Clement found she had lost her power of speech.

Gilly was gazing intently at the icicle‑decorated eaves of a half‑built building. He glanced at Clement, finally. To her surprise, his glance was serious, with no mockery at all. He turned to the storyteller and asked the question Clement could not. “How will she do such a thing?”

“When I tell that story,” the woman said, “then we will know how.”

In a crowded, dirty room, a dozen soldiers gathered, all men from the same company, who had come directly from the construction work. They had pulled bread and meat from their pockets and were eating companionably and passing a surreptitious flask as they awaited the storyteller. They leapt up in confusion when Clement entered, and settled down again at her gesture, though now the flask was nowhere to be seen. She could smell forbidden spirits, though, and a stink of dirt and sweat and slightly rancid meat. After Clement and the storyteller had helped Gilly to dismount, he had scarcely been able to walk. But now, as he sat and took a pen from behind his ear, an ink bottle from his pocket, and a roll of paper from inside his coat, he became the very model of grimy officiousness. In fact, of everyone in the room, only the storyteller was truly clean, as though even dirt could not adhere to her.

The soldiers began telling stories almost at once, their order of recitation apparently having been worked out in advance. Half listening, Clement watched the storyteller, whose attention in turn was focused on whoever spoke: an attention the likes of which Clement had never seen, not even in a predator whose life depended on such watchfulness. When one or another speaker began to falter self‑consciously, the storyteller would look away, to give him some relief. Every single time, she looked into Clement’s eyes instead. Clement perceived nothing in that glance: not curiosity nor self‑consciousness nor weariness nor wonder. Certainly, the storyteller didn’t care that Clement stared at her. In fact, she hardly even seemed to notice.

Gilly, skimming his list, interrupted one man’s story, and then another, to say, “Sorry, that one’s been told.” For other stories, he wrote a few words down on his paper: a title, or a description, Clement supposed. After some mental ciphering, Clement concluded that the woman probably had already told, and been told, well over two hundred stories. And if the storytelling continued to winter’s end, it would easily be more than a thousand. Surely the soldiers were making bets on when the stories would run dry because they had realized, however vaguely, that the storyteller was uncanny, and that she was doing something that should have been impossible. But, apparently, it had occurred to no one, except perhaps to Gilly, that extraordinary events are seldom benign.

The storyteller was in the refectory, being served an early supper so she could be refreshed and ready to perform when the meal bell was rung. Clement and Gilly stood out in the chilly street, both of them on foot now. As always, Gilly crouched over his cane like an old man, but he looked even older in winter, and in the last few years his hair had begun to go gray. Clement took off her hat and brushed a hand self‑consciously across her own hair, close‑clipped for the helmet she hardly ever wore anymore. Was she also going gray? She tried to think of when she had last looked into a mirror.

“That storyteller is more than strange,” she said. “She is supernatural.”

Gilly gave her that peculiar sideways look of his, but did not speak.

“Is she a witch?” Clement asked.

He said, “I believe she has what the Shaftali call an elemental talent, an unusual ability that gives a remarkable shape to her thinking. If she were a witch, though, she’d be turning her stories into reality.”

“If Cadmar knew about this …”

Gilly looked grimly down at his hand gripping the cane. “The soldiers adore her. I’d hate to take her away from them for no good reason, after such a year as they’ve had to endure.”

“I think,” said Clement, “that you yourself might like her a little.”

He looked sideways at her again. “A monstrous creature like her?”

They were silent until Gilly added, quietly, “She must be aware of what danger she puts herself in by entering these gates. But she seems incapable both of fear and of self‑protection.”

“Isn’t she as much a danger to us?”

Gilly said, “You think she’s a Paladin spy? With that memorable face? Dressed in extremely visible flame‑red silk? Always the center of attention?”

“Well, if she was lurking about trying to be invisible, she wouldn’t have soldiers blabbing to her for hours every day with official permission.”

“What one thing has she been told today that could be even remotely useful to our enemies?”

“It’s not what they’re telling her that matters,” said Clement. “It’s the habitof telling.”

“Yes,” said Gilly. “The habit of telling. And the novelty of being heard. It matters, yes. But how is it dangerous?”

Clement could not think of when she had felt so unbalanced, so utterly confounded. Gilly’s steadiness, his very seriousness, only contributed to the sensation. She wanted him to make a joke of the entire afternoon. But he clung to his cane as though he feared he would fall over, frowned distantly at the icy ground, and waited for her to speak.

Surely something the storyteller had said to Gilly had unnerved him also. Perhaps, because of her, he now shared with Clement this lingering sensation that he had overlooked the possibilities of his life. But the sensation would pass, and they would still be what they were.

Clement said, “Well, we can forbid the storyteller to enter the garrison. Or we can arrest her and do to her what we do to witches. Or we can pretend like we haven’t noticed a bloody thing, and let the soldiers hear her tales.” She paused. “Do you think you can make certain she has no other conversations like the one she had with me today? With anyone? Including yourself?”

There was a silence. “Yes,” Gilly said.

“Has Cadmar showed any interest in hearing her tales?”

“None.”

“Let’s make certain he doesn’t.” The bell was ringing. “Shall we go in?” She took his arm, and felt him lean into her.

It was the first time Clement had sat down in that room to watch the storyteller’s performance. The eager soldiers struggled with each other for the best spots, but they had left a seat for Gilly, and Clement sat in the place the storyteller vacated. A soldier said, “Lieutenant‑General, you’ve not come here before? You’ll be amazed.”

She turned to the soldier, and found a hard‑faced, embittered veteran, who had already turned away from her to look up at the storyteller with an expression of childish anticipation. “Why?” said Clement.

“Oh, she’s good.”The veteran put a ringer to her lips. “This is the best part.”

What followed was a ripple of silence, and the tension of anticipation. The storyteller waited on the stage of the tabletop: poised, taut, intent. Just as Clement thought the performer had waited too long, she spoke. “I am a collector of tales, and I will trade, story for story. This is a tale of the Juras people, who are giants in an empty land, whose voices are so big they sing the light into the stars.”

She told the tale of the grasslion and the buffalo, which Clement thought was about the dangers of underestimating the enemy, or of overestimating oneself, or perhaps of being so stupid as to assume there is no more to be understood about the world. The storyteller told five more tales, and each one was a disappointment to Clement, for none of them was a tale of magical flower bulbs.

“Oh, dear,” Gilly said. “Clem, I fear you are in trouble. Something very odd is happening to you.”

But he added, after a while, “At least get Cadmar’s permission.”

Clement made certain Cadmar was in a jovial mood, which, after so many years with him was not too difficult to engineer. He laughed at her request, which she expected, and then granted it. He liked to think he was generous with his inferiors, especially in matters that were irrelevant to and not inconvenient to him.