I had not moved from the tent since Benih had arrived with the news, news it had ridden three rikka nearly to death to bring me. I'd gone outside at the sound of the swift tattoo on the earth and there listened to its hurried recitation, holding its arms in my hands. I remembered that better than the words: the feel of its dry skin against my palms, the tremor in the hard muscle. I remember the smell of its sweat mingled with the rikka's, the scent of leather tack and over it, as over everything, the brine breeze off the nearby ocean.

I could not recall the look on its face. I saw myself in its dilated pupils, fat as ink drops: my stone-still body, my impassive expression.

Then I'd retreated to the tent, and there I had remained. My heart continued to beat, faster than the surf I could hear through the thin fabric walls. I still breathed. This seemed nonsensical when I knew, absolutely, that there was a hole in my chest, a new one to augment the one that had never healed after Dlane's amputation from my life. I could not still be living.

Surely this was mourning. Or shock. I had known that what I'd built had been fragile, but I'd expected dissipation.

Not destruction.

Not murder.

I was still sitting in the tent when the Brightness's seer peeked into it, one long creamy tress spilling over her shoulder. "Ke anadi?"

"Seer," I answered, and discovered I still knew how to speak.

"Ke anadi, we've spotted them. They'll be here shortly."

"Thank you," I said.

The tent flap fell shut behind her, leaving a trace of her spiced perfume behind. She still wore the scents she'd used most of her life, a life she'd spent as an emodo. Like me she'd had a late Turning. Unlike me, she'd known it was coming. So it was, with seers. Perhaps it was that late Turning we had in common that led her to address me properly. Most of my friends and associates forgot.

My friends. My people. My dead.

Again, I heard the heavy footfalls of rikka outside... many of them this time. I stood on legs that seemed foreign to me and pushed open the flap. A group now: eight Claws of the empire in their charcoal gray uniforms, sashes swiped to one side by the sea-breeze. Before them the Void's oracle was dismounting, white mane dragging over the back of the rikka, sun glinting off his unearthly pallor. And in front of him, handing off the reins of his beast to one of the eperu... was Roika.

I had thought myself numb, resigned, stunned useless with shock until I saw him, and then my world paled to blood-white rage. The World held its breath and the Moment came and I moved through it, locked my hands around his neck, palm to throat, claws digging into the heavy muscle in the back.

"YOU!" I howled. "DESTROYER!"

He grabbed my arms as his Claws rushed for me. I savored the wheeze of his breath as I pressed. "KILLER!" I yelled. "YOU KILLED DLANE AND YOU KILLED REÑA AND NOW YOU'VE KILLED US ALL!"

"Ke Thenet!" the oracle said, and his voice pierced my grief and rage like a spear. His one lifted hand held the agitated Claws at bay, and with his presence alone he drew all our eyes, even mine. "You won't be on that ship if you kill its master."

"What good is it to go now?" I hissed.

"Now more than ever you must," he said, and in his black eyes I saw the fires of my destroyed hopes... and his sorrow over them. "Let him go," he said gently.

The tendons stood on the backs of my hands. I felt blood seeping past my claws to warm my fingertips, make them slippery.

Then I thrust Roika away from me. He stumbled back, coughing, one hand on his throat. I watched him, every muscle in my body tense, my heart racing so hard I could feel my pulse in my ears.

And then he spoke, and the rumbled bass that had troubled my sleep for years... it was different. Thicker, weary. "Ke Thenet. I... would have thought... when we met that it was for me to strangle you... given what you did to Edze the night you fled it."

"You dare?" I said. "You razed my settlement!"

"I did?" he said, ears flicking sideways.

This sign of puzzlement only infuriated me. "Don't be coy, det emodo. You've been hunting us since I left het Narel. You finally succeeded and you want me to believe you aren't pleased?"

Roika glanced at the oracle, who flicked his ears back. Receiving no more from him Roika looked again at me. "You have news I apparently don't."

"No one's met us on the road," Keshul added to me.

"You expect me to believe no imperial courier's raced up the eastern road to share news of the emperor's latest triumph with him?" I asked.

"We don't have regular courier runs down this road yet," Roika said. "And there's just the one wayhouse. The only thing down this way so far is the harbor, ke eperu—" I tried not to bristle, "—and since the success of the ship-building initiative was in question we didn't put the money into it." He took one step toward me. "I didn't expect to see you here."

I slicked my ears back but stood my ground. Behind Roika, Keshul said, "I told you someone would be waiting for you."

"Someone, yes," Roika said sharply. "But not this someone."

"It was past time," Keshul said. "For this, and for everything else."

Roika glanced at me, ears flat, then forced himself to relax. "So. Ke eperu. Are you going to tell me what I've done?"

Behind me a baritone belled forth, clear and strong. "You destroyed my home, father."

Kaduin stepped up beside me. The eldest of Roika's children I'd stolen from Edze's nursery, he had grown into a thoughtful, passionate young male, a scholar who'd dedicated himself to studying the ruins of our ancestors. It was he who'd made the discoveries that had led us to this harbor, to the knowledge that we needed to go north.

I had not taught him to hate Roika. He'd learned that on his own.

"Surely not," Roika whispered. "Kaduin?"

Kaduin lifted his chin. When he spoke I could smell the tears on his breath. "Your Claws found our settlement, emodo... found it and destroyed it, and killed or enslaved everyone in it. Including your other children from House Edze."

Roika stared at us, breath harsh in his throat, so thick I could hear it from here. Then he looked away.

"What is it, det emodo?" I said. "You're not going to tell us 'it had to be done?'"

"If you expect to go with me on that ship," Roika growled, voice low, "you'll speak with more respect to me, Thenet."

"Don't use my name," I said. "You lost that right when you destroyed my family in het Narel."

"And what will you pay me for their deaths?" he asked. "They were alive and healthy before you came, eperu. It was your knife that opened their throats. We both have blood soaking our ruffs, don't we?"

Keshul stepped between us. "Enough," he said. He pointed at Roika. "You want to see where our ancestors came from." Looking at me, he said, "And you believe there is a secret there that we need. Yes?"

Reluctantly, we agreed.

"Then you will both go," Keshul said, and raised his hands when I began to protest. "You both must go. The solution you bring back must be acceptable to everyone on Ke Bakil—"

"—if its people are dead, that's hardly material," Roika said and raised his chin when I lifted my hand, claws out.

"Don't be an idiot," Keshul said to Roika, surprising me. "You know as well as I do that half the people in your empire would stick a knife in your back if they could. If you're to have any hope of a united Ke Bakil, then you will go together. Or were all your pretty speeches to me just that?"

I had only met the oracle recently, but nothing in that meeting had led me to believe he could speak to the emperor of the Stone Moon this way. I was savoring it when the oracle turned to me. "And you... I know you're in shock right now, ke Thenet. But now more than ever you have work to do. The dead are fewer than you think, and beyond aid. You must be strong now for the living."

I said, "Ke emodo—"

"No," he said. "No excuses. Are you eperu or not?"

It was a cruel question. I sealed my ears to my skull as he met my eyes, challenging. When I could no longer hold them, I looked away.

"Right," he said. "Then I suggest you prepare for the journey. You have to leave with the tide, yes? It goes out at sunset."

"He has no right to speak to you that way!" Kaduin hissed. "He killed everyone!"

I packed my bag and Seper's with motions made wooden by too many things: grief, shock, rage... fear. But at least I was moving. Without some spur I coasted to a halt, weighed down by the desolation of loss. For years, Dlane's vision had saved me from contemplation of Dlane's absence. Now that I had lost that as well, my only hope was to keep moving, to keep chasing her dream to the north and the possibility of the answers there.

"Benih said only some of them died," I said finally when Kaduin's stare became intolerable. "Most of them are probably in the empire's labor camps right now... which means they'll still be alive when we get back. We have to see if you're right about finding better ruins in the north. If there are records there we could use to save our people, we have to go. And for that we need Roika. I doubt the Jokka aboard will sail us north without him."

"They might not if we leave him behind," Kaduin said. "But if we kill him outright, they might give in to the inevitable. And then the others would be safe. We could solve all our problems."

I stopped, straightened. Looked at him, ears flat.

"Well?" Kaduin demanded. "Am I wrong? One hit with one of your throwing claws, ke eperu, and the Stone Moon would fall!"

"No," I said. "No, it wouldn't, Kaduin. Haven't you been listening to the stories our refugees bring? The Stone Moon ministry is large. If we kill Roika, we'll merely put a new Stone Moon emperor on his seat... one convinced that his enemies are willing to assassinate him. Do you want to rid Ke Bakil of a tyrant only to replace him with another whose paranoia is justified by actual facts?"

Kaduin looked away, braided tail twitching angrily.

"Kaduin," I said, my fatigue welling to the surface. "Kaduin, I don't like it either. But there's something I want more than his death, and so should you."

He glared at me, then slung his pack over his shoulder. I hadn't noticed until then that there were tears streaking his chin. "I'll be outside," he said and left.

I let my head fall until it rested on the bags, and that's where I was when Keshul said behind me, "Ke anadi. I grieve for your loss."

"Honored Oracle," I said without lifting my head. "Did you know?"

"That he would find your settlement?" he said. "You know as well as I do that it was a matter of time."

"I don't know if I can do this," I said.

I felt the chill of him advancing before I felt his hand on my shoulder. "Thenet. I'm not in the habit of doing this, but... will a promise give you strength for the task?"

I looked up. He was crouching beside me and in the umber gloom of the tent he glowed, a faint, milky light thrown off his impossible moon-shell skin. On his chest, shoulder and ribs there were gouges that gathered shadows, but not the brown ones that riddled everything else in the tent... his were lavender, as if he stood beneath a permanent star-strewn night. In all the weeks I'd known Keshul I'd not heard him tell a fortune, speak a portent, bruit his otherworldly knowledge. He'd acted with a supreme confidence in all he did, but then, so did Roika. Keshul did very little at all to stress his right to speak in the name of a god, and I who had believed in the gods all my life had been prepared to be skeptical.

But it had never seemed to matter to him whether I believed he was the Void's avatar. That more than anything had convinced me.

"A promise," I repeated, wary.

"I know," he said with a faint smile. "It's a risky thing to request of a diviner. Shall I go on anyway?"

"All right," I said, the words slow off my tongue.

His eyes remained close and considering, but my reflection drained from their surfaces. I saw stars in them instead. "Go on that ship, Thenet. When you come back, Ke Bakil will be free."

I choked on a gasp, my body trembling under his cold hand. To add hope to the conflict in my heart... it was almost more than I could bear.

Keshul released me. The stars in his eyes became more mundane, the reflections of the rare metal buckles on our packs, the glint of light thrown into the tent through a flap that shivered in the wind.

"Is it true?" I whispered.

Keshul rested his open palm against his brow, touched it to his groin and then his heart. "By the gods, I vow." He smiled with a hint of tooth. "And I don't do that often."

I drew in a shaky breath. "All right, honored Oracle. I'll do my duty." I squared my shoulders and finished, "And thank you. For not telling him."

Keshul said, quiet, "It's for you to tell him... if you want to. I wouldn't blame you for deciding against it." He lifted the tent flap and said to my back, "We'll be waiting for you when you return." And then the flap swung shut, its breeze cooling my spine.

I resumed packing, trying not to think. Not about the settlement destroyed and scattered. Not about the hope that all these deaths, all the suffering might mean something in the end. And very definitely not about the male with whom I was about to embark on a voyage I couldn't make without him, and the anadi who remained between us even in her absence. Particularly in her absence.

As I turned toward the tent flap I came face to face with Seper, who was entering. I stopped, then forced myself to keep moving, to shrug the eperu's pack off my shoulder and hand it over. Seper received it and then embraced me... and I allowed myself the luxury of leaning against it. Neither of us was good at this. I had never been comfortable with my weaknesses, but Dlane had seen them so effortlessly I had lost the habit of hiding them from her. Once she was gone... and then there had been so many people to be strong for.

After the revelation of the true legacy of Roika's violence became incontrovertible, Ilushet, strong, serene Ilushet, had been inconsolable. Had blamed itself for not rescuing me, despite knowing the impossibility of it. And its grief had been nothing to Barit's, who compounded it with an awkwardness around me that left us both uncomfortable in one another's presence. Of my intimates left from het Narel, only Seper had accepted the consequences of that night, perhaps because it too had lived through House Edze's attentions: it had its own guilt to carry and had no shoulders left to bear any on my behalf. It was Seper who'd brought me cloths to wrap my chest; Seper who'd helped me with the bleeding as my body changed; Seper who'd asked me how I wanted to be addressed rather than stumbling through any number of embarrassing alternatives.

I had told it, truthfully, that it should call me "friend."

"Thenet," it said against my braided mane. "Oh, Thenet. The settlement."

I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of it, like the spice of grasses off the plains. "That's the second time Edze has taken something from us," I said, exhausted.

"When will he be called to account for his crimes?" Seper asked, stepping back from me.

I thought of the blood I'd spilled in het Narel and said, "What we do will come back to us in the end."

"Let it be so," Seper said. "Are you ready? Kaduin's already aboard, the avatar escorted him up. The ship will be leaving within the hour."

"Let's go," I said. I did not say I was ready because I didn't think I ever would be.

I had loved the ocean once, its vastness, the unfathomable world beneath its heaving surface, the gloss of its waves with their salty lace edges. But when it became complicit in the destruction of my beloved and my life, all its magic dissipated. I had spent several days waiting for Roika and the susurrus had chafed at my ears, reminding me constantly of the Birthwell and the beginning of the end of my life. Waking every day to the taste of it in the air and the sound of it in my ears had been profoundly alienating, and Roika's Jokka had aggravated my feelings with the creation they'd set afloat on the ocean's back: a ship, they called it, not a boat, a thing large enough for a hundred people, surmounted by unlikely canvas sails that reminded me of the ones that had shaded Ilushet's caravan wagons. This vessel was so large the eperu built a pier to reach it, for it could not easily come to shore, and I often stared down that narrow walkway that led to an abrupt end, like an unfinished sentence I had forgotten how to speak.

This vessel, Keshul told me, had been put together based on the stories in ancient records and refined by the bitter experience of several years. But they'd succeeded in recreating the ocean-going vessels of our forebears, and in their last journey they'd sighted land before turning back and heading home to tell the emperor. Three months, they'd reported. Three months we would spend on the emperor's ship, avoiding his company. Once we reached land we could go our separate ways, he to whatever had moved him to the north, and I and mine to seek the ruins that could illumine the story Kaduin had found on a rare intact wall in the grasslands... one that had told of an affliction that had felled the breeders for lack of... what? We knew not.

We prayed we would find out.

It was late summer but the wind off the waves was cool and whipped my cloak and tail around my legs. I drew the fabric closer at my breast, squinting up at the height of the vessel moored at its end of the pier. There was a ramp leading to the deck and Seper ascended that precarious bridge without incident or challenge.

I took a step and rested my foot there, flexing my toes. If Keshul was right, this act would lead to the end of my journey. Since Dlane's death I had done nothing but work toward her dream of a Ke Bakil that treated justly with all its people, no matter their sex. The sanctuary I'd built—and lost—had not been self-sustaining, despite the struggles we'd undergone to create it. And I... I was weary, weary of laboring on without her, weary of turning to her and discovering her missing, of staying up because some part of me was waiting for her return. Many days I woke without faith that I would see her aims achieved before I died, and those days were better than the ones where I woke feeling broken because she wasn't lying beside me.

I closed my eyes and walked up the ramp to the ship. The only way left was forward.

The ship had a name: Fedre, "Endurance." This, one of the eperu ship-handlers told me, was because it was the fourth such ship they'd built in their efforts to recreate the art, and it was the only one to have survived. The emodo who'd designed all the ships had christened it themselves, and everyone referred to the ship as one might a neuter, as a sacred it.

The crew was comprised of almost a hundred Jokka, twenty emodo and the remainder eperu, for the work of hauling in the great sails or positioning them to catch the wind was taxing. And if there was no wind there were oars stowed below, and no one could work them for the durations needed but the eperu. I was given a tour by the same eperu who'd explained the name to me; there were narrow caverns beneath the floor of the ship where people slept and stored the great kegs of water and food and supplies that long journeys required. The water of the sea could be drunk for short periods of time and was even healthful, but over longer periods freshwater was a necessity. There were fishing nets and hunting spears for the eperu who'd become adept at diving for water prey, tethered by the waist to the ship so the currents wouldn't bear them away. I found the whole matter as mysterious as the sea that had inspired it and could well imagine why it had taken years for these determined Jokka to pioneer the innovations needed to make it possible. I could even feel a memory of wonder that they had accomplished so much.

Kaduin was standing at the ship's rail looking out over the waves as the crew made ready to depart. When he heard my footsteps, he glanced behind him, wary; seeing me, his ears flicked forward and his shoulders eased. "Ke Thenet."

"Kaduin," I said. "Were you expecting your father?"

"Yes," he said, wrinkling his nose. He glanced at me. "Do you think I should talk to him?"

"Do you want to?" I asked, joining him at the rail.

"No," he said. "We have nothing to discuss, he and I. We've made our choices."

I thought of Dlane, who'd dismissed Roika's dream of uniting the Jokka and bettering their situation as an emodo's fancies. I thought of my settlement burning. Who had died? Who had lived? The eperu and the emodo who'd been enslaved... they would manage. But our anadi, accustomed to sunlight and freedom and the right to choose their course... they would not do so well in the underground prisons of the empire. Would they make House Reña's choice? And if so, would there be anyone to help them enact it?

"I suppose we have," I said.

He rested a hand over mine on the rail and there we watched the waves shift, slapping against the high wall of the vessel.

Seper joined us later. "We have been assigned quarters and I have put our bags in them. The emperor is aboard... they are casting off. We'll go out with the tide."

"I guess we're committed now," Kaduin murmured.

"Three months," I said.

"Three months on the ship," Seper said. "Who knows how long once we reach land? We may walk weeks before finding what we need."

Kaduin's ears flattened. "Gods protect us from that. We can't wait much longer. The Jokka can't."

"We'll find what we need," I said, and not because Keshul had promised it to me... but because I couldn't bear the possibility that we wouldn't. After everything we'd gone through, to fail would be too cruel for the gods to countenance.

"Would you like to see where they've put us?" Seper asked.

"I'll go," Kaduin said. "The pattern in the waves is hypnotizing me." He smiled with a quirk he'd had as a child and never lost. "Too much longer and I might walk over the edge."

"By all means, then," I said, "Go."

I stayed, though; watched the crew go about their inexplicable errands and attempted to puzzle out the reasons for their actions. And then the great ship shivered and without warning we were adrift... adrift and then gliding, the breeze combing my mane back from my face, chilling the gold earring. I tasted the sea spray, the salt in the wind, and shuddered.

"Quite a thing they've done, isn't it," Roika said behind me.

My shoulders tightened and I looked down. He outraged me, I hated him, I feared him... and he was a part of me. He was necessary. He had wanted me at his side. Emodo—the Void—without which the Trinity is incomplete... yes, and the Trifold as well. I touched the pendant at my neck.

And then I realized what he'd said. "That they've done?" I repeated, turning to look at him.

He snorted, a thick sound in his nose, and took Kaduin's place at the rail. "You expect me to take credit for their work? Don't be ridiculous, Thenet. I have done many bad things in my life, but I am not solely composed of flaws." He lifted his face to the wind, closing his eyes. Behind us I heard the bark of commands from the Jokka at work on the deck, but they seemed distant. What was very close was the sight of his face... of the hollows under his cheekbones, the too-sharp angle of his jaw, the fatigue I saw in the lines leading from his eyes. When he opened them, the metal-dark gray I remembered was clouded with pale blood. From what, I wondered... too many worries? Too little sleep? "Keshul said you were seeking a secret in the north. What is it?"

"And I should tell you?" I asked. "Why? So you can sabotage my attempt?"

He sighed. "I suppose I deserve your mistrust."

"Yes?" I said, amazed. "Did you think otherwise?"

"I'd hoped otherwise, I admit," he said. "But tell me, Thenet. Have you not approved of some of what I've accomplished?"

I looked away.

"I promised to build roads," he said. "I built them. I promised food, and there is no more famine... indeed, there is surplus in our warehouses. I promised fresh water, and cities as far south as het Serean have enough for gardens. The forests are receding, but imperial ministers are replanting them in better locations. There are couriers for mail and messages. Trade is flourishing. We have irrigation now, and granaries, aqueducts and ships. We have money that everyone trusts. There are even children again. Would you complain of my results?"

"No," I said, because it was not in me to deny them. I had once wanted what Roika promised. Still wanted. But: "Your methods are appalling."

"I know," he said, surprising me. "But they work."

"They work now," I said. "But they're unsustainable."

"I know that too," he said. "Why else do you think I'm going north?"

My eyes narrowed. "You're going north to find a better way?"

"Yes," he said. "I have no idea what it is, but our ancestors lived there, Thenet. Maybe it's better there."

"And if it's not?" I asked.

"Then I'll hope that your mission is more successful than mine," he said. "And if it is..." He smiled without humor. "Then yes, I will help you implement whatever solution you find."

"In your own way," I guessed.

"In the way that works," he corrected. And sighed. "Thenet, I'm not the Jokkad you fled in het Narel... seven? Nine? Years ago? I don't remember anymore. I had visions of empire but I had no idea what those visions would entail. I do now... and... I'm tired." He smiled faintly. "It has not been the glorious road I had imagined."

I did not want to feel pity for the male who'd destroyed House Reña and my second attempt at a home on the plains. "You still chose to walk it."

"Yes," he said. "I did. I won't deny that. You chose a road yourself, Thenet. Can you tell me it's made you happy? More importantly, can you tell me what it's done for the Jokka? Can you say you've done as much for them as I have?"

I flattened my ears against my skull... but I said nothing.

He smiled but there was no happiness in it. "In some things you haven't changed at all, ke eperu. You're still honest about your ambivalence, honest in a way I could have used when I was building the empire. We could have made something very good together. Maybe it would have been better than the Stone Moon. But we'll never know now." He glanced at the earring I still wore. "You don't want to tell me why you're going north... all right. I won't ask. And I'll avoid you for the voyage. We can go our separate ways once we land."

He left me there, stunned. At the concession, at the graciousness of it... and of his admiration for my candor. He had changed in the years since we'd joined battle in het Narel.

And so had I.

Ke eperu, he'd called me. But I was anadi now... because of him.

The area below the deck was divided into chambers, most of which were accessed from the deck by trap doors and ladders. Our quarters were among those chambers. I watched the horizon long past sunset; when my cheeks had grown chafed from the constant wind, I left the rail and asked one of the crew to lead me to our room. When I carefully climbed down the stairs I found Kaduin and Seper already inside, sitting on cots that had been fastened to hooks on the walls.

"It's to keep them from moving when the waves are high or fast," Kaduin said when he caught me glancing at them.

"I see," I said. "Did they bring something to eat?"

"Dried fruit and meat," Seper said. "There's water as well. We saved some for you."

I ate while Kaduin worked on the slates he'd brought with him. For as long as I'd known him he'd been writing on something; even as the boy I'd taken from House Edze, he'd scribbled in dirt with sticks. When he'd discovered the pictograms in the ruins, he found his passion. I did all I could to encourage him. Kaduin had been born of my worst enemy and an anadi I'd despised, but he'd been like a son to me.

"What are you writing?" I asked.

"Notes on the voyage," he said. "What it's like, this ship, being on it. And I'm marking the days that pass too." He drew in a deep breath, ears sagging. "It helps me to not think about..."

"I understand," I said.

He glanced at me, rolling the stylus in thin fingers. "Will you carve? Ke Seper brought the tools."

"Not tonight," I said. "I want rest."

Among the Jokka I'd left behind that comment would have elicited an uncomfortable silence. But these two had kept me company too long for such things, Seper at my side and Kaduin often against my side; as a youth he'd sought me when his sleep had been disturbed, as if sensing that I too needed solace from dreams of loneliness and fear. So Kaduin merely made an affirmative noise and returned to his slate and Seper offered to help me undress. I let it because unwinding the cloth was cumbersome and the eperu had a way with it.

I made a very unconvincing anadi. Jokka who Turn female grow heavy and rounded, with smoother skin and glossier hair. Their voices change. Their hips broaden. They even smell different: fecund, a smell that reminded me of new, wet soil.

I was still hard and thin, with the toes, fingers and frame I'd been born with. My breasts were so small they could be covered completely with the palms of my hands; I bound them to maintain the silhouette I'd had since birth, because the attention my "condition" received if I didn't was often intolerable. My voice pitch hadn't altered. And if my smell had changed, it was such a minimal alteration that Seper had to press its nose behind my ear and breathe there for quite a while before it could detect anything.

One of the settlement's few healers had examined me and been puzzled by my condition. I was now anadi, it said, but the result almost looked like an incomplete Turning. Such were rare enough that I'd never heard of one, but the healer had been trained by an eperu who'd seen the phenomenon once. The eperu had told me I was probably infertile. I never chose to investigate the possibility that it was wrong.

But I did need more rest than I had before, so I curled up on one of the two cots. Seper sat on the floor beside me, its arm and head on the edge.

"Three months," Kaduin muttered. "Trapped on a ship with a madman."

"Don't worry about Roika," I said. "He won't trouble us."

To be at sea... to be surrounded by it... it was beyond anything I'd known, and I had walked Ke Bakil from the southern forest all the way to the Birthwell. The land sank in the horizon with each passing day until at last there was nothing but water for as far as I could see: endless waves, gilt by the sun as it passed overhead, stained by it when the sun set, and then frosted by the moon that illumined the ship's ropes and deck but only the very crests of the waves. Beneath them was a bottomless mystery, one my eyes could not pierce no matter how long I stared over the rail.

We had good wind those first weeks, and the ship was never idle. Its passengers were: we were superfluous among the Jokka who had learned this forgotten discipline. I had had reports of the empire, and knew that the camaraderie I saw among the emodo overseers and the eperu who fulfilled their commands was unusual. The master of the vessel was an emodo but his immediate subordinate was an eperu, and theirs was a close trust. They conferred on almost every decision, and when they didn't it was because the one had done what the other would have.

I was not the only one who wondered at them. The one time I saw Roika on the deck in the weeks that followed, it was on the opposite side of the ship and like me he was watching them. I felt a frisson of fear for the two: was he gathering evidence in order to condemn them? Fugitives to the settlement had brought back stories of the penalties for daring to show too great a trust for someone not one's sex. And yet, what I could see of his posture was not hostile.

Did he look at them and see what we might have been, had he not destroyed my House? Had he not taken Dlane?

True to his promise, Roika had avoided all three of us since our departure. Since we were often on deck, I could only guess that he kept to himself in the chamber he'd been assigned. He'd brought no others... but then, he didn't need them. The crew of the ship was his and they were nearly a hundred strong. I sometimes wondered when I lay down on the cot if his was lashed to the same wall; if we slept close enough to touch, save for one thin panel of wood. Sometimes I thought I could hear him breathing. I strained to hear it to keep from sinking into the despair in my heart at all we had lost. At all I had lost.

"You have magic, ke Thenet," Kaduin said to me. "You have kept him at bay for weeks."

Would that I had stayed in the settlement and protected them instead.

My sleep was no longer the twilight-dreaming of an eperu, but I did not seem capable of an anadi's full slumber, either. It often left me restless and our situation made it worse, in an unfamiliar room surrounded in foreign noises, left in the dark to contemplate the hole in my heart. On a night when my sleep patterns had been particularly erratic, I gave up trying to rest and slipped from my cot to dress for a walk. Seper was awake; it always woke when I did and had since we'd returned from het Narel with the children. I had never asked it to be my guardian and most of the time it did not act as one, for what eperu would have wanted a jarana? But Seper was a friend, and somehow I never found myself resenting its assignment to my side. I glanced toward it in the dark and whispered, "I'll be back."

It dipped its head and curled back up on the floor beside my cot. Kaduin, dreaming through his dense breeder's sleep, did not even flick an ear as I vanished up the ladder, my tail whispering over the rungs.

I found myself beneath a bright scythe moon, so sharp a white it made my eyes water as I looked up at it. How intense the stars were alongside it, like beads of blood scattered from its edge! A cold blood, for a cold light, like the skin of the avatar the Void had chosen. I chafed my arms and drifted toward the eperu who served the emodo master of the ship; for once it was idle, a silhouette leaning against the mast that supported the great sails.

"Ke eperu," I said.

It straightened and touched a hand to its chest, barely visible; it had black skin and black hair and the moon barely pricked it from the darkness of the sky. "Good evening. Is there something I can help you with?"

"I am just curious as to our progress," I said. "And perhaps I wanted a walk."

"It is a fine night for one," it said, smiling and lifting its sharp nose to the cool wind. "For now it's bright and clear... soon enough it will be too cold to be comfortable."

"It will?" I asked, startled.

"Summer was ending when we left, ke eperu," the other said. "Autumn on the sea is less forgiving than it is on land. We’ll be meeting the season’s strength soon enough though we’re making very good time." It smiled. "Perhaps the gods are with us at last."

"You can say that without fear of drawing their attention?" I asked.

It chuckled. "Oh, we have been through so much already, ke eperu. We have capsized, been overturned, foundered on underwater rocks, gotten lost, found ourselves becalmed, nearly starved or died more times than I can describe. I think the gods owe us this victory."

"You're a braver Jokkad than I to say so," I murmured.

It rested a hand on my shoulder. "Did not the avatars of the gods send us on this voyage? Have no fear, ke eperu. We will reach the shore."

I smiled, flicking my ears back. "Then I'll take my walk while I can."

"Enjoy it, ke eperu."

I had once had such certainties. I no longer remembered what it was like, to be free of doubt and guilt. The cutting moon above me and its attendant blood-drop stars felt like an indictment of an endeavor I'd started in violence. Even before the incident in House Edze... long before, I'd taken the first step on this path by standing attendance at the bodily death of an unborn child and the mind-death of its mother. Did I try, I could still feel the sticky film of the birth scarf fluids on my arm. Perhaps it was no surprise that the second birth I'd tried to oversee had also miscarried. Even before Roika had razed the settlement, I'd been struggling to sustain it against the overwhelming weight of the empire's existence. To travel far enough to be free of the Stone Moon would have denied the Jokka fleeing it a refuge with us. But to be near enough to save them required us to stay small and mobile, and one cannot build a civilization from the back of a caravan. In all the years I'd labored at Dlane's work, I had not found a solution, and had feared that there was none. Worse, I'd feared that I was wrong: that we could not live separate lives. That we would fail because I had held myself and Dlane apart from the final third of the Trinity.

These thoughts... they were too familiar. And yet for a while the cold off the ocean, the scent of the clear salt in it, the weight of the water in the wind, all of that washed my mind clean and left me empty of grief.

In that state of mind I began my return to our room…and was interrupted. The door to the chamber alongside opened and then fell shut again on the sound of a great crash. Startled, I reached for the door, wondering where the crew was, why no one had come to investigate. And then one hand lit on my shoulder and I looked over it at the eperu who'd wished me a good walk.

"We are under orders not to disturb the emperor," it said.

From the narrow crack between the door and the deck I heard the muffled sound of coughing. I flattened my ears to my mane. "There's something wrong—"

"We are under orders," the eperu said again, "not to disturb the emperor."

"And do you always take orders from the emperor?" I asked.

"He is my master," the eperu said.

"He's not mine." I reached for the handle again and this time it didn't stop me. When I looked up again, the eperu had gone.

So I opened the door and peered inside, and saw little but heard much. More of that thick, ugly coughing, and between attacks, wheezing. Was this Roika's room, then? Surely there was someone in there with him. Had they fought?

I crept down the ladder and paused halfway down, straining for the sound of another person's breath, their movements. But I heard nothing but that stridor, growing increasingly desperate, and the coughing that interrupted it. I slipped all the way down, bracing a foot on the ground, and groped for the cord that led to the shade. All these chambers had little windows; at night one could tie a fabric cover over them. The one in this room was barely attached, so it came free easily and the edged light of that sickle moon fell onto the face of the emperor of all Ke Bakil, crumpled on the floor near the ladder. As I stared at him, he was wracked with another coughing fit, ugly barks that brought up dark, sticky masses that showed in stark contrast to the lighter wood of the floor.

There have been moments in my life where everything seemed to stop, where even the World ceased to breathe—allowed me to live in the forever between its breaths—and the moment when I realized Roika was dying... what did I feel? Joy? Horror? Shock? Anger? All these things blocked my throat and the words I might have spoken. I thought to go straight back up the ladder and leave him to his suffering.

But the cough kept on and on, and an animal need to make it stop moved me to his side. I put my arm under him and his torso was too light for the emodo I remembered dancing with at the Leaf Gathering. It should have been an effort for me to haul his dead weight upright against the wall, particularly after my change, but it wasn't. When he continued coughing, I held him in place and found myself praying for the paroxysm to end. I hated Roika, but to watch anyone asphyxiate was beyond me.

I inhabited another one of those pauses between the World's breaths and could not count the time, and yet as interminable as it seemed to me it must have been far worse for him. But at last he began to draw uninterrupted breaths, even if they were labored. Beneath my arms I could feel his heart slowing from its crazed sprint. I lifted my hands from his shoulders just enough to see if he would list, and when he didn't I went through his chamber, looking for something I could use as a rag. I was somehow unsurprised to find several on the table beside the cot. I offered him one and after a long moment, he took it. I used a second to wipe up the floor, an act that kept my back to him. I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to face this evidence of his frailty, his impending demise. A healthy Roika, alive and opposing me, I could encompass. A dying Roika robbed me of one of the motivating forces of my life.

I didn't leave after I'd finished cleaning. I didn't know why, either. I just sat on the nearest cot and regarded him, the cloth crumpled in my fingers. One good look at its contents had told me everything I needed to know. I was no healer, but a jarana is intimately familiar with the diseases that show themselves in early infancy. It was that knowledge that prompted me to say, "How long have you known?"

His eyes were just visible beneath the lids, wet glints in the moonlight. "A few... years. After I started... building the Stone Moon." He sucked in a breath, fighting for it. "In het Kabbanil."

I frowned. "There was no sign of it in your childhood?"

"None," he answered. "Healer... in het Kabbanil..." He stopped to breathe. "Said he'd never seen it... show up so late."

"But it is what it looks like," I said. "The black-spit killer."

He let his head dip toward his chest, then pressed it back againt the wall, mouth hanging ajar. His difficulties were easing but now that I'd witnessed them I saw their tracks everywhere else. From the moment I'd attacked him on the shore, the signs had been there in the slight thickness of his voice, in the pattern of his breath, not swift enough to be noticed but still too quick for a healthy adult.

I'm not sure what I expected him to say then. The choices we make in our lives shape them forever after, even the small ones. What he decided to say next and the fear that shaped the words changed him in my eyes, no matter how much I wished otherwise.

"Kaduin... he hasn't... tell me... he hasn't...?"

My ears flattened. "No!" And then, worried, "But if you're right he's younger than you were when it rose in you."

"Gods... spare him..." Roika said, and sagged. He stank of blood and panic-sweat, sharp and acrid, and his exhaustion was palpable, so I helped him to one of the cots. He did not protest and in his weary acceptance I read years of him facing that humiliation and learning to live with it, and was moved despite myself to pity.

"Can you sleep now?" I asked.

"Maybe," he rasped. He opened eyes gone cloudy with fatigue. "So... now you know my... terrible secret. Are you glad?"

"No," I said, and was unwilling to expand on that. "Are you sure you'll be fine here alone?"

"Nothing... anyone can do." He closed his eyes. "Either will make it... to the north and back... or not."

In his place I would have resented sympathy and felt smothered by fussing, and we two... we were not as un-alike as I could have wished. So I left him to recuperate, climbing up the ladder and shutting the door. When I straightened I felt as if I had been in that room for hours; every joint felt outraged and all my thoughts ran white with blood and horror. The cloth was still balled in my fist.

The eperu was waiting for me.

"That's why he's never on deck," I said to it. "He's hiding in his room to keep everyone from discovering he's dying."

It shook its head slowly. "No. He's staying in his room because he's conserving what little strength he has. We already know."

I glanced up at it. "The empire knows its emperor is dying?"

"We know," the eperu said, "because the Fire in the Void asked us to guard his health. What the empire knows, I cannot tell you. But surely what the emperor's favored aide knows is known by the ministers of the Stone Moon."

I rubbed my arms. I had thought Turning anadi would have made me better friends with the cold but in this, as with many things, I seemed to have remained more neuter than female. "And you," I said at last, "You agreed to this. To guarding his health."

It glanced at me. "I know this may be difficult for you to hear, but not all of us oppose the Stone Moon, especially among the eperu. We live to serve the Jokka, to protect the breeders so that they might perpetuate the species. Much that the emperor has done has been difficult, but beneath him the anadi bear more young and all the sexes have seen their mindspans extended... even the anadi. There are more of us now than there were before, and the population is not only growing, it is well-fed, it is prosperous, it lives longer."

"The empire is not just," I whispered.

"The empire is imperfect," the eperu corrected. "As all things that exist on the World are. But one must begin somewhere."

I glanced at it. Then said, "What is your name?"

"Marilin," it said. "I am of het Kabbanil's labor."

"Ke Marilin," I said. "Thank you. You have taught me something tonight."

"You honor me," it said.

I returned to my assigned room and slipped beneath the blankets on my cot. Seper opened its eyes long enough to ascertain that I was well and returned to its doze. And I did my best to take my troubled thoughts to sleep and succeeded far too well.

The master of the vessel was Denret, an emodo with skin the pale yellow of cream and a wild mane of black hair that the ocean wind was always teasing free of the braid he effected. When I started spending more time outside our assigned room Seper and Kaduin followed me, and the latter was often at the side of Denret, asking questions about everything. That was Kaduin: forever curious, forever seeking. Even when he spoke, it was always an eager tumble, words spilling out as if they were racing to catch up to his thoughts. I stood at the rail and listened to the two of them and learned, every day a different topic, a different tangent.

"What is the north like?" Kaduin asked several weeks later. "Did you land there?"

Denret was standing with Marilin at his side, looking toward the horizon. "No... we just came close enough to be sure it was there and that it was large and then we turned for home." He glanced at Kaduin. "And as for what it's like..." He inhaled and smiled, eyes reflecting the glitter off the sea. "It's green."

But our first sight of the northern coast was not the green of new leaves and peridots and summers in Neked Pamari. It was instead an entire palette, awesome in its breadth. Green grass shading brown and dappled yellow. Black conifers rising above trees with stunning crowns of ruby leaves and yellow, oranges bright as rust. The coast itself was a long strand of rocks in every shade of gray. And there were distant mountains... brown shading to lavender and darker purple. I was riveted to the rail as the ship dipped in the choppy waves, skating closer. Seper, joining me, breathed in and said, "It is like a jewel box."

Kaduin, wrapped in a cloak and shivering, was last to approach. "By the Maker," he said, hushed.

"It must snow there," Seper murmured. "A lot more water, and a lot more cold than we get."

"Can you imagine having so much water that you can't see the land for the trees on it?" Kaduin asked, enrapt.

Seper's silence was one I'd long since learned to heed. I glanced at it.

"So many trees," it said. "Have you tried to navigate when you couldn't see the horizon? And the hiking will be hard."

I looked at the coast. "I have found my way through Neked Pamari but I knew the forest. This one I don't know. And it looks larger."

Seper's tail twitched once in agitation.

"It's beautiful," Kaduin said softly.

We let him admire it. It was for the eperu to see to the safety of breeders, and if I no longer belonged to the former group I was still eperu enough to see to my own welfare.

"I'll go pack," Seper said to me. "Tell me when we'll make landfall, when you know."

It took five days for the Endurance to find a safe place to anchor, a decision complicated by the need not to run afoul of any underwater hazards. Each morning some number of the eperu crew would pole the ship's raft down one of the possible approaches, testing it for rocks or precipitous rises in the sea floor. Denret finally chose one and informed us that it was safe to cross.

"What will you do?" I asked him as Seper went for our bags.

"We'll stay here," he said. "The crew will alternate on and off the ship. We'll search for fresh water and game and wait for you to return."

"Is it just us, then?" I said, glancing behind us.

"Just you," Denret said. "And—"

"Me," Roika said, shutting his door behind him. We had not seen him for weeks and the sight of him on his feet felt strange to me, knowing what I did now about his health. He had once called me a dead thing upright, but he suited the moniker better than I had. I had never heard of someone with the black-spit disease surviving to adulthood, but even so I knew he could not survive that cough long.

"You trust yourself with three Jokka who are dedicated to Dlane's cause?" I said. "Without even a guard?"

"Will you kill me?" Roika asked as the ship's master watched, unsettled.

My ears flattened. "No."

"Well, then, I have nothing to worry about, do I." He wrapped his cloak more tightly around himself and cleared his throat.

Denret touched a hand to his brow and said to Roika, "The raft is ready, ke emodo."

"Thank you," Roika said. "You did well, Denret. Tell your crew they are to be commended for their work."

"I will pass it on, sir."

Roika dipped his head and stepped over the side of the ship, onto the ladder leading down to the raft. Two of the ship's eperu followed; they would row the craft and bring it back to the ship when we were safely ashore.

Seper brought me my bag, Kaduin following it to my side. He said, "Do we have to use the same raft?"

"Be patient," Seper said. "We won't be in his company long."

The two of them climbed over the side. I waited for Seper to step onto the raft before starting down the ladder, nursing my misgivings. If Roika went off into the forest alone he might very well die there. I thought Denret and Marilin would bring us home without him, but would they blame us for letting him die? When they'd been charged with his safety and Marilin knew I'd been informed of that charge? And worse, how would I feel if a male I'd been fighting for years met his end unremarked in some nameless forest on an alien coast? We had been building toward a clash of empires since Dlane had died in my arms. If it ended like this, would it ever feel finished at all? Or would it make a new emptiness in me to add to the one Dlane's death had created?

The raft was cold and leaky and barely large enough for all of us and our packs. Kaduin sat at the far corner, keeping as far from Roika as possible, his toes curled up tightly to avoid the water that slopped over the raft's floor. Seper and I sat in front of him, facing the eperu at the oars. By the time the pebbles scraped at the bottom of our little craft, we were all wet; the water was cold enough to numb my toes.

And then we were on the shore of an entirely different place, a shore three months away by way of a ship that was, for now, unique. I sat in the raft and stared up at the towering trees and the quiver that ran the length of my spine was not the chill but incredulity.

Roika stepped out of the raft first, pulling his pack after him. "Thank you." And then he turned his back on us and made his way to the trees.

I said, "Quickly, or we’ll lose him."

"Lose him!" Kaduin hissed. "Why are we following him at all?"

"Because he'll probably die in that forest without aid," I said.

"Then let him die!" Kaduin said. "It's what he would do in our place!"

Seper glanced at him, ears flattening.

I grabbed my bag and hopped out of the raft, wet tail slopping on the pebbled beach. I touched my hand to my chest in salute to the eperu who'd brought us and said, "Thank you," and then said to Seper and Kaduin, "Come on." And then I jogged after Roika.

At my approach, he growled, "Is there something you need?"

"We need to stay together," I said.

"I can do this myself," he said. "And I can't imagine why you'd want to do it with me anyway."

"Like it or not," I said, "you are the one responsible for making this possible. We already have done it with you, Roika."

He paused and turned, eyes narrowed. "This is about your pity for me."

"And if it is?" I said.

"Then I don't want it," he began, baring his teeth.

Behind us, Kaduin cried, "Stop! Look!"

Standing with a hand on one of the trees, almost invisible in their reddish shadows, was an anadi.

I remember the first time I saw Dlane on a dais at a Transactions fair being auctioned to the highest bidding House. Her beauty had stunned me: the slim shoulders, the rounded hips and belly, the shimmering gray skin and golden hair. She had seemed to me like the Brightness made manifest, a light too powerful to be contained within a single body. I had never seen anything like her.

...but this anadi made Dlane's beauty seem febrile. She was radiant, vital in a way I'd never seen in my life. Her skin was glossy, a rose-amber that was all the colors of pink and peach and pale cream and yellow that I could perceive. Her hair had been braided into a complex pattern but even pulled back from her face one could see its health and thickness. Her posture was effortlessly erect, and she was sleek where her clothing revealed her. She might have the heavy breasts and broad hips of an anadi, but there was little soft about her.

The sight of us had stopped her fast. Her pupils had swollen in eyes a clear aquamarine blue, and she raked each of us with a glance that seemed to be seeking something, something we were lacking. And then she spoke in an urgent mezzosoprano, the words an unmistakable interrogation... one none of us could answer, for none of us understood her.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Could you repeat that?"

The anadi took a step forward, ears flattened, and the unintelligible words came again, a swift staccato.

Kaduin said, "Maybe... maybe she speaks the language of the ancients?"

"And we don't?" I said.

"We don't understand their writing," Kaduin said. "Why would we understand their speech?"

The anadi had been listening to our exchange, ears straining and brow furrowed. At last she made an exasperated noise and flipped her tail against the grass. Waving a hand to draw our attention back to her, she made an unmistakable 'come' sign and walked deeper into the forest.

The eperu from the raft had joined us further up the beach at the sight of the stranger. Roika said to them, "Take word to ke Denret. We'll be back when we have news." As they jogged back to the raft, he flicked his tail and said, "I suppose we'll be walking together for a while after all," and followed the anadi.

What could we do? We went too.

Acquaintance did not make the anadi less astonishing. She wore clothing heavier than I was accustomed to seeing: thick leather pants and vest over a thinner shirt with sleeves that ended just above her braided forearm ruffs. She carried a small bag slung from shoulder to hip and at her belt a sheathed knife. The ornaments holding her braids in place were carved wooden sticks with animals chasing each other up their lengths, or evoking twirling vines with flat flowers at their ends. Of course they had wood and to spare, if this forest was any indication; what was extravagance beyond measure at home would be normal here. But all of it only served to underscore her alien nature. Even her height was strange: she was taller than anadi were wont to be, nearly my own height. And she set a brisk pace, traveling paths that her confidence implied were familiar to her. Now and then she stopped to cut a leaf from a vine growing up a trunk or pluck something from a plant near the ground; these she carefully stowed in the pouches or pack she carried.

"An herbalist, surely," Kaduin said, excited. "Would that ke Abadil had come with us! All those plants he read about in the records, the ones that no longer seem to grow back home, maybe she would recognize them?"

"Maybe," I said. "If not her, I cannot imagine who would."

As we traveled the anadi stopped and pointed at things, speaking a single word as a question. When we didn't respond she sighed and continued. Eventually, Kaduin began offering her one of our words in exchange: 'tree,' 'leaf,' 'dirt.' That seemed to satisfy her, though she continued to frown as she walked, and often glanced at us.

We'd been hiking at least an hour when Roika began hiding a cough behind a hand, falling back so that the noise wouldn't draw attention. But soon enough he was lagging for lack of breath. The anadi frowned over her shoulder at us and stopped until he caught up, then resumed walking. When he fell behind again she waited with flattened ears and a scowl. This time when she turned away, he coughed—and she froze and spun back around. Before he could retreat she was in front of him, leaning into him and staring up at his mouth. She sniffed his neck, took his hand and flipped it, checking it. She trailed a finger over the palm, rubbing it against her thumb. As Roika stared at her, wide-eyed and flat-eared, she rested her fingers on his wrist and closed her eyes. She said something to him, swift and incredulous. When he didn't answer, she looked at the rest of us, exasperated, and said something else.

"He has been sick a while," I offered. I faked a cough and a wheezing breath for her.

Roika growled. "I can talk for myself."

She ignored him and duplicated my wheeze and cough, arching her brows. Then she glanced around the path and grabbed some of the dark, fragrant soil. She pretended to cough into her hand and opened it to show me the black dirt and again asked her question.

"Yes," I said, ears flicking forward. "Just like that."

"Yes," she said, her accent... very strange. But she duplicated the noise well. She eyed Roika. "Yes?"

He glared at her, then snarled. "Yes."

That loosed a tirade none of us understood, but she resumed walking at a reduced pace.

"Thank you," Roika said to me, seething. "For sharing my secret for me."

"Your illness was no secret on the ship," Seper said behind us, surprising us both. "The crew spoke of it when it was needful."

Before he could recover from his surprise, I said, "And the anadi heard you herself. She's obviously well-versed in sicknesses. She didn't need to be told. And you know she would have found out."

Roika said nothing, marching with stiff shoulders. I let him pass on and resumed trudging alongside Seper. Glancing at it earned me a flip of its tail. I was not surprised it had discovered the emperor's condition, but Kaduin? When I looked over at him, I found him grim, back straight and brows lowered. He had not known, then. It was not how I would have chosen to tell him.

It was not a short journey the anadi led us on. Nor an easy one. Few of us were habituated to hiking with the forests so few. That I'd had so many experiences with them was rare among Jokka... or at least, among the Jokka I'd known. Here things must be different, among these behemoths that reached so high above the shorter trees. The air was moist and smelled of astringent sap, so different from Neked Pamari's drier, sweeter smells, but some things remained the same. The muffled sound of our feet on the path. The way sunlight shivered when the branches above us moved. The distant call of animals. The memories were powerful, so much so that I kept looking over my shoulder for the anadi who wasn't following me anymore.

Instead, I wound up with an arm slung under Roika's shoulders, for it was not long before he could no longer walk without aid and Kaduin wouldn't touch him. Seper did not offer either, though it awarded me a significant look. I judged that to be a warning against overworking myself on behalf of our enemy.

It was strange to touch him, strange and familiar. I remembered his arms around me at the Leaf Gathering and the comfort I’d derived from his strength. Beneath these alien trees we were neither of us what we were. We'd come to this: a dying emodo and a failed anadi stumbling through a world that smelled like a welcome we were too late to accept.

Our guide looked over her shoulder at us once, saw that I was handling the problem, and said something to us I thought was reassurance before continuing.

“I hope that meant ‘we’re not far,’” Kaduin muttered.

I said nothing and labored on, listening to Roika wheeze.

I knew the break in the trees as a sudden brightness on my shoulders and brow, as the shock of moving air after the close stillness of the trees and their heavy silences. Before us was a small valley and in it nestled dozens of small wooden houses. Wooden houses! There were pens with small herdbeasts grazing in them and people, beautiful people, shimmering under the light—

—and then Roika collapsed and took me with him. After that things became a confusion of hands helping us and talk, so much talk, collapsed from language into music by its impenetrability. And the Jokka... oh, the northern Jokka. They blinded me with their health and beauty and quickness. Had someone not led me after Roika I might have remained there, stunned insensate. But they did lead me away as our anadi chivvied them, toward one of the wooden houses on the outskirts of the settlement. It was nothing like the homes I was accustomed to, places meant for an entire House. This one seemed sized to fit our guide, who stood outside and gave orders to the eperu and emodo helping her. She nudged us all in after, including Kaduin, whose expression I recognized: the only reason he wasn't asking questions was because no one here would be able to understand them.

The Jokka carrying Roika vanished into an adjacent room at the anadi's request, leaving the three of us in a small area in front of a wall. There were no chairs, only a high table set flush to the wall with incense burners and a lamp. Above it on the wall was a giant piece of painted stone: a circle with three colors swirled together, sienna brown, lapis blue and pearlescent white. Beside each color was a word, and even I as poorly literate as I was understood them. It seemed so normal to see them, in fact, that I don't think any of us realized until several heartbeats had passed that... the words were written with letters we recognized.

When the anadi returned with another anadi and an eperu, Kaduin rounded on her, pointing at the wall. "Anadi!" he said. "Eperu! Emodo! Yes?"

Startled, she looked up at the wall. Then she tapped on one of the words and spoke, and I thought... I thought perhaps I heard the word this time, our word. But pronounced so strangely I had to strain to hear it.

"Anadi," Kaduin said. He pointed at our guide. "Like you. Anadi. Yes?" He pointed at eperu and then at Seper and the eperu behind our guide. "And eperu? And emodo!"

The guide pursed her lips and said something to the other two before motioning to Kaduin. When he stepped closer, she pulled him toward them and then pointed to the room across from us, a place with soft cushions and a low table beside a fireplace. Eagerly he went with them.

I waited until I saw them settle down before saying to the anadi, "Where is he? The emodo?" And pointed to the word.

She motioned for me to follow, so I did.

They'd settled Roika onto a couch in a room stocked from floor to ceiling with shelves of small ceramic and glass jars, each labeled in script I recognized, though I didn't know all the words. There was a table with a mortar and pestle, a knife, and other tools that looked typical to an herbalist. The anadi pointed to a stool next to the couch, so I sat and watched her go through her shelves, muttering to herself. Seper positioned itself at the door where it could see both me and Kaduin, and I let its presence serve as an anchor. Even the scent of this place was unknown: the wooden walls smelled of the same fragrant sap as the forest.

The anadi sniffed at Roika's throat and eyes, peered into his slack mouth and then sniffed there too. She showed me her knife and then set it against the top of a knuckle, pricking there and showing me the results as if to demonstrate she meant no harm. When I didn't react, she nicked Roika's hand and lapped up the bead of blood that welled there. And then she shuddered and stared at me. She said something incredulous and then demanded my hand, pointing to it and holding hers out. So I rested my palm on hers and let her cut me too, using the opposite side of the blade. Her tongue was hot and swift, and her expression appalled when she lifted her head.

Shaking herself, she took a brief inventory of her shelves and then started pulling down jars, talking to me all the while. I didn't need to know what she was saying; from her tone she was distressed and trying to ignore it by focusing on practical issues. I knew it by the firm set of her shoulders and the flattened ears. When she'd satisfied herself as to her list of ingredients she mixed something in a bowl, sniffed it and sighed out. She would have offered it to me as well but she didn't have to: the paste she'd made was so strong it was clearing my nose from the other side of the room. This she rubbed on Roika's chest and throat, around his nostrils. Then she covered him with a blanket and left him propped up on the couch before taking me by the arm and pulling me out of the room, calling.

Her summons brought the other two and Kaduin, whose eyes were shining. "Thenet!" he said while they talked. "Thenet, they have paper! They have so much paper they use it for scraps! Look!" He brandished a few sheets, full of scribbled notes in several hands. "I think they might be speaking the same language after all, just... so differently we can't hear it right. And some of the words aren't the same. But they are when written. Except when they're not—"

I held up my hands. "Slow down, please."

"They use our way of writing," Kaduin said. "But they also use the glyphs we've seen in the ruins. Just like they seem to speak our language, if very, very differently... along with words we don't know. But I can write and they understand. You see?" He pointed at where he'd written 'we are from the south' and received an answer in response. I couldn't read it all, but I knew the word for ocean.

The anadi had dispatched the other two and was frowning at us. Seeing the paper, she pulled it out of Kaduin's hand, and the writing stick as well. When she finished writing on the paper, using the wall as a flat surface, she handed it to me and tapped it urgently.

"Kaduin?" I said.

He looked over my shoulder. "It says 'why are you all so sick?'"

I frowned. "Did you read that correctly? 'you all'?"

"That's what it says," Kaduin said, frowning. He jotted a reply, speaking the words as he wrote them. "We are not sick. The emodo is sick."

She looked at it, flattened her ears and hissed. Taking the stick back she wrote again, then showed him the paper and pointed at it.

Seper read it this time. "'You are all sick. Like animals that have not seen proper feed for years.'"

We all looked at one another, then at the anadi.

Seper whispered, "All the others outside... they look like her."

"And we don't!" Kaduin said, eyes wide.

The anadi underscored the word 'sick' with the stick and thrust it at us. Kaduin glanced at me, then took it from her and wrote slowly in response. "Where we are from, we are not sick. Everyone is like this."

When the anadi read the words, she grew very still. She looked up at us, eyes rimmed in white.

"It's true," Kaduin told her.

She took the paper back and wrote, "You will come eat now. We will begin repairs."

"What about Roika?" I asked. "Ask her about him."

Kaduin scrawled the question and showed it to her, and she frowned and scrawled, "I made him comfortable."

Comfortable, I thought. So even here, among these amazingly vital people, there was no hope for him.

The anadi said something and beckoned, so we followed her.

Before I ate my first meal in that northern house, I had not tasted food. I had eaten all my life but never felt nourished, not the way this food nourished. The aroma had me salivating before it reached the low table where we were waiting and the actual act of eating was… indescribable. As if the inside of my mouth had been numb until this meal had stung it to life. As if my stomach had been sleeping until I filled it with this food. It did not look much different from anything I’d eaten at home: some kind of red meat shredded with hints of green leaves, of spices and nuts. But the flavor...! It was soaked in a vibrant sauce that tasted gloriously of fat and seasonings I couldn’t identify and our hosts used soft, flat bread as scoops to gather as much of it as they could, so we did the same. And we ate... how we ate. I was not the only one stunned by the food. I had never seen an expression of sensual bliss on Seper's face until that afternoon, savoring that first bite and then the second.

“What could possibly be different about it?” Kaduin said as we ate. “It’s the same sort of things, isn’t it? Animal flesh and plants that grow out of the ground. Why does it taste so real?”

“Maybe the soil is richer here,” Seper said. “At home, the farming Houses found that the soil faded after years of use, even when fertilized."

“So you’re suggesting that our soil is deficient despite our efforts,” Kaduin said.

“Maybe they grow different plants here,” I said.

“Or they could be better cooks,” Seper said.

“Whatever the cause of it, I want more of it,” Kaduin said, and served himself again.

As we ate, our anadi guide watched us. From her expression she was unsurprised by our reaction.

Partway through the meal we were served cups of a drink made from cream: spicy and salty and sweet and fatty, the taste mild against the bolder flavors of the meat. And when all that had been cleared away, another cup, this time of a clear tisane, some stimulant with a touch of mint and other herbs I couldn’t identify.

“I want that again,” Kaduin said, nose drooping over the cup so that the steam parted around his nose. “I want to eat like that all the time.”

“Maybe this was an unusual meal,” Seper murmured.

The anadi said something to the eperu seated beside her, causing it to rise and fetch a fresh stack of paper and the charcoal stick. It sharpened the point, then glanced over at her. They were siblings, I thought: it had the same hair and eyes and skin very nearly the same rose-amber, but darker. Strange to see two siblings seated together.

But it was writing. Kaduin scooted over beside it, still cradling his cup, and read past its wrist. “It wants to know why we’re here.”

Such a question. How could I possibly answer? That we were here because our world was falling apart? That our society was destroying itself in an argument over the just treatment of all of its members? That we had come because the Stone Moon and the truedark rebellion were seeking some way to avoid a war? I looked away, my eyes focusing on the brim of my cup and a highlight there, cast by a nearby lamp. “Tell them that we came seeking the knowledge of the ancients. Tell them about the ruins.”

Kaduin frowned in thought, then began to write. The others leaned close, murmuring to each other as the words appeared. When he’d finished, he offered them the sheet but our guide flattened her ears and pointed at the first word. She glanced at him until he said, “There.” Then pointed to the next. So he spoke the whole thing aloud for her.

“There are ruins where we come from, ruins that tell stories we don’t know, ruins whose stories have no endings. Our own world is in desperate need of answers. How can we live so that the breeders don’t fall to the mind-death? How can we have children without risk to the anadi? Did we come from the north, and if so, what happened? Were we born in the Birthwell? We came here hoping for answers. We did not expect living Jokka.”

The three looked at one another. Then the eperu shook its head and took the stick back from Kaduin, murmuring a question to its sibling. She said something swiftly and it wrote. When Kaduin took back the sheet, he read it first, ears dipping. Then said, “They… write… that they didn’t think there were any people left on the birth continent after the great disaster. That a great flame in the sky struck the earth and destroyed everything. Their ancestors fled on a ship and came here.”

“A flame?” I asked, startled. “Where? It couldn’t have been near het Kabbanil where so much of the city still stands. Was it north or south of there?”

But the anadi touched my arm. “Kabbanil?” she repeated, and despite her way of mangling the vowels I understood her. “Kabbanil?”

“Yes,” I said. “One of our cities.” Kaduin hastily wrote for me and pushed the paper on the eperu, who read it to the others. The two anadi shared looks, then considered us. Then she said something slowly to the eperu, who wrote it down and showed it to all three of us.

“They say we are their ancestors,” Kaduin whispered.

After that there was no separating Kaduin from the northern Jokka and their paper. I left him to pursue the implications of their revelation and went instead to check on Roika, who was sleeping on the couch in surprising peace. When I trained an ear toward his face I could catch the faint wheeze in his breathing but he was a different Jokkad from the one I'd helped lumber through the forest. Seper trailed in after me and glanced at him. "He seems better."

"He does," I said. "I wonder how long it will last."

"And what was in the unguent," Seper said.

The anadi entered, brushing past us to sniff at Roika's breath and check his wrist again. She seemed satisfied with the results though not happy, unsurprisingly. I had yet to meet a healer who did not feel personally affronted by the diseases it couldn't cure.

Sitting behind her desk, she found a sheet of paper and a pen this time, dipping it in a pot of ink. She began to write. When she had finished she twirled the paper to face us and tapped it. Seper leaned closer, frownining.

"She asks if we eat things from the sea and things from the land."

I glanced at the anadi, who was staring at me as if willing the answer from my lips. "A fine thing to ask of people who only recently re-discovered the sea."

"I will tell her that we eat plants," Seper said, writing carefully. The eperu did not have Kaduin's facility with language, but then no one did. I drew better than Seper, but it was more literate than I was. When it was done, it showed the anadi the sheet. She scowled at the words and shook her head, ears flattening. Tapping it she said something, forgetting that we didn't understand, and when we didn't respond she made an exasperated noise and wrote in a hasty hand and shoved the results under Seper's nose.

"I... I'm not sure I understand this correctly," Seper said. "But she says... that our blood is... flat? That we are starved. We must eat a great deal and properly while we are here."

"No hardship that," I murmured.

Seper's brows lowered. "...but she says that this will not fix you, because you were starved during your Turning and it was... something here I don't understand." It glanced up at the anadi and pointed at the word. She said something, then scratched it out and wrote something new. Seper said, "Not finished, now, it says."

I touched my chest. "Not finished."

Seper wrote for me and the anadi answered, and I saw on her face concern and that anger particular to healers when confronted with health problems that could have been avoided. "She writes that Turning Jokka must always be fed properly and rested, particularly when going from neuter to breeder. Otherwise, the change might not complete. It will cause problems."

"Yes," I murmured. "I imagine so."

The anadi was writing again. I didn't have to look up to tell; the furious scribbling, so confident, was very different from Seper's slower, more erratic response. I closed my eyes and waited.

"She says she must look up exactly the... I don't know what this word is. Look up something in something in order to decide how to treat us, to make us better. Our problem is so rare she has never seen it in a person. Only occasionally in animals who have been trapped in the mountains." Seper's voice grew sardonic. "Like animals in the mountains."

The anadi answered its tone and though we didn't know the words we understood her well enough. None of us liked the situation. "Tell her thank you," I said. "For her hospitality, for her healing, and for taking care of Roika."

"Are we truly grateful for the latter?" Seper asked, but it took up the pen.

"Whether or not we are," I said, "she didn't have to see to him and she did. Her effort deserves thanks."

It snorted and wrote, and this note the anadi stared at for a long time before sighing. She stood and touched Seper on the shoulder on her way to the door, and there she stopped and caught my eyes before touching her fingertips to her womb and then to her heart. She left before I could stop her, but then... what could I say? That I was shocked that she knew the sign of an anadi's respect to an eperu? It was, wasn't it? But I was no longer eperu and this she apparently knew.

"We have a great deal to learn here," Seper said.

"Go with her?" I suggested. "If she is going to look for information on what's wrong with us... I'd like to know what form it takes. Perhaps they have records. If they're written in the same way..."

"Then I could understand them," Seper said, and dipped its head. "I will go, and check on Kaduin."

"Thank you," I said.

Once it had gone, I closed my eyes and let my head drop, drawing in deep breaths until I'd found some strength to rise. As I did so, Roika said, "Is it true?"

I halted and slowly looked over at him. He was lying just as he had been, hands folded on his midriff, but his eyes were open.

"Yes," I said at last. "Your doing."

"My doing!" he said, brows lifting.

"We had a refugee from het Serelni. There used to be a chenji there, an anadi witch, who could Turn other sexes anadi by mating them to emodo. It does not always work."

"But it did on you," Roika said. "How is that possible? When you came back to me to kill your House-mates, you were still eperu and it had been months since the incident in the breeding chamber."

"I was... ill," I said, looking away. "Too sick to recover well. And when I finally regained some strength I spent it all preparing to kill you. It wasn't until I began eating normally and resting more that I began to show signs."

The words were reluctant to leave him judging by the pauses between them. "I would never have chosen that for you, Thenet."

"Is that an apology?" I said, voice harsh.

"Yes," Roika said. "Yes, it is. I regret hurting you, Thenet. I regretted it even as I was doing it."

"You didn't stop," I said.

"No," he said. "I was past stopping. I—" He bared his teeth and looked away. "I wanted, very badly, for you to join me. Your refusal drove me past reason."

"You had some fantasy," I said. "You, me, Dlane. All together, all helping you build your dream of empire."

"Would it have been so wrong?" he said. "You wanted it."

"But she didn't," I said. "And I loved her, Roika. I love her still."

"Don't let your love for her blind you to truth," Roika said, quieter. "My way may not have been the kindest way. But it has been the only way."

I growled but he didn't flinch from my glare and then... then I heard the words and frowned. "'Has been'?"

"Has been," he said. "Maybe now there will be a new way. Help me, Thenet. These people know things we've forgotten. They have things we need. For better or worse I speak for Ke Bakil. Decisions I make here will be carried out by the empire when we return." He touched his throat, his chest. "I feel better now, but it won't last. The good periods no longer outnumber the bad ones. When I begin to fail, promise me you will speak in my name. In the empire's name. And if I die here, bring those decisions back for me."

My heart had begun to pound halfway through his entreaty and by the end of it I was shaking, my incredulity was so powerful. "You trust me with this?"

"Yes," he said.

"But why?" I asked, stunned. "You've just learned that your rape Turned me anadi. I've told you that I love the anadi who counted you her worst enemy. I lied to you, stole your children and raised them as my own, killed half the anadi you took from me. And you would trust me?"

"Yes," he said again. "Because you still want the best for Ke Bakil. And you are too honest to turn your back on what the Stone Moon has accomplished once I am no longer a threat to you."

"You're mad!" I exclaimed.

"No," he said, quiet. "I'm dying. And if I don't live to see our home again, Thenet, I must arrange for its safe transition into another's hands."

"I don't want power," I whispered.

"Then don't take it," he said. "Give it to someone worthy. But help me bring home the secrets of the north, Thenet. If these people can heal us of whatever sickness they claim we have..." He closed his eyes. Then managed a smile. "Then I'll die without resentment."

"And without regrets?" I said.

He looked at me then, gray eyes unreadable. "Show me a life without regrets, Thenet, and it won't be either of ours. Will it?"

I could not argue that and he knew it. I left him to rest.

Our hosts improvised sleeping arrangements for us in the room beside the entry hall... this after Kaduin's hasty explanation caused them to dismantle the nest they'd built for us to share. "They form triads," he said after they'd withdrawn and left us to the dim warmth of the banked fire. "That's how they do things. One each of each sex, and they become a family group. The eperu here is the herbalist's sibling, and it and the other anadi have made an initial agreement. Until they find a third they're staying here with the herbalist."

"Triads," I repeated.

"Yes," Kaduin said. His voice was tight. "Here it's normal for Jokka to love one across sexes."

"And our host?" Seper asked. "The healer?"

"I don't know," Kaduin said. "They haven't said anything about her having mates." He fluffed his blanket and then slid under it. "Tomorrow they are bringing some people to talk with us. They're very excited, ke eperu. They never expected anyone to survive when they left. They said the skies were dark with ash and the seas had drowned half the land and taken the cities there with them... it was a terrible catastrophe. Plants died, the waters were poisoned by the ash and the flooding. The animals lasted a while and then they started dying too."

"How long ago?" I asked.

"They don't know," Kaduin said. He was lying down now; I could just see the tip of his nose and the gleam of his eyes in the shadows of the blanket he'd pulled up to his chin. "Hundreds of years ago. Maybe thousands?" He yawned.

"Rest," Seper said. "There is much to be done."

"Yes," he said and closed his eyes.

The two of us sat by the fire while he drowsed off. At last I said to my companion, "What do you think?"

"I think there is much to be done," Seper said again.

The warmth off the fire only made my limbs feel colder by contrast. "I'm tired, Seper."

"Then sleep," it said gently.

In the morning I found a narrow plate awaiting me by the fire, and on it three rich small cuts of meat wrapped in bright green leaves. There was a similar plate next to Kaduin, but not beside Seper. I brought my plate with me when I went in search of the anadi. She was tending to Roika, who was awake and sitting up. I pointed to the plate and she narrowed her eyes and mimed eating it.

"Do you feel well enough to write?" I asked him.

"Yes?" he said.

I brought him the paper and said, "Ask her why Kaduin and I have these plates but not Seper. Doesn't it need breakfast?"

The anadi looked over Roika's shoulder as he wrote and snorted when he finished. She plucked the pen up, dipped it in the inkwell and scrawled a quick note beneath his.

"She says that breeders need more and different food from eperu and don't we know anything." He glanced at me. "It seems not."

The anadi tapped him on the shoulder and said a word slowly, then motioned for us to follow her. So we did... to breakfast, where Roika had his first experience of northern cooking and the rest of us learned that our first meal was no anomaly. The first meal of the day was served with small flat cakes made of something shredded and sweet, hot from a pan and glossy with fragrant oil. With this, some combination of vegetables I didn't recognize and strips of pale meat marinated in a tangy yellow sauce. Everyone ate from the same bowls and plates, but I noticed the two northern anadi had narrow plates like the ones Kaduin and I had found by our fire.

Afterward, several more Jokka came to call, one of them with a stack of paper. The meeting that followed was a laborious one, involving not only writing back and forth, but reading aloud, something the herbalist insisted on. But from these people we learned that the northern Jokka were astonished at our arrival and wanted very much to know about us and the remains of the civilization they'd fled. Roika, who'd been propped up against a wall with several pillows, said to me, "Don't make any promises."

"Don't we want what they have?" I said to him, ears flicking back.

"I did not build the Stone Moon so foreigners could take it from us," Roika said. "Ask them how many of them there are, about other towns."

Kaduin scowled but I said, "Please." So he asked, and one question led to the next. The answers were surprising: there were only two other towns and a scattering of single-family homesteads in between. This town had some nine hundred people in it, and while it was the smallest of the three the others weren't much larger: apparently they considered having grown their population to this size a great accomplishment, for very few of them had made it to this continent at all. This town traded the products of the forest and sea to the other two, which sent back cloth and metal. There was almost no infrastructure, certainly no empire.

"But then," Kaduin said as he read one of their responses, "why would they need it? They live among riches. They don't need one another to survive the way we do." He glanced at me. "Can I tell them now about the ship and our plans?"

"Go ahead," I said.

This explication brought on exclamations of surprise and then speculative looks amid the general excitement. The newcomers consulted with our hosts, and the anadi growled something to them that set their ears back. She pointed at us and spoke at length, gesturing with her hands.  Then one of them handed her the pen.

"She wants us to bring the ship to... someplace. I'm not sure what that means. And she wants to see all the Jokka on it. The more of us she can see, the more likely she'll understand what's wrong with us."

I glanced at Roika who said, "We may as well. We won't be leaving here for months anyway."

"Months!" I exclaimed.

"The seas are rough in winter," Roika said. "It's safer to wait until spring before making the return trip."

"Months would give us time to see if their aid really does help," Seper offered.

I sighed. "Let it be done, then. And Kaduin..." When he looked up, I said, "You'll be in charge of arranging all this."

"Ke eperu?" he said, startled.

"You're the most facile with writing," I said. "Until we can speak with them, it's the only way."

As he dove back into the one-sided conversation with the northerners, Seper murmured, "You give him the task he wants very much to do."

"Do you want me to assign you to him as well?"

Seper grimaced, ears flicking back. "Someone should go with him."

"And someone should stay here."

It glanced at Roika before saying, "Is that necessary?"

I held its gaze until it relented. With a sigh, it said, "As you will."

"You could have gone with them," Roika said later, lying on the healer's couch while she thumbed through stacks of records at her table. "They could have used the help."

"Kaduin needs to do something for himself," I said. "He's ready. He deserves the chance to prove he can accomplish great deeds on his own."

Roika smiled, eyes closed. "You've raised him well."

I sought any possible sign of sarcasm and heard none. So I said, "And I gave him the task because I'm tired."

"Not too much longer now, ke eperu," Roika said. "And then it will be over."

"I'm not an eperu anymore," I said.

"Do you think of yourself as anadi, then?" he asked, parting his lashes just enough to study me. At my expression, he said, "I didn't think so."

"To deny what I am now would be to deny what you did to me," I said.

"So why do you do it?"

I looked at my knees and squeezed my eyes shut. "There's only one anadi in my life, Roika. I'm not her."

"And now you know why I call you ke eperu," he said, quiet, but when I looked up in surprise he refused to say more.

That evening after another astonishing meal, Seper, Kaduin and I repaired to our blankets in the front room. Outside the windows a deep blue twilight had fallen and through it I could see the lamps hanging from the eaves of other wooden houses, casting warm reddish lights in the autumn dark. Seper rebuilt the fire from the coals with wood that smelled like incense when it burned, sweet and fragrant and rare.

“Their cove is about an hour’s walk away,” Kaduin said to us as we settled in. “Nobody seems to ride around here, I gather the trees are too thick? Have you seen any riding beasts, ke Thenet?”

“None,” I said. “But I haven’t left the house.”

“Well, it’s not important,” he said, more to himself than to us. “The cove is where they fish, there are several boats tied down there. Nothing the size of ours, but the place is large enough for us to bring the Endurance. The northerners say it will be safer from storms there. So we walked back to the beach and ke Denret says they’ll sail the ship there tomorrow. He was amenable to having some of the Jokka up here at the settlement, so once they anchor at the cove we should be seeing them.” He watched Seper feed the fire. In profile, I saw the resemblance to his father more strongly, particularly with the new confidence that squared his shoulders and raised his chin. There was a little of his mother Magun in him too, in the strength of his nose and the ember-red of his eyes.

But then he smiled at me, that same bright eager smile he’d given me since childhood, and all resemblance to his parents vanished. “I think I’m beginning to understand them a little, too. They often use the same words we do, it’s just that they pronounce them differently. This place for instance. They call it a het and it’s spelled ‘het,’ just like at home. Except they don’t say ‘het,’ they say ‘aith.’”

“That doesn’t sound at all like het,” Seper said, sitting next to me.

“No, no of course it doesn’t,” Kaduin said. “But if you start listening, you notice that a lot of the words with ‘eh’ sounds now have ‘ai’ sounds. And a lot of the ‘t’ sounds have become 'th.' They have a different rhythm when they speak, so it’s hard to pull those changes out, but if you pay attention when they’re reading aloud from what they’ve written you can hear it. Plus, they seem to have different versions of a word when it speaks of one single object or several—“

Our looks must have been instructive, for he trailed to a halt and flushed at the ears. Laughing, he said, “I know it sounds crazy. But once you start listening for the changes, they really do start making sense.” He looked past us and added, “Yes?”

“Yes,” said the healer, who was standing at the door with a tray of steaming mugs. And though I could hear a hint of the accent Kaduin had been explaining, I understood her quite well.

“They’re learning how we speak too,” Kaduin added. “Pretty quickly now that they’ve heard the shipboard Jokka too.”

The healer brought our tray and set it down, and amid the mugs there was a slip of paper. Kaduin peered at it and read, “These are for warming the stomach before sleeping. Because it’s cold out.” He looked up at her. “Thank you.”

She inclined her head. Then tapped her chest. “Loë.”

“Loë?” I said. “Some new word we don’t know?”

“Loë,” the healer repeated, pointing to herself. She pointed at me and arched her brows.

“Ah, names,” Kaduin said. He pointed at me. “Thenet.” And at Seper and himself, repeating the exercise.

Satisfied, the anadi said, “Kaduin. Thenet. Seper.” And added something that was perhaps ‘good night,’ for she left us then.

“Sae-dwyn,” Kaduin repeated, bemused. “I almost like it better that way.”

Seper glanced at me. It was not the only one who saw Kaduin’s enthusiasm. I said only, “You’ve done well, Kaduin. Keep going.”

“Yes, ke eperu,” he said, beaming.

The following day Kaduin, Seper and the eperu and anadi who were—what could I say? Joined? Mated? Left early to go to the cove and wait for the ship. Loë stood with me at the door, breath curling white from her mouth; when they’d vanished amid the general bustle of the het, she drew me back to her workroom where Roika had resumed his seat after eating with us. He was reading through a handful of sheets left from the conversations that had happened since we’d arrived, and as I entered, he said, “They use a lot of words I’m not familiar with.”

“Kaduin said some of the vocabulary is particular to them.” I stopped as the anadi waved me over, so I joined her at the table as she unwrapped a leather package and brought forth from it a great stack of papers bound together with a cover. I had not seen so much paper in one place ever and when she opened it to reveal a page covered in tight, neat writing and accompanied by painted illustrations I drew in a sharp breath.

“What is it?” Roika asked.

“Come see."

He joined us then, moving without grace but not needing help. For some time he said nothing, staring at it. Then at last he whispered, “Gods of the Trinity.”

“What does it say?” I asked, glancing at him.

He touched a finger lightly to the picture, a pale flower tipped in lilac with a scattering of amber pollen on one petal. “I don’t understand a great deal of it. But it’s something about the medicinal uses of this flower. Where it’s found, when. How to prepare it.”

My ears flattened. “How many flowers and plants are in this book?”

Roika glanced at the anadi, hand hovering over the bottom edge of the page. When she gestured assent, he flipped to several pages at random. The catalog was extensive and the flora described unfamiliar to me.

Loë offered some comment, then pointed to another of these compendiums. That one had anatomical illustrations. “Disease,” Roika said, and not all the thickness in his voice could dilute the awe in it. “And how to treat it.”

The anadi opened to a page that had been marked with a thin strip of leather and tapped one entry. Roika leaned over it and I saw him go gray at the ears.

“Roika?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The terminology is… I can’t read most of it. But they seem to know an adult form of black-spit.”

“Is there any information about curing it?” I asked.

“There is treatment information,” he said. “There is nothing here about curing. Unless one of these foreign words involves that.”

“Ask her,” I said. “Ask her if she can make you well.”

I expected him to find the paper and pen, but all he did was raise his head and meet her eyes. The regret that softened her gaze was more eloquent than words. She touched his shoulder, then groped for the pen and a scrap of paper, jotting something down on it and offering it to him. She pointed to the words as she spoke them out loud.

“She says she’ll do what she can,” he said.

“How long?” I asked, soft.

Roika looked at the paper and shuddered, and in that moment I felt a terrible, unwilling tenderness at the revelation of his fear. “Thenet… Thenet, I don’t want to know.”

I drew in a breath and nodded. “Well. We should find some way to occupy ourselves then.”

“You could join the others,” he said.

“Kaduin has that matter well in hand,” I said. I glanced at Loë. “Maybe we should learn to understand her better instead. It would give us something to do.”

He glanced at the anadi, who was listening to us with pricked ears and a considering expression.

“So it would,” he said, and pulled the paper back over.

That evening Kaduin returned with Marilin and two of the emodo from the vessel. Loë was watching when they bowed deeply to Roika, and she was very attentive to how he spoke to them and the respect in their responses. I wondered what she made of it, given how little we'd said to her of our relative importance at home. After a time, she withdrew to have a low, intent conversation with her housemates and I joined Kaduin and Seper to hear how their day had gone. Denret was still with the ship for now, it seemed, but a good twenty Jokka had come with Marilin and were now being settled in houses near the healer's. They would be along during the day to speak with Roika, Kaduin reported with a stiff face but an even voice. If this situation was giving him the opportunity to work on his comportment among those with whom he disagreed, I judged the practice would serve him. I doubted the world we returned to would be very much like the one we'd left.

In the morning Loë allowed Roika another two such meetings and then sent the Jokka away. She showed him a piece of paper: "Now your health." He acquiesced. I followed them because she seemed to expect it, and this involved my first trip out of the house and into the het at large. The clearing it occupied was surrounded by trees so enormous that some of the houses had been built into them or against them. I found it curious that such a perfect open space existed in the forest and soon discovered why when we passed a series of homes built into part of a fallen log. Roika caught me glancing at it and said, "The danger must have been immense."

"If they cleared it themselves," I said. "Maybe it was like this when they came."

Loë brought us to what looked like another small house, but we entered into a narrow room bordered in four doors. She stopped us and pointed Roika at one of them, saying something authoritative. A swell of dry heat engulfed us when he opened the door, startling after the chill outside. The anadi went into the room and patted the bench in it, making a show of taking deep, slow breaths.

"All right," he said to her. "I understand." He vanished into the room and the anadi tugged on my arm. I followed her obediently out the large door in the back of the house onto a deck with a beautiful view. Decoratively arranged rocks boxed in a spring that extended well out toward the encroaching forest. The steam rising off the water smelled tangy, like salt and metal, enough to make my mouth water.

The anadi smiled crookedly at my confusion and started undressing. Leaving her clothing neatly folded on a bench she slid into the waters and beckoned to me with an expression that drew an unwilling laugh from me: she looked so much like a handler trying to entice a recalcitrant rikka. I wanted to tell her how tired this rikka was of the harness and the work of pulling its burdens, but lacking the words I settled for shedding my clothes and following her. I didn't miss her studying the evidence of my stunted Turning, but her regard was so clinical I couldn't find offense in it. And the water... the water made the exposure worthwhile. It was so hot it hurt before my limbs acclimated, and it felt so heavy that the pressure on my body made it hard for me to breathe. And yet I felt so light and the waters so soft. I shivered and let my head hang, sucking in the steam, tasting the metal sting on my tongue, inside my nostrils.

When next I opened my eyes there was a cup of cold water sitting on the rim of the spring alongside me. I drank and then drifted back into the warmth until the creak of the door drew me from my reverie. Roika was carefully shedding his pants to go with the shirt he'd left on the bench beside Loë's.

From his throat swung a golden ring on a black cord. My eyes seized on it. When he straightened and saw my face, he smiled a little. "You kept hers. I kept yours. It seemed fair." He looked down at it, touched it with a finger. "Though I don't wear it when I think it might be seen, and disrespected." When I didn't say anything, he stepped into the water and said, "Besides, it goes with the chunk of flesh you took out of my shoulder."

I hadn't noticed it, but with him naked in the water the dimple in his shoulder where I'd bitten him in the forest was distinct.

"We've marked each other, then," I said.

"Did you doubt it?" he said. And sighed, blowing the steam from before him. "She knows what she's about, this healer."

"You feel better?" I watched his chest rising and falling, listened to his voice. It sounded somewhat clearer, but there was a rasp in it that never seemed to leave.

"As much so as I'm capable," Roika said. "When I breathe..." He trailed off, then twitched his ears back and finished, calm, "...it seems to stop partway through the breath. As if I can no longer hold as much air in my chest as I used to. But other than that, I'm more comfortable than I thought I'd be."

"A few months," I said, quiet.

"Maybe."

After that we were quiet. We did not sit together in the spring, but we were close enough to touch if we stretched our arms. That served us well when others came to use the waters. Almost always in threes, the northern Jokka: one anadi, one eperu, one emodo. Loë exchanged greetings with them amiably when they arrived but after the introductions all the visitors observed the silence, relaxing in the heat. I tried not to stare at the anadi cuddled into the eperu, the emodo with his arm slung around the neuter's shoulders. I tried not to hurt at the sight of the Trinity made flesh. The spring soothed my aching body but I flinched from the evidence that the way we'd arranged things at home was not the way it had to be.

That night I found Kaduin, Seper, Denret and Marilin awaiting me in our borrowed room, and their faces stopped me at the door. "What? What is it?"

"Thenet, they..." Kaduin stopped, fighting for equilibrium. Straightening his back, he said, "They don't have the mind-death here."

My knees quivered. I think I began to fall because my hand groped for the door frame and I felt the drag of the wood against my claws. "What?"

"From what we've been able to gather, the northerners don't have the mind-death," Seper said, quiet. "They recognize it when we speak of it, but they seem puzzled that we're so afraid of it."

I stared at them, then turned and headed for the clinic, hearing them follow. Roika was already there, curled on the couch with his eyes closed; Loë was mixing some new poultice, her compendium of remedies held open with a painted rock for a weight. She looked up when I entered and then pushed a piece of paper at me in response to my expression. I nudged Roika. "Wake up. I need your hand."

"Not sleeping," he rumbled, and took up the pen. He wiped his hair out of his face blearily and said, "What?"

"Ask her what she knows about the mind-death," I said.

His glance was sharp then, but he wrote the question quickly and offered it to her. The anadi read it and looked up at us without lifting her head, brows low over her brilliant eyes. Then she started writing.

Roika read the results to himself first, his ears paling. Finally he spoke. "She says what we speak of is a thing out of histories. Healthy people need not fear the mind-death."

"And everyone is healthy here," I whispered.

The anadi leaned over and added a few more sentences, tapping them.

"When she was trained," Roika said, "she was taught to recognize the symptoms of many problems. We are very sick with something... I don't know the word."

"How is it fixed?" I said.

He didn't even have to write that; the tone of my voice and my agitation made it clear what I was asking. She mimed eating and drinking and then wrote.

"We are not eating the right things," he said. "Or we have been poisoned by something that we must stop touching or eating."

I sat—fell—on the end of Roika's couch, feeling the world spin away from me. At the door, I heard Kaduin say, "That makes sense. We have records describing plants that no longer can be found at home, Abadil told me about them. If what they say is true and these Jokka fled the south because all the plants and animals were dying..."

"Then we have been subsisting on foods that don't nourish us," Roika said beside me.

"No wonder the meals here are so extraordinary," Denret said.

"No mind-death," Seper whispered.

I covered my mouth, hiding my tears behind my hand.

"What can be done, though?" Marilin said. "Short of moving everyone here?"

"That's a lot of people," Denret said, and from his voice he was frowning. "And a lot of wood to build ships. We don't have a lot of wood."

"And that's assuming everyone wants to leave," Seper said.

"Why wouldn't they?" Kaduin said. "It's wonderful here!"

"We haven't seen their winter yet," Roika said, the rust of his voice startling against their much clearer ones. "And we're assuming they'd want to absorb us. From what they've said there aren't that many northerners... we'd overwhelm them with our numbers."

"It also begs the question why there are so few of them," Denret offered. "If life is so easy here, why are they not more numerous?"

Loë had been listening to this with growing frustration; finally she grabbed the paper and scrawled on it, shoving the result at Roika. He started answering. "She wants to know what we're talking about."

When she read our answer, Loë frowned. Her question in return stunned us all.

"Why do you have to come here? We could go there, and bring plants."

"But would they grow?" Marilin asked.

Loë's answer: "Soil can be without nourishment, like people. It can be healed, also."

"So that's it," Denret said softly. "We bring back plants and people who know how to farm the northern way?"

"Trade," Marilin said with a little laugh. "In the end it's always trade."

Roika wrote a note and handed it to Loë, who smiled at it and said, very clearly, "Yes." The emperor of Ke Bakil handed the paper to Denret. "Help them build a ship. We'll need to bring back more than one can carry."

"Yes, ke emodo," Denret said, and withdrew with Marilin.

Seper crouched alongside me, setting an inquiring hand on my knee. "No," I said. "There's nothing to be done for me. I'll be along in a moment."

"All right," it murmured, and took Kaduin with it.

Loë respected the silence I used to compose myself. So did Roika, until at last he couldn't anymore. "Would she have been willing?" he asked me. "Would she have borne children had she not feared the mind-death?"

I heard the memory of Dlane's words about children existing as parasites that sucked the intelligence from their mothers through their birth-veils. I heard the terror that had lurked beneath her every diatribe on the subject. I thought of the society we'd created, the one that coddled the anadi in their cloistered worlds—and later, the Stone Moon's prisons—to protect them from the possibility of the mind-death while also denying them the choice to abstain from breeding. I thought of the emodo who'd gone to that duty, hating it for its implications, and what that had done to the relationships between sexes.

I thought of generations of misery and anger and injustice and fear and the fact that we could no longer blame it on unchangeable biology... but on a problem that could have been solved had we known it existed.

The sob surprised me, so abrupt my chest hurt. And then another followed it, closing my throat. I bent over myself as if I was about to vomit, and I was, I was... vomiting a lifetime of unnecessary suffering and the one death from which I had never recovered.

Roika rested a hand on my shoulder as I wept. When I didn't resist, he held me. I forgot my anger. He was dying, Dlane was dead, and all our strife had been predicated on a false premise. What did any of it matter anymore?

The northern Jokka greeted the new plan with enthusiasm; to trade with the ancestors! To cross the sea and investigate the land from which they'd come! And to bring with them the means by which to succor their distant cousins! How could they have resisted such a mission? The crew of the Endurance began teaching their hosts how to build an ocean-going vessel and every day Kaduin and Seper went to the cove with them to contribute to their efforts.

I remained in the healer's home. Each afternoon she went into the het to see to the Jokka who had called for her services, so I kept watch on Roika and studied the strange compendiums Loë left on her table for our edification. They remained opaque to me but most of them were illustrated and the pictures were distracting. As the days wore on, Loë practiced the southern tongue and set me to work on making the salves she used to ease Roika's breathing. My health improved: when brushing my mane I could feel the change in texture in the new hair growing from my scalp, and my skin shone under the wan winter light. My claws, which I had never thought of as brittle, strengthened demonstratably and so did my body. I slept lighter and better, without the near unconsciousness of an anadi's slumber. If the diet in the north did not complete my botched Turning, it did at least restore some of my wind. I found it remarkable how little my weakness had to do with becoming anadi and how much it had to do with whether I was eating properly. Nor was I the only one to bloom: Kaduin, Seper and all the Jokka of the ship changed with me.

Roika did not. He often turned away food and when I tried to insist that he eat Loë held up a quelling hand with somber eyes.

"Will he make it home?" I asked her at last. "How long before it's over?"

But she would not answer and it was just as well, for I feared that the question I'd asked was less about Roika and more about me. I often found myself sitting in the front room beside one of the windows, watching the beautiful, vibrant northerners walk past in their triads. I felt insubstantial, a ghost without anchor to a living world. I did not belong here, but there was nothing left for me at home, either. My only link to the life I'd lived, the one that had had meaning, was slowly dying in the adjacent room. Once he was gone, what would be left to make sense of any of it?

The weeks passed. I heard reports of the progress of the new ship, of the discoveries about the languages, of what gifts the northerners were planning to pack and when they thought would be the best time to go. I listened to these reports because they were delivered by Kaduin and other Jokka glowing with the realization that they would be bringing home Ke Bakil's salvation. But I did not remember the details of any of it. The days flowed through me. I spent them sleeping, helping Loë or standing vigil over Roika's bed. As the weather grew colder his bouts of coughing grew more frequent, and I added cutting wood and feeding the fire to my duties.

I often found myself holding him as he fought his body. He would allow no one else's touch in those moments. The rush of his blood beneath his skin was so frantic I could feel it speeding under my hands as I steadied him. We spent many wordless nights that way, and afterward I would use one of the soft sea sponges the anadi gave me to wipe down his skin in front of the fire.

"Ask her," he said to me after one particularly harsh session. "When she comes home. If there's some way to tell if Kaduin will contract this."

He collapsed before I could tell him that I couldn't write. But it didn't matter in the end, for when Loë returned from her errands she studied him and said, slowly but intelligibly, "The final phase is coming soon."

I looked up at her, ears slicked back. She sat on the stool by the couch and checked his wrist again, touched his face, smelled her fingers. "A few months now," she said. "Certainly within a year. Please accept my condolences for the forthcoming loss of your mate."

"My—he's not..." I trailed off.

"Not your mate?" she asked, careful of the words. "You have metal rings, both of you? That does not mean the same? I assumed it did, from how the two of you act to one another."

"It's complicated," I said. I swallowed. "He has a son. This disease..."

"The young male?" she guessed. "Do not fear. The adult disease is not passed from parent to child. It develops on its own, spontaneously. Unlike the disease that afflicts infants, it may linger for years before killing, but we have entered the last phase. It won't be long now."

I focused on his slack face, seeing the drawn skin and the unhealthy color of it. "You speak well."

"Do I?" she said. "Good. I have been taking lessons from my sibling and its mate. They are more often at the cove among the others and have more opportunities to practice. Once one learns the changes in sounds between the languages, it is not hard to guess at how unfamiliar words should be said. Tell me if I say something poorly, though. I wish to be prepared for the journey."

I glanced up at her. "You're going?"

"In summer, with the trade vessel," she said. "Yes. I am already making a list of things I want to bring." She looked at Roika. "Your people need healers. This het has several herbalists; they can handle the work while I am gone. I am the most knowledgeable of the healers here. I am needed in the south."

"Why have you not spoken before?" I asked.

"I have, among the others," she said. "But my duty as a healer requires a higher standard. I did not wish to speak to you of your mate's illness before I could speak well and be understood." She glanced at me, curious. "Why do you not write?"

"I didn't learn," I said. "I know enough to read and write simple things, but... we have no paper in the south. There are almost no trees. We write on stone or bark, and it's expensive."

"No trees!" she exclaimed, ears flattening. Then she frowned. "We will have to bring seeds. And saplings. Someone will have to devise a way to keep them upright on the ship. I will tell the others."

"Do you really think it will work?" I asked her.

"If there are plants and animals and water in the south, then there is potential," Loë said. "And if we cannot realize the potential, then we will find some other way. But your disease will end. We will not stand by when our cousins need our aid. We are a family long parted, but we are family all the same. We will make our reunion cause for rejoicing."

I could not tell her why my throat contracted because I didn't know myself, save that this was what Dlane could have been had we been born more fortunately.

"I never told you about how my House came to be Broken."

He rarely spoke anymore, and when he did I remembered the beautiful deep bass that had made my bones shiver in my flesh... for memory was all I had left of it. His voice had become a hoarse ruin that he mitigated by speaking softly. I finished rebuilding the fire and then joined him, sitting on the edge of the couch. "Your House. You mean the one before Edze."

"The one I fled in the south." He met my gaze with eyes made cloudy by too many nights spent coughing instead of sleeping, coughing until the tiny blood vessels in them broke.

"From the het past Serelni," I said, recalling the day in Neked Pamari when he'd told us of it, chasing Dlane and I in our flight from het Serean. "I didn't think there were any hets past Serelni."

"Because the one I'd lived in died," he whispered. He cleared his throat and continued. "It had been dwindling for years by the time I was born to one of its two farming Houses. My sire wanted me to be the next Head of Household. Every day he told me how he expected me to behave so that I might develop into the kind of emodo who could lead a House and rule a het, for without the two farming Houses the het would have foundered and everyone knew it."

"Your father wanted you to be chosen?" I said. "Was he important, then?"

"Enough that I had a chance," Roika said. "But I didn't want to be Head of Household. That was his ambition, not mine."

"You wanted to be an artist," I guessed, ear flicking out. "Or a lore-knower."

He laughed, a thin, breathy sound. "No, nothing so dramatic. The truth is that I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself, Thenet. My sire never allowed me the leisure to consider any other path. He set me against the Head of Household's favored choice and began politicking, currying favors with the members of the House who did not favor me, prejudicing them against each other and the Head's selection. And when he was not conspiring within the House, he was helping the House destroy our rival within the het." He rested his head on the back of the couch, eyes closed. "I wanted nothing to do with any of it. The quarrel was affecting our food supply. When I could steal away from my sire I was in the fields, trying to help the others save us from famine."

"You failed," I said, quiet.

"I failed," he said. "My father didn't and I became Head of Household, but by then the settlement had lost so many people there was no reason to stay. The het disbanded entirely and all the refugees fled for other towns. That is how I came to be in het Serean looking for anadi for House Edze. I had chosen to break from my House and begin a new one."

My hands rested loosely in my lap as I watched the fire and felt the story seep into me, make sense of everything, from Roika's inability to love without control to his obsession with saving the Jokka. His sire had been so fanatical about shaping an emodo to rule a House that he'd shaped an emodo to rule a world. "He'd be proud of you."

"Yes," Roika said. "I'm afraid so." At my glance, he said, "He sacrificed everyone else in order to fulfill himself. I often wonder if I have done the same."

"Your father," I said, "wanted a son with power to reflect that power back onto him by association. You wanted power to prevent Ke Bakil from going the way of the het where you were born."

"I did it for myself too, Thenet," Roika whispered. "And I sacrificed a great many people to satiate my own need for order and control."

"But you still saved a world," I answered.

He opened his eyes, the fire reflecting off them. Though he said no more, he slept easier that night.

It was the last extended conversation I had with Roika. Loë's assessment of the disease had been correct, and as the winter days crawled past I spent them tending to him with her help. Kaduin no longer reported the progress of the ship-building initiative to me, for he hated to come into the clinic where his father was dying. Seper brought me the news instead, whispering it into my ear as I rested from my long nights of caretaking, one arm holding Roika against my side and my cheek pillowed on his gray hair.

And yet, he held on.

"One sees this, sometimes," Loë told me. "That the afflicted wait for something before releasing their hold on their mortal flesh. Your mate may be waiting." She looked at me. "You know what it is that he waits for?"

I did, but I shook my head.

Winter gave way to a damp and chilly spring, and with it the trials of the new ship. Denret and the others were training the fishers to crew the much larger vessel and they made several voyages to and from nearby locations. They went well—the northerners were already familiar with boats and were eager to make the longer trip now that they knew something would be waiting for them at the end of it. The packing commenced, as did the endless debates about what to bring and how much and whom. Seper spared me the minutia, reporting only on what had been accomplished when I was awake to receive the news. The passengers would be the last to board the ships, it told me, and Roika and I the final Jokka to embark at Loë's insistence. She wanted to limit Roika's exposure to the wet, chill breezes.

Nevertheless the day came, and with it the Jokka of the Endurance who lovingly wrapped their master in the healer's warmest blankets under her watchful eyes. As they prepared him, Kaduin stepped up beside me.

"Thenet," he said, soft. He drew in a breath. "I won't be going with you."

"I know," I said.

Startled, he faced me. "You know?"

I met his eyes and found a smile for the boy who used to find surcease from loneliness nestled against my side. "You love it here, Kaduin. It's in every word you speak and every motion of your hands, your body."

He flushed, looking away. "We'll need someone here. If we're going to start trading with these people regularly they'll need several of us to be liaisons. They'll need to understand us, our concerns. I can continue teaching our language to them. I... I'm in love with Ewair and Shaeva." At my glance he said, "Loë's sibling and its mate. They've been seeking an emodo to complete their triad and..."

I smiled, tired. "You'll do a good job here, Kaduin."

"I'll miss you," he said, ears sagging.

"I know," I answered, even though I knew he wouldn't.  I embraced him. This life was calling him and it would fill him until there was no room for the sorrows and fears of his life before. It was for the best. Against his ear, I murmured, "The healer says you need not fear the black-spit. The adult version does not run in families."

He shuddered against me and whispered, "Thank you."

"Be well, Kaduin," I said, and rested my hand on his chest. And then I left him behind.

The northern vessel had been christened the Aeva, "Hope" in the northern vernacular. Both it and the Endurance were filled with the treasures of the north in the form of seeds and saplings, dried foodstuffs and herbs, long boxes of rich, fragrant soil and compendiums of information, bound papers dense with the information the northerners wanted to share with us. Once Roika had been carried aboard, we were ready for departure, and on the next favorable tide both ships set out for the south.

"Three months," I said to Loë, who asked.

"All this time," she said. "You were so close and we never knew." She sighed, drawing her cloak closer around herself. "On such things do lives turn, betimes. At least we are coming now."

"Yes," I said.

The days that followed blurred into a single extended nightmare. The sea that had been so placid and forthcoming on our initial voyage turned turbulent and sullen. It was a rare day that did not rain for hours on end, and when it did not rain it was damp and chilly despite the season. The doors into the cabins leaked and it seemed impossible to stay dry or warm. And despite our every effort Roika deteriorated precipitously. I began the voyage in a room with Seper, but I could not remember sleeping in that room. My guilt at abandoning the eperu to tend to our enemy was a shroud over my thoughts, and yet I couldn't stop myself. To see him die... I was standing vigil over my own soul, not his.

Seper found me on my cot on some rain-slashed day. It had just descended from the deck and rivulets of water had plastered its mane to its face and shoulders, sealed its clothes to its lean frame. Crouching across from me, it spoke as if resuming a conversation I didn't remember starting. "There is much talk about building more ships and making this passage more common. Trading with the north. And perhaps expeditions to explore other regions if they can be found. After the emperor dies, I plan to join one of these crews. Marilin assures me there is work for me to do, even with one of my hands weaker than the other."

I looked up at the eperu, who continued. "It will be good work. I'm told it does not appeal to everyone, but I think I will find comfort in this. To be doing useful work that is nothing like the work I have ever done. There will be no reminders in it to paralyze me. No unexpected griefs. There is a freedom in the emptiness of the sea. I will help the Jokka fill it." It stood. "When we return I will stay on land long enough to ensure that our remaining people have been freed and our dead tended to... and then I will come back here to this new life. Have no worries for me. I will be fine."

And then it went back up the ladder and vanished into the wet night. I let my head hang and swallowed the tears that seeped from my teeth, letting them burn the back of my throat. I wanted to thank it for the gift it had made me and knew better. Instead I did as it wanted me to—as it had freed me to with its reassurance—and packed my meager belongings. That night I moved into Roika's room with Loë and gave myself entirely to the struggle to keep him alive. I did not think in terms of days, but in hours, in heart-beats. The weather was destroying him. He could barely breathe for the coughing and he was never warm. I curled up behind him in his cot, holding him, but he drew the heat from my body and left me clammy more often than I made him comfortable.

And then, one night, he stopped coughing and became listless, his breath coming in short, slow pants. I stroked his chest and he did not respond. "Loë? Loë!"

She started from her shallow sleep and came to us, bent close over him. She did not check his wrist, his face, smell his breath. And the look on her face... "What is it?"

"This disease," she said. "The sacs of air in the chest, they are filled with little sponges like the sea-sponge I gave you to wash with. When this disease strikes, those sponges begin to rot. They swell and then burst and fill the sacs with fluid and pus. So the body coughs, to empty the sacs of the detritus. As the disease advances, the sponges rot faster, until at last there is too much matter in the sacs. They become too heavy for the spasms of a cough to move them. So the coughing stops."

"You're saying... that he's drowning," I whispered, horrified.

"That he is still alive is extraordinary," Loë said, quiet. She stroked his damp forelock from his face. "But it is almost over now."

"How long?" I asked, trembling.

"Days," Loë said. "Weeks, perhaps. Less than a month certainly."

"He could linger ilke this for a month?" I said. "Asphyxiating?"

"Yes."

"We can't let him suffer like this," I whispered. "Wouldn't it be kinder to end it?"

"I would not kill a Jokkad without their consent, and maybe not even then," Loë said. "And he has not given it me. Could you kill him to spare him?"

A hand touched mine, weak fingers fluttering. "No."

His voice... it hurt so much to hear the thin wheeze that remained of his full bass. But he continued despite the effort. "No. Thenet. You were forced. To kill... Dlane. I won't. Make you go through... that again."

"Roika," I said. "Please—"

"No," he said again, eyes closing. Almost inaudibly, to himself, "Not... much longer. Have to... know... that it will pass... into safe... safe..."

When his mumble faded into silence, Loë looked at me. "Most would have died by now. He lives so that he might die on his own soil. Let him make that choice."

"All right," I whispered, to him as much as to her. But I wept against his back and with my ear pressed to his skin I could hear the ugly, thick sound of his breathing and the thready race of his heart. I did not want him to die and take with him the Void to the Brightness that had already fled my life. How could the World live without the warmth of the sun and the comfort of the dark? Who would keep my secrets when I lost the evidence of the gods? Who would I love and who would I hate?

What would be left?

The ship glided to the pier on a bright afternoon, copper light on calm waves. In our absence several more piers had been constructed and permanent buildings to support them, and waiting for us at the end of the pier were eperu of the Stone Moon to tie us down... and the Fire in the Void, the breeze combing his uncanny mane in a milky stream over the wooden planks. He did not seem at all surprised at the sight of the Aeva, but he did not go to it either. Denret and Marilin disembarked first to make arrangements. I waited alongside Roika, who rarely woke anymore. The sound of his uneven breathing was louder in my ears than the susurrus of the waves.

When they came for him I followed his bearers into the sun, squinting against its brilliance. The air smelled of brine but the heat of it was familiar. Late summer in the south was a taste on my tongue and a caress of warmth on my skin, a vast and cloudless vault above. I longed to rise into it and dissipate but I could not. Not yet.

I trudged after the Jokka carrying Roika and stopped short at the end of the pier. A tent had been erected there and arranged around it was a crowd. I did not recognize most of the people waiting though an alarming number of them wore the Stone Moon's uniforms. But Keshul touched my arm, directed me into the tent and followed me inside. There was a pallet waiting, one built up with cushions so that Roika could lie on it upright. They knew, then. Of course.

The bearers left after settling their master. I sat next to him and rested my hand on his at his side. As the oracle crouched down beside him, Roika shocked me by whispering, "Keshul."

"Roika," Keshul said, low. "I'm here."

Roika smiled, eyes still closed. "Feel... you. Damned... cold."

"And no fifty-coin to be found at this new settlement of yours," Keshul said. "I'm going to have to have a talk with your ministers."

Roika's laugh was all breath and no tone and too weak by far, but he opened his eyes and rolled his head toward the seer. "You... do that."

Keshul smiled. Then sobered and said, "Iren, Jushet and I have chosen your successor. He's a former Claw of the empire who went on to build a very successful enterprise in het Narel. In fact, he's now sitting on most of the trade for all of Ke Bakil. He's a good man. We've brought him here."

"Send him... in."

Keshul rose, tail hissing behind him on the sand. He ducked his head out of the tent and called, then opened the flap. A moment later, an emodo stepped through it, a male in clothes cut like a Claw's uniform but black rather than gray, the black of truedark. He moved with a grace, with an assurance... as if he knew who he was and where he belonged. And when he looked up, he had golden eyes... beautiful, bright eyes, eyes like treasure, like Dlane's.

He took Keshul's place at Roika's side. He did not speak and Roika didn't either. They considered one another in silence, the emperor that was and the male who had come, I realized, to ask his blessing. I did not see the moment Roika gave it, but the stranger did. He closed his eyes and then touched his hand to his brow, dipping his head low. This Roika accepted with more lucidity in his gaze than I'd seen in weeks, and he stared after the stranger long after the tent flap had fallen behind him.

Keshul rejoined us after some time and kneeled alongside Roika. "He'll do well. The empire you made will flourish."

Roika exhaled, a reedy sound. I could barely hear him when he said, "Keshul..."

"I'll tell them," Keshul said. "About you. The good and the bad. All of it will be remembered, Roika." He touched the male on the chest. "I vow it."

Roika's breath was already slowing. I swallowed and looked up at the oracle, who was setting Roika's hand back on his chest. To me, Keshul said, "I'll leave you alone now. Come out when you're ready."

"Thank you," I whispered.

We were alone then. The walls of the tent rippled in the summer breeze. I slipped my hand into his and rested my head on the pillow beside his shoulder. We did not speak. We couldn't. I closed my eyes and tasted my tears with every slow swallow. We listened to the sea, to the distant cry of birds, to each other's breathing.

And then the Void passed out of my life.

I left the tent to stand in the sunlight, feeling it fall through me. There were people outside but I did not see them, did not properly understand them until Keshul's voice drew me back to a tenuous connection with flesh and breath.

"There," he said. "Look there. That is the new emperor of the Stone Moon and his lover."

Obediently I looked and saw the male in his black coat alongside an eperu. They stood close, easy with one another, and they were talking to Loë. I did not have to be an oracle to see the strands of those three lives entwining. It was good, I thought. Proper. Ke Bakil would pass from the hands of a male divested of balance, of his neuter and female counterparts, and on to the Trinity made manifest.

"You see," Keshul said, low. "It's safe now, ke Thenet. Ke Bakil is free. The three of you made it possible."

I watched the eperu asking avid questions of Loë, saw the anadi answering with enthusiasm as the emodo leaned close to listen. I turned to Keshul and said quietly, "Thank you."

He met my eyes, then stepped away, turning his back on me with a deliberation that made it clear he knew and respected my intent. But I watched him for long enough to see him return to his beloveds: again the Trinity made flesh, male, female, neuter.

It had not been for us. But in seeking it, in striving against it, in shattering, we had sown the earth. Now others would bring home the harvest.

I left them, the sounds of conversation and life distant in my ears. On the horizon the sun was shimmering like the gold of her eyes. I followed it home.