She left him in his basket, and went to Gilly’s room. Perhaps two hours remained before Cadmar would have reason to angrily summon her, and even the sight of Gilly’s sleeping face, gray and drawn with pain, could not make her wait to awaken him. She shook him. He opened his eyes, squinting in the lantern light. “You look like hell,” he mumbled.

She sat heavily in the chair by his bed. “I’ll help you to get up. I don’t even know where to look for your aide at this hour.”

“Give me some time to wake up, or I’ll just fall over. How is the baby?”

“I doubt he’ll survive the morning.”

He sighed.

“Gilly, what do you know about earth magic? How does it work? What can it do?”

“Earth magic?” Gilly rubbed his face with one hand. “It is physical–a physical power with a physical existence. It inhabits the flesh of the earth bloods, and it flows out of them through physical contact. Whatever earth witches do, they do it with their hands.‘

“Are earth bloods healers?”

“Yes, people with earth talent might be healers, farmers, stone masons, artisans of any type.”

“Could an earth witch heal a broken back that had caused paralysis?”

Gilly’s painful effort of sitting up was excruciating to watch. He finally said, “I doubt it. I don’t know what the limits are, but surely something so dramatic would be talked about.”

“Could a G’deon?”

“A G’deon?” Gilly considered. “Yes, it seems possible.”

Clement said, “Well then, the proof of the Lost G’deon’s existence, and the proof of the storyteller’s identity may all be written down, in a document that even Cadmar can read.”

“What document?” said Gilly with great surprise.

“The storyteller’s body: her skin, her bones, her scars.”

Gilly rubbed his furrowed face again. “You must be awfully frightened, Clem,” he said. “Terror brings out your genius.”

The storyteller waited, as she always waited, in silence and stillness, without impatience or fear. Gilly entered the cell behind Clement and sat heavily on the stone bench.

The walls of the cell were shiny with ice. A barred window, as big as a hand, let in a little gray light. When the wind picked up, it blew in a cloud of fresh snow. A few flakes decorated the storyteller’s shoulder.

Clement said, “Take off your clothes.”

The storyteller commented, “This is a strange conclusion.”

Gilly said sharply. “What do you mean?”

In the silence that followed, the storyteller stood up and undressed. Under cloak and jacket she wore her close‑fitted suit of heavy gray wool. Under that there was silk, and linen, and under that nothing. Her skin, even the skin that was never exposed to sun, was brown, almost black. She had a light build, a deep chest, and powerful legs. It was not at all difficult to imagine her running lightly up and down the vicious ridges of the high mountains, or sneaking into a heavily guarded camp to cut the throats of sleeping soldiers.

Clement lay her hand on the woman’s bare shoulder. She felt a shudder, but the storyteller only seemed to be shivering from cold. Clement put a hand to the woman’s coarse, stiff hair. She dug her fingers to the skull, and her fingertips encountered the hard ridge of a healed fracture. She felt how the woman’s hair tangled there, where it grew out crooked from a ragged scar. “How long has it been since your head was broken?” Clement asked.

“My head was broken?” the storyteller asked.

Surely this flat curiosity was feigned? Exasperated, Clement said sharply, “Turn around so I can see your back.”

The storyteller turned impassively.

“Good gods! Gilly, hold up the lantern!”

The storyteller’s back was a shocking patchwork: a disease, or a terrible burn, had left large pale patches in her skin. But when Clement touched the pale skin, she found it soft, healthy, unweathered as a child’s. What could cause such a thing?

Gilly said, “Lying a long time on the back in an unclean bed can cause the flesh to be eaten away, I’ve heard.” He was speaking with difficulty; the lantern trembled in his hand.

Clement said, “Did that happen to you, storyteller?”

The storyteller said nothing.

“Hold still.” Clement pressed her fingers down the length of the woman’s backbone. When she found the lumpy mass of a healed bone in the woman’s lower back, she felt no surprise, only relief. She knelt, taking the lantern from Gilly to illuminate the woman’s bare feet. Some of her toes were brown, others were pink. And then, as Clement raised her face, she found right in front of her nose the distinct, round scar of a gunshot wound in the side of the storyteller’s thigh.

“You must have taken that gunshot when you were in South Hill,” Clement said. “When you were a Paladin. But a wound like this would have putrefied. It wouldn’t be a clean scar like this–in fact, you should have lost your leg entirely.”

The storyteller looked down at her. “What a story my skin is telling you.”

“I read here that you are longtime enemy of my people, an Ashawala’i warrior whose back was broken six years ago.”

“ Katrim”she said.

“What?”

“You believe I am an enemy of your people, a Paladin, and a katrim!”

“I believe you are the last survivor of the Ashawala’i. I believe your injuries were healed by the Lost G’deon.”

The storyteller said, “May I get dressed?”

“Oh, for gods’ sake! What possible purpose can your pretense of forgetfulness serve?”

“I do not pretend.” Without permission, the storyteller began dressing.

Clement sat next to Gilly and put her head in her hands. Her relief had given way to crushing exhaustion. Like a wanderer lost in a dark night, she could see no further than her next random step. After a night’s desperate work, she could prove that the Lost G’deon existed. And now she had no idea what to do with that knowledge. “Gilly, help me.”

Gilly said, “I have always believed the storyteller to be telling the truth as she understood it. Storyteller, will you tell us what is your purpose in Watfield?”

“I am collecting stories,” the storyteller said.

“It occurs to me that a fire blood could probably make a great deal of sense of us, just by hearing our stories.”

The storyteller looked up from doing her buttons. “A fire blood can make sense of anything. Perhaps I could also, were I more than half a person.”

“You are half a person?” said Gilly blankly.

“That is what the raven told me.”

Clement lifted her head from her hands. “Gods of hell!” she breathed.

“You’ve been talking to a raven?” said Gilly casually. “What did you talk about?”

“You must ask the raven, Lucky Man. I do not owe you a story.”

Clement was nonplused, but Gilly apparently had overcome the lingering mental dullness caused by his pain draught, for he promptly said, “But you do owe a story to Clement, now she has read to you the story in your skin.”

Prompted by a jab of Gilly’s elbow, Clement said politely, “I would very much like to hear this tale.”

The storyteller covered her once‑mutilated feet with heavy wool socks. Then, she reached into her left boot and took out her packet of glyph cards. “The raven told me that I am part of a whole, and that the remainder of my self is lost. In return for this story, he asked me to cast the cards, to answer a question. The question was, Hew can the Sainnites be overcome without destroying the spirit of Shaftal?This is how I answered him.”

As she lay fifteen glyph cards on the bench in a complicated arrangement, Gilly said in a low voice, “To read the glyphs with any depth requires long study–and I thought this arcane knowledge was lost entirely. How a tribal woman learned it is difficult to imagine.”

Apparently finished laying out the cards, the storyteller put on boots, jacket, and cloak. She pulled the hood over her head, and sat on the bench with her knees tucked to her chest and her cloak wrapped around herself against the cold. The illustrated people on the glyph cards variously spoke, shouted, screamed, or wondered– but they were all speechless, and the odd situations the cards depicted seemed meaningless. Gilly said, “Ask her to explain, Clem.”