reached out a hand and took Adel’s arm.

Hello, said Adel.

One of the women snarled, Jardan Bosch Adel is still alive? Weren’t you a traitor to both of us? Don’t you serve the dragon now? Your arms…

I serve my husband always, said Adel. He who killed the dragon.

I apologize, but this is not a matter for now, said Tycho. He raised his eyebrow again to ward off the danger. So much power in one eyebrow. Please, my lovely darlings. I would love to discuss all of this with you at a more opportune moment. I will be throwing a ball soon to celebrate the return of my wife. Then we will discuss such matters.

The woman frowned. She had a small face, like a clamshell, and it scrunched up into a sudden veracity. Her hand tensed around something beneath her dress.

Tycho touched her forehead gently with his cane.

She fell back, her eyes sealed shut. Her head hit the stone floor, hard, like a large gourd landing.

Tycho smirked. When she wakes up, he said, get her something cool to drink, and also my apologies.

Seth lit a match and blew a puff of fire that flashed in the gems. People gasped and stepped back.

Pardon me, said Seth, I think I ate too much spice in my breakfast.

The strange women stepped back from us. They left the sleeping one where she had fallen. A thin line of blood trickled over the stone where her head had landed.

Korinyes smiled and let go of Seth’s hand. She had her dagger somewhere. I watched her walk. The weight of something swung in her dress. We pressed deeper into the cave.

The jewels took shape and swirled into mosaics of emerald men in long phalanxes charging toward a great creature. The beast breathed rubies into the sky.

The men held arquebuses in their hands, though I still didn’t know what those devices were. They were small silver funnels and smoke and fire shot out from them in tiger’s eye and obsidian.

Small couches and divans lined the halls. People in decadent gowns surrounded by armed guards talked in thrilling voices about nothing and everything both at once. The world bends to these tongues, and their version of realities.

This is all from the dragonslayers’ original deed centuries ago. They did the impossible. How does anyone overthrow such a visceral, vengeful god?

The surface dwellers have such safe lives, with shining coins and bakeries and marketplaces and Khali and cinnamon tea. The tall buildings that scratch the surface of Alastair’s blue mask were all made by men who have thrived in this realm of the dragonslayers. These fingers point to the heavens and declare war upon the Goddess, and upon their petty gods and goddesses. The dragons who had for centuries demanded tribute were defeated by our lords. Next is to be You, O mighty Heaven.

The noble dragonslayers burrow underneath the ground in the dens of the defeated. They commune like brutal sheep with the jewels of the dragon’s horde pasted onto the walls in scenes of victory. Each voice says nothing and leads an army. Each army unites under another and another and another until the power cracks. They kill each other with the ease of fornication. Each little death is a rebellion.

Adel told this to me in the mountains. I had asked her why everyone called her a servant of the dragon. She concealed her forearms and snarled at the dragonslayers. Her eyes burned with the demon fire of the milkweed.

She cursed Tycho, and all his brethren.

And we passed through this underground palace in safety because the son of the most powerful, honorable man in the entire realm of Proliux stood with us and stated, This is my family.

And this lie was as firm a truth as falling, though everyone knew it to be false.

And he took us to the throne room. A single chair carved from the ivory tusks of the giant, defeated beast. No one sat in the chair right now. The chair was gilded with the crackling dragonscale leather. The skulls of dragons lined the walls like the signet shields in our own Alamedan castles. Like narrow-necked whales with shark teeth, gigantic black holes for eyes, and a lean, lizard face.

Three other chairs, there were, with three men. These thrones were smaller, and lower. They formed a triangle around a circle of silver on the floor. The three men’s thrones aimed at this circle. They did not look beyond each other, yet.

A man, as fat as two good harvests, clopped Tycho on the back.

Hello, my dear friend. I hear you are in the throes of a family reunion!

I am, said Tycho, This is my long lost wife Adel, and her relations.

Ah, I see, said the man, is the old one of her line as well?

My ears perked up.

Seth coughed. This old one, he said, does he look a little like me?

Hardly, said Tycho.

Adel took Seth’s shoulder. She pulled him down and whispered into his ear. His mouth opened silently, Oh.

I said, What?

Seth shook his head at me. (The dragon, he would say later, the old one is the dragon. They were attacking Adel, the paladin.)

Adel brooded. Her fingers twitched and popped. She was ready to kill everyone here. I saw it in her eyes. The swirl and mash of colors in her pupils are only green eyes in this dim torch light. Green eyes, and white knuckles. Bones popping.

Deeper we crawled down the long, gorgeous halls.

Korinyes stayed close to Seth. She felt a hand near her. She stabbed it. A black hand clenched and pulled away. I watched the blood drip down his silk sleeves, flickering in torchlight. Adel finished him off fast. I don’t know what she used because she came from behind him and the mercenary tensed and released. I think it was her strange daggers, weighted odd for the paladin games.

She leaned the body back against a wall. None of our noble counterparts said a word. None of the other mercenaries moved a muscle.

Adel’s hand was clean when it appeared again. No blood at all, Tycho caught her eye and smirked at her.

Seth took a deep breath. He had the vial in his hands, ready for flames. He had other things in his pockets. He had so many pockets.

And the caverns were magnificent and flickering jewels in the torches filled the caves with the stench of kerosene and tar.

Deeper. Down a long stairwell crowded with bowing servants and silent women. Black men, mercenaries and giants among their own kind line the walkways with twitching eyes. Each waiting for the precise moment to overwhelm the other lords.

Along the walls of the lowest chamber in the caves hung the bleached skulls of dragons, like serpentine sharks. Giant jaws, and giant teeth, and narrow heads like lizards. Their other bones were wrapped around their heads like mosaic tiles in imitation of the living.

We saw once more in our whole lives, when we came north again, the village where we had come from.

Bear was the official name, though I’d never seen a bear my whole life.

We passed over the mountains at last, with Grandfather’s golem in tow.

And the fields were fallow, the rooftops sunken or sinking in. Seth ran to the edge of a rock to get a better view.

Get down, idiot, I said. What if it was the army?

No smoking ruins, he said. And we got ahead of the army. I don’t see anything.

The songbirds of home sang in the trees around us. The familiar cries of home, and nothing remained but the birds and the woods.

We pitched our camp in Kyquil’s abandoned home, where I had warmed my belly and my body, with the heavy woman’s hospitality. Where I had heard her sing a beautiful lullabye.

All the iron things were gone. The stove. The smokepipe. The pots and pans. The furniture nails.

Chunks of abandoned, rotting wood piled in heaps at the fringes. Our firewood.

Adel stretched out next to the fire. It’s still so cold. How can anywhere be so cold?

Seth touched the panes of the window. The glass and the shutters had been removed carefully long ago.

Seth sighed. It wasn’t always cold here. This was my friend’s home. He had a wife who kept feeding and feeding you. Wonderful woman. I left him in charge of the village when we left. I told him to get a new shaman right away.

Grandfather’s golem sat at the edge of this all. He stared at the fire.

Fest tugged at the rope around the golem’s neck. What do you see in these fires, you? You stare in all of these fires.

The golem’s face was a stone. What do the dead see? said his tongue, without moving one of the frozen lips. I cannot see much anymore. My eyes are rotting out. The fire is bright enough to break through.

Seth’s knuckles whitened on the windowpane. His lips curled. Quiet, you! I am tired of you. I think we’ll leave you here for the wolves.

The golem looked up at Seth. You don’t know tired like I know tired boy. I am tired. I haven’t slept since I died. Cut off my head and burn this flesh. Leave me for the wolves. You don’t need me anymore.

Seth nodded. You will sleep soon enough, he said. Goddess, what happened here? What happened to our home, Zhan?

Silence. The fire crackled. The golem turned to the open doorway. Outside, the wolves howled so close to the village. They chased after the dead stench of rotting meat dragged with us on a rope.

Korinyes touched Seth’s arm. A bad harvest, and a long winter. This can kill all villages. Your whole family dead, and their harvest no longer helping the families. And Kyquil can’t feed his people as good. And they tear away the edible unnecessaries — things like cloth and pets. And then, they kill their flocks. Some of them die from hunger. And then, when spring breaks in again, the ones left strip away the things worth trading, and that’s it.

Adel’s eyes were bloodshot in the fire. Her voice silent. Her gaze deep into the fire. Her lips pale white, like the white scar tissue on her brown face.

Korinyes shrugged. That’s the way of villages. Someday, new people will come, or your fields will fade into forest. It’s like this with ants, too. Ant mounds die, and new ants find them or the mounds disintegrate into dust.

Seth’s knuckles were still white. His rage still pure.

Fest smiled, and his fangs glimmered. We will need your anger if the wolves come. If the scouts of the army find us fleeing and hunt us down like wolves hunt rabbits. Our armies move fast over the forests and the open fields. We sleep too much. We’ll never beat them.

Adel spoke at last. Quiet, Fest. Go to sleep while you can still wake up.

And where were we? I don’t remember. There was a fire, though, and he said that. Someone was angry. Was it me?

He was right, though.

And then my eyelids dropped and all that mattered was this forgotten dream, quietly.

The crack of wood on wood, the clean line of blood on a spear head, and drops of it on my white leather jacket. This, too I remember from the palace. In the center room, where I danced the dance of wolves with a gigantic mercenary. Where I shoved the spear into his body and his eyes opened, surprised.

Are you awake, Zhan? whispered Adel. I sat up. Adel’s silhouette in the darkness. Her black hair and mangled ear. Her hot breath.

Zhan, take the golem, quickly. There’s something we must do before Seth wakes.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I pushed my blanket off my body, and it was cold. Goddess, it was cold again. No seagulls laughing overhead in this village.

Grandfather’s golem leaned against a wall because he had trouble holding his putrid head up straight.

Korinyes slept hard, and snored a little. Her arm draped over Seth. Fading embers glowed. His drool glistened in her long hair. Fest was gone somewhere. I don’t know where. Adel didn’t seem worried, and so I didn’t worry. When we returned to the hut he was back.

Grandfather’s golem could barely speak. The cold hit him harder because he had no blood keeping him warm. He walked with a heavy limp in both legs. His arms hung like anchors in the air. His head lolled about like a flag.

I grabbed the rope and pulled him from the wall. He staggered forward. He didn’t speak.

Adel stepped out into the village square. I went with her.

Zhan, this used to be your village, but you weren’t here when the murders happened, correct?

Yes, I said.

Do you remember who lived in what hut before you left?

Maybe a little, I replied. My footsteps were sure, but I was not. I concentrated on each of the houses, trying to remember what they were like when I was a child. I tried to remember when I came back from the riders.

Golem, show me everyone you killed, said Adel, Start at the first. Zhan will cut your head off if you are lying.

I can’t lie. Cut my head off anyway, his voice slow, soft. Leave me for the wolves to finish.

The black sky was starless. Too many clouds. The night sound of home and winter. The howling wolves. Nothing but the light of our torches in the early morning twilight. The insects were silent. Our footsteps sucked our boots as the three of us stepped through the muddy mixture of old snow and dirt.

Grandfather led us to my father’s house.

Zhan, whose hut was this?

Mine, I said.

Partridge was in the empty village all along. He was too afraid to come out of hiding, or too stupid to know we were there. He didn’t know who we were. My husband was still far off, yet, in Ilhota.

And in Proliux, in the court of the dragons, I killed a man for the laws of men and not the laws of Alastair. My husband assured me I was not guilty of murder.

I try to place the man’s face — the first one I killed — into the web. His empty eyes and ashen skin are there, lingering in the rafters with his haughty brethren. His husk is too far gone. His ghost felt no anger in death. It stays with me only as a guilt.

I have killed too many of his kind to remember the angle of a cheek, or the curve of his nose against the jewels. He is every one of the mercenaries up there. He has every face, and every scar. I cannot place him.

But I remember what it felt like to kill him. It was horrible, and I loved every moment of it until he looked up at me with those eyes.

Yes! Brown eyes! He had brown eyes! I can remember a little of it, I hope.

A very old man wrapped in layers of gorgeous cloth and a crown bigger than his whole body pointed at Seth. Seth blinked. He looked at Adel. Adel pointed at me. I said, What?

You will fight for our right to stand here, Zhan, said Adel.

Why her? said Fest, Why not I? Isn’t that why you bought me?

No, said Adel.

That little girl? said Fest, She looks, strong, but… But a girl against prime mercenary? You send her to die.

Better her than you, said Korinyes.

I will not shirk my duty! he growled. His hand found the pommel of his blade. His chest puffed up.

Your duty is to do as you’re told, said Adel.

Tycho touched my white leather shoulder. You should hurry, he said, You’re wasting their time.

I moved forward. I didn’t think anymore. I couldn’t think. I could only breathe, and feel the wood in my hands, and the ground beneath my feet. Between these things was the emptiness of me. The spear was made of wood, which grows from the ground, and metal which also comes from the ground. Men took these things from the ground and made the spear. I was the emptiness between the ground and the spear. I was a gust of wind. I was only a breath.

Inside the silver circle, between the three thrones, a gigantic black man already stood, swaying side-to-side. He twirled a hooked spear in his hand. And I took my spear into the circle. Mine was straight as an arrow, and the shaft was a heavy wood I didn’t know by name.

Everyone around me stared at this girl on the killing floor. The flickering mosaics stared. The crowns like the eyes of a peacocks tail stared.

(Have you ever seen a peacock, Esumi? I saw them there. Women carry them as pets, and wear them like crowns at their feet. Where the peacocks call out, it’s a cry for help. That is what the three men’s crowns looked like, I think.)

The mercenary on the floor with me smiled. He had white teeth and black skin. His red and orange garb rippled in the wind of his motions. The sound of cloth on cloth is all I heard. I added my calm breathing to the sounds. I twirled my own spear.

Tycho slipped a knife in my belt as I passed. The flat of the blade pressed against the small of my back while I walked into the circle. He patted my back above this secret weapon.

Last Dragon

J.M. McDermott