May 1, ’94 (5 days after the fire)

The submarshal, trying to ignore the ache in his knee that his advancing age had put there, looked over a bleak landscape. The trees were black, and as leafless as they would have been in winter, although the sun was high and the lack of shade made it quite hot. A foot of ash covered the ground, and the air still smelled of smoke.

In this view, the investigation was useless. The Global Company had already decided, and thus the world already knew, who had started the fire: Farisa La’ewind, a witch gone mad, a refugee of the Jungle Wars in the Seventies, long thought to have died as a little girl, but now truly gone because the inferno that started here—at this Witch’s Cabin, more than a mile north of campus—would have spread at twelve miles per hour, given landscape and conditions, and nobody could sustain a run that fast, through a forest, long enough to survive. The search for further evidence was a pretense; in reality, they were collecting artifacts the higher-ups would take as family heirlooms, given the morbidity of the event, or sell to collectors. The heat-twisted spoon he had found an hour ago would be worth be worth a hundred grot to some boss’s boss’s boss in Moyenne he couldn’t convince himself to give one fuck about.

The fire, even by the standard of forest destruction, had been impressive. The remnants of the cabin, black and waist-high, would probably collapse into a mound of ash if kicked hard enough..

His commanding officer, a midmarshal half his age and nephew of a Z-4, approached.

The submarshal hated this man, but habit had turned to reflex by now. He offered the Company salute, right arm outstretched and hand knife-parallel. “H’vast Hampus!”

Midmarshal Fuckface, who did not return the salute, muttered, “H’vast Hampus.”

“Imperious fuck,” said the submarshal. He found a black triangular stone that probably had nothing to do with the fire, but weight was weight, so he put it in his sack.

One of the crewmen, a Z-9 in his twenties, whose canvas sack still appeared quite light, asked, “What’s our quota?”

The midmarshal waved his petasi—a timeless symbol of the Employer’s authority, a leather-bound bundle of seven wooden rods whose extended central staff bore a spearhead—hard enough to make a whiffing sound. “Whoever brings me the least gets a beating. That’s your quota.”

Once the officer was gone, the submarshal told the Z-9, “They’ll call us in just before dark, so there won’t be much time to look through the bags, and we’ll probably be ranked on weight. If it’s heavy, put it in. Just don’t make it obvious.”

The Z-9 nodded to give thanks.

“It’s never a problem,” said the submarshal. He kicked up a bag of dust, exposing an onion that had somehow partially survived the blaze. Though black and inedible, it did not turn to ash in his hand, so he added it to his bag.

“I don’t know why we’re even up here,” said the Z-9. “The good loot’s to the south.”

“You’re right,” said the submarshal. “I’d bet a hundred grot—if I had a hundred grot—you won’t even find a whole tooth up here. Grackenheit insists we’ll find clues, though.”

“Clues to what?”

“We know who started the fire. We don’t know why.”

“If he wants to know so badly, the fat fuck should come up here himself.”

The submarshal put a hand on the young Z-9’s shoulder. “It has never in my too-long life worked that way. You have to take your sense of honor from the job itself, or you will go mad.”

The midmarshal, though a dozen yards away, must have heard them. He cupped his hands around his ugly mouth. “More work, less talk!”

So the day went on. The submarshal continued kicking through ash and, when there seemed to be something underneath, digging in with his hands. He found a bent butter knife. It wouldn’t be useful to anyone, and nothing distinctive marked it as having anything to do with Cait Forest, but it would add an ounce to the weight of his sack, so he put it in.

Like so, like so, work continued. The crewmen, hunched over in the ashes, gathered what they could. The supervisor walked around, clothes mostly clean, swinging the petasi and shouting threats. Carbon dust clung to the sweaty skin of the men, most of whom were younger than the submarshal.

Discomfort was a part of all jobs worth doing, but the collection of coarse ash in his boots and socks was irritating as hell, so the submarshal stopped to clean them out.

“Finding much?” The midmarshal had come up behind him as he was tying up his last pair of shoelaces.

“Still kicking around.”

“Let me see what you’ve got.”

The submarshal opened his bag. “Brass bangle, some glass shards, and a few of these.” He palmed a pair of triangular snake skulls. “Oh, and there’s this.” He showed his supervisor the warped mouth of a broken test tube—although the submarshal had never had a formal education, he suspected it had something to do with scientific experiments.

“Kick more. I’m not impressed.” The petasi whooped in the air as its owner swung it. “You know what happens if you come in light.”

Try using that thing on me. Court-martial or no, I’ll rip you a third cunt.

The submarshal had nothing to lose. In November, he would turn sixty and be “relieved of the obligation to serve.” Company policy held that anyone not promoted in his final ten years—this was, in practice, everybody, because people over fifty were assigned the worst duties, and thus could never make their case for further leadership—retired on a Z-12’s pension of one grot, twenty cents per day, not enough to keep four walls up, let alone feed a man. If the midmarshal—a younger man, but one sixty pounds lighter and who had never seen combat—did strike him, he would happily trade the grim remainder of his life for the chance to end his superior’s. He had taken life before; one got used to it.

He coughed as he inhaled a cloud of dust, having plunged his hands into a mound of ash that had seemed promising, but concealed only an ordinary stone of medium size.

As a younger man, he had risen fast in the Global Company, moving from privatto (Z-12) to etta-privatto (Z-11) in four months, up to mustrino in less than a year, etta-mustrino on his twenty-second birthday, and corporal by twenty-five. At thirty-four, he was promoted to submarshal, Z-7, only one rank below where they started college brats like the score of students slain here. Those were excellent ages-at-grade for the son of a drunken coal miner. His bravery—ill-calculated, but miraculously survivable—in the Alma Campaign had earned him a Silver Mallet, leading to the recitation of his name—on a short list, with only two thousand other recipients that year—by Cyril Bell in Moyenne.

Alas, one’s parentage was never truly forgotten. He wished had been told, forty years ago, that careers were inherited rather than earned. He might have still made all the same choices, but would have been spared the heartache of dashed hopes.

Afternoon shadows stretched. The temperature dropped like a dead man’s balls. On base, buglers would be playing that funereal tune in an hour or two, reminding the submarshal of being one day closer to his forced retirement. He took little joy in ranking through ash to gather the torched possessions of a dead arsonist madwoman, but his life without this work—a life on the streets, trapping and eating rats to survive—would be worse. Bad knees, dirty boots, and this canvas sack full of mostly worthless trinkets were the sum total of his life. It made him angry, to be truthful. He kicked the ash. He kicked it again, making the same clouds of powder that he had made in gravel lots as a boy. The slow-settling dust reminded him of the tephra over Mount Alma.

The toe of his boot caught on something beneath the ash. He bent down to see what it was.

“Well, I’ll be a grandmother’s tits.”

The thin, many-spoked metal wheel he recognized as belonging to those obnoxious pedaled vehicles one saw in the cities. Its rubber tire had melted, and its frame was deformed by heat. He added it to his bag—weight, after all, was weight. More searching led to other trinkets, most of no concern, but one of which was a book—a diary. The top half crumbled immediately, but its back pages had been burned only partially and were still legible.

L’tae qeru teru flara.

These were words in a language he did not recognize, but even he could see they had been written in a state of fury. Surely, some mystery existed here, but he put the journal into his loot sack. No crime was worse than to be caught reading on Company time. The posters in every office and barracks said it clear: We Pay You to Work, Not Think.

“Daylight’s downing,” shouted the midmarshal. “H’vast Hampus!”

The grunts in the field, including the submarshal, replied, “H’vast Hampus!”

The submarshal found himself genuinely curious about what he might find in addition to the diary. Names like Reverie and Kyana La’ewind meant nothing to the young, but the Seventies had been a real time in his adult life, and the question of whether connections existed between historical events and this new one could not be easily put aside. To someone, Farisa had been a real person.

Something caught his eye. A pink silk ribbon, an adornment he recognized as probably more expensive than anything he had ever owned, stuck out of the ground cover like a pubic hair in mashed potatoes. He tugged on it. A charred finger bone popped into view. The submarshal shuddered. He had seen death before—he had caused it before—but to come upon a scorched body where no such one was expected reminded him, too much to continue, of Mount Alma’s eruption and its nightmarish aftermath.

“What ’n’ what have we here?” The midmarshal had come up from behind.

“It’s... animal bones,” said the submarshal, hoping his idiot supervisor would leave.

The midmarshal did no such thing, clearing the ash with his petasi, exposing a shoulder blade, some arm bones, and a spine. “You idiot. This is a man.”

“Woman,” said the submarshal. The skull’s narrow chin made clear that she had been a petite female, no older than her late teens, and probably a light-skinned Ettasi. Having taken a course in forensics to bolster his case for a promotion he never got, he also recognized a fractured hyoid bone. A fire’s heat could split a bone, but there was no charring or mineralization here, so she had been strangled—where the fire started, but before it had started.

He did not know it yet, but he had found the clue that would solve the mystery of Farisa’s Fire.

#

March 14, ’94 (6 Weeks Before the Fire)

As they walked through a stand of oaks on a warm day in early spring, their bare arms brushed by accident, and Farisa’s heart raced.

She stopped. “Hey.”

Erysi turned to face her. “What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” Farisa looked aside. “The last one’s up ahead. Not far.”

Each of the eight flagpoles had a padlocked chest at its base, wherein one could find a crimson banner as heavy as a boxcar blanket. Katarin had requested that Farisa, who had volunteered to take on the late ranger’s duties, raise each of them before the end of the day.

“Zhraka naavin,” Farisa said as she fastened the red canvas flag to its halyard.

“Is that Lyrian?”

“No. Lorani. ‘The invited killer.’ It’s what my people call a drought. Other disasters, like quakes and cyclones, announce their vice as they begin. A drought, on the other hand, begins as a series of warm happy days that you’re happy to see.” She shook her head. “This time last year, there was wild garlic growing out here. Today, there’s nothing.”

Erysi flashed her mixed smile, her what-are-you-going-to-do face.

Farisa tugged the flagpole’s hoist line. The banner caught more wind as it rose; once at the top, ikt flapped about as if it weighed nothing at all. “We are done.”

“You seem to enjoy this.”

She wiped sweat from her brow. “I do.”

“More than your teaching?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can answer that.”

She did love teaching. She believed, in some corner of her heart, that if she could ever truly and fully educate one hundred people, those five score would set in motion the processes that would destroy the Global Company. Still, the role forced her to project authority rather than fraternity. The conservative dress, frankly, was almost too hot for Cait Forest’s long summers. Out here, she could wear a sleeveless red tunic, a wide-brimmed hat, and denim trousers—a look less professorial, more Farisa—and nothing would be said by anyone. Also, the physical nature of the work gave her a pleasant burn in the muscles, which she could now see in a mirror, as well as the clean smell of fresh sweat.

“So that’s all eight. Are we done?”

“With the firebans? Yes.” She pointed up a rugged brushy slope. “I’m going up there next. The headmistress thinks there’s an aquifer in the foothills. If we can find a stream, we may be able to divert it to the spring vegetable gardens.”

Erysi hurried to keep up. “Do you ever take a day off?”

“No.” Farisa had never found the Old Bear, in whose employment she had lasted for less than three hours in one hot autumn afternoon, to be a pleasant man, but he had done more for Cait Forest than had ever been acknowledged. Until Katarin could find someone to fill the role of ranger, his workload was now Farisa’s. “Not since summer.”

“I see.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

Pain flashed across Erysi’s face.

Farisa wondered what she had said. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Not you.” Erysi folded her arms. “I… saw one.”

“A spider?”

Erysi nodded. “I hate them so much.”

“They’re not dangerous. Not the ones here, anyway.”

Erysi shuddered. “In biology, we had to look at one under a microscope. It had eight eyes.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“The best to see you with.” Farisa’s hand scrambled up Erysi’s back, causing her to shriek. “Don’t worry. I promise to protect you from the spiders.”

They followed the trail west, gaining elevation. The way was not steep, but Farisa found herself out of breath, as if she’d run up six flights of stairs, while Erysi carried ahead with no trouble, and this surprised her, because having taken on the ranger’s tasks had made her quite fit. Her visual field shimmered. Her heartbeat, now visible, sped to a flutter while her skin turned tingly and cold.

Erysi looked back. “Is something wrong?”

Farisa waved her hands. “I need water.”

“Sure. Of course.” Erysi handed her a canteen. “Rest?”

“No. We have to keep walking.”

As if an insect had flown up her nose and stung the center of her skull, searing pain erupted behind each eye, and light became intolerable, as if she had fallen into the sun. She walked blind, eyes shut, arms outstretched.

“You're worrying me,” Erysi said.

“I know what it is,” Farisa said. “It’s not...”

She was, in truth, frightened. Her nerves were burning black. A spreading sense of ruin had conquered her head. Her spine seemed to be twisting in place, turning itself into a spiral that would break loose at any time. Orange lights like spots of fresh fire appeared in the distance. Her skin, once cold and clammy, now burned. She tried to scream, but a hoarse rasp was the only sound she could emit. Erysi handed her a canteen, and she tried to drink water, but her throat seized shut and she could not swallow.

Farisa pointed. Guide me that way.

Erysi took Farisa’s hand and tugged her arm. “I’m with you.”

To distract herself, she counted her footsteps in Lyrian. Etta, wy, ter, rosz, bez, hala…. Once she could breathe, she said the numbers aloud. “Wyetz-hala, wyetz-sio, wyetz-kaya.” She tasted bile. She stumbled, and would have been unable to walk in a straight line without Erysi’s guidance. “Zohn-teretz-nay, zohn-rholetz, zohn-rholetz-etta…”

“Be careful. There are a lot of rocks here.”

“Right,” Farisa said. Wyzohn-sioletz-ter. Wyzohn-sioletz-rosz. The pain in her spine was gone, and her headache was fading. Wyzohn-sioletz-bez. Two hundred and seventy-five steps. “We are almost past it.” She pointed to the wide trunk of an uprooted elm tree. “We can rest there.”

Erysi led Farisa through the brush and helped her sit down. Farisa, seated and hunched on the dead bole, drank as much water as she could, then rubbed her eyes until they stopped stinging.

“You really are a mage,” said Erysi.

“It’s not something I would lie about.”

“Was that the White Marquessa?”

“Blue Marquessa, and no.”

“So...?”

“Do me a favor.” Farisa pointed back the way they had come. “Do you see those flat shrubs? Go over there and tell me if it’s flowering.”

Erysi went out to look at it. She called back, “Little purple flowers?”

“That would be,” Farisa yelled. “You can come back.” When Erysi returned, she said, “That was blackrue.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“To you, not at all.” In fact, blackrue had been used as a fertility tonic in the Castle Age and, although ineffective, had done no harm except to the tastebuds. “To a mage, it can be.”

“Do you want me to go rip it out?”

“No,” said Farisa. “Except to me, it’s harmless, and I know where it is now, so I won’t come back. In this drought, I’m glad to see that something is flowering.”

Erysi stopped and looked at Farisa with a bemused smile. “A mage. A real one. There’s so much about you that I don’t know.”

Farisa smiled back. “I’m sure there’s a lot about you that I don’t know.”

Erysi’s fingernail jabbed the scar on Farisa’s left shoulder. “How’d you get this?”

Farisa knocked her hand away and stood up. “Come on. We’ve got a long way to go.”

#

She caught a whiff of woodsmoke. She doubted her senses, because people rarely came this far from campus, but Erysi smelled it too, and by walking in its direction, they came upon three students who did not yet know they were there.

Erysi said, “What do you think they’re up to?”

“Nothing good,” Farisa said. The irony of Cait Forest, with its hidden lakes and western pine barrens, was that almost no one cared much for the outdoors. The ninety miles of hikeable trails went mostly unused; her cabin might as well have been a day’s ride away. She had always hoped, when discovering other people out here, to find people who enjoyed nature and exploration but, almost always, mischief of some kind was being concealed.

The ranger adjusted her hat. “How do I look?”

“Ready to wrestle a bear,” Erysi said with a naughty smile.

“Let’s hope nothing comes to that.”

As they approached, silently in case there would be need for evidence to make a disciplinary case, they found two girls and a boy, seated around a firepit. The girls were first-years who still looked like children. The sun was shining and it was not the least bit cold, so there would be no need for a fire, but the boy had set one, perhaps to prove to them that he knew how to do it.

Standing behind the boy with crossed arms, Farisa cleared her throat.

He did not respond. Instead, he added another twig to the illicit fire.

Farisa stepped in front of them. “Do you see the flag over there? The red one?”

One of the girls said, “I do.”

“I’m asking him.” Farisa squatted, to reach his eye level. “Sir, I raised that big red banner two hours ago. You should have been told in your first week that it is called a... what?”

The boy, not looking at her, sneered.

“I am speaking to you. The big red flags, raised this morning all over campus. What are they called, sir?”

One of the girls said, “Fireban.”

“She pays attention.” Farisa stood back up, sure to keep the boy in her shadow. “I have seen you on campus before. I know that you are in your second year. Has the Cait Forest education been wasted on you? Which word are you having trouble with, fire or ban?”

Farisa kicked ash over the boy’s creation, putting it out.

He stood up. She noticed he was almost a foot taller than she was.

“We’re sorry, Miss Ranger,” said one of the girls.

“Good,” said Farisa. “We’ll make this a warning, alright? Next violation is a hundred-grot fine.” The booked amount was ten, but the purpose of such fines was to alert parents, who wouldn’t notice a small amount if it went missing. “After that, it isn’t up to me, but expulsion is a real possibility.”

The boy stepped closer. “You can’t talk to me that way.”

Farisa replied, “You think so?”

“My father’s an Executive. He’s a Z-4. I can have him make sure you never work again.”

Farisa made a hand gesture suggesting inadequacy of size. The girls laughed. “You know, I work for the headmistress, not the Global Company.”

“My father runs the entire—”

“I do not give one sack of dogshit about your father.” Farisa forced herself to hold eye contact with this wretched boy. He was the first to look away. “We have been in drought for close to a year. A forest fire is bad enough, but out here it’s all prairie grass. On a windy day today, it would catch up with you before you got back to campus. No fires. I fucking mean it.”

The boy rolled his eyes, then walked away.

The girls looked at Farisa, as if about to issue an apology, but followed the boy. When they caught up with him, he put one arm around each.

“They have no sense of self-respect,” Farisa said.

“They’re young,” said Erysi.

“It’s no excuse. Girls who take with boys like him get thrashed by their parents and, honestly, such cleaning of the world is sometimes a necessity.”

“That isn’t true, though.”

“He’s a lout.”

“He’s rich. These days, that trumps everything.”

Farisa scoffed. Erysi was right, of course. “We’re taking a detour.”

They followed a gravel path that ran downslope to a dried-out creek. One year ago, the water had been three feet high. Today, only a few puddles remained. Farisa filled a canteen in the deepest one.

“You can’t be that thirsty.”

“It’s not for me.” She looked back the way they had come. “Six-to-one odds, that little miscreant left us a parting gift. Today was probably the first time he’s ever had to take an order, the entitled Easthorn prick.”

“I’m an Easthorn,” Erysi said.

“You’re different. For you, it’s just where you’re from. Some of these people, they really bring it with them.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I’m so sick of these fucking....” Farisa smelled smoke. She growled as she hurried to the site. “See, Erysi? I’m right. He didn’t even wait ten minutes.”

On a triangle of yellow grass amidst three gravel trails, a knee-high fire danced. One gust could have turned this pissant flame into a raging grass fire. Farisa emptied the canteen, then stomped out the embers, then climbed an oak tree for a lookout, to be sure the boy hadn’t set more, then climbed down, twisting her ankle on the final hump.

She and Erysi had walked another thousand yards before she said anything. “What do you think would happen to this place if I weren’t around?”

Erysi said, with a nervous laugh, “It’d burn down. Like the rest of the world.”

#

They had climbed into the hills. The balance of sun and wind kept the temperature ideal. It was probably two thirty when they stopped to eat. Farisa had brought a pair of sandwiches, along with nuts and dried dates. The clear sky made it possible to see all of campus.

Erysi pointed. “Is that Mason Hall?”

“It is,” Farisa said.

“It looks so small right now.”

“Now you know why I spend so much time out here.”

A falcon flew over the Lepid River. Chimneys exhaled narrow smoke streams. A steep limestone cliff was behind them.

“Farisa,” said Erysi.

“What?”

“I.... There’s been so much on my mind. Thank you.”

A brown spider scrambled across a rock, but Farisa did not point it out.

“How long do you think you’ll live here?”

“Forever,” said Farisa. “No such thing, I know, but I can’t see why I would ever leave.”

A high puff of cloud partially covered the sun, and the wind picked up speed.

“We should get moving. It is still March, and we are in the mountains.”

They climbed into the pine barrens. This was Farisa’s favorite part of Cait Forest, for its overwhelming wildness. Trees lacked the manicured symmetry of their campus cousins, but made up for it in size. The soil was reddish and woody, and there were still sizable quartz rocks, the kind that students collected to use as paperweights or door stoppers, that no one had taken.

“You see those?” Farisa pointed at a field of fly traps. “They’re actually carnivorous.”

Erysi chuckled. “I forgot to bring steak.”

“They eat insects.”

“Gross.”

“The soil’s nitrogen-poor, so they’ve learned how to trap and digest small animals. Given all the eating of plants we do, it seems fair.”

The highest point on this trail was a wooden footbridge. There was no need to use it today, because the river it crossed had turned into a bed of dust. Erysi was the first to spot the metal object, gleaming in the sun.

“What do you think that is?”

“I’m not sure.” Farisa hopped over the bridge and walked toward it. “It looks like a—”

She looked back to see if Erysi was still following her.

“—and that’s exactly what it is.”

Farisa bent down to pick it up.

Erysi’s face whitened and she stepped back.

“It won’t kill you for looking at it,” Farisa said.

“You shouldn’t. Tell the r—”

“I am the ranger, for now. Remember?” She opened the revolver’s chamber. “Two rounds still in the thing. No rust, so it couldn’t have been submerged for long. It was tossed here no more than one year ago.”

Erysi shook her head. “Let’s go tell—”

“It’ll be no issue. The headmistress knows me.”

Weapons were illegal in Cait Forest. A boy had been expelled in the Sixties for having an arquebus, centuries out of fashion and probably no longer operational, in his dorm room, and people still talked about it.

“Then throw the bullets away,” said Erysi.

“No. They might be a clue. Katarin might be able to figure out who this belongs to.”

“You’re a hundred percent sure she won’t toss you out of here for having it?”

“One hundred and five,” Farisa answered. “She’s one of the few people I trust.”

“Just remember to say that I never touched it.”

Farisa looked west to see the sun lowering over the mountains. “We should head back.”

They began to descend, using trails that were steeper and harder on the boots, but would get them to campus faster.

“No aquifer,” Farisa said. “I’m sorry we didn’t find anything today.”

“Don’t be,” said Erysi.

They descended below two thousand feet. Deciduous trees, still bare, were beginning to outnumber the conifers.

“I don’t understand why a gun would be in Cait Forest,” Erysi said.

“If it were a rifle, I’d suspect a poacher. It has been done before.”

“How long ago?”

“Fifty years. So few people ever get into this place.” Although the concept of a kasa seemed absurd, even to Farisa, illegal entry happened so rarely, due to Cait Forest’s natural barriers and its location, that its frequency could be counted by historians. “I wish right now I knew more about guns, though.”

Erysi kicked a rock off the trail and it tumbled down the ridge.

“Do you think it’s Company issue?”

“It probably belongs to some idiot first-year,” said Erysi. “He brought it here to show it off to shi friends, then realized how much trouble it would cause if anyone reported him, so he got rid of it in the most remote place he could think of.”

“Probably. That’s probably it. I don’t know what I was so worked up about.”

They continued descending. There was probably an hour left before sunset—the mountains could make it hard to tell—before Farisa heard a sound that struck her, for an instant, as impossible. “Stop.”

Erysi did.

“Do you hear that?”

Erysi put her chin on Farisa’s shoulder and tried to match her gaze. “What? Where?”

“Over there.” Farisa pointed to a rocky shelf a hundred yards off. The increasing presence of moss, as they walked toward it, suggested humidity, and the sound grew louder. In a ravine, they found a stream fed by an underground spring that ran clean over soft loam and colorful pebbles. “That’s it. There it is.”

“Thank the gods,” Erysi said. “My feet were really starting to hurt.” She took her shoes off and waded in.

Farisa looked around, to be triple sure no one (at least, no man) was watching, before she also removed her hiking boots and socks. The water’s chill bit hard at first, but once she was knee-deep, the current relaxed her and she could forget, for a moment, the firebans and the disobedient boy and the enigmatic revolver she had found up in the mountains.

“It feels amazing. Doesn’t it, Erysi?”

“It’s stupid cold, actually.” Erysi shivered. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m getting out.”

“No, stay.” Farisa grabbed Erysi’s small hand; she could feel the other girl’s heart, beat by beat, fingertip to fingertip, skin on skin. Farisa stepped toward Erysi, imagining the play of their lips together, the scent of the nape of Erysi’s neck, the gentle squeezing embrace in which her hands would go Erysi’s blouse, and then...

A bush rustled.

Erysi mouthed, “What the...?”

Farisa nodded.

Erysi left the stream, rubbed her feet to dry them off, and put her shoes on.

“Mine too, please.”

Farisa put her boots on, sockless—because nothing felt worse than soggy socks, and she still had two miles to walk—in the cold water.

“You really can’t stand the thought of a man seeing your feet?”

“The bottoms,” Farisa said. “The top of the foot, no one cares. Lorani women can wear sandals. I mean, I wouldn’t, but—”

“It sounds inconvenient.”

“That is probably the point.”

A groundhog ran away from them and up the trail. “Was it that?”

“No,” Farisa said. “The sound was high. If it isn’t an adult deer, it’s probably a person.”

“We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

"We don't know—Never mind."

They continued to search, checking every vantage point that had a clear view of the stream or from which one would have been able to identify the women in it, before jointly taking stock of the darkening sky and deciding that the issue, though it would try Farisa’s nerves, was not urgent.

“Could this be a clue?” Ten yards from where they had left the trail, Erysi found a pink ribbon entangled at neck height in an arrowwood bush. She ran her finger along it, to straighten it out. “Holy shit.”

Farisa came to her. “What?”

“Feel it.”

The material between Farisa’s fingertips was smoother than spring rain. “It’s nice.”

“Nice?” Erysi held the ribbon up to the wan western light. “This is blood silk. It’s worth at least a thousand grot.”

“One thousand, for a teenage girl’s hair ribbon?”

Erysi nodded. “Can I keep it?”

“It isn’t mine,” Farisa said.

Erysi tied the stridently pink ribbon into her hair. The contrast of hues made her blonde locks bright to the point of being stark, and Farisa no longer found herself, as they walked alongside each other, wanting to look. The young woman had been perfect before; now she was overtouched. Erysi no longer struck Farisa’s eye as a living girl, but as something like a figure in a portrait, the work of a hand that had turned to dust five hundred years ago.

The sun was half an hour set, and Farisa’s arms were cold, and the wind’s howl had become repetitive and unpleasant, by the time they got back to campus.