“Son of man," the fish said, "set thy face against Gog of the land of Magog, the chief priest of Meshech and Tubal.” The names were unfamiliar to Shemaiah, and the story was hard to understand; after a moment, he realized that the very language the fish was speaking wasn’t quite the one he knew. The words were Ivri, but they were the old Ivri, the one the ancestors had spoken before the books and scholars were burned.

Really, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Shamans drag away poor farm girls from the outlying provinces all the time (particularly in seasons of great calamity, as everyone insists we are in now). Even then their lives stray little from their previously charted course. They trade mud thatch and straw for cedar wood and oil, reborn as sworn sisters, plodding away the rest of their days with too many early rises.