LYARI VE Haveranth sat by the banks of the Bemin, watching the sun slice clean lines across the late afternoon stillness. A climber fish jumped—she knew what it was from the silver-green scales that flashed in the light—and for a fleeting moment, Lyari wished she could be that fish. To have a simple existence. To spawn, swim downstream, grow, eat, mate, toil your way back upstream, up ladders of rocks and white-capped rapids, lay your eggs, continue, continue, continue, fearing only a fisher’s spear or a tiger’s paw.

She envied the fish she was so good at ending. Even from where she sat, she tracked the climber fish’s movements under the water, a blur near the surface, vanishing as it dove deeper, then reappearing as a bend of light before jumping once more. Lyari allowed the fish to disappear from her sight, instead standing and turning back to the village. She let her feet carry her where they would, and they took her in the direction of Carin’s roundhome.

Opening the door to enter felt strange, like putting someone else’s shoes on your feet. Lyari thought of the hundreds of times she’d climbed through Carin’s bedroom window, her feet covered in dust or water or snow depending on the season of the cycle. She thought of clambering into bed with Carin, their breath scented by the vanilla-tasting rilius resin that cleaned their teeth, giggling into their pillows so as not to wake Rina.

The hearth was cold; never had a fire been lit on its stone. The chimney above was clean and unmarred by soot. The beautiful carved maha table stood to one side, and the sight of it made Lyari want to sick up and cry at the same time.

This home had been meant for her fyahiul, for the woman Carin had been meant to become. But Carin was now dead, or as good as. Nameless. The adult who was meant to live in this roundhome had never come, leaving less than ghosts to haunt its spaces.

Lyari made her way into the bedroom, where the sick feeling strengthened. Here there was evidence of Carin’s departure. A set of torn leggings from their Journeying, their knees saggy and stretched. A rumpled dent in the coverlet. Lyari kicked off her leather clogs and climbed into the bed. The room was hot in the summer afternoon, but she burrowed under the coverlet anyway, rolling onto her stomach and pulling one of Carin’s pillows to her chest.

She expected tears to come, to fall down her cheeks in salty rivulets to mourn the loss of her oldest friend. Instead nothing came, only a cavernous hollowness in her chest that seemed wont to consume her.

Lyari lay there for some time, until sweat slicked her back and her face stuck to the pillow’s bavel surface. Finally, she kicked back the heavy coverlet and stood, feeling lightheaded. If she’d thought curling up in Carin’s bed would help, she’d been wrong. Instead, Lyari felt the gaping loss of her friend all the more acutely. She straightened the coverlet and replaced the pillow, fluffing it between her palms as if perhaps Carin would return to lay her head upon it.

When she bent to fluff the second pillow, something rough touched her hand.

Pulling the pillow to the side, she saw it. A folded piece of parchment.

Lyah, it read.

With a shock, Lyari realized that Carin wouldn’t have known, couldn’t have had any way of knowing her new name.

You won’t understand why I’ve had to go. I couldn’t return and ignore what we learned. Maybe this is what Jenin meant, when sy said the Journeying was just as much choice as a quest for identity. I know who I am, and I cannot be what I must to continue on in our home.

I will miss you, and Ryd, and Dyava.

That was all. The pen’s nib had scratched into the parchment on some words, and on what we learned it seemed to have shaken, the runes forming the words uneven and jagged. Lyari stared at those lines, willed herself to look deeper within them, to connect with Carin and see what was in her friend’s mind.

But simple will could not bridge that distance.

“She wrote to you.”

Lyari started, then turned to see Jenin leaning against the wardrobe, hys eyes somber. The sight of hyr made Lyari’s heart jangle, and she swallowed, nodding. Lyari read the note aloud, watching Jenin’s face as the words tumbled from her lips. On the Night of Reflection, children were given the chance to pick tokens out of a bag. Each would correspond to a gift, and each gift was handmade by one of the adult villagers. As Lyari read the note to Jenin, she felt the childish apprehension of reaching into that bag, as if within her was a pile of emotions and she wasn’t sure which would come out in her hand.

Jenin cleared hys throat when she finished, and fleetingly, Lyari allowed herself to look at the jagged slice across hys neck. The sight gave her a start.

“You see me as you expect to,” Jenin said, raising hys fingers to hys neck. “My body is only as mutilated as you think it is.”

Lyari didn’t know what sy meant by that. Her gaze flicked upward to Jenin’s eyes, standing straight, her fingers holding the note with a light touch that kept the parchment from falling only barely.

“What do you think she meant, that she couldn’t stay here?” Jenin changed the subject back to Carin, eyes boring into Lyari, seeking an answer at which Lyari could not guess.

“She meant that she could not live with this sacrifice.” The word came easily from Lyari’s tongue. Sacrifice. What was this life in Haveranth if not that?

“Is that all she meant?”

Lyari thought about that, about what that meant. She looked again at the shaky runes that spelled out Carin’s reason for leaving. What did it mean if Lyari could live with something Carin could not?

Weakness, a voice in Lyari’s mind whispered. She shook the word away, met Jenin’s eyes, and shrugged.

Jenin seemed not to care that Lyari hadn’t answered hys question. Instead, sy looked around at the bedroom and gestured widely. “It is a shame such elegant work will be turned to ash.”

Lyari nodded, wistfully gazing around the roundhome. She finished making the bed, placing the pillows atop the coverlet and smoothing out the wrinkles. She tucked the note into her belt pouch, feeling Jenin’s gaze upon her.

This home was a reminder of so many things. Of a past now washed away by a village’s whispers. Of a friend lost to the wilderness. Of how easily change could engulf a life.

Lyari met Jenin’s eyes once more, and she made a decision. She would move into Carin’s home, and though the village would erase Carin from memory, Lyari would not. As apprentice soothsayer, she would remember.

It took only a few hours to carry her necessities into the roundhome, to arrange the bedroom and the kitchen to her liking. Someone had stocked several items on the worktop. Bundles of hanging herbs, a few scattered carafes of conu juice and icemint tea and goat milk. The milk was warm, but did not smell curdled. She placed it in the shallow, stone-lined cellar off the kitchen and found bundles of brined meat. These things would have gone to waste before anyone else thought to look for them. For Rina, Lyari supposed, coming here would be too much to bear, at least until time washed her daughter away. Jenin came and went as she worked, hys face curious or neutral, never speaking again for the remainder of the day.

Lyari once saw Rina, her shoulders bowed, carrying a sheath of bronze ingots from her shed to her forge.

Time would erase her daughter from the village consciousness, this Lyari knew. No one spoke of the Nameless. For anyone else, moving into the home built by one would be taboo, but Lyari was the soothsayer’s apprentice.

Still, she would have to tell Merin, if no one had yet done so themselves.

Lyari made her way to the soothsayer’s home outside Haveranth. As always, she did not knock, only pushed open the door. Merin was not in the central room by the hearth, though Lyari heard her voice from the far room and followed it. The door was closed, and she waited outside.

“Harag, it is already done.” Merin’s voice sounded as though it had been stretched out like gut twine to dry in the sun. “Sahnat hunts, and he never fails.”

“This is not a thing we were prepared for.” The voice that responded to Merin’s statement was thinner still than Merin’s, as if heard from the opposite side of a cavern, and it was unfamiliar to Lyari, though the name was not. Harag, soothsayer of Bemin’s Fan.

“I know that as well as you. I received your message. Not long remains.”

Lyari listened, intrigued by the words she heard. Merin had spoken before of an event coming, one she said she would explain to Lyari after her Journeying. Now it seemed that time would come sooner than Lyari had expected.

“We will prepare as best we can,” Merin said. In her tone was resolve, but also worry.

A thin tendril of the same worked its way into Lyari’s breast. After Merin’s words faded, no more came.

She started when the door opened in front of her, though Merin looked unsurprised to see her.

“Lyari.” Merin reached out and clasped her shoulder, her eyes assessing as if she could see into Lyari’s very thoughts. “Come, child. It is good you heard that. There are things it’s time I told you.”