Three days had passed since Qaelet; December 18. Saito’s ancient memories had given them enough confidence to discover the edible berries, nuts, and fungi of this new world. The novelty of flavors and increasing lushness, as they gained elevation, put them at ease, although Farisa still struggled nightly for sleep. The forty dead eyes—human eyes, they had all been human once—had never fully vanished from her mind, and she doubted they would ever let up.

Still, every day brought new miles to make, and motion was kind. Walking—and foraging, and scouting for water—had become so routine, she dreaded the boredom she might feel if freed of the obligation.

As they set camp, Claes leveled his theodolite to take a reading. Andor had repaired it, fixing all the tiny deviations introduced by the jerks and jounces of travel, so they could read their latitude to the arcsecond.

“We’ll cross the equator tomorrow morning,” he said.

That evening, they ate wild cabbage that tasted like cauliflower, cooked with a last flask of olive oil that had been saved for an occasion like this. Eric and Mazie mixed brown sugar into flour and made a dessert cake in a cast-iron pot oven; it came out better than well enough. In the back of their lone husker wagon, Farisa found a bag of roasted coffee they’d forgotten about, so she ground the beans with a stone and they brewed some. They sat, alert, around the campfire for a long time, as if it were their first night together and all tales would be fresh.

She had never told them what had truly happened on the night of April 25–26, and she was not sure she ever would. Did it matter, at this point? The Monster had never existed, and also truly had—but to those who would never know Ilana Harrow or Erysi Brune, such details were unimportant. The rest of the journey, though, was a fair topic of conversation. They spoke of Muster and Portal and Lethe Tell as if all this had happened in a distant time and realm.

A midnight astronomical measurement confirmed their coordinates as equatorial. The men went to bed, but Farisa and Mazie, neither of whom had coffee in some time, and who had therefore lost all resistance, stayed up. The topic all night had been memory, so it came naturally for Farisa to inquire about Mazie’s state of it.

“July and August, I have solid.” Mazie laughed. “I remember all those dry, overpriced towns. I remember Portal. I can almost picture Switch Cave, though I’m not sure if that’s what I was anticipating it would look like, or what it actually did.”

“It was dark,” Farisa said.

“That, I could have figured out on my own.”

“I’m saying there probably isn’t much of a difference.” She watched the campfire dance. “I wish there was more I could do for you.”

“Were,” Mazie said. “Subjunctive. You wish there were more you could do.”

Farisa laughed. Six months ago, they would have been on opposite sides of that one. “Give me a break. It’s twelve thirty in the fucking morning.”

“Is there a...?”

“A spell for it?” Farisa said. “No. It comes back or it doesn’t. Sadly, a lot often doesn’t.”

Mazie looked up at the stars. “Right.”

“Tell me this, though.” Farisa did not want to say too much; she knew she had the power to rewrite Mazie’s memories, but refused to do so. “This is going to sound like such a stupid question. Vain, even.”

“Well, then you must ask.”

“Do you find me attractive?”

Mazie’s eyes widened as if she were affronted. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

Farisa nodded. “I am.”

“You’re gorgeous. A right-on banger. Why?”

Farisa laughed. “Forget I asked. Really, it’s nothing.”

“Oh.” Mazie’s eyebrows knitted. “You’re asking if... No. No, I’m not. If I were to choose a woman, you’d be my first choice by a thousand miles.”

“A thousand.”

“I’m just not that way. Are you?”

“Say no more.” Farisa stood up. “I’m turning in for the night.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Maze.”

“Qaelet.” The others had all discussed what they had seen, but Farisa had shared her experiences only with Mazie. “It seemed to prey on this fear you had, after all this travel, that none of it had been real—that you had died, or were dying in Exmore, and that this entire journey was the final dream of a broken brain.”

Farisa nodded.

“So, I have to ask. How do you know—really know—that you’re here, not in Exmore or Qaelet or somewhere else, imagining all of this?”

Farisa laughed. “Mazie, come on.”

“It’s a valid question.”

“It is.” Farisa put her hands on Mazie’s warm, bare shoulders. “It is. I suppose it’s that I couldn’t have come up with you in my own head.”

#

The next morning, Farisa woke up late—almost eight o’clock—to find that Claes had performed more calculations to triple-check her double-checking of his own theodolite readings. Andor had fastened a spare wagon wheel to a fallen tree limb, set to click once each revolution. “You walk it like this,” he explained. “The equator is one hundred and thirty-seven clicks due south of where I’m standing right now.”

Saito gave her a compass. “This has been adjusted for the local magnetic deviance.”

Claes said, “We all agreed you should be the first to go.”

By the time they had packed up, it was well into the morning and the sun was hot on the skin. The equator passed without fanfare through a pale-green meadow with tiny yellow flowers. Purple mountains held up the distance on all four sides. To the southwest, tall pines crowded around a lake. Farisa would have been just as happy to cross the equator last, having never considered herself to be one for ceremony, but considered it fortunate to be out here on her own, with vegetation blocking the view below her calves.

Around the fortieth click, she stopped and waved her arms overhead.

“Mazie! Come with me.”

The woman’s wavy black locks bounced as she ran. “I don’t know why you’re so nice to me.”

Farisa shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

The women walked together. The wheel kept clicking.

“Autumn of the worlds,” Mazie said. “‘The sun fastens south.’”

Farisa added, “‘Blind children play at the river’s mouth.’”

“I used to love that poem.”

“Used to?”

“I wrote verse myself, which had the side effect for a while of making me unduly critical of everyone else’s. In Exmore, I was one of the better-known drum poets.”

“No shit.” Farisa looked at Mazie. “Yeah, I can see it. I bet you were good.”

“Well, I think I was.” In the sun, a strand of Mazie’s hair turned amber. “Let’s be honest, though. People see a girl like Mazie Naveed, they think ‘thief’ not ‘poet.’ Verse is one of those things I had to put away with age.”

“The opinions of that world no longer matter. You should start writing again.”

Mazie smiled. “Maybe.”

“How long has it been?”

“I stopped when I was twenty, twenty-one.”

“Twenty, twenty-one,” Farisa repeated. “My age.”

Mazie’s gaze followed a blue-headed songbird that crossed their path. “Right.”

Farisa stopped. “Shit.”

Mazie looked at Farisa. “Ya step in something?”

“No, I lost count of the clicks.” She looked back. “That stone was a hundred, so...”

“A hundred thirteen,” Mazie said.

“Just a few steps to go.”

#

On December 29, rain fell in cold, hard drops as they crossed a shark’s jaw of a mountain ridge. They had only come a hundred miles from the equator, due to rocky terrain and thick coniferous forest. In the clearings, ground grass was abundant but dull yellow, and the rare deciduous trees were dry-season bare.

“It’s freezing,” Mazie said.

“Aye.” Farisa’s breath condensed in front of her. “It really is.”

They had seen this kind of cold in the high mountains, from midnight to six in the morning, but here the temperature had remained at one flag, even though it was mid-afternoon. Their shivering unta required a blanket, and the husker struggled to keep her usual pace. They cut open Talyn’s sleeping bag to keep the animal dry. As they continued on a slow descent, the rain hardened and, a few miles on, turned to flurries that fell lazily from the gray sky.

Andor laughed. “The first time in my life I see snow, it’s here.”

“I didn’t think we were that high,” Saito said.

“We’re not,” Farisa said. “The natural snow line’s about twenty-four thousand feet, and we’re at half that.”

“Most of the trees are leafless, too,” said Mazie.

Eric said, “You told me the equator doesn’t have seasons.”

Farisa shook her head. “Not natural ones. What we have found here is... promising.”

Trees, as they went forward, became sparse along certain paths, suggesting the land had been cleared, and they reached an expanse of untouched snow across which they could see a barrier as long as the horizon, a brown wall that turned red when the sun flashed through cracks in the clouds, but they did not appreciate its immensity until—dusk had fallen by this time—they stood beneath it and found it taller than the highest trees. Seeing through the wall was impossible, as the gaps had been filled with dried mud.

“We do have provisions for cold weather,” said Claes. “Winter sleeping bags are near the front of the wagon. We’ll camp here tonight and, tomorrow, look for a way through this wall.”

At dinner, they huddled as close to the cooking fire as they could get. The clouds cleared and starlight gave the snow a blue sheen. The land’s quietude drew focus to the fire’s crackling.

Mazie asked Farisa, “Do you have an idea what this wall is, or who lives on the other side?”

“None,” she admitted. She had been sifting, in her mind, through all the possibilities she had read about, but nothing suggested there would be people here. “I suppose, if they want us to know who we are, we must wait for them to tell us.”

The next day was just as cold: at sunrise, minus-one. They followed the redwood wall, clinging close because the snow was less deep—only three inches here, as opposed to nearly a foot. Clouds came in around sunrise, dropped another inch of snow, and dispersed in the afternoon, when the upper level melted. The six of them were walking toward the setting sun when they found the gate.

Four times as high as a husker’s withers, with the upper jamb of the door frame curved slightly opposite a standard arch, the door proved as solid as the fence. There was no knob to pull on, and it would not be pushed.

Exhausted by cold, they fell asleep shortly after dark. By the time Farisa woke up the next morning, Claes and Eric had found a swift stream and caught a few fish. The white meat cooked unevenly in their meek campfire.

“We could probably climb that fence,” Mazie said. “Or burn it down.”

Farisa said, “If these people can induce seasons where none naturally exist, I suspect it is best not to offend them.”

“It's a thought, though.”

Eric said, “What if there’s nothing beyond it? What if we’ve—”

“Quiet,” Farisa said. She heard noises beyond the wall and walked toward it.

She entered the blue and could perceive, ten yards beyond the fence, that a boy and a girl, both with purple hair, were building a snow fortress. To learn their language, she tried to enter their minds, but either they had a native resistance or the skill of it, so she doubled over as if hit in the stomach.

No more than a minute later, a slat in the gate opened. The children looked the travelers over, then ran, screaming.

Andor shook his head. “We know there’s someone.”

“I picked up two words,” Farisa said.

Claes finished gutting a fish. “Is that so?”

“Their language and Lyrian have—must have—a common ancestor.”

“What were those words?” Mazie asked.

“They called us Ydenz-h’roxh.”

Mazie tilted her head. “That hardly sounds like it means ‘handsome motherfuckers.’”

“It sure doesn’t,” Farisa said.

“Then what does it?”

“It isn’t polite.”

“After all we’ve endured,” Claes said, “I think we can handle a few impolite words.”

“Ydenja is Lyrian for ‘winter’ or ‘ice’—as in, ‘ydenstone’—but also a metonym for north, and h’roxh must be hurkh, or ‘orc’. ‘North-orcs.’”

Saito spread his feet in the snow. “How do we convince them we’re not orcs?”

Farisa looked up at the fence. “To them, I suspect we are.”

“The nearby river,” said Claes, “has more than enough fish.”

Later that afternoon, the gate opened again. A man in a brown tunic stepped out, followed by a woman in a blue-green dress. It was impossible to guess how old they were. Their ears were pointed and, to people who had been traveling for eight months, they seemed impossibly clean and their clothing impractical.

Farisa spoke in Lyrian, as it would be better to transmit words imperfectly than not at all. “We are refugees from the Far North. We are cold and tired. We seek your protection. We will share what little we have, including knowledge of northern geography, culture, and science.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The man and woman spoke to each other, nodding their heads. They returned to their side of the gate and locked the door.

“Did they understand anything?” Saito asked.

Farisa sighed. “I don’t think so.”

They all looked at each other: Andor at Farisa, Farisa at Mazie, Mazie at Eric, Eric at Claes and Saito in alternation. Some heads lowered; the ground was white and the wind stirred it up.

#

That evening, clouds returned and more snow fell. Garet’s thermometer read minus two at midnight, and the temperature didn’t improve much after dawn, as the sky whitened. Their down sleeping bags kept their bodies warm enough; doubled-up socks and gloves protected their extremities. Around ten in the morning, they ran out of firewood and had to collect some.

Mazie split a log in half. “Fuck, it’s cold.”

Farisa laughed. “You should see Tevalon. This is March weather up there.”

“Remind me to visit that place never.”

Farisa knocked settled snow off her collar. “Aren’t you part Vehu?”

“One-eighth.”

“We should go together someday.”

Mazie looked up. “We’ll have to go in the summer.”

Wolves howled in the woods.

Mazie cut another log, then pointed at the fence. “These people better credit us our restraint. Switch Cave and the Ivory Ashes didn’t stop us. I lost a fucking hand, and I’m still on my feet. It is out of sheer respect that we heed a wooden fence.”

“It is a tall fence,” Farisa said. “In any case, we’ll need their help, unless we want to sit here in the cold for forty years. It’ll take time for us to trade enough knowledge—language would be a start—to trust one another.”

Mazie stopped and looked at Farisa. Knocking a lock of hair from her brow, she said, “Did you try to—?”

“Enter minds? I did. No luck, other than them knowing we’re here.”

Saito peeled a root vegetable. He had carved out all of its sprouts; the quantity of edible flesh that remained was disappointing.

“I wonder if this wall has another gate,” Andor said. “We’re freezing our asses off standing still, so it might be worth a walk.”

“I agree,” Farisa said as she put on a second jacket. “I’ll go along.”

“I can go on my own.”

“Never. We don’t know what’s out here. We might all die, but nobody dies alone. The rest of you can stay back, in case the people on the other side return.”

Claes nodded. “We’ll have plenty to do.”

“We’ll be back before dark,” Andor said.

Having come from the east, with a day’s worth of miles in that direction already observed and nothing found, Farisa and Andor decided to head west. The forest became thicker as they went; after five miles, the trees were so close to the wall, their roots were surely under it.

“I wish I had brought a scarf,” Andor said. “I didn’t know how cold cold gets. You must be used to it.”

“Tevalon?” Farisa laughed. “Yeah, you could say so. It’s like this from the tenth of November to the fifth of April. You put on a whole suit of armor to leave the house. It takes five extra minutes to go anywhere.”

“We’re familiar with jackets in Salinay.”

Farisa stepped over a fallen log. “I’m sure that three hours of winter gets brutal.”

He chuckled. “You learn to deal with it.”

The wind picked up, so they didn’t talk much over the next few hours.

Andor stopped. “We’ve come about seven miles. It’s been a good hike, but we seem to have found nothing. Shall we turn around?”

“Let me take a last look.” Farisa spotted a tree fit for climbing, a massive chestnut whose thick branches rose well over the height of the wall. Up there, she could see for at least a dozen miles in all directions, and the barrier continued, a ribbon through dense forest, uncut anywhere. The trees were less thick on the southern side of the wall, but no signs were indicative of how to reach the people who lived there.

“Nothing,” she said as she descended the tree.

“So shall we go back?”

“We shall. She added, with a shrug, “We tried.”

“We did,” Andor said.

“I wish we knew...” She did not finish her sentence. She could not express her sense of loss at having come so far to possibly find so little, but she did not want to reify it with complaint, because they might in time come around. What, if given audience with these people, would she ask? She kicked snow against the wall, and then they turned around and walked.

The wind had changed direction and was blowing twenty knots against them. Between the whistling sounds and the cold, they found they had not much to say, and had walked one or two of the miles back to camp when Andor broke the silence.

“This may not be the place we stop either.”

“I worry so.” Farisa stepped on an ice crust. “It would be a waste, to come this far and be stopped by a wall. I have nowhere else in the world to go.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The Company will come after me. They already have.”

“If we had to return to the old world, Salinay will admit you on my word.”

“Salinay is right on the ocean.”

“It is, but the Black Mountains have never been conquered. The university has moved itself into the hills before, for decades at a time. It can be done again.”

“I’m sick of hiding.” Farisa stopped as an image flashed into her mind of Exmore’s graffiti. Farisa Will Arrive. She had, but somewhere else and nowhere. “Anyway...”

The snow here was crunchier under their boots.

“I wanted to say something, Andor. It’s about Mazie.”

“What about her?”

“Are you fond of her?”

“Of course, I am.” Andor stopped. “Wait, are you asking if—?”

Farisa’s fingers tugged her own hair, pulling at roots. “I know that look in her. She’s—”

Andor pulled his hands from his pockets. “I swear the thought has never crossed my mind. I have no designs.”

“Of course,” Farisa said. They continued walking, hurrying their steps so they would reach camp before dark. “Of course you have no designs, and you should have none, knowing our history, but it also seems unlikely that she will ever remember it and, if she comes on your own to love you...”

“I couldn’t do that to you.”

“I want you to feel that you can—and maybe should. If she grows to love you, please love her back.”

Andor laughed. “You mean this?”

Farisa looked around herself, as if something in the frosty afternoon forest’s severe beauty could settle the balance of conflicting emotions. “I do mean it. I will always feel something for her, but there’s no reason the memories she has of our time together will return. I have... I have heard the women in Salinay are beautiful.”

“They are.”

They walked the next few steps in snowy silence before Andor continued.

“Farisa.”

“What?”

“You’re one of the good ones.”

Farisa, never skilled in receiving compliments, put her hands in her jacket pockets and looked up at the gray sky.

“We’re going to find something here,” she said, a quarter mile closer to camp. “It is no small thing to enchant a climate over a span of twenty miles or more. We could find the power, in this new world, to protect what is worth saving in our old one. Salinay. Tevalon. The Va’ala communes. The Yatek, as the Vehu move in…”

“Cait Forest.”

“If it’s ever restored.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“This is not the end of our journey,” Farisa said, with a confidence she could not justify but that felt good in her throat as she spoke. “We could win our world back from the Global Company. It would be like crushing the Polar Ocean slave trade all over again.”

Andor smiled. “It’s a lot to run through a mind.”

“I suppose. Today, though, it’d be enough to be on the other side of that fence, with a hot bowl of pumpkin soup.”

#

Saito had dug into the ground, finding the temperature warm enough to prove this place did have a summer. Delicious red carrots, in addition to the fish and berries, suggested a temperate climate with a growing season. Food was not abundant here, relative to the caloric demands of staying warm, but they would not starve.

Two hours or so after nightfall on January 5, Farisa heard a rustling outside. The others were asleep, beleaguered by cold from having, even in coats and sleeping bags, been surrounded by it. Winter air had always been tolerable; the inescapable wetness of melting snow, inevitably attracted to one’s person when doing anything outside, had been more of an issue.

She crept out of the tent, hoping not to disturb whatever had caused the noise, and saw the same dark-haired woman. Alone this time, she carried a copper-framed hexagonal lantern with leafy trim.

Farisa, realizing the woman had seen her, and having read that to show one’s palms was a universal signifier of harmlessness, removed her gloves and did so.

The woman walked toward her, making a hand gesture that was unfamiliar but seemed to be some kind of request.

“You want of our books?” Farisa tried Lyrian. “Ksulae?”

The woman’s brown eyes glowed green.

Claes asked from inside the tent, “What’s happening out there?”

“She wants to get a sense of our language,” Farisa explained. “I suspect they’ve been listening to us for a few days, and have a grasp of our phonemic range, but are struggling to split our sounds into words.”

The woman smiled.

Farisa looked through their possessions. She found a novel in the back crate of their husker wagon. The elfin woman opened a page to point at a word. Farisa sounded it out. They did this a few dozen times; then, the woman would attempt to make the sound and Farisa would say it back correctly.

The woman touched her own elbow, which Farisa understood to be a gesture like a bow, then made the two-fingered “request” sign.

“You want to borrow the book? Cha nessa ksulo? Yva sen.”

Farisa handed the novel to the woman, who took it and went back to her side of the gate, leaving the night again silent. Farisa returned to the tent.

Mazie rolled over. “What did you give her?”

“I think it was one of the Teller novels.”

Mazie chuckled. “Some choice.”

Farisa got back into her sleeping back, facing Mazie. “It’s what I first grabbed. It’s fucking cold.”

Mazie smiled, then went back to sleep.

When Farisa woke the next morning, she was covered in sweat and found the tent quite hot. She stepped outside to find the others, barely awake but warm. Snow was falling, but the grass around them was bare and dry, as a bubble of warmth had been set around them. The unta, no longer shivering, showed an appetite for the first time in days.

A small table had been set nearby with biscuits and fruit as well as a sheet of yellow paper that read, More books?

“I see no harm in giving them everything we’ve got,” Farisa said to Claes.

She imagined this society being like the Library of Tevalon during the Second Bronze Age—every manuscript to come through Black Harbor was confiscated and duplicated, but they were always returned, and often repaired, as soon as the copies had been made. Farisa gathered all of their written material, excluding private journals: novels, travel guides, A History of Wytchcraft, 6500 to 8250. The books lay on the dry table all day. The next morning, they were gone.

On January 9, the woman returned, along with the tall, thin man they had seen before.

“I am Saloma,” she said.

“I am Terazin,” said the man as he removed his hat, showing pointed ears and a bald head.

“I’m Farisa.”

“Farisa,” Saloma said. “That’s a pretty name. Are you this group’s leader? I understand it is essential to get that sort of thing right among your kind.”

She pointed. “He is. His name is Claes.”

Terazin said to Saloma, “For this, you probably want the girl.”

“We don’t keep secrets,” Farisa said. "Speak to us as a group.”

“Very well,” Terazin said. “You’ll find all your books in your living quarters.”

“I’m amazed you learned our language so fast.”

Saloma blushed. “Reading is the only thing Macski do quickly.”

“Macski. That’s what you call yourselves?”

“Macska, singular; Macski, plural.”

Mazie said, “Call us anything but orcs.”

Terazin nodded. “Zidava hrukh. Anything but orcs. We’ve prepared a house for you.”

Claes and Saito packed up camp, silent and almost befuddled at first, but starting to smile and then laugh as they did so. There had been joyous moments in their rugged lifestyle, but everyone had tired of cold-water fish and huddled sleeping bags. Eric and Andor coaxed the animals, clinging to the bubble of heat the Macski had set, into reluctant movement beyond it. Saloma opened the redwood gate, and Terazin hung back to close it after them. Saloma, as they walked, rubbed her ungloved hands together.

“Farisa, I’d like to talk about Jakhob’s Gun.”

Farisa laughed. “I hope you don’t take that for our people’s highest literary accomplishment.”

“We don’t.” Saloma pointed to a violet-tufted golden cardinal that crossed their path. “We watch the other worlds, North and South, from afar. We have a trove of your world’s literature, though I cannot tell you how we get it. Our collection is only fifty years out of date.”

“Have you read Tales of the Sixteen Winds?”

“Your mind is the place you make it,” Saloma said. “Rhazyladne.”

Terazin came forward to speak to Claes. “I’m afraid your animals are no longer good for travel. We will keep them in perfect comfort.”

“Ouragan stays with me,” Farisa insisted.

Saloma said, “Is that the name of your cat?”

“It is.”

“It’s a pretty fucking name,” said Saloma.

Eric snickered, Andor laughed, and Mazie almost broke out in tears.

“Did I say something funny?”

Farisa said, “You might want to avoid our word ‘fuck.’ It’s a curse word.”

“Your people put curses on words?”

“Oh, no. It’s not literally cursed. You’re just not supposed to use it.”

“I’m confused.” Saloma’s pace slowed. “If no one’s supposed to use it, how does anyone know what it means?”

Mazie looked back. “Because people do use it, all the fucking time.”

Farisa glared back. “Don’t corrupt them.”

“Your language has put it to so many uses. What does it mean?”

“A thousand things and one,” Farisa said.

Mazie said, “The one is the fun one.”

Farisa put her hands together. “It’s not always a bad word. Sometimes it’s a great word. It is... do you have a notion of profanity in your language?”

“We do not,” Saloma said.

“I suppose it’s an advanced topic, profanity. I was a language teacher, so I studied this sort of thing. Profanity is a subset of a language of words considered severely disreputable, and that develop a set of purposes including catharsis, emphasis, sometimes an indication of aggression, but more often a sign of using an informal register—conviviality, in other words. Oh, and sometimes the words are used for cadence alone. It is their subtle contextuality that makes these words so interesting—adept use shows the ability to master the volatility and variance of language so that a speaker may, if she chooses—”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Saloma said. “A bad word? A good word? Hard to fucking tell.”

Mazie and Claes laughed. Farisa flashed them an annoyed smile.

Terazin said, “Your margin notes in Jakhob’s Gun suggest you were looking for a coded message.”

“We were,” Farisa said.

Saloma said, “We have found it.”

Farisa stopped. “You have?”

Saloma put a hand on Farisa’s wrist. “We’ll discuss that tomorrow.”

“Be careful,” Terazin said as he looked at Farisa. “To Macski, ‘tomorrow’ can mean ‘in ten years.’”

They came over the crest of a hill. Saloma pointed to a four-story mansion made of reddish fieldstone with arched windows, triangular crenellations, and a widow’s walk on the third floor. Farisa found its blend of medieval and modern elements impossible to place in time—it was as if an antique world had come into the present day, but with a graceful saunter rather than a blunt, earth-turning march.

She asked, “Our room is in there?”

Terazin chuckled. “The whole house is yours. However, the bottom floor gets chilly this time of year. We’ll fix the steam pipes soon, but our mechanic lives in Oran-Yi.”

When they got to the mansion, Saloma opened the double front doors. Farisa found the ground floor more than warm enough—the fireplace had been started some time ago.

Farisa said, “I meant to ask about your weather—your seasons.”

“We have no natural seasons, of course.”

“We are a very old people,” Terazin added. “We found it easier to adjust the climate and produce to our bellies than the other way around.”

Saloma used one lit candle to light another. “In the center of our province, it’s temperate all year round. Out here on the fringe, seasons move like a clock. Right now, it is summer down south, autumn in the east, winter here, and spring in the west. In three months, it will be spring here and autumn in the south. You can see any flowers or foliage you’d like, any time of year, if you know where to go.”

A young Macski girl arrived to remove their packs. Her hands hovered over snow the travelers had tracked in despite all efforts not to do so. It evaporated, leaving no puddles.

Saloma said, “I’m sure you have many questions to ask us. We’ll make time for those, but today, you shall rest.”

Terazin added, “There are, we have learned, dangers rising of a kind the world has not seen for thousands of years. Consider this comfort and our protection freely given—we do not have the concept of money that you use—but not fully free. We expect you, all of you, to participate in our defense, should the time come as I suspect it soon will. However, if I understand your motivations, there is much common cause among us.”

“Worry not on this today,” Saloma said. “We will see you soon, and we will explain everything. Let us now eat.”

They had a light lunch of berries, spring greens, and honeyed cornbread while a few small Macski—they appeared to be children, but it was hard to tell their ages—moved the travelers’ possessions into the residence. When it came time for Terazin and Saloma to depart, Farisa stepped forward and opened her arms, but the Macski did not seem to hug—indeed, they were not tactile at all.

“Thank you, Saloma.”

“If you need anything, know that we live down the road. Ours is the green cottage. The paths are lit at night, so come any time.”

Eric went upstairs to choose a bedroom. Andor found a kettle and started making coffee while Claes examined the kitchen and started asking the others what they wanted him to cook tonight. Several servants were in the house, but the self-sufficient habits of the Road never died. Mazie looked over bookshelves that had been stocked with Ettasi classics in volumes printed hundreds of years ago, all in perfect repair. Saito spotted a winter vegetable garden behind the house, and decided to see what was growing out there. Farisa unlaced her boots and walked in wool socks up to the second floor, where she sat on a window seat and rested.

So much had happened, and so much had been endured, and so much had been lost, that she felt every instant of civilization here deserved uncompromised attention, so she let her mind clear there for a moment. The house was full of a dry, moderate heat; the snow-covered world outside, white as fresh paper.

She heard Saloma’s and Terazin’s voices, as they had not gone far, but instead had stopped on a clay footpath to the main road. Farisa could, by the similarities between the Macski language and Lyrian, discern some of what they were saying.

“Saloma, I agree with you, but Revah still feels we should not have admitted them at all.”

Saloma followed an Ettasi loanword by “him.” She added, “He and his superstitions have never served us well.”

“If he learns what power the north-orcs—”

“Humans.”

“—intend to acquire, he will say, ‘Kill them all.’ He will not care that there are a billion of them. Such has been done before.”

“We can prove they are not all bad. We have six of them, and they did not try to harm us once. They did not even try to scale our wall. And they do have power—they even have her.”

“They do,” Terazin said. “Now we do. So, when do you plan to tell her about her father?”

“Tomorrow.”