Three times, Karis put the needle through Emil’s earlobe.

Mabin put in the earrings. When she was finished, she said solemnly, “Emil, General of Paladins.”

Everyone moved towards Emil: it appeared to be time to comfort him, embrace him, reassure him that he would survive.

But Emil did not rise. Karis’s hand rested on his shoulder. Apparently, she was not finished with him. Emil gazed steadily, starkly, into her face.

When Karis finally spoke, her voice was scarcely audible. “Emil, will you form and serve at the head of a new Council of Shaftal?”

He replied without surprise, in a voice that did not waver, “What Shaftal requires of me I will do.”

Norina said, “Emil, General of Paladins, by this vow you are bound.”

Then, Karis helped him to rise, and kissed him apologetically, and passed him to Medric, who passed him to his friends, who passed him to the Paladins, and they each did what they could for him.

Garland spent Long Night as cooks do, in the kitchen. When he emerged with trays of food still crackling from the oven, he saw Emil dancing gracefully with Mabin’s commander. He saw Karis laughing, with a half dozen people crowded around her. He saw Paladins dancing around the candle and kissing drunkenly in the corners. He saw Norina and J’han leaning shoulder to shoulder against a wall, fingers intertwined. Another time, he saw Norina and J’han dancing, Emil serious in the middle of an earnest crowd, and Karis crouched on a crate, delicately repairing the neck of the fiddle, with her toolbox at her feet.

Garland lost all track of the time. When he eventually found his way back to the celebration, the ovens were cold, the dishes washed, and the First Day sweet bread was rising in bowls on the hearth. In the great room, the Long Night candle was two‑thirds burned. People dozed in companionable huddles by the fireplaces. The fiddler played a melancholy tune while four people, leaning on each other for balance, sang soulfully but unclearly about leaving home. Garland could find none of his companions and did not know where to look for them. He found a chair and watched the candle burn.

Eventually, he noticed Karis’s toolbox, pushed out of the way against the wall. Above it was an empty peg where her coat had hung.

He put on his coat, and went outside.

The cold struck with such violence that he could not much appreciate the crystalline beauty of the starlit night. Snow cracked under his boots, and despite the hobnails his steps skittered on ice as hard as iron. The wailing singers, the howling fiddle, these sounds seemed far away as he tread around the glittering stones that composed the exterior wall of the building. The river was a road of ice, hedged on both sides by barren, bowed‑over trees. The sky was light‑spangled black, remote and mysterious. By habit he located a few familiar stars, and noticed the rising and setting constellations. He heard a sound of ragged breathing, and walked down the quay that stuck a stubby finger into the river here. Karis huddled there, like a boulder shoved up out of place by ice. He reached an arm around her, for she was weeping.

The cold seemed unendurable. When Karis spoke, her breath covered them in a sudden cloud, but her voice was just a crack of sound. “I’ve made a lot of tools in twenty years. Scarcely a household lacks one now. I feel them, gathering dust or being used. Just like with Medric’s books, I know where they all are. Like stars.”

Garland looked up and tried to imagine being surrounded always by such a constellation of knowledge. He wanted to ask her to come inside, to be again the one who turned tree prunings into furniture and cupboards into sledges. But the transformations of that day had been irrevocable.

She said, “I made some metal files one year. And one of those was used a while ago. It’s the only one of my tools used tonight. Now, the one who used it is dead, and the file is still in her bloody pocket.”

She breathed sharply in. Her muscled back gave a shudder under Garland’s arm. “Now another one is dead,” she said, in her shredded voice.

“What is happening? What is killing them?”

“Violence,” she said heavily.

“But it’s Long Night! A new year!”

She raised her head from her knees. “And it would be acceptable on any other night?”

Garland heard the scrape of hobnails on ice, and then the distant, distinct rhythm of Sainnese curses. He stood up, and shouted. Medric, his feet jammed into unlaced boots, and Emil steadying him with one hand while buttoning his own coat with the other came down the quay. Medric crouched beside Karis, shivering violently. “Hell, hell, hell! She’s given them a martyr!”

Emil stood back, hands in his pockets, grim in the faint starlight. He looked up–the habitual movement of a traveler, checking his orientation, confirming with the sky that it was indeed winter, the dawn of a new year. His earrings glittered faintly in the starlight. He said obscurely, “That idiot, Willis. Inevitable.”

Medric responded, “But Clement is a short‑sighted, bloody fool! If she had just read the book! She had it in her hand …”

Karis had raised her head again. She said to Garland, “These men speak a strange language, don’t they.”

“I guess Willis is one of those that was killed,” said Garland, “And that’s a disaster. I don’t know how!”

“My poor little book,” said Medric. “All I did was tell the humble truth, and trust the common sense of the Shaftali people. But Willis, his is a grand, heroic tragedy. My little book can’t compete. His death is what they’ll heed.”

Garland burst out, “You mean it’s all for nothing? The writing, the printing, the hauling, the worry? It’s all wasted? Because that fanatic got himself in the Sainnites’ way?”

In the silence, the distant sound of celebration seemed drunken self‑indulgence. If such great labors could be so casually undone, thought Garland, what was the point of effort?

Karis asked Medric in her cracked whisper, “What future do you see?”

The seer said miserably, “I can’t see a bloody thing.” “What about Zanja?” Her shattered voice made it seem as if Karis had lost all hope.

But Medric looked up. The frosted lenses of his spectacles glimmered. “Maybe it’s time I talked to her.”

Zanja na’Tarwein filled her pot and lit her fire. The stars were coming out. She examined them as they appeared, but not a single star seemed to be in the same place as it had been the night before. She asked, “Does the pattern lie in the lack of a pattern?”

And then she knew something had changed. In all these fleeting days and patternless nights, she had never spoken out loud. Now that she had done it, she recognized the soundlessness of this barren place: she heard not even a far away bird song, or the soughing of the wind, or the crackle of the flames under her pot of water.

A footstep grated on gravel. She turned her head, and Medric squatted down beside her. “You’re not easy to find,” he commented.

“Are you dead, Medric?”

“Oh, no, just dreaming. You’ve got Emil’s tea set! And that old tin pot we used to put kitchen scraps in.”

The water was boiling, so Zanja made tea. As she swirled the pot, she could smell it: half grass and half flower, the scent she would always associate with Emil, since it was his favorite kind of tea. She heard her clothes rustle, felt the heat of the pot on the palms of her hands, the ache of pain in her chest.

Medric sat beside her fire in peaceful silence. She said, “You’ve brought sensation with you.”

“Have I? Is it unpleasant?”

She poured him a cup of tea, but hesitated to hand it to him. “If you eat or drink in the Land of the Dead …”

“This is not the Land of the Dead.” He took the tiny cup from her, and sipped. “You know, this is the first time I’ve tasted your tea? It isgood.”

Zanja tasted the cup she had poured for herself. The complex flavor of the tea made a fist of sharp pain clench her heart. She said, If I’m not in the Land of the Dead–and you can visit me in a dream–have I traveled so small a distance? How long does it take for a soul’s journey to end?“