LYARI’S SHIRT chafed her neck. Higher upon her chest than she liked it, it barely scooped at all and felt like the nooses Tamat used to wrangle hys goats in the fields. Above it was a beaten bronze necklace that remained cool upon her skin even though she’d been wearing it for the past hour. The soothsayer’s cuff still hung loosely at her right wrist, its runes flashing in the firelight, and she wore Merin’s on her left now. In remembrance.

To anyone else, it would seem simply traditional.

To Lyari, it meant more.

Her pale green tunic reached only to her elbows in spite of the chill of the day, soft wool from Cantoranth sheep, slit at both sides to allow free movement of her hips and belted at her waist with more beaten bronze. Each scale of her belt shone with a different rune, each of the moons of the cycle. Vigil Moon was high overhead, and its rune on her belt sat just over her right hipbone.

Leggings of wool-lined leather covered her legs, and tall triple-lined boots covered all the way to midthigh, almost meeting her tunic. Her hair flowed loosely down her back, and she sat at her trestle table, strands of pale green vysa with tiny brass clasps laid out on the shining maha tabletop. She took one by the clasp and twisted a small lock of hair between her fingertips, fastening the brass around it near her scalp. She repeated the motion fourteen more times, one for each moon, each tiny clasp bearing runes like her belt. When the last clasp took hold of her dark hair, she laid her hands in her lap to rest.

Carin used to plait her hair for her.

Lyari thought of the day of their Journeying, the day of their departure, the bells tolling across the village to summon everyone to their work. They had missed the first bell, and the second, and Lyari had begun her Journeying much as she had begun anything else in her life, her hair sloppy and escaping its plait, tumbling over one shoulder where it would flop about with every move she made.

With careful hands, she reached up to her scalp, where her hair parted down the center, framed by the clasped strands of vysa. Her fingertips took hold of her hair and began to plait it against her head, ringing from temple around to the back, where she twisted it into a knot and pushed a halm stick through it. Starting again on the other side, she did the same again, meeting it at the back of her head and joining the two plaits. Pulling the ends of the vysa strands from the circle of plaits so they trailed down through the rest of her hair, she shook the lot of it over her shoulders.

Her fingertips trembled when she finished. She took her place on a cushioned chair at the head of her table then and waited.

At sundown, her door opened without warning, but Lyari was not unprepared. One by one, the elders of Haveranth filed in. Rina, dressed all in deep scarlet that bloomed out of her cloak like the petals of a hibiscus. Old Wend in warm gold like turmeric; Ohlry in hys pale blue like the winter sky; Varsu with his folds of indigo robes falling like dusk to his feet.

Rich colors, all adorned with the same belt as Lyari wore. They sat at her table without comment, and Ohlry pulled a bottle of redberry cordial from hys cloak, pouring it into squat glasses that twinkled in the firelight. It was her position to take the first drink, she knew. Doing so would bind her to the elders and the governance of Haveranth.

All seated and still silent, Lyari waited.

Old Wend held his cup to his lips and drank, licking the viscous red liquid from the corner of his mouth before speaking. “Soothsayer,” was all he said.

“Soothsayer,” the others repeated, stealing glances at one another and at Lyari, who sat shocked in her seat, too surprised to say anything.

Old Wend drained the rest of his glass.

Silence stole over the room, except for the crackling of the fire in the hearth.

No one seemed to know what to do; the soothsayer always drank first, and Old Wend knew that as well as Lyari did. His taking the first drink would have been considered a grievous insult if Merin were there. But Merin was not.

Lyari felt very, very young.

Old Wend had seen as many harvests as Merin, or very near to it. Ohlry and Varsu had each seen over a hundred, and Rina, until now the youngest of the elders, had nearly that herself. With eighty harvests she had birthed Carin, still within her reproductive time, but barely. Merin’s notes had told Lyari that in cycles past, no elder with fewer than one hundred and fifty harvests had been accepted.

Lyari had just barely seen eighteen.

She was to have continued working with Merin for scores of cycles to come before this day. In one movement, Wend had made clear his lack of respect for Lyari.

The room, along with all the people in it, seemed to know that as well as she did. Rina and Ohlry lifted their cups and drank, small sips each without meeting Lyari’s eyes.

Lyari’s cheeks grew warm, and she placed both palms on the smooth maha table, drawing from the coolness of the wood, willing it to spread through her body so her humiliation would not show.

“Some three cycles until the reinvocation,” Varsu said then, straightening his robes and leaning forward on the table with both arms. He hadn’t touched his cordial.

Touching hers would admit that she had no control over the meeting, and, without looking around at the others, Lyari carefully slid the squat glass of ruby liquid away from her on the table and stood. “Three cycles,” she repeated. Her voice held steadier than she expected, and Old Wend had the decency to cough.

She thought she saw a flash of triumph in Rina’s eyes, but it was gone so quickly she might have imagined it.

The rest of them were silent, and it was the quiet that Lyari did not like. The quiet meant that they were thinking too hard about whether she deserved this place. In the coming moons, Lyari would have sat alongside Merin at the head of her table—a table that had now been burned to ash—and over time, Old Wend and Rina and Ohlry and Varsu would have come to accept and respect her place there.

Time was no longer a luxury Lyari could enjoy. Instead it slipped around her fingers like a sly fish in the river. Flowing always away, toward the sea. Never back again.

“Three cycles,” she repeated. “In that time, we will prepare for the reinvocation.”

“And how do you expect to do that?” Old Wend demanded. His knees cracked as he stood, placing both gnarled hands on the edge of the table where his knuckles stood out, pale in the dim light. “You’re greener than the first planting’s sprouts, girl.”

Lyari thought of Merin’s hair catching fire in her own hearth and bit her tongue, wanting more than anything to say the words, Do not call me girl.

Instead she met Old Wend’s eyes and pictured Carin and Ryd standing over his shoulders, cold and dead. “I will do what I must.”

Varsu’s eyes had fallen on Lyari’s untouched glass of cordial, and he exchanged a glance with Ohlry. “It seems none of us have all the choices we would like. Wend, if you’ve a solution to our troubles or have stumbled somehow upon a way to bring Merin back from ashes to guide us, by Vigil above, share.”

Ohlry, hys lined face and dark, silver streaked curls framed by the pale blue hood of his cowled tunic, nodded agreement.

“Merin wouldn’t have known any better herself. She wasn’t there for the last one,” Wend said, eyes on his empty cordial glass.

Rina smacked the table with the flat of her hand. “And you were? Shut your mouth, Wend. Varsu’s right, but he didn’t go far enough. You may be the eldest among us, but you keep yourself well enough away unless it suits you.”

Wend’s wrinkles seemed to deepen into creases, and he opened his thin-lipped mouth. “Now, see here, smith. This is my village and my homeland too, and if a new-whelped hysmern is the one holding all of us between her fingers, I’m not going to watch her drop us into famine and death.”

Hysmern. Child. Lyari felt her face burn, and not from the heat of the fire. Merin had taught her that the old land to the north had gods, wise but aloof. Gods were not only man or woman but both or neither or changing, hysu. When the Hearthland’s founding families had made their way south through the mountains, they had left behind those gods because they had become their own. But in some words, remnants remained, and in the word hysmern, god-having, Lyari felt the shame of being compared to the Northlanders in their starving ignorance, just like the Hearthlander children in their own.

She thought of Jenin, who was, like Ohlry, hyrsin, which meant god-like, transcending through knowledge.

As if thinking of hyr summoned Jenin, sy appeared by Wend’s side, face quiet and eyes shining.

Hys silence spoke more to her than any words could, and Lyari went back to her seat and lowered herself upon it. She had nothing with which she could threaten Wend, no piece of information that would win his trust. She had few tools and little time, but she would do with her position what she could. It would be slow, slow, slow.

She would bide what time she had, and she would bring Wend to heel at her side. She sat straighter and said nothing, but she made eye contact with Wend and held it.

Rina drummed her calloused fingers against the table, drawing Wend’s gaze to herself. “Lyari is not hysmern; she is soothsayer, and you would be wise to remember it.”

No one else said anything to Lyari’s favor or fault.

Lyari’s cordial remained untouched in the center of the table, and she watched Old Wend’s eyes drift from Rina to look upon it.