Besides, her son’s family had not even noticed the problem, and her own family thought she was ridiculous. Later, they would regret not having paid attention, but she could not wait for that to happen.

She lay down across the crack, with her front legs on one side and her back legs on the other, and she dug in with all her claws and began to pull. She pulled for many days and nights, and the winter snows began to fall. Her family assumed she had decided to stay with her son for the winter, and of course her son thought she was comfortably at home.

After the spring mud, though, her family went out looking for her. “There is the crack she was so worried about,” they said, as they stepped over it. “It is not nearly as wide as she said it was.” On the way back from their son’s house, very worried about her now, they found Tortoise Woman’s walking stick. They noticed the marks she had made on it to measure the width of the crack, and they laid it across the crack to measure it again. “According to these marks,” they said, “this crack has gotten much narrower. That’s ridiculous.” And they walked away, looking for any sign of what had become of Tortoise Woman.

In fact, she was very close to them, so close that she had heard the entire conversation. With her legs dug deeply into the earth and her head tucked in out of the weather, she had gradually been covered with mud, and looked like a big rock straddling the crack in the earth. She had been pulling the edges together all winter long, and was glad to hear that she had made progress.

Several years later, her son brought his children that way, and they did not even notice the crack, though he did wonder what had happened to it. Tortoise Woman had begun to sink into the earth, and plants had taken root on her back. Even if she had dared let go, she could not have pulled herself loose. But she knew she needed to hold on, for she was the only thing keeping the world from splitting in two.

And there she remains, to this very day.

Chapter Thirty‑Two

The winter sun, a pallid and late‑arriving stranger, still lingered below the rooftops as the heavy iron gate of the garrison swung open. A small, precise woman in a gray cloak, with flashes of red silk shining through like flame in charcoal, stepped out onto the crisp ice. “Good day, storyteller,” said one of the soldiers who had just come on duty. “Get some sleep, eh?”

He and his fellows might have benefited from that same advice, for they were blinking wearily in the rising light. One of the others called after the storyteller, as the gate was locked, “That was a fine night!”

The storyteller walked away across the ice. As sunlight suddenly gilded the attic window of a narrow building, she pushed the hood back from her face and looked up. The sky was clear but colorless. The golden glare on the roof seemed sourceless and mysterious. Across that glare, a raven stalked, his ragged black blurring in a halo of light.

It was the first day of the new year. Already, though the iron winter stretched before them, farmers would begin to plan for the distant spring. The storyteller climbed the steps, opened the door to the silent house, and went in.

In the sparsely furnished upstairs rooms, the baby slept beside a cold stove. The storyteller soundlessly lit and built up a new fire, then she went to a dark window over which thick curtains were drawn. She opened the curtains, lifted the stiff, ice‑crusted sash, and opened the shutters. Now the sun’s reluctant rise cast its tentative brilliance across her features, sprinkling a golden flush on her sharp cheekbones but leaving her eyes in shadow.

In a rush of cold air, the raven landed. His ragged feathers rustled dryly as he lifted his wings and hopped from the windowsill into the room. The storyteller lowered the window sash, then turned and politely offered the raven something to eat.

“Thank you,” the raven said.

She brought him a plate of bread and cheese, poured him a mug of water, and knelt on the floor near him as he gulped down the food. “It cannot be easy to find a meal in winter, even in the city,” she said.

“Do you know who I am?” the raven asked.

“You are a raven who wishes to talk to me.” The woman looked at him a moment, as though she knew that she should be surprised. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“No, I am not certain.”

“I am a collector of tales. But I have never traded stories with a raven.”

“I will gladly tell you a story,” the raven said. “But I do not want to hear one of your stories. I want you to answer me a question.”

“I can answer no questions. There is very little I understand.”

“You have insight, do you not?”

“Insight? I suppose I do. But I have no memories. And insight without memory has little value.”

After a long silence, to which the storyteller seemed indifferent, the raven said, “I know you are a reader of glyphs. I ask you to cast the cards for me.”

The storyteller rose up lightly, checked that the baby was not too close to the rising heat of the stove, took the packet of glyph cards out of her boot, and squatted down by the raven again. “What is your question?”

“How can the Sainnites be overcome without destroying the spirit of Shaftal?”

The storyteller moved her fingers through the cards, seeming scarcely interested in the raven’s question or in the cards. The room’s only light came through the unshuttered window. A card fell to the floor: the Wall, also called the Obstacle, which glyph readers often interpret as an impermeable and insurmountable problem. The storyteller examined this solitary card, and then she reversed it. On the right and left of the Wall she lay out a pattern of cards. Her actions seemed swift, casual, and random, but, gradually, as she added cards and relocated those already laid down, the scattered cards began to group together and overlay each other in some complex relationships. She had dropped fifteen cards when she finally stopped, though her fingers continued to sort through the cards in her hand.

“The pattern is not complete,” she finally said. “But that is all I know of it.”

The raven walked around the cards, examining them. The storyteller rose up to check the infant again, and this time she moved his basket a small distance from the warming stove. Beyond a half‑open door a sleeper moaned.

“Is this a pattern of present‑and‑future?” the raven asked. “Or is it cause‑and‑result?”

She returned to look at the cards. “Both, perhaps.”

“What is the obstacle that must be broken through?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it a place? An idea? An event? A people?”

“People,” she said. “Persons. But perhaps it is just a wall.”

The raven continued to ask questions about various elements of the pattern, both those elements to the left and those to the right of the overturned wall. To some questions the storyteller offered several tentative or overlapping answers. To others she could offer no answer at all.

The sleeper in the next room moaned again, and the infant became restive. The raven asked, “How much longer do you think we have?”

“Not long.”

“I promised you a story,” said the bird.

The storyteller said, “But I have not truly answered your question.

“You have answered–but I must work to understand that answer. Therefore, I will tell you a story without an ending. Is that a fair exchange?”

The storyteller had picked up the baby to quiet him. “It is fair.”

The raven told her a story about a woman whose spirit had been irretrievably split in two. Half her spirit was exiled to wander aimlessly in a distant dream world. Half her spirit remained in her body, and could only tell stories. So those separated halves were doomed to continue, the raven said, without any alteration in their condition, as long as the woman’s body lived.