Tadala did not sleep. She walked from the door of her room out onto the balcony and back to the door, again and again, until she grew irritated with the pounding of her heartache against the darkness and the slapping of her soles against the stone. She eased the door open—the heavy wood didn't creak—and crept down the gallery to the narrow stairs.
Elabel had collected her spare clothes to pad out beds for the twins. Nyoma had questioned her gender somewhat rudely, though the androgynous woman had not seemed particularly put out.
Nyoma and Ntembwa were not sleeping. They were crying in great, long gasps that shook from one inarticulate syllable to the next. Every so often one of their voices would lapse, only for her sister to sob with renewed ferocity.
They're going to make themselves vomit, Tadala thought, and stood still at the base of the stairs.
Ababa had not let her cry for her mother as they had fled, but when she had clutched at him in terror or abject loneliness, he would sigh and draw her close. When he, too, had been lost, all Chikondi could do for her was give her more things to wash.
The weeping briefly turned into retching, then quieted.
Maybe if they cried now, the grief would sit more easily in their hearts, Tadala thought.
She turned back to the exterior door. It was as silent as the one above. They had to leave, and soon. It had been a full day since she and the children had stumbled into the city's depths. If any of the men had survived from the caravan, they were doubtless already moving again. She and the girls had maybe a day, two days at most, before they would have no hope of catching up.
Something had shivered in her bones when Elabel had said she would help them get home, but in the darkness those words felt unknowable, paper-thin.
Elabel had said she could use threads inside the city to do things. That made no sense at all. Was she mad? Or was she a witch?
Lights flickered in the windows of the house where Elabel had given them tea. The sound of books being shifted from one pile to another rustled past the shutters, followed by pages flipping and a pen scratching. Next there were footsteps, and then the sound of a great number of things being knocked to the floor, accompanied by panicked muttering.
Tadala fled down the path.
Descending into the city was not so easy as climbing to the roof had been with Elabel's unseen guidance. Some of the roof-lights had been left open, but one hallway lit by the silvery glow of the pipes looked much the same as the next. Tadala stopped at every juncture, examining the carvings with her fingers, before continuing onward. It would be just her luck to forget her way and get stuck in a cellar, she thought sourly.
Her mind, though blurred by sadness and exhaustion, had slowly tightened around a plan. Once she found the hall where they had entered, she only had to follow the wall around to the city's south face and walk directly away from it. During the sandstorm, it had felt like she had run for an eternity, but likely she could cover the same ground in a half-hour when the night was still and clear. The sand moved quickly, but the caravan would have left some traces in the place where they had sheltered—a smashed cup, a snapped bridle, maybe even a dead camel. She scowled.
From there, she would walk east. Hakim had said the oasis was east. Sound carried in the desert; if she could see the caravan's shadows she could call out to them. She couldn't believe they had made good time in the last day, though. The storm had lasted for hours, and it would have taken them another half-day just to dig out and pour the sand out of their robes.
Hopefully they would wait for her to go back and get the twins. She could tell them about the water in the city, the fruit. They could afford to turn back for a day. The image of the man who had leered at her back in the cliffs rose in her mind, and her chest clenched. If Hakim hadn't intervened, would the other men have helped her? Would she and the twins be safe until they got to oasis?
Did they have any other choice?
As the descent through the city's halls grew darker, she unwrapped the small bundle she had taken from her room. Elabel had left her a mostly-empty metal lamp, a thin strip of metal, and a flint, promising to bring more oil and a coil of wick the next day. It took a few strikes before Tadala could hold a guttering light out in front of herself. She hoped there would be enough wick to get back up to the terrace.
She didn't recognize the great hall until she blew out her lamp and listened to the way her footsteps lost themselves in the cavernous darkness. Then, as her eyes adjusted, a narrow strip of pale light appeared up ahead of her: the massive door opening into the desert.
She wondered where Hakim was buried.
The temperature dropped when she stepped clear of the door. A slice of wind whipped her dress around her legs. The desert unrolled before her, and she had to take a long, deep, terrified breath before stretching her fingers out to the stone of the city wall and beginning to walk its length.
The moon was high in the sky, turning the sand watery and filling the dunes with liquid darknesses. Tadala could not cover ground as fast as she had hoped. Every shadow looked like it might hide some small proof of men having passed this way, and every little rise in the ground pulled her eye, a potential artifact buried beneath the sand. As the distance from the city grew, the dunes grew taller and more exhausting to scale and slide down. They had reshaped themselves during the storm, sometimes obscuring the bulk of the city behind her. She dipped her hands into the sand over and over, combing through the grains and finding nothing. Her neck ached from jerking her head back to stare over her shoulder, half-afraid that the walls would disappear for good once they slipped from view.
Tadala had grown tired and disoriented when her foot struck something solid, and she stopped. The moon had dipped lower, and nervously her hand traced the outline of the lamp in the cloth.
She pulled the object lose and held it up. It was a sandal.
She stood in a small depression just before a larger dune reared into the sky. It was difficult to see in the shadow thrown by the crest of the sand, but several smaller hillocks ringed the edges of the sunken bit.
Could these be abandoned packs? she wondered, kneeling next to the one of these little rises and pushing the sand away. Maybe the caravan had decided to jettison as much as they could to make better time.
Her fingers found cloth, but it was thin, folded back on itself, not like the heavy canvas bags that the camels carried. Frowning, she tugged one edge free. Sand poured into her lap, as the fabric unspooled from the heavy object it had been wrapped around. When she finally pulled it clear, the object flopped back to the ground.
Setting the fabric aside, she reached for the heavy thing.
It was covered in hair. Smooth hair. Tadala froze, her skin crawling, her stomach in her mouth, her tired mind understanding the sandal. Wanting desperately to stop, to run back to the city, to lie down on the makeshift bed and close her eyes and forget as hard as she could, she continued to feel the object in her hands. It was round, hard, cold to the touch, attached at one end to a larger mass—
—her fingers found eyebrows, an ears, a nose, and when they brushed the man's teeth she screamed and shoved herself away. A minute later she realized numbly that she was still screaming, and she shoved her hands again her chin to close her mouth.
The caravan had been six men and ten camels. She found four little humps in the shadow of the dune and seven big ones. Digging first with her hands and then with a broken tentpole, she uncovered each one, finding camels and men where she desperately did not want to find either camels or men. As she pulled sand and cloth away from the fourth grave, the hand of the corpse fell onto her own. The fruit and bread she had eaten that day burned in the back of her throat.
There was no caravan left. They would not be going to the oasis.
Tadala kicked one of the big hills, fell backwards into the sand, and burst into tears.
She lay there for a little while but could not give in to misery so far as to forget that the moon was setting and she'd soon be walking back to the city in pitch blackness. This was all horribly unfair, she thought tiredly, staring up at the stars. Perhaps she deserved some irritations in life—borers in her squash vines, Chikondi's favorite litany about the cost of beans, even combing mysterious sticky things from Nyoma's hair on a semi-regular basis—but not this. This was simply excessive.
Oddly fortified by this thought, she got to her hands and knees and slowly pivoted until her eyes found the shadow on the horizon.
The trip back was much faster, but when she approached the door her heart juddered at the sight of a pale figure standing in the entrance.
“Who's there?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“Tadala?” said the strange woman, made stranger by the dark and the cold.
“What do you want?” she snapped, wondering if she should run. Instead she forced herself to walk closer until she could see the outline of Elabel's eyes and nose and mouth.
Elabel stared past her. Her hands twisting themselves in her tunic were just barely visible in the darkness. “The twins are crying for you,” she said. “I didn't know what to do.”
Unexpectedly Tadala's tears came again. “The rest of the caravan is dead,” she blurted. “They smothered, like Hakim.”
“Oh, no,” Elabel said, but her voice sounded curiously flat to Tadala's ears.
“We have to bury them,” Tadala said, wondering at this as soon as it was out of her mouth. She didn't much care about the other men in the caravan. And yet—if she had somehow been able to convince them that the shadow on the horizon was a real one— “The men of the desert have—they won't rest easy if their bodies are taken by jackals, or buzzards. They have to be buried soon.”
“I see.” The silence of the desert, filled with wind, spread between them. “If you are sure—”
“I am sure.”
“—it would be best to do it early in the morning. Afterward it will be terribly hot.”
“Tomorrow,” Tadala said.
She did not let either of the twins lie down again until each one had washed her face and drunk a cup of water. Tadala did not sleep in her new room but between the girls, an arm around each of them.
“Tadala,” said a small voice close to her ear. “Excuse me. I don't mean to bother you. Tadala.”
Black fog filled her brain, and she struggled to remember what was on the other side. Did Chikondi need her to start the laundry soaking? No, Chikondi was gone. Did Hakim—no. Where were the twins?
Tadala creaked into a sitting position, scrubbing a wrist over her eyes to clear the gluey fluid away. Ntembwa was curled into her left side and Nyoma pressed into her right, both sleeping the death-like sleep of the truly exhausted. The room was still shadowy, lit by a thin stream of pale light trickling in at the window.
A shadow directly in front of her moved, and Tadala jerked violently backward. “Wha—” Nyoma whimpered in her sleep, and she checked her volume. “What do you want?” she hissed angrily. She was so tired. She just wanted to lie back down.
“Pardon me,” said the quiet voice that still did not seem to issue directly from Elabel's mouth. She stood up from where she had crouched to wake Tadala. Her hands seemed to move without her consciousness or approval, pressing palms together and then fingers and then palms again. “But you said—you did say—”
“I said what?”
“It will be very hot later in the day, and it will be very difficult to bury the men from your caravan,” she said. “I also don't know—perhaps—you mentioned buzzards—I have never seen buzzards, but perhaps there are buzzards—”
“I understand,” Tadala interjected. “If you will give me a moment to prepare.”
The red-haired woman nodded and backed away, her eyes on her feet, before turning to flee.
Tadala thought of letting the twins sleep, then of the terror they'd likely be in if they woke to an empty room, then of the greater terror of letting them see the caravan remains, then of what trouble they might get into unsupervised in the city. She pressed her index fingers to the insides of her eyes.
The twins didn't move when she eased out the door, nor when she returned with a piece of charcoal from Elabel's stove. Chikondi had not been able to read, and Hakim's frequent absences at sea had made his schooling of his children somewhat irregular. Tadala's knowledge was even more irregular, picked up secondhand, and she did not think the words she wrote on the floor were spelled very well.
STAY HERE
RETURN LATER
TADALA
She stared at the message for a long minute before turning away.
Elabel led her down through the city, using hallways and doors than Tadala had not yet seen. She felt her shoulder tensing with every new turn. Perhaps her host survived in the desert by eating members of lost caravans. She thought of the twins, asleep in their makeshift beds, and felt sick.
The sand was still cool under the gray light from the east when they emerged from the great door to the outside. Now Tadala took the lead. Elabel hung back when she strode away from the south wall into the dunes, and when Tadala turned back she was still pressed against the stones.
“Come on,” she yelled. “They're out here.”
Elabel made a bizarre gesture, grabbing the air to both sides of her as though she were steadying herself in invisible rigging. Something odd seemed to be happening around her hands—some sort of glimmer or shift—but Tadala turned her back and went on. The exhausted fog had briefly cleared from her brain, but it was descending again. She thought she probably had a couple of hours of work in her before she would start bawling and then fall asleep on her feet. She would deal with whatever witchcraft attended Elabel after she was sure that eagles weren't pilfering the eyes of the dead men.
The sands had shifted again, and it took some circling to find the caravan's location. Tadala finally tripped over a corpse's partially uncovered leg and fell into the sand, unable to stop a short scream.
Elabel emerged over the top of the closest dune, panting, her face as red as her hair and shiny with sweat. She struggled forward as though something were jerking her backward, pulling her back toward the city, her fists clenched in front of her.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her words punctuated by gasps.
Tadala scrambled away from the body and lurched to her feet, brushing sand off her knees and calves with a fierceness that she hoped would also dislodge the crawling sensation of touching the dead.
“I'm fine,” Tadala snapped, and rushed on: “I found four of them last night, but there should be six men.” She had started shaking again. “There were ten camels. We can leave those here.”
“Camels?” Elabel said, in the same bewildered tone of voice.
“Yes,” Tadala snapped, struggling to keep her patience. She pointed in front of her. “Here. We can start with him.”
“If you think that's best,” said Elabel, bobbing her head and staring at the bundle of undistinguished human at Tadala's feet. “Let me just—”
She half-stumbled, half-fell down the near slope of the dune, only just stopping herself before stepping on the body and kneeling next to it.
“We can each hold onto his robes—” Tadala started.
Elabel didn't seem to be listening, but was instead gesturing over the body like she was tying off a boat at a dock, playing out rope and then knotting it.
“What are you—”
Elabel was not touching the dead man. Tadala was sure of this. She could see both white, knobby, long-fingered hands held flat-palmed in front of her chest, touching nothing but air.
She could see this, and yet the dead man moved, jerking from the sand like a caught fish on a line. The sand scattered from his robes as the body rolled free and then started to slide across the sand, toward the city.
Tadala screamed. Elabel jumped and dropped her hands. The body slammed forward into the next dune with sudden, terrifying force. Its torso shuddered, as though an invisible set of hands was yanking on it.
“What are you doing!” Tadala heard herself howling. “Stop! STOP. STOP!”
“What—stop—what—” Elabel backed away from her.
“Stop doing whatever you're doing!”
Elabel dived across the sand and grabbed the body's feet; it had partially worked its way through the crest of the dune and was starting to slide forward again. She did something with her hands, and the body was still.
Tadala put her hands over her face.
“I thought you wanted help burying them,” Elabel said. “And—I thought—to protect them from animals—it would be best to do it in the city—”
Tadala opened her mouth, then closed it again. She looked at the sky, then at the pitiful mounds of sand covering the other corpses. Elabel had a point about protecting the bodies, she thought. She didn't know how far they'd have to dig through the sand to find solid ground. Then she wondered what sort of madness had infected her that she was taking advice from a witch.
She couldn't leave, she reminded herself. At least not without enough food and water to get them either to the oasis or back to the city on the coast.
“Elabel,” she said finally. “The people of the desert—these men—they don't practice witchcraft. They wouldn't want to be touched by magic.” She thought of Hakim again and flinched.
“Witchcraft?” Elabel repeated, startled. Her eyes flickered across Tadala's, and then she looked away again. “How do you mean?”
“What you just—that thing—that!” Tadala shouted, waving her arms at the crumpled corpse. “Whatever you just did! You can't do that to them.” Tears came into her eyes, and she rubbed them away angrily. “The least we can do is bury them like normal people.”
“Like normal people,” Elabel said carefully. She took a deep breath, twisting her hands in the fabric of her tunic. “I don't mean to make you angry,” she said. Her voice sounded choked, as though she were also on the verge of tears. “I know—well, I know I'm slow—I know I'm slow to understand things. I don't mean—I don't mean to be stupid. How should I—how do you bury people?”
This was not at all the response Tadala had expected, and her rage deflated like a kite hit by a rock.
“We carry them back,” she said finally, flatly. “With our hands.”
Elabel clutched her elbows, then nodded.
In those first weeks, grief began and ended their days and shaded the hours between.
Tadala collected food from every garden she could find on the city's roof, working with single-minded fury. She found grapevines, all sorts of herbs, delicate lemon trees, more miniature olive groves. Often she was so tired at the end of these expeditions that she curled up and napped in the garden bed she was harvesting.
She took the twins down the great entrance hall once, to show them the corner slab that Elabel had lifted to bury Hakim and the other men from the caravan. This display of magic had made Tadala terrified and queasy, but she had no idea where else they could put the bodies.
Her own sorrow had surged under the onslaught of the twins' nighttime tears, violent races up and down the halls, and occasional screaming matches—which, if Tadala was able to separate them before they started punching each other, usually devolved into more tears. She often found herself weeping as she filled her veil with more fruit, which made her so angry that she cried harder.
The fruit itself was another source of frustration. She dried the grapes on an empty stone path, but she had no salt to brine the olives and no press to make oil. She could find no beans or corn growing or anything she could make into porridge or bread for a long journey. She did not think she and the twins could make it to the oasis carrying bags heavy with raisins and lemons.
Elabel, for her part, hung back from them during those weeks of sadness. She appeared at the doorway to their house with the pieces for folding cots, more woven blankets, jars of dried and pickled food, and new clothes and shoes for each of them. She could not explain where any of this came from, or at least not to Tadala's satisfaction.
“I took it from the Stewards' cupboards,” she said.
“Where?” Tadala demanded.
“On the other side,” Elabel said, dipping her hand like she was pushing it into a sleeve.
“On the other side of what?”
“The city,” Elabel said, and then Ntembwa was shouting about something and Tadala couldn't question her further.
All of the new things Elabel brought came out of a huge, odd-smelling canvas bag, still damp when she appeared in the morning on the patio and unrolled the top. Sometimes the jars or wooden furniture or new rugs, too, would be beaded with water, and had to be set on the windowsills in the brittle air to dry before they could be brought inside.
Tadala tried to follow her to the source of all these things, but Elabel was so quick and so quiet and knew the city so well that she could only keep up for a few minutes before the other woman had vanished and Tadala herself was completely lost.
She did not want to think about living with a witch, but after the burials, Elabel seemed painfully self-conscious. If she noticed Tadala watching her talk, she covered her mouth with her hands. (Tadala, for her part, tried not to look at Elabel's lips when she spoke; the mismatch between sounds and shapes made her dizzy.) She did not make the air shimmer with her hands again.
But for all this reticence, Elabel performed a violent and thorough excavation of the things accumulated in drifts around her bed, her table, her sitting chair, and her potted plants, scouring her rooms for a map. When the twins had stopped waking in the night to cry, and when Tadala had started to eat regularly again, she brought them books. These were not written in a text that Tadala had ever seen—the script of the desert curved and looped like a wave on the ocean. This was hard and angular, each sign separated from the next by a thin cushion of space.
First came an enormous book that filled the entire kitchen table when it fell open. It was illuminated in a bewildering array of colors: translucent greens, chalky reds, velvety purples, sparkling whites, all traced over in a spiderweb of black and blue lines, marking roads, cities, rivers. Each new page revealed a complicated pattern of these things intersecting each other, but even more remarkably, each facing page carried drawings of people, cities, animals, plants.
“It’s the atlas Mumma gave me when I was small,” Elabel said cheerfully, though her fingers lingered on the frayed binding before she passed it to the twins. “I thought it might be better because it has pictures—there are pictures of the people from each land—as well as the Node Cities next to each map—so if you can recognize one of them, you know you’ve got the right one.”
Tadala didn’t know what the Node Cities were, and nor could she recognize any of the pictures in Elabel’s atlas. The people who looked like people she knew—people with broad noses and brown skin as she had, or arched noses and olive skin like Hakim and Mustafa—inhabited strange cities. The places that looked like those she knew—grasslands, deserts, seaside cities—were inhabited by strange people, some with eyes and skin as pale as Elabel.
She spent many evenings on her own small patio with the enormous book across her lap, slowly turning its pages and trying to make sense of its images, yet another mystery in a city full of them. One page showed roiling hills of sand, the edges of a cresting dune picked out in gold foil, but the people shown crossing the sands had orange and blue stripes on their faces like lizards. They wore turbans and close-fitting garments of blue, not at all like the voluminous white robes of the men of the desert. Her eyes traced the drawing of a dozen adults and a child gathered around a fire under a sky of deepest purple and wondered: Where are their houses? Why are they out in the open? There were no cities marked upon the map opposite.
She flipped later to another drawing of a young man, who looked so much like her father’s brother that she had to quickly close the book and set it aside so she could rub the heels of her palms fiercely into her eyes. His dark eyes turned up slightly at the corners; his full lips parted in a smile; his jaw was square, stern and out of place in his laughing countenance. She had not seen him in three—no, wasn’t it nearly four years now?
After Tadala had wiped her hands on her baggy new tunic, she warily picked the atlas up and paged through it again, half-afraid the young man would have vanished from its pages. But there. There he looked out of the pages, as though her heart had conjured him up.
But the other illustrations on this spread made her heart sink further. These people looked like they might have come from her village, but the city shown in the book was no place she had ever seen. The other pictures showed men and women paddling through a maze of streams or ditches lined in gray stone, stepping out from their crafts into tall masonry buildings built up to the edges of the water. More people looked out from banks upon banks of narrow glass windows and fished from second-story balconies or tiny bridges. They wore strange clothes too: pantaloons tied at the knee and short robes laced up the front.
Tadala asked Elabel to show her the map that had their own red cube on it. The other woman flipped to the very first pair of plates and pointed. Tadala’s heart sank.
“Elabel, what does that green pattern mean?” she asked, brushing the squares that filled the ground around the crimson square with a fingertip.
“They are fields,” Elabel said.
“We are in the middle of a desert,” Tadala said.
“Yes.”
“What does the blue line here signify?” asked Tadala.
“It is a river than runs by the city,” Elabel answered.
“We are in the middle of the desert.”
“Yes.”
Tadala told the twins to stop looking in that atlas.
Elabel brought more books, which she read aloud to the twins and Tadala during mealtimes. These had titles like The Twelfth Emperor’s Journey to the Outermost Veil and An Exploration of the Far Reaches of the Narrows. The twins were fascinated, but Tadala couldn't recognize any of the places Elabel was describing.
She paced the roof between meals. She had started putting away little bits of the dried food that Elabel brought them. How much would they need to get back to the city on the coast? How much would they need to get to the oasis? She found a patch of roof on top of a wide, flat house, far from the houses where they slept, that had been entirely taken over by wildflowers. Seedpods from plants she had tasted in her wanderings started to catch her eye and find their way into her pockets. The thought of how long this meant they would stay in the city was pushed away. She wasn't stupid for not wanting to leave without knowing where she was going. Surely Elabel wouldn't let them take all of her food, anyway.
She repurposed the broken pieces of a pot that Nyoma had knocked down for digging the weedy bed. She thought briefly of asking Elabel for tools, then pushed that notion away angrily. Worries about gardening in this strange place filled her head, a small respite from larger, more painful questions. How did one garden in a place with no rainy season? Did she need to make beds, if no storms would come to wash the seeds away, or should she plant in rows?
A corner of the roof, five paces long by seven paces wide, had been dug up and planted when Tadala realized that Elabel was watching her cultivate from the stairway up to the next house’s roof.
“What do you want?” she called, rubbing dirt from her hands onto her tunic.
Elabel wordlessly presented her with a little bag and a flat metal tool fitted into a handle. Tadala took it gingerly, repressing irritation that the garden was apparently not to be her private project. The bag contained dried seeds: beans, spices, grain, gourds, melons. That night after she shut the door to her room, she poured each over her fingers, feeling their shapes and thinking half-formed thoughts of her mother’s garden. After several days of uncertain silence, half-irritated and half-sorrowful, Tadala thanked her host over breakfast. Elabel breathed very hard through her nose and nodded before hastily rising from the table, bread still on her plate, and disappearing out the door.
The garden grew quickly and bloomed. Tadala had a suspicion that Elabel was tending it during the night, possibly bringing animal dung in her giant bag to poke into the dirt. The bag smelled bad enough.
After the second or third month of this, Ntembwa and Nyoma no longer fixed Elabel’s bag with ferociously hungry eyes when she let it clunk to the table, nor did they harass her to start reading immediately. She had brought them amusements, ropes to skip with, wooden puzzle boxes, chalk to draw with, even tiny sculptures of chickens and turtles. She taught the two children to read the strange, angular script of her books.
Tadala asked Elabel to look for a map of the stars. Ababa had used to point out the shapes in the sky every night when they had lived in her mother's house, but the skies over the desert were not the same ones that had stretched over the great lake. Still, she knew that the caravans used the stars just as sailors did. The diagrams and charts that Elabel brought her did not look like either the figures she knew from home or the ones she saw overhead now.
At the beginning of the second year, the twins went through a growth spurt, their curly heads stretching up past Tadala’s shoulders and staying there. Ntembwa’s hair sprang out from her head in minute curls, the sun highlighting the colors of olive wood in each strand. She was broader of face and shoulder than Nyoma, with square hands and a round jaw. Nyoma’s hair was closer to pure black, her cheeks slightly hollowed under the high cheekbones she shared with her sister, her chin pointed and usually thrust forward, her hands long and fine. Both of them now had golden flecks in their eyes, and Tadala wondered if the city—and Elabel—were somehow changing them.
She couldn't judge her own appearance in the hand-mirror they all shared. Elabel still looked like a large, red-haired crow.
It snowed in the desert, leaving a fine layer of white powder over all the olives and the lavender bushes that disappeared by mid-morning. When the high summer came, when the twins' birth-day was, Elabel appeared with fruit-flavored ices, wrapped in waxed paper, wrapped in pouches full of sawdust, and Tadala thought of the snow cupped in hundreds of shining olive leaves, tiny mountain ranges on hundreds of waxy stems. The twins were ten. She would be seventeen sometime after the worst of the heat broke.
Her garden grew much larger. On her birthday, the twins had jointly braided her hair into a graceful interlace, and Elabel had brought her more seeds. She was able to grow a small patch of corn on the roof of another house very near to the outermost parapet. The twins liked the flavor of the flour that Elabel brought in tins, but to her it tasted of magic.