It wasn’t noon when we arrived—I could easily have gone on—but I’m completely exhausted and I’m hoping that a night’s rest will restore me. With any luck, I’ll be on the move bright and early, and the islands will be looking very different. We’ll see.

I’m doing it wrong, I can tell.

I’ll write again,

Horviss.

All I thought of, in the evening when they left, was of all the people Diwn was on his way to see, and though I could not imagine it, not clearly, the bustle of others like myself and Father, close together, talking and singing and making life and worlds. Me, I sat idly in the dead leaves fallen on top of one another slowly crumbling into dirt. I thought of what I had, and I had Father, and I had wicker, and I had birds, I had swimming, I had carving. Newly, I had that old Gurthern. These things were not enough.

I had been asking myself the same question since I looked at Kenji’s map. If Kimiko was at fault and the act was malicious, would I, in order to protect the villagers under my care, be forced to deal with her and thus make a mortal enemy of someone as powerful as Lady Kuzunoha? Someone I still considered a friend? I wasn’t as sure of the answer as I wanted to be, but I still had a faint hope, and I clung to it tightly.

Toro used the brief truce to catalogue his resources. He wore a short sword, with which he was moderately capable, but his real weaponry was all concealed. While the knives were his tool of preference, he had others, including a couple of rare items he'd been saving for a suitable eventuality. He'd have traded them for a flask of water. The room was hot and airless, his throat was bone dry, and these trials had been known to drag on for hours.

Iná looked about, taking in the long sparse hall with phosphorescent globes glowing in their sconces. There were no windows in the hall. Come to think of it, there had been no windows in her room either, or in the passageway.

We have walked two days, which means we are soon to reach the swamp. The swamp of ghosts, some call it, but what lies in the swamp are not ghosts. They are worse than ghosts. They are foul spirits, who wish to slip into your body and keep it. I do not tell Kuyka this, because silence is much better than noise, and because I do not wish to see him act like men do and state how unafraid he is.

Tadie had never seen witchspawn, but she had heard their hunting screeches beyond the trees; sounds like children in pain. Master had told her that witchspawn were children once, girls like her who felt the Itch and gave in. The Itch that made clothing unbearable, that made children scratch themselves bloody, that made them ravenously hungry. Last harvest, it had been Kyla, a girl three seasons her elder, who’d gotten the Itch and ran away. Usually the Fold spotted it before that—usually children with the Itch were taken and Unsaid before they could turn.

Eventually their nexian corpses, smelling sweetly with a scent like cardamom, fennel, nutmeg, star anise, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon combined, caught fire as they always do once the inevitable changes of decay have rooted themselves in nexian flesh. I removed the fireproof shiro all nexians use for bedding so that the flames of their corpses would eat the orphanage in the night. I wanted to burn in the fire of my beloveds, but the voices that attack my mind wouldn’t let me, and so I flew through a second story window into the ash-colored trees of the surrounding Serenblen.

The moth-eaten republican institutions of ancient Eldshore had been re-tailored with egalitarian trappings by Pirate Empress Zayne fifty years ago, and officials were now Chosen every year by a thin slice of citizens. Zayne had labeled those who were eligible to stand for office, and to participate in the Choosing of the officers, the Free Brethren, in model of the Spiral Sea corsairs she’d dallied with in exile. She’d still been firmly in charge, but many decisions had been left to a consensus of the officers in much the manner of corsairs choosing their captains, or their targets.

Exmere was studying her as if seeing her, for the first time, as the woman of medicine she’d become. For a moment Luzetia wanted to press this advantage, to prove to him that Agata was in her past; that she was a different person, now, with different concerns. Then she remembered that she had not been aware of an influx of Woltani refugees into her city. The lesser evil was still an evil. She would look it in the face.

I held the candle before me where the Normans could see it. Its weight was potential; the wick beckoned. Already the spark rose up under my skin. Mother Ursula could not put a candle in my hand and expect I would do nothing. I touched the wick. The candle lit, a tongue of fire flaring and settling. "Mon Dieu." This was whispered by the wiry, chestnut-haired man standing to Sir Gilbert's right. The nuns made the sign of the cross. Sir Gilbert smiled.

Once upon a time, they were just them. But monstrous creatures from the north, crook-backed savages who shot from the saddle and ate babies, drove them from their homes until they reached the sea and had nowhere else to go. So they built ships, and eventually after many cruel wanderings they reached the Black Isle. It's a fertile country, they say, deep-soiled, well-watered. Left to themselves they'd have been happy there. But they didn't get vacant possession. He was there before them. They say he's nine feet tall with the body of a man and the head of a bull.

In the breathless tomb, Orios touched my shoulder and stood close, as if to comfort me, but before I could protest and tell him I feared only dying disgraceful as a badger in its den, that I shook not for fear but for the action, ready to die glorious and bright, fighting beside my love as all the gods adored, he whispered that I should look out the crack of the door; my eyes were keenest. That far at least he knew my worth and trusted it.

One star-bright night, I watch Bitta chase after fireflies. I experience a spike in my chest—a hot something I can’t name—at the sight of her, so delighted by them, not me. So I shift into a firefly myself, and I lead her to the edge of a precipice. She’s so amused by my weaving, dancing flight, that she doesn’t realize where she is. She falls.

When I travel to the monastery for the first time after our marriage, I bring Lilist with me. She has traded her silk gown and velvet cape for wool and furs at my advice, and only a jeweled broach, hairpin, and rings betray her status. The wind in the mountains is harsh without the shelter of the monastery’s walls and the heat of dragon breath. Thankfully, though, there is a well-traveled path.

When Beatrix leaned forward, a story playing around one corner of her mouth, the dust came alive, the tower full of held breaths. When I sat at prayer, long hours of silence, the angels laughed at me from the windows of the chapel. I wandered through my thoughts like trees. Behind every tree an angel waited. They winked at me until I lost the path, until I couldn’t bear it, until I went back to the tower to meet her again.

For a moment, she considers repeating the spells that she tried before; it would be easy to give in to that desire, to assume stubbornly that everything she was taught in school will be the solution and that the spells might only require a second casting to work. But this is a test designed to weed the weak from the strong, and part of Bryce realizes that she must try something different.

"You feed on the loathing that you ask of your betters. You never ask for help. You are addicted to self-hate. Your fuel will undo you, son. Unless you find something better to burn. That, or remain lost. Let the jungle swallow my two sons, and let me have the mystery of your disappearance rather than the knowledge of your failure. At least then I can pretend you tried."

They plunged into the orange glowing mouth of my kiln—yes, the whole choir dove straight into the fire. It blazed white and emitted a stench of burnt feathers. Then the angels were nothing but dark bodies going to ash, leaving me on my knees staring after them shocked and silenced in disbelief.

“Those with a husband would inflame the jealousy of the goddesses, and those who have never known loss would incite their rage.” It is one of the white-sareed women. Her lips are without paint and her hair is hidden under the drape of her saree. My companions at the bonfire have taken several bodily steps away from her. The effect is comical. It is as if she is a snow-white horse wading through the brown and black mud of us unknown and foreign types.