IT TAKES A SPECIAL SORT of person to be a ranger like Tuhin. One must be a fighter as well as a tracker, and able to survive alone in the wilderness for weeks on end. I never wanted to be one. Not because I lacked the skill—I was better in the wilderness than most, and a good archer, as well as a passable swordsman. But I did not want to fight for my mother, to be another soldier serving at her command. As a consequence, my mother thought I was rather useless, and that was the only quality she could not forgive in a person. She doted—as much as she ever doted—upon my eldest sister, Romil. And she tolerated my middle sister, Ditra, because Ditra at least tried to play the part our mother demanded.

When I was young, it was hard for me to tell how much of Ditra’s demeanor was an act, and how much was genuine. She could adopt a hard-bitten, stern manner when she wished to please our mother. When she was following orders, she would grow stone-hearted, cold, even ruthless.

But I knew another side of her. She was kind to me, and to others, when not under my mother’s eye. She was assigned several retainers close to her own age as she grew older, and she grew to love many of them—or at least to bed most of them. I was not supposed to find out, but I did, though Ditra swore me to secrecy.

It happened when I was fifteen, and Ditra would have been … oh, she would have been about nineteen? I had woken after a nightmare. I had such dreams often in my youth, though never after my wending, which tells you something. In any case, when I woke up frightened in the night, I would creep down the hall to Ditra’s room. Never to my mother’s, certainly never to Romil’s.

And so there I found myself, creeping along the hallway in the thin moonslight pouring through the windows—when suddenly, the door to Ditra’s room opened.

Out came her retainer, cloaked in shadow and little else. I could scarcely see her in the darkness. But she saw me, and she fled at once as if in terror. I stood staring after her, and only after a moment did I realize that Ditra now stood in the doorway. She was clothed in a thin robe, one hand on the door’s edge, red upon her cheeks and a scowl upon her face.

“Do not say a word,” she whispered in the dark. “Not one. If Mother finds out, she will put me in the stocks.”

“Mother would never do that!” I protested. But Ditra gave me a long look, and I wilted under it. “I mean … well, obviously, I would never say anything in the first place.”

“Good girl,” she said, because none of us knew any better in those days, least of all me. “A bad dream?”

I nodded, though I had almost forgotten why I was there. The nightmare was fading. “A small one. Do not trouble yourself over it.”

“Oh, come in,” she said, opening the door wider. “But sky above, please pay attention in the future, will you? And if you should come by in the future, and my door is closed, knock before you open it.”

“I will,” I promised her.

“Very well,” she said. “Tell me what you dreamed.”

I entered her room, which smelled sweet, and told her all about the dream, which I do not remember now. And at last I fell asleep in her arms, and felt just a little safer than I had before.

That is what a ranger should be. It is why I always thought Ditra would be an excellent ranger, if she had not had to serve my mother. But it is why I never thought I would be a good one. Because Ditra could always make me feel safe, but that was not a gift I felt I could give to anyone else.

A ranger’s first duty is always to keep their people safe. Or at least to try, even when faced with threats against which they are powerless.

On the same night that Mag and I conferred with Tuhin, there was trouble in my homeland of Tokana.

In a small village north of my family’s stronghold in Kahaunga, a woman named Whetu and her husband Paora had just put their children to bed for the night. They were sharing a cup of wine before they, too, went to sleep. They rested in wicker chairs in front of their home, watching the stars make their slow turn through the sky.

Whetu had been a ranger long ago. She was the one who heard the sounds first. A heavy stomping, along with a deep, guttural snuffling.

She shot to her feet. “Paora,” she whispered.

Paora rose, though more slowly. “What is it?”

“Something is coming. I think—”

A loud, heavy crash shattered the stillness of the night. Towards the northern end of the village, someone screamed.

Whetu turned. “The girls.”

They ran inside the house to the back room. Their daughters were sitting up in bed, listening in terror as more screams rang out in the darkness. Together Whetu and Paora scooped them up, running for the front door.

CRASH

The wall to their left shattered inwards. A piece of wood whizzed through the air to jam straight into Whetu’s thigh. She managed to bite down on her scream, turning it into a grunt instead, but her daughter fell from her arms onto the floor.

“Whetu!” cried Paora.

“I am fine,” wheezed Whetu. “Get the—”

Her eldest daughter screamed, pointing at the new hole in the wall. A massive face was looking through it. The skin looked stony, with small formations of crystals looking as though they had erupted through the skin, and moss clinging to the cracks. Two tusks were visible in the bottom jaw, and two in the top. Huge ears, like miniature sails, swept back from either side of the head, twisting every which way. Small, beady eyes glinted with the light of a nearby fire.

The troll opened its mouth and roared. 

“Run!” screamed Whetu, forcing herself to her feet. She seized her daughter’s hand and pulled her along, half-dragging her out the door and into the night, forcing herself to keep up with her husband despite the pain in her leg.

Together the family fled south, beyond the bounds of the village and up a rise. Most of the other villagers had gathered there. Whetu and Paora stopped in their midst, clinging to their daughters as they turned to look back at their home.

Trolls were ripping the village apart. There were at least a dozen that Whetu could see. Wooden timbers cracked in their grip as they ripped roofs and walls off of houses, as though they were peeling away the skin of great beasts to reveal and eat the insides. There were only a few stone buildings, but even those could not stand before the monsters—the trolls simply smashed their fists into the stone, and after a few blows, it crumbled before them. A fire had caught in one of the buildings, and tongues of orange licked up into the night. The trolls gave that building a wide berth.

“Why did they attack us?” said one of the villagers.

Whetu’s expression was grim. The village had been her home ever since she had retired from the Rangatira’s service. Ten years she had lived here, and they had been the happiest years of her life. Watching the trolls rip it apart was like watching them tear her life into pieces and scatter them to the winds.

“Who knows?” she said. “It does not matter now. We must make for Kahaunga.”

“She is right!” cried Paora, turning to the others. “We will be safe there. The Rangatira can protect us.”

Whetu held her tongue as she pushed through the crowd, leading them off south in the darkness. She wanted to say that Paora’s hope was misplaced. They needed to reach the city because they needed food and shelter. But if the trolls attacked Kahaunga, Lord Telfer would not be able to keep them safe. No one would.

Whetu wanted to say it, but she did not. She was no longer a ranger, but she had been. And a ranger was supposed to make her people feel safe. No matter what.