Zanja said that it must not happen at home, and so it must be done outside, and since they could not do fire magic without a fire, that meant it must happen before the rains began. Because the ravens no longer even offered weather reports, Norina kept an eye on the behavior of the local earth talents. Earth witches were rare, but every farmhold had people with earth talent, who, like J’han, had earned the reputation of knowing how to do things right, whose mundane advice about building and planting was often sought and always followed. When Norina noticed that the work of harvest had become frenetic, the four of them could delay their terrible act no longer.

The last day of Zanja’s life began with brilliant sunshine: a light that blinded them as they walked eastward, for the sun no longer rose quickly as it had during summer, and instead hovered along the horizon for half the morning. The four of them set forth in the dazzle of sunrise and stark, sweeping shadows that twisted away from the sideways lift of the sun. They were hailed from an apple orchard where battered baskets of red and green apples clustered under the yellowing trees, awaiting the wagon that would take them to the cider mill. Their pockets were filled with apples by the friendly, busy farmers, and later, a girl ran down from a dairy to give them a wedge of cheese and ask about the weather. Emil sighed under the burden of neighborliness, but Zanja crunched an apple as she walked and took the slender, beautiful blade out of her boot to cut them all pieces of cheese. She was as calm and remote as Norina had ever seen her and beneath the unruffled surface of her visage lay the drowned corpse of her vital mind.

Medric interrupted his anxious gabble to ask abruptly, “Where are the ravens?”

“Absent,” said Emil briskly, not even bothering to scan the sky or the tops of the picked apple trees they now passed. The sound of hammers making last‑minute repairs on a leaky roof was loud against the whining of the crickets.

Karis was making herself as remote in her way as Zanja was in hers, and both for the same reason. Only Norina called it heroism, and only to herself. To disturb the frail fabric of the fire bloods’ illusions would have been disastrous.

Emil showed them to the high place that he had in mind, where ancient oaks spread a vast canopy, and there was a wide, comforting vista: a long horizon, a brilliant stretch of sky. The busy, distant cider mill could be seen, tucked into the curve of a brightly shining stream. They distracted themselves with gathering wood, but once the fire was lit, distractions were no longer necessary–the momentum of the ritual took control of them.

Zanja obediently followed Norina into the shelter of a grove of saplings. There, among the lobed leaves edged with autumn’s bronze, she looked somberly upward, into the verdant shadows of one of the ancient trees. Norina followed her gaze, and thought she saw the hunched shape of a waiting owl. “Salos’a?” she asked, and Zanja gave a nod: the god that had made her a crosser of boundaries had come for her, to escort her soul across its final border. Norina looked narrowly at the waiting owl; it looked like an ordinary bird to her.

Norina said, “Your belongings connect you to this world, so you must give everything you’ve brought with you to be burned in the fire, including your clothing. And your hair.”

Along with the pieces of her clothing, Zanja silently handed Norina the little knife from her boot, and the battered pack of glyph cards that she carried in a pouch hung from her belt. Her fingers struggled with buttons as her gaze kept returning to the shadowy owl; she picked ineffectually at a knot; Norina finally knelt to undo her bootstraps for her. Zanja stood quiet among the leaves that twitched a bit in a passing breeze. Now, stripped of her Shaftali clothing, she had never looked so alien: thin and wild as a ferret, her dark skin covered with a patchwork of scars, with some of her warrior’s braids coming undone and her coarse black hair brushing the backs of her thighs. Norina gave her clothing that Emil had acquired somewhere: a rough, woolen tunic and baggy trousers, simple shoes, and leggings of goatskin with the hair still attached. But then Norina had to dress her, for Zanja simply stood like an addle‑pate, with the clothing falling from her hands.

Norina had done much planning, but that planning proved all but unnecessary. It was easy to hide Zanja’s discarded cards and knife in the leggings as she tied them around Zanja’s calves, and it was just as easy to tie a red tassel onto one of the braids and then tuck it down into the loose neck of the tunic. And it was easy to turn her back on Zanja, and fill the empty card pouch with oak leaves, and lay onto the tangle of discarded clothes the knife Norina always carried, a fraternal but not identical twin to Zanja’s, though Emil and Medric would not know the difference. In a lifetime shaped by truth and lies, rarely had Norina’s deceptions been so simple.

Norina gathered up Zanja’s clothing and the substitute belongings, and took the hand of the vacant alien who for a while had been her bitter rival and for a long time had been her friend, and led her out to the fire where Emil and Medric were waiting.

Earlier, Norina had noted the muffled sound of Emil weeping, but now he was again the battle‑hardened soldier. Norina sat Zanja down beside the fire and, rather agitatedly, Medric began to speak of Zanja’s life: he spoke of her birth as though he had been there, and of how the old men and women of her clan had noticed her, and how Salos’a had claimed her, and how she had traveled Shaftal with her first mentor, and how she served the Sainnites as a stablehand one summer, to learn their language. Then Emil spoke of how she had begun to fear for her people’s safety, but her warnings had gone “unheeded, and he spoke in detail of the night her people were massacred, which he called Zanja’s first death. He and Medric took turns speaking of the revenge the surviving warriors wreaked on the Sainnites; of Zanja’s second death, when she was paralyzed in an avalanche, the third death in a Sainnite prison, and of Karis’s abrupt, timely, and utterly unexpected intervention. They spoke of the single summer during which Zanja had, directly or indirectly, intentionally or inadvertently, disrupted and changed the direction of all their lives: the summer when Medric deserted the Sainnites, Emil resigned from the Paladins, Norina shifted her alliances, Mabin kidnapped and nearly killed Karis, Karis broke her addiction to smoke, their family was formed and their love affairs began.

The last five years had been more quiet, and Emil was able to speak of them quickly: so, after hours of talking, they finished telling the story of Zanja’s extraordinary, appallingly eventful thirty‑five years.

The men were hoarse with talking and with breathing smoke. Zanja had listened, if such passivity could be called listening, in blank speechlessness. Now Norina rose up from her long, weary watch and built up the fire. Medric gathered himself up and said, clearly and firmly, “And now, Zanja na‘Tarwein, your life has ended, as all lives end, and with love and sorrow your family now consigns your body to the pyre and your spirit to the care of the gods.”

Norina put Zanja’s good boots onto the fire, and followed them with the rest of Zanja’s clothing, and, finally, the worn leather pouch stuffed with leaves–Emil, who had given Zanja the glyph cards, wretchedly watched it burn–and Norina’s own knife, which she knew would later emerge from the ashes unscathed. Then, with a pair of scissors she had brought with her, Norina began cutting off and burning Zanja’s hair. One handful at a time, she lay the slender braids onto the flames, where they flared and became ash all in a moment. But one braid remained, hidden for now.