Crows. Everywhere and always, crows, seldom behaving the way crows should. Tools. Their sudden interest suggested they feared I would learn something I ought not. Which meant there was something.

My mind leaped from stone to stone across a brook of ignorance. If I did discover something I had best not be obvious.

Realization.

The clearing felt familiar because it recalled a place I had lived. If that stump represented the Tower, whence I had ruled my empire, then the scatter of stones might represent the badlands I had created so the Tower could be approached along just one narrow, deadly path.

Patterns emerged. They were almost imperceptible, as though put there by someone who knew he was watched. Someone surrounded by crows? If I let my imagination loose, that scatter of rocks, debris, and twisted figures did make a fair representation of the Tower’s surroundings. In fact, a couple of sticks and a scatter and a boot scuff and a little soil pushed into a mound described a situation that had existed only once in the history of the Tower.

I had trouble pretending calm and indolence.

If the rocks and twigs and such were significant, so must be the creatures of grass and bark. I stood up for a better view.

One thing jumped right out.

A leaf lay at the foot of the stump. A tiny figure sat upon it. A lot of care had gone into creating that figure. More than enough to make the message clear. The Howler, my then master of the flying carpet, was supposed to have been killed by a fall from the heights of the Tower. I had known that was not true for some time now. The message had to be that the Howler was somehow involved in current events.

Whoever set this up knew me and expected me to visit the grove. That should mean that someone knew what I was doing. That someone must have access to what the crows reported but was not their master. Else there was no reason for such an elaborate and iffy means of passing a message. There was more.

Many great sorcerers had been involved in the battle where the Howler was supposed to have died. Most of them were supposed to have been killed. Since then I have discovered that several had fled after faking their deaths. I checked the figures again. Some were identifiable as representing some of those sorcerers. Three had been crushed underfoot. Those known to have been destroyed?

I gave it all the time it needed and still nearly missed the critical message. It was almost dark when I spied the clever little figure carrying what appeared to be a head under its arm. It took a while after that to understand the significance of the figure.

I had told Narayan that we do not see what we do not expect to see.

A lot of things fell into place once I realized that the impossible was not impossible at all. My sister was alive. I saw a whole new picture of what was going on. And I was frightened.

And, frightened, I missed the most important message of all.

Narayan was not in a pleasant mood. “The whole temple has to be purified. Everything has been defiled. At least they committed no willful sacrilege, no desecration. The idol and relics remain undisturbed.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. All the men had long faces. I looked at Narayan over our cookfire. He took my look for a question.

“Any unbeliever who found the holy relics or the idol would have plundered them.”

“Maybe they were afraid of the curse.”

His eyes got big. He glanced around, made a gesture urging silence. He whispered, “How did you know that?”

“These things always have curses. Part of their rustic charm.” Pardon my sarcasm. I did not feel good. I did not want to spend any more time hanging around the grove. It was not a pleasant place. A lot of people had died there, none of them of old age. The earth was rich with their blood and bones and screams. It had a smell, psychic and physical, probably pleasing to Kina.

“How much longer, Narayan? I’m trying to cooperate. But I’m not going to hang around here the rest of my life.”

“Oh. Mistress. There will be no Festival now. The purification will take weeks. The priests are distraught. The ceremonies have been moved to Nadam. It’s only a minor holiday usually, when the bands break up for the off season, and the priests remind them to invoke the Daughter of Night in their prayers. The priests always say the reason she hasn’t come yet is we haven’t prayed hard enough.”

Was he going to dole it out in driblets forever? I guess no one of any religion would have spent much time explaining holidays and saints and such, though. “Why are we still here, then? Why aren’t we headed south?”

“We came for more than the Festival.” We had indeed. But how was I supposed to convince these men I was their messiah? Narayan kept the specifications to himself. How could the actress act without being told her role?

There was the trouble. Narayan believed I was the Daughter of Night. He wanted me to be. Which meant that he would not coach me if I asked. He expected me to know instinctively. And I did not have a clue.

The jamadars seemed disappointed and Narayan nervous. I was not living up to expectations and hopes, even if I had discovered that their temple had been profaned.

In a whisper, I asked, “Am I expected to do holy deeds in a place no longer holy?”

“I don’t know, Mistress, We have no guideposts. It’s all in the hands of Kina. She will send an omen.” Omens. Wonderful. I had had no chance to bone up on omens the cult considered significant. Crows were important, of course. Those men thought it wonderful that Taglian territory was infested by carrion birds. They thought that presaged the Year of the Skulls. But what else was significant?

“Are comets important to you?” I asked. “In the north, last year, and once earlier, there were great comets. Did you see them down here?”

“No. Comets are bad omens.”

“They were for me.”

“They have been called Sword of Sheda, or Tongue of Sheda, Shedalinca, that shed the light of Sheda upon the world.”

Sheda was an archaic form of the name of the chief Gunni god, one of whose titles was Lord of Lords of Light. I suspected the Deceiver cult’s beliefs had taken a left turn off the trunk of Gunni beliefs a few thousand years ago.

He said, “The priests say Kina is weakest when a comet is in the sky, for then light rules heaven day and night.”

“But the moon...”

“The moon is the light of darkness. The moon belongs to Shadow, put up so Shadow’s creatures may hunt.”

He rambled off into incomprehensibility. Local religion had its light and dark, right and left, good and evil. But Kina, despite her trappings of darkness, was supposed to be outside and beyond that eternal struggle, enemy of both Light and Shadow, ally of each in some circumstances. Just to confuse me, maybe, nobody seemed to know how things really lay in the eyes of their gods. Vehdna, Shadar, and Gunni all respected one another’s gods. Within the majority Gunni cult the various deities, whether identified with Light or Shadow, got equal deference. They all had their temples and cults and priests. Some, like Jahamaraj Jah’s Shadar Khadi cult, were tainted by the doctrines of Kina.

As Narayan clarified by making the waters murkier he got shifty-eyed, then would not look at me at all. He fixed his gaze on the cookfire, talked, grew morose. He was good at hiding it. No one else noticed. But I had had more practice reading people. I noted tension in some of the jamadars, too.

Something was about to happen. A test? With this crowd that was not likely to be gentle.

My fingers drifted to the yellow triangle at my belt. I had not practiced much lately. There had been little time. I realized what I had done, wondered why. That was hardly the weapon to get me out of trouble.