The storyteller stood by the stove with the infant in her arms. She said, “If I were telling this story, it would properly end with death uniting the two halves into a whole.”

After a long silence, the she added, “Ah, Raven, I understand! What a favor you have done!”

The raven said, “With your consent, I can arrange your death.”

“But you are a trickster. To what am I truly consenting?”

The raven said, “I will not trick you. In twelve days time, you will be killed. If you consent.”

“I do consent,” the storyteller said, without hesitation and with‘ out sorrow.

The girl in the next room asked an irritable question. The storyteller went silently to open the window, one‑handed, with the baby starting to wail with hunger into her shoulder. The raven flew out, and was gone in the blaze of pale sunlight.

It was the first day of the first year of Karis G’deon. She huddled on the rough, unfinished boards of the shearing‑house attic, weeping. Garland had his arm stretched across her broad back. Leeba, recently awakened, huddled with her arms wrapped around Karis’s bent legs, frightened into tears herself.

Emil had been the one who talked to the storyteller, through the medium of Karis and the raven, but it had been Karis who offered the storyteller her death. Now, Emil knelt beside Medric, who under Karis’s direction had laid out the glyph pattern on the floor, using cards borrowed from a sleepy and confused Paladin.

Medric said unhappily, “This is worse than reading Koles.”

“She was able to give us some clues of how to read it,” Emil said.

“But glyphs without context… !”

“The reader always creates the context.”

“We are not seeking a subjective truth, though. And to read these cards as though my experience of them somehow reflects a political reality is not just specious. It’s dangerous.”

Emil put his hand on the seer’s shoulder. His three earrings glittered briefly in a beam of sunlight. “We sent her out to explore the wilderness. Now she has found a way through, but it is up to us to read the trail markings so we can follow her.”

“What if we are too stupid?”

“Stupid? Oh come now, Medric!”

To Garland, this discussion was incomprehensible. He understood, rather vaguely, that Emil had thought it reasonable to let a casting of cards determine Shaftal’s future. He understood now that Medric, who would be responsible for interpreting those cards, thought that to read them reliably was impossible. But Medric’s explanation for his reluctance made no sense, and neither did Emil’s steady assurance that it could be done. What if Emil were as mad in his way as Medric was in his? Surely, Norina would not allow lunacy to continue. Garland glanced hopefully at her.

Norina stood with her arms folded, her back against a post that supported the center beam. She watched Medric fret over the incomprehensible glyphs. Her face was inscrutable.

When Norina killed the storyteller, it would be with that very expression on her face: passionless, impersonal. She was as mad as the rest of them.

Karis’s desperate, shuddering sobs had fallen silent. One of her clenched hands unfolded, to stroke Leeba’s head. J’han, who embraced Karis on the other side, dug out a preposterously clean handkerchief for her to use. Leeba made a fretful sound, and Karis said hoarsely to her, “I’m sorry I’m scaring you. But I’m just sad.”

“You’re always sad,” Leeba said.

Karis let her limbs unfold to take the child into her embrace. “I’m sorry. But you make me glad, you know.”

Emil said, “Karis, can you talk to me about politics?”

Karis, bowed over Leeba, did not respond.

Emil persisted. “I think I must call an assembly, and it will take two months at least to gather people together. I have the Paladins now to act as messengers, but I assume we won’t be bringing them to Watfield with us–”

“You’re going to visit the center of Sainnite power without any Paladins?” said Mabin, who had joined them earlier. “Well, this is certain to be a short‑lived government.”

Karis looked up then. “That battle last night was the last. There will be no more bloodshed in Shaftal.”

Mabin looked blank, and Garland felt that blankness also. No bloodshed? How?

Norina said, “Under the law, the G’deon’s declarations are to be understood as fact.”

“Her words only sound like hope to me!” said Mabin.

Norina straightened from her post. “Break the law at your peril, Mabin.” Her tone was cold.

“Fact?” said Karis in a small voice.

“You speak for the land,” said Norina to Karis, as though that explained everything. “You’ll get accustomed to it.”

Not by accident, Norina’s foot sharply nudged Mabin’s. The councilor said, “If Karis says we don’t need an army to defeat an army, then she must be correct.” She looked like she had taken a mouthful of putrid fish and was trying to determine how to spit it out.

“For war cannot make peace.” Emil gestured at the cards on the floor. “And I see no war there. Do you, Medric?”

Medric said irritably, “This is nota predictive casting. It’s an advisorycasting.” He sat back on his heels. “War, defeat, victory, none of these are advised.”

Abruptly, mysteriously, Garland understood all of them. Medric, who examined possibilities, could conclude that war might continue, despite the storyteller’s advice. Except Karis had said that it wouldn’t. And Mabin clearly thought that peace without victory would be impossible, and Norina might well have agreed with her, except that the law required her to agree with Karis, no matter what. So she agreed with her.

Karis said flatly, “The war is over.” A statement of fact.

Karis’s advisors all nodded distractedly: fire logic’s uncertainty was resolved; air logic shifted its entire rationale to match a new principle; earth logic remained inarguable. Emil, apparently the quickest to readjust his thinking–a dancer, that man, always poised on his toes–said, “Well, Medric will grumble over the cards, however long it takes. You and I, Karis, we need to decide what I am to do, if I am not re‑establishing the old government.”

Karis shut her eyes. Emil began to say something apologetic, but a gesture from Norina silenced him. Garland, still embracing Karis, thought she might be analyzing the distribution of weight on that loaded food tray she had once described. Her desperate sorrow was not past–and would never be, perhaps. But Karis said sturdily, “Call an assembly, Emil, and name everyone who attends it a councilor of Shaftal.”

Emil blinked. “No Council of Thirteen? No Lilterwess Council?”

“The Lilterwess Council is to be formed by the G’deon,” said Norina. “But if she chooses not to form one, and to transfer their power directly to the assembly, that does not contradict any law.”

“It contradicts tradition–” began Mabin, and got herself kicked again. Apparently, she was to endure a painful re‑training, but Garland could not manage to feel sorry for her.

Karis said, “Master seer, what do you think?”

Medric looked up from his glyph puzzle. For once, he did not protest the formal way she had addressed him. And his spectacles seemed perfectly clear. “You are choosing the right way. Now leave me alone.”

Emil asked Mabin, Norina, and J’han to help him decide who to invite to the assembly, and how to compose the important letter that would coincidentally announce to all the people of Shaftal that, after twenty years of chaos, they had a G’deon again. Apparently, Emil would then recruit the entire company of Paladins to simultaneously write dictated copies of the letter, which the Paladins would hand‑deliver to the recipients. Garland cried, “Do you mean to tell me that every single Paladin carries pen and ink?”

Emil blandly produced a pen and a packet of ink from his waistcoat’s inside pocket. Mabin kept hers inside her black jacket, in a buttoned pocket that seemed designed for no other purpose. “I don’t believe it,” Garland muttered in Sainnese.