"I will never dishonor you! Because I will never dishonor myself!"

Now he smiled. "I am rebuked."

Her cheeks were hot, and her heart was hotter. She was still not quite sure what threat she faced because in most ways Anji was still a mystery. Father Mei would have hit her, and her mother and aunt would have pinched her arms and ears until she cried. It had been easier to fit herself into the walls they shaped than to endure slaps and pinches, but she had passed through the gate and survived the ghost lands. She was not the same person any longer. She refused to go back.

"I want to be trusted," she said softly, "because it dishonors me if I am not trusted."

His gaze remained level. He was no longer angry, but rather measuring and perhaps a little curious, intrigued yet not at all amused. "Honor is all we have. You are right, Mai. I must trust you."

She nodded in reply. That was as far as she could go. She could not trust her voice, and turned aside gratefully as O'eki brought the horses forward.

LATE IN THE afternoon, the wagons rolled into a meadow already fitted for encampments. A covered cistern opened through a series of cunning traps into a trough suitable for watering stock. A spacious corral built out of logs allowed them to turn out many of the beasts. Posts offered traction for lead lines where horses could be tethered. Pits rimmed with stones marked off six fire circles, all of which had iron stakes set in place to hang kettles or cauldrons over flames. Hired men and slaves set to work to raise camp and get food ready.

She made her way on a dirt path that cut through a thick stand of pipe-brush and under an airy grove of swallow trees to the crude pits set back against a ravine. Some kind soul had woven screens out of young pipe-brush stalks and pounded and nailed arm braces against the steep slope for ease of use. There was a great deal of coming and going and, remarkably, a stone basin cooled by trickling water flowing down through an old, halved stalk of mature pipe-brush. As she washed her hands, she noticed a small structure off to one side that almost blended into the foliage. She walked over, Priya and Sheyshi trailing after, but thought better of mounting the steps when she saw it was a shrine. She had been raised in the path taught by the Merciful One. In the empire, she knew, the priests served Beltak, calling him the Shining One Who Rules Alone even though he was only a harsher aspect of the holy one all folk worshiped.

This altar had no walls, only green poles with the shapes of leaves carved into them, a tile roof painted green, and a green rug laid over a plank floor. The rug was woven of thick, stiff grass-like blades as long as her arm, and it had begun to wear away where folk had trodden on it. A walking staff stood within, propped at an angle, so tall that it fit inside the peaked roof. A stubby log sat on its end in one corner, with a bouquet of withered flowers discarded on top.

"I'm surprised the flowers haven't blown away, or been replaced with something fresh," she murmured to Priya. "Is there no bell or lamp?"

"This is no altar for the Merciful One," said Priya.

"I don't think it's a Beltak temple, either," said Mai.

"I see no god," whispered Sheyshi. With head bent, she eyed the shrine as she might a twisting snake whose dance can cause women to fall into a charmed and deadly sleep.

Folk were looking their way, faces obscured by twilight.

"Perhaps we're not meant to stand here," said Mai. "Let's go back."

Anji had staked out the central fire pit, and he stood near its flickering light speaking to the reeve as Mai walked up behind them. They were laughing, and did not see her.

"You are a lucky man, did you know that?" Joss was saying.

"It would be impolite to reply to such a question. If I knew, and said so, then it would seem I am boasting. If I did not, it would seem I am foolish."

The reeve laughed. "I am answered!" He turned, alert even before Anji was, and Anji turned, and saw Mai. Sheyshi scuttled away to help O'eki, who was wrestling with a steaming haunch of venison. Priya paused just outside the circle of firelight.

"Surely you are a fortunate man as well," said Mai, coming forward.

His smile remained easy, but his gaze retreated into itself, as though he were staring down a long straight track into a twilit distance whose landscape was forever veiled from mortal sight. "I am not married."

Day seemed to shift into night with the swiftness of a child whose mood can swing from joy to tears in an instant. She halted beside Anji, but she could not look away from the reeve.

"You have a shadow in your eyes," she said to the reeve.

He looked at Anji, and she looked at Anji, and the captain nodded, and the reeve spoke in a low voice as around them the camp settled into its evening routine of drinking, eating, song, and sleep.

"I gave up telling the tale years ago. It came at the beginning, when the shadows first began to reach into the land, in the north. She was the first one-the first reeve-slaughtered. That was on the Liya Pass. Twenty years ago. Where it all began, when outlaws and cursed greedy lords began hunting down the eagle clans. I still dream about her. I shouldn't have let her go alone. If I'd gone with her…" But he shook his head.

"What then?" she asked.

Anji remained silent, watching.

He shrugged, and offered her a wry smile that made her want to cry for his pain. "Most likely we'd both be dead. Her eagle was found. Not just dead, but mutilated."

She had a nasty, prickling feeling along her back, as if someone drew cold fingers laced with slivers of glass up and down her skin. "What of her?"

He shifted his gaze to the leaping flames, his head canted and jaw tight, and continued speaking. "Her body was never found, but we found her clothes, her boots, a belt buckle, her knife, items she carried in her pack…"The fire sparked as a soldier shoved a pair of branches into the flames. The reeve winced back from the flare, then caught himself and went on, although his voice seemed flatter and more distant. He might have been reciting from a scroll. "Her boot knife was found on a girl, one of the Devourer's hierodules. The girl had been stabbed in the heart. That girl's corpse lay there with the rest of the discarded gear. It was only her body we did not find, nor them who did it, as they had all abandoned the camp."

"She might not have been taken away with those who killed the other one?" Anji asked.

"We searched, but there was never any sign of her. No, she's dead. I knew it as soon as I saw what remained of Flirt-that was her eagle. A reeve doesn't survive her eagle's death. An eagle can survive through the lives of four or five reeves if it's particularly long-lived, like my good Scar, but for the other way, no. Better dead than no longer a reeve, so we say." His smile was a ghost's smile, without life, but he struggled with it and shook his head and said, "It still hurts. A few years later, bones were found in an unmarked grave up beyond that abandoned camp. Perhaps that was her, hidden because they feared our revenge. I try to leave it behind." He blew breath out through his lips and shook himself in the manner of a duck shedding water. "I keep thinking I have."

"I'm so sorry," said Mai, wiping away a tear. "What was her name?"

"Reeve Joss!" A voice hailed him from the darkness. "Best come see this!"

"Excuse me." Joss left.

"Every young man loses his first love," remarked Anji to Mai, "but most get back in the saddle and keep riding. He's tethered to one post."

"Is it fair to say so? You don't know what he's done in the years since, only that speaking the tale makes him sad. The storytellers in the marketplace would make a song out of it, like in the tale of the Rose Princess and the Fourteen Silk Ribbons. She ran off with her lover, and he left her by the riverside while he went into town to buy her silk ribbons, and she was eaten by a lion that had been sent to earth by a demon jealous of her beauty. Afterward he wore her bloodstained rags and went on pilgrimage to the fourteen holy temples, one for each ribbon he had bought for her, but he could not calm his heart and after all he turned back to seek revenge, but the demon seduced him and made him steal back the ribbons from each temple and. .. It's a terribly sad tale!" she finished indignantly, seeing that he was trying not to laugh. "He dishonored himself! What could be worse? There is a song, but it always makes me cry."