As she endured the empty days, Clement desperately wished she could distract herself. Her room had one small window, and often she opened the shutters and peered out at the pristine snow, sunlit or starlit. Sometimes there were children out in the snow. Watching them, Clement felt a pulling in her chest, as though some physical pieces of her had been left behind in Watfield.

With the visiting war‑horses as allies, the children beat down a circular track along which they marched, or chased each other, or pulled each other on makeshift sleds. Around and around the garrison they went. So also Clement’s thoughts circled around and around, but they circled a distant place and time, five years in the past: the seer Medric’s most recent posting, Wilton Garrison, in South Hill, the summer after Cadmar became general.

That summer, Wilton garrison had been attacked and burned by rockets. The rockets had been invented by Annis, a Paladin woman of South Hill Company. Those same rockets had burned down Watfield.

The leader of Death‑and‑Life, Willis, had also come from South Hill. If he had learned from Annis how to make the rockets, he must have been a member of South Hill Company–the same company that had held firm in the face of what should have been an overwhelming force of soldiers.

Medric had been a resident of Wilton garrison when it was burned, an attack he inexplicably failed to predict, even though, according to Commander Heras, under whose command he had served, his previous predictions had been devastatingly accurate. Later that summer, he had disappeared.

Willis disappeared. Annis disappeared.

The longtime commander of South Hill Company–a formidable leader, respected even by Heras–disappeared.

Heras reported vague rumors of treachery, of a mysterious member of South Hill Company who Paladins thought was a Sainnite spy. But she also, it seemed, had disappeared.

Surely all these disappearances mean something!Wildly, desperately, Clement wore away the floorboards with her pacing. In the dead of night, in a building filled with sleeping children, she spoke aloud to her empty, solitary room: “What happened in South Hill?”

Some hours later, she asked the question again, differently: “What beganin South Hill?”

Then it came to her: in the autumn of the same year, a gigantic woman had supposedly plunged a spike into Councilor Mabin’s chest without killing her. She had done it because of a mysterious woman. And then the so‑called Lost G’deon had disappeared.

Had all these people disappeared together? Would they also reappear together? Annis had reappeared–or at least her devastating rockets had. Willis had reappeared as the leader of Death‑and‑Life. Medric had reappeared, to blithely publish the Sainnites’ most dangerous, most closely kept secret. And a mysterious woman was telling stories in Watfield garrison.

Some hours before dawn, Captain Herme sat up in startlement as Clement walked into his room. “Lieutenant‑General, what is wrong?”

She wanted to say, I am trapped ten days’ hard journey from Watfield, and I am going mad.

But instead she said apologetically, “I’m having a bad night, captain. And it’s occurred to me that we’ve got to capture the leader of this group alive, somehow.”

Herme groaned.

“I know–to kill a cage full of rats is easy. To kill all but one is practically impossible.”

He groaned again, his hands rasping loudly on his unshaven cheeks. “Can I ask why?”

“I need to ask the man a question.”

“But to try to keep him alive will risk our success. Is it that important?”

She wanted to say, Perhaps it will spare us from being completely exterminated.But instead she said, “Yes, captain, it is that important.”

Chapter Twenty‑Nine

They were huddled around Karis, in the single room that had been afforded them by the farm family on which they had imposed themselves. Leeba, on whom the great adventure of this winter journey had quickly palled, had whined herself to sleep. The rest of them, blistered, frostbitten, and still chilled to the bone, clustered together in their underclothes. A fire burned in the fireplace, but its heat was blocked by drying boots and breeches, long shirts and wool coats. Karis was on her knees before Emil, with his frostbitten foot clasped in both her big hands. His boot, having developed a leak, was in the kitchen being repaired by the farmstead’s cobbler.

“You know how still Zanja could be,” said Karis.

Emil said, “If Zanja were thinking, or waiting, or listening, she could almost seem absent.”

“She is like that all the time, now. Present, but absent. Visible, but invisible. Listening, and silent. I see her form, her flesh, but I don’t see her.”

Emil said, “Perhaps a part of her has replaced the whole.”

J’han, who recently had come in from attending an ailing member of the household, got under the covers with Norina and Leeba. Norina asked, “What else do the ravens see? What do they see this woman doing?”

Garland, against whose back the exhausted Medric had companionably curled, watched Karis shut her eyes so she could look through the eyes of her raven. She said, “She is inside the garrison, in a building, where the raven can’t see her now. But I can hear her voice.” A silence, and she said, “‘… Frost sparkled on the stones … The crack was wide as a hand … It seemed to go on forever.’”

“Apparently, tortoise‑woman has just noticed that the world is splitting in two,” said Emil. “The woman is telling stories to the Sainnites, as Medric dreamed she would.”

Garland wrenched some of the blankets from Medric so that Emil could tuck himself in. The three of them would share the single narrow bed, a feat they had accomplished several times now, in several different beds, though each time it seemed quite impossible. Karis, too big for the rooms, the doorways, and the furniture, had no choice for a bed but the floor.

Medric, his face buried in the pillow, mumbled, “What about the book?”

“The ravens dropped the book inside the garrison gate, like you said to do,” said Karis. “Zanja–or rather whoever she is now–was standing on the other side of the gate. On the garrison side, many soldiers were gathered, with sledges and snowshoes. A soldier picked up the book from the snow, looking puzzled. He gave it to a woman, who gave it to a man on horseback. A very ugly man, terribly deformed.”

“That must be the general’s Lucky Man,” said Garland. “He uses a tincture for pain for his twisted back.”

“He’s a Shaftali,” said Medric.

“But they say he’s privy to all the general’s secrets.”

“Still, he’s Shaftali.” Medric smiled smugly, with his eyes still tightly closed, his spectacles safely put away for the night. “Did he like the book, Karis?”

“He and that woman, they had an exceptionally dismayed discussion.”

“Oh, very good! And what is the woman doing now? That woman was Lieutenant‑General Clement, by the way.”

“She left the garrison with the soldiers. I don’t know where they went.”

“I think you’d better keep an eye on her,” Medric said.

The work of travel was far from easy. But neither was it as grueling or frightening as Garland had feared. Some of the ravens had returned from Watfield, but their aerial scouting was no real necessity, and only rarely were Norina’s maps unpacked. Because the land revealed itself to Karis, the travelers never took a wrong turn, and were never surprised by the weather, though their hosts were certainly surprised by their arrival. Day after day, the load of books grew lighter.

Leeba wore red, like most children, to make it easier to find her when she got herself buried in snow. Karis also wore red: a coat of red felt, exuberantly decorated with red tassels. She looked magnificent in it. When she first put it on, Garland thought such a coat contradicted everything he understood about her. Someone else must have bought the coat for her, someone who saw her differently from how she saw herself. Zanja, he thought.