HARAG VE Beminohna sat in her bedroom and watched sand creep across the face of her mirror.

The sight made her skin shift like the surface of the sea, and her breath came short and fast in her chest. She had not seen this in moons, many of them, and she should not have been seeing it now.

In the sand’s grains that crept across the glass of her mirror, words began to form, as delicate and as light as a spider’s silk. Follow Lyari.

Harag felt a coldness rise up in her chest, and she felt as though she were trying to stand on the waves. As a child ran by, Harag’s stomach was a mass of bile, for she did not know hys name. Only Lyari ever would, and if Harag wanted her village to continue believing that she was their soothsayer, she would have to go on as she ever had and ask the soothsayer of Haveranth to tell her.

By Harag’s side was a long strand of three-ply vysa, almost empty except for the single black pearl at the knotted end.

• • • • •

A hawk winged north from the Mistaken Pass, where it had spent the winter among the herds of ihstal that lived there. Hard feathers fought the air over the mountains, and the winds were rough and harsh, but still it flew on.

The hawk flew straight and sure over the peaks, unfettered by all it had left behind and undeterred by the winds that buffeted its wings. Its goal ahead, the past behind.

The hawk flew into the north.

• • • • •

In the north, something burst in a mountain, and water sprayed out, out, out and down over the face of the mountain as if it had erupted in tears of joy. Across the land, beneath the feet of the people and animals who trod upon it, far under the soil and clay and rock, water began to flow and surge. It burbled up from the ground, free, always seeking lower ground. The water moved as it would, released from its tiring uphill flow.

Where there once was a muddy creek, soon a gush of water would find its way down from high in the mountains, weaving around hills and washing away silt and clay. It spread and spread across the land without thought or purpose beyond doing as water does, and it would not stop for beasts nor people, roads nor waymakes.

The water was free, and it would not be caged again.

• • • • •

Valon ve Avarsahla sat alone in her hut.

That they left her alone was good. It meant they had begun to trust her. Valon’s fingers danced over the blade Culy had slipped to her. A small bronze knife, meant for her belt. This they could not break and throw in a fire to burn.

When her fingers touched the hilt, she felt Culy’s presence like a grey wind, and though it was not the first time—nor the hundredth—that she had felt it, she felt hot tears well behind her eyes, sharp like relief. It cut through the turns and moons of worry, and her fingers grasped the hilt tight against her palm.

What she had told Culy was only the truth; Wyt kept her people watered and fed, for around the spring grew grasses and trees, and the animals had begun to come their way. She had given hyr the message she had held for moons, and she had seen in hys eyes that sy understood.

Now all that was left to do was bide her time.

She hated waiting.

Almost as much as she’d hated letting herself get captured.

• • • • •

A bright fire blazed in the hearth, crackling and hot, sending light in a golden pool around it.

Calyria fought back tears.

Everything she had thought, everything she had suspected since she had held her cousin as sy bled out and felt hyr die in her arms—it was all true.

And now, with Jenin beside her, present, hys eyes full of concern and hys neck no longer crusted with dried blood, she finally understood. What she had been told. What she had done. What she would now do.

Jenin watched as Calyria sat in silence, offering nothing but hys presence.

The blood had faded with Calyria’s growing knowledge, healing like a cut on a finger.

“You see me as you expect to see me,” Jenin had told her, very much dead to the villagers but every inch truly alive.

Now, beside hyr, Calyria felt the warmth of her cousin’s skin.

The night was cool for midsummer, and the fire’s heat did little to ward it off. This was her roundhome now, this small place where she could leave her village behind. She understood now. The frantic whispers, the secrecy, the knowing looks exchanged when others thought she could not see. She looked into the fire, thinking of the blaze at the village hearth-home she had spent the past cycle tending, never allowing it to go out.

In her roundhome, her solitude felt safe, and around her she built a bubble of it.

She remembered leaving the other Journeyers at Cantor’s Road, saw their meld of joy and relief to finally be allowed to go home. She remembered returning, one foot dragged out in front of the other, following the Bemin to Haveranth and finding how the village ignored her. And she remembered those few remaining days, spent in her new roundhome in peace with only an occasional visit from Lyari, who was ready to listen, but Calyria would not speak.

Not of what she had seen in the cave, not of the Journeying there and back with five near-strangers to whom she was now both bound and unbound, not of her return.

Calyria kept all things folded deep inside her chest now. She had made her choice, and as the days spread out before her in their inexorable march, she knew it was the right one, even as she wished with everything in her being that it could have been otherwise.

Could she have done as others had? Fled the village and become Nameless?

Calyria didn’t know, and she didn’t think so.

It wasn’t just what she’d been told, in urgent low tones and hastily given warnings with eyes and ears turned outward in case the wrong person happened by, that the hunters would now be ever more vigilant against any Nameless trying to escape the Hearthland. It wasn’t just that to find the passes she now could name in her sleep would require more moons of walking, many, many more. It wasn’t even that she would have had to do that walking with a target rune painted on her back.

For those reasons and more, she didn’t think so.

There was a space of breath in her chest, and in that space she kept her name. Not the one she had found in the cave, but the name that felt hers. Clar. Just Clar. No necessary appellation. She kept her name in that space of breath, and there it would remain.

Tonight, she would sit alone with her belt knife, scraping the remainder of High Lights’s ashes from under her fingernails with Jenin at her side, silent and understanding.

Tomorrow, she would leave her bubble of safety as someone else, but she made sure she had a home where she could simply be.

For cycles to come, however many it took, she would face her village as Calyria.

She let her fire gutter and die, and she sat ready in the comfort of the dark.

• • • • •

Far to the west, past the edge of the world in a small boat just off the shore, a dark-skinned man pulled a silver-scaled fish in from the sea. The fish was large, and it would feed his family for several days, but the fish was also wrong. The man frowned at the fish, at its wide jaw and bulging eyes that belonged much farther out to sea than he was.

The man turned to the east, then looked at the fish, and then his head turned to the sea once more, so quickly it hurt his neck. The horizon had changed.

When he looked back to the shore, he saw that the sea had pulled itself back like a curtain, exposing sand that should not have been seen except during a neap tide. The sight filled the man with terror, and, dropping the silver-scaled fish into the floor of the boat, he took up his oars and rowed.

He rowed and he rowed and he rowed, and he continued to row until his boat scraped bottom on the sand. He grabbed his pole and his fish and his rucksack and ran. He did not look behind him, for he had no need of it. He knew what was coming. The almanac had held no such thing, and yet it came. The almanac was never wrong, and yet it was. He ran.

The man yelled for his lover and their child, loudly enough that she came bursting from their stout little house with wild eyes and the child grabbing at her short hair. She froze when she saw him, the child’s pudgy hand clinging to her ear, and she did not look at his face, for she saw behind him, down the hill, to the sea, where it was coming for them.

She turned and ran, and he ran with her.

Up the hill farther, there was a large, large cypress that grew in spite of its location—or maybe because of it; a spring came from the hill that fed the tree—and the man reached it moments after his lover and launched himself at the lowest branch. Dropping his rucksack and pole in the cleft of a branch, fish on top of it, he reached down. He took the child from his lover, ignoring the child’s screeches and pulling hyr up into the branches. He did not wait for his lover, but instead climbed higher, telling his child in a low, urgent murmur to cling to his back, to hold on tight and not let go.

He heard his lover scrambling up the tree behind him.

Sweat dripped from his face, down his back, under his arms. The child wailed in his ear but clung tight like a loris. Up and up and up he climbed until the branches grew small and would no longer support their weight. He turned and straddled the branch, looking down to his lover, who climbed with his rucksack slung over her shoulder and the fish and pole in one hand.

High in the tree on a hill, they watched the sea live.

Though it seemed like only moments before he had pulled the fish from the water, he watched the sea approach with a strange sense of lassitude.

Over the next hill, he heard the gong bellow out in the village. He met his lover’s eyes, so warm and dark, and he knew her thoughts. He hoped the gong had sounded in time and that it was not too late.

Through the branches of the cypress, he saw the ever-present bank of clouds to the east, the stormline that kept ships from traveling much farther than his island. He lived with them always there, the flashes of lightning against dark clouds the constant backdrop of his daily fishing.

He closed his eyes and felt the sea meet the land.

He heard it too, and he heard himself, speaking comfort to his child, telling hyr not to fear, that they were safe and that today was not the day they would join the sea.

He heard his lover doing the same, and he heard her begin to sing and joined her, singing a song about the gentler waves, the ones that lapped the beach and sang them to sleep at night. The child calmed, and the man breathed deeply, and his lover reached over and took his hand.

The sea raged inland, moving fast, the crashing of its frantic race loud, so loud he could hardly think.

He opened his eyes, knowing what he would see.

His home was gone, though homes could be rebuilt.

The conu trees near the shore were gone as well, though in time they would regrow.

His boat was gone, though he could make another.

He looked at the fish high up in the tree, perched on a branch—the wrong, wrong fish that had saved his life, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.

He looked to his lover, squeezed her hand, feeling the child’s sweaty little arms tight around his neck, and he told those two people that he loved them, for they were not boats or trees or houses, and they could not be remade.

What he didn’t see through his tears of joy was that past the living, roiling sea, the line of storms was gone.