Ammonite

Where she stood, near a wooden tent pole, the roof was high enough that she did not have to stoop. Directly ahead, two pallets heaped with more furs lay to either side and slightly to the front of a hearth which looked as if it was heaped with dead ash. Two pallets, both used–Aoife did share with someone, then. Such a large space for two people, given the subsistence living of the Echraidhe. Behind the hearth stood a second tent pole. The space beyond that was taken up with several bowls and pots, some in use, some empty.

She shivered. It was cold enough to see her breath.

From the roof hung a bewildering assortment of mosses, a string of shells, semi‑tanned leather, herbs, skeins of dyed and undyed wool, strips of drying meat, and bottles made of clay and leather. The smells were smoky, human, rich. Standing free by the right‑hand wall was a loom with a wooden shuttle tucked into the half‑finished weaving. She did not need to look closely to see the same geometric patterns that were repeated on the hangings.

Where the hangings did not cover the walls, the felt had been reinforced by thick strands of what looked like rope that arced down from the tent poles to the floor. Marghe touched one. Horsehair. Sewn onto it were pouches, each a patchwork of leather, brightly dyed cloth, and felt. They bulged with odd shapes. Marghe could see that at regular intervals, where the walls met the floor, the tent had been pegged down from the outside.

Although she knew that the tent was designed to be dismantled and packed onto horseback in a matter of hours, the whole thing felt secure, lived in, permanent. But cold. She shivered again.

Aoife slung her overfurs across the foot of her pallet and stretched out with her eyes closed. “Fire needs building. Plenty of taar chips outside.”

Marghe waited for more, but Aoife did not open her eyes. She went back through the white wool hanging to get her boots. The foretent was well organized: sacks of grains and legumes stood against one wall, separated from some sealed clay pots by bits of wood. She poked the wood, picking up small pieces. Out here where there were no trees, wood meant wealth. Next to the wood was a neat pile of leather scraps; plumped on top were two tied sacks the size of her fist. She untied one and sniffed at the greenish gray powder. Her nose flooded and stung, her eyes ran. She tied it up again quickly and did not bother with the second.

Her shivering was now a constant shudder. She jammed her boots on and pushed through the outer flap.

She walked around the tent twice, flapping her arms to keep warm, without seeing anything that looked like taar chips. She looked out between the taar pen and the other tents, across the tundra. There might be satellites and orbital stations and a military cruiser wheeling across the sky, but this cold and lonely place, this wasteland, belonged to the Echraidhe. Holle had tried to tell her: Tehuantepec belonged to the wild tribes, to the ghosts of magical beasts. She had no place here. And she had no idea what would happen to her now. Already this plain made her think in terms of things happening toher, not her acting. Tehuantepec could drain a person of everything but what it took to stay warm. She wanted to run, as far and as fast as she could.

One thing at a time, she told herself, one thing at a time. First, find these taar chips, then get a fire going and get warm. If she could stop shaking, she could think; if she could think, then she would get Aoife to tell her what the Echraidhe wanted of her, if she knew that, she could find a way out of here, somehow.

Walk, she told herself, walk and think. Keep body and mind ready. Every minute you have to spend here, spend it learning, stay supple‑minded. She forced herself to look at the tent she was walking around. The forward poles were topped with leather caps; the rear support was left bare. Why, she asked herself roughly, think why. To let out smoke. And the tent pegs, what were they made of? Bone, sharpened bone.

It was getting dark. On her third circuit of the tent, she kicked something that rolled a little way through the snow. It looked like an olive‑gray stone. She bent and picked it up. It was the size of a plover’s egg, smooth, hard. Frozen droppings. A taar chip. She sniffed it cautiously, but all she could smell was snow and the wet fur of her glove.

The taar chips were stacked in three snow‑covered cairns against the left wall of the tent. She took off her gloves, squatted next to the nearest cairn, and tried to pry a few lumps loose, but it was like trying to tear apart concrete with her fingers. She needed something long and thin, a rod or a knife, to lever the lumps free. She thought for a moment, then began to feel through the snow at the base of the cairns. She found it: a piece of bone a foot long, sharpened at one end. When she brushed away the snow, she found a leather sack.

Back inside, what had looked like ash turned out to be carefully banked and covered embers. She used the bone stick to hold a lump of dung over the embers long enough to partially thaw, then crumbled it to tiny slivers. She dropped a sliver into the embers. It kindled, a tiny blazing thread. She added another, and another, fanning the threads to busy tongues. Then she added two frozen lumps. They spat and hissed as they thawed, then gradually began to burn with a soft lavender flame that yellowed and filled the tent with a ripe, sweet smell. She sat back on her heels and added more, until there was a good‑sized fire and her purple hands turned red and began to itch. She rubbed at them absently, enjoying the animal comfort of warmth. A good fire.

Aoife still appeared to be asleep.

She enjoyed the fire a little longer, then cleared her throat. “Why am I here?” It came out softer than she intended. Aoife did not stir. She tried again, louder. “Tell me why I’m here.”

Aoife opened her eyes. In the firelight they glimmered like the eyes of a beaten‑bronze statue Marghe had once seen in a Macau temple. Shadow played over her broken face.

“You are here to learn to be Echraidhe.”

“I’m not Echraidhe. And I wish to leave.”

Aoife looked at her so long that Marghe wondered if she had gone to sleep with her eyes open. “You are Echraidhe,” she said again.

“I need to know why you have brought me here against my will.” She searched Aoife’s face for an expression she could understand. Aoife said nothing. “You can’t do this to me.” She took a deep breath, exhaled. Another. “It’s important that you understand. People will be looking for me.”

Aoife shrugged. “In winter, tracks fade and the cold stops even the closest of kin.”

“But my… kin… track by a means unknown to you. They and I are from another world. A place far away, in the sky, like… like the moons.” Even to her, it sounded ridiculous.

“You are Echraidhe,” Aoife said flatly.

She shook her head. “No. I’m not even from your world. I–”

Aoife, unfolding like a mantis, sat up, cracked Marghe across the face with her open hand, and was back on the pallet before Marghe understood what had happened. “You are Echraidhe. Never say differently, or you will be whipped.” She stood up. Marghe flinched. “Stay here. Wait for Borri.” She walked through the wool flap.

Marghe blinked, touched her hand to her stinging cheek. She had moved so fast. Just like those miners on Beaver. Marghe breathed hard. This was not Beaver, and she would not let this happen. She surged to her feet and ripped open the hanging, but Aoife was gone, swallowed by the gathering dark.

She breathed harder, deliberately focusing her anger, husbanding it, trying to think. Aoife was gone; to hand was fuel for fire, and food and water; she had her FN‑17. She could run, now. She pulled on her boots in the foretent, then came back in with her saddle pack. First she pulled down one of the bulging skins of locha, then grabbed food and the half‑full sack of taar dung. She stuck her head out of the flap. No one. She heaved the saddle up onto her left arm, supported it with her right, and ran to the horse corral.

It was guarded by two women. One, mounted, laid a hand on her knife. The other straightened from breaking the ice on the trough and folded her arms. They watched her in silence.

Marghe wanted to run at them, smash them out of the way, ride into the cold dark. But there were two of them. She stood there, feeling angry and stupid, weighed down by the saddle. The woman on horseback nudged her mount forward. Marghe turned around and began walking back to Aoife’s tent. The rider followed her all the way.

Marghe calmed herself with breathing and meditation. When Borri entered the tent, she was sitting peacefully by the fire, staring into the lavender and yellow flames.

“So, you’re the stranger.” Borri was taller than Aoife, and older, too, rangy under her furs. She untied a belt hung with tiny pouches and packets and dumped it on the bed.

“Marghe.”

“Marghe, then,” the woman acknowledged. “And I’m Borri.” She sat down, held big‑wristed hands out to the fire. “Ah, that feels good. It’s a cold night and they ache from rubbing the phlegm from little Licha’s lungs.”

The talk unsettled Marghe. She had not realized how accustomed she had become to Aoife’s silent gestures. She wondered if she was supposed to do something for this woman, and if she would get beaten if she did not.

Borri was looking at her, head tilted to the side. Her eyes were gray and widely spaced. “I’ve got something for that cheek. It won’t soothe the pain much, but it should ease the bruise away quicker.”

“Thank you,” she said cautiously.

“We’ll need to heat some water.”

Borri filled a pot from one of the skins and showed Marghe how to settle it securely on the fire. “Aoife doesn’t mean to be cruel,” she said suddenly. “You mustn’t let her treat you as badly as she sometimes treats herself.”

Marghe was not quite sure how to respond to that. She wanted to grab this woman’s hand and shout, I don’t belong here, on this world! Instead, she asked, “Where’s Aoife?”

“With the Levarch.”

Marghe wondered if it was anything to do with her. “Does she go there often?”

Borri nodded. “She’s Agelast.” Marghe looked blank. “Agelast. The next Levarch.”

Marghe searched her memory for the word. Agelast: one who does not laugh.

Marghe stood in her stirrups to scan the taar herd. In the distance, Fion lifted her palo stick and flicked it to full length, slicing the air horizontally in a question; Marghe raised her hand in an all’s wellgesture. Overhead, clouds raced by in tatters and streamers, and for the first time since Holme Valley Marghe caught glimpses of hard, deep blue sky. A pensel sky, Borri called it, after the pensels the riders wore fluttering from their spears during bollo games in the spring. Sunlight glittered on the snow that had fallen fresh the day before. Here and there, piles of taar droppings glistened, dark and smooth against the white.

It was her fourth day at the winter camp, her second riding with the herd. While she rode, Fion always kept her in sight. Aoife had told her that the younger tribeswoman was not as good with the sling as she: if Marghe tried to escape, Fion would go for a chest shot, perhaps breaking ribs, or worse.

Marghe was careful not to make any sudden moves. In time, she reasoned, Aoife and the others would relax, just a little. A little was all she needed. Whenever she could, she replenished her saddle bag with food. When the opportunity came, she would be ready. Until then, she would be patient and win their trust.

Meanwhile, there were things here to be observed.

She hooked her leg over her saddle horn, pulled off her right glove, touched RECORD. “The Echraidhe number one hundred and eighty‑three, and occupy fifty‑four tents, or yurtu. Although age is difficult to judge, I guess that about thirty are under fifteen, twenty‑eight or ‑nine over sixty–two of whom are or appear to be very old. More than half the rest are between about forty‑five and sixty. There is some evidence that the yurtu hold many fewer people than they were originally built for. I believe their population is declining, and suspect that the absence of trata has led to diet deficiencies which–”

Movement caught her eye; she touched OFF, slid her foot back into the stirrup, and pulled her pony after the straggling taar.

“Haii!” She did not have the extra reach of a palo, so she had to lean half out of the saddle to whip the animal across the rump. It leapt nimbly to rejoin the herd. Fion gave her a thumbs‑up and Marghe smiled to herself. That sign had traveled to this world all the way from ancient Rome. Human cultures kept the oddest gestures. Many too, were lost: in the minimal gravity of space communities, people did not nod or shake their heads; it caused inner ear disturbances.

She wondered if she would ever see any of those communities again. Don’t think of the future, she told herself, stay in the here and now.

In the far distance a woman sat on a horse, watching. Uaithne. After a while, the rider wheeled away. Marghe was glad. Uaithne’s constant scrutiny was unnerving; she did not understand it. She went back to her report.

“The yurtu and their occupants form economic and social units, each laying claim to, and having use of, a variable number of taars and horses. As the Echraidhe subsist on these animals, such divisions of property are vital. They are kept and tended in a communal herd; I am not yet sure at what point individuals or families take responsibility.” Or whether the women watching the herds day and night guarded them from more than just her escape attempts.

They drove the taars back into camp in the late afternoon. They passed a young woman heading out, empty sacks flapping behind her saddle: dung‑collection detail.

Fion helped Marghe pen the animals. Children waited to groom their mounts. Finally Marghe edged sideways into the yurti with the saddle. Aoife was squatting on the floor, feeding the cookfire, one chip at a time. She looked up and nodded. Borri stood near the entrance, filling her medicine belt with pouches and bundles of herbs. She smiled briefly at Marghe, and the deep frown line above her nose disappeared and reappeared.

“It’s little Kaitlin this time.” She tucked her single braid down under her overfur and pulled up the hood. “Don’t save food.”

Marghe laced the flap after her, for the warmth. The fire would give enough light. “Kaitlin?” she asked over her shoulder. It was a kinship question, one of the few Aoife would answer.

“Mairu’s youngest. Licha’s soestre.”

Marghe nodded. Soestre: those children, two or sometimes–rarely–more, born at the same time to different mothers who shared the same yurti–though not all children born this way were named soestre. The concept held a special significance which she had not yet been able to unravel. Marghe wondered if it was linked to the fact that the tribe celebrated the anniversaries of their childrens’ conception, not birth. Some yurtu were organized around two or more soestre and their tent sisters, who might or might not be biologically related. Borri and Aoife were tent sisters but not soestre, nor, as far as Marghe could tell, otherwise related.

By the light of the fire she checked the saddle over for wear. Scooping a gobbet of grease from the jar by the hearth, she began to rub it into the leather. Aoife had some water bubbling and was dribbling it over shavings of dap into a clay bowl. One braid hung down her back, the other dangled in front of her, almost dipping into the bowl; the firelight picked out strands of silver, staining them to red gold. Her eyes were soft with concentration. While the drink steeped, she ground coarse grain into meal, her movements graceful and precise. When the dap was ready, she strained it through a cloth into two smaller, wooden bowls.

Aoife dropped a handful of meal into her bowl and stirred it with a finger. To that, she added a scoop of taar butter, then mixed the mess until it formed a doughy, greasy ball the size of her fist. She tweaked off a piece and chewed it.

Marghe set the saddle aside and wiped her hands down her thighs before reaching for the tea. She preferred to drink half her dap down, enjoying the earthy, fragrant warmth, before adding the grain and fat she needed to survive here in winter. She longed for fresh fruit, or vegetables.

Aoife pulled off another piece of dough, rolling it through her fingers into a small ball. “Soon,” she said, “my daughter Marac, and Scatha, the daughter of Aelle, will bring their beds to this yurti. You will become their tent mother, like Borri. Aelle stays choose‑mother.”

Marghe did not know what to say. “How old are they?”

“At the Moon of New Grass, they celebrate their sixteenth life day.” She put the dough in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

Marghe sipped from her bowl. Sixteenth. She would be joint mother to two twelve‑year‑olds. She tried to think of the right thing to say. “Marac and Scatha are soestre?”

“No.” Aoife stared into the fire. “The old Levarch wanted kinship ties between my yurti and Aelle’s, to strengthen the tribe. Aelle and I are not soestre, not even tent sisters, but we tried.” She bowed her head. “We failed.”

Marghe put down her bowl, tried to work out what Aoife was telling her. “Soestre only come from soestre?” she asked slowly.

“No.”

“Usually from soestre, then.” Aoife nodded. “So soestre from tent sisters is rare.”

“It has been done.”

Marghe ignored the warning in Aoife’s voice. She leaned forward. “But the old Levarch was asking you to do an almost impossible thing, because you weren’t soestre?”

Aoife looked right at her. Brown eyes met brown, but Aoife’s were cold, igneous, compressed by years of hard living. “The Levarch asked, and we obeyed. It has been done.”

It was dark and cold. Marghe crouched in the snow behind the yurti, where the women usually relieved themselves, and lifted her wristcom closer. “So,” she whispered, “although at first I suspected these simultaneous births were the result of menstrual synchronicity of some kind, there’s obviously more to it. Perhaps, then, the term soestre has biological as well as social significance.”

So many people would give so much to understand how these women reproduced. A bitter smile cracked open her lip: she would trade the professional opportunity of a lifetime for an operational SLIC and the sight of Danner and a squad of Mirrors humming over the snow on their sleds.

Her mouth was bleeding. She wiped at it. Snow, crusted on her sleeve, broke open her lip in half‑a‑dozen other places. She had the foresight to take off her gloves before wiping at her tears.

Five of them ate around the fire. Aoife sat on her own pallet and Marac shared Borri’s. Scatha shared Marghe’s, and whenever either of them moved, it rustled. Borri had shown her how to weave together the flat, dry ropes of horsehair and stuff the pallet with dried grass and scraps of felt. It was still new enough to be uncomfortable. Scatha and Marac would bring their own pallets, along with the rest of their belongings, from Aelle’s tent after the meal.

Marac was named after the small black knife of a healer, the marac dubh. Like her mother she was dark and slight, her eyes the same brown; she lifted fingers full of spice‑yellow rice to her mouth with the same precision. Next to Aoife’s flinty strength, however, Marac was lighter, thinner, and her hair, untouched by silver, was pulled back from her face into a single braid. Marghe looked over at Aoife’s face, all hollow and muscle, and wondered if it had ever been as soft as her daughter’s, even before the scar. Aoife and Marac were identical twins, separated in looks only by time and circumstance. She thought about that for a while. Marac was no one’s soestre. But Mairu’s daughter Kaitlin looked nothing like a twin to her mother, and Kaitlin wassoestre, to Licha. Being soestre must have something, somehow, to do with the alteration of genetic information passed from mother to daughter.

Aoife was looking at her. She returned her attention to her food.

Scatha lifted her bowl to Borri. “This is good.” Marac smiled shyly. “We’ll eat better here than with Aelle.” And Marghe was struck by the similarities between these two adolescents and herself at that age. She remembered a meal with her mother’s aunt, Great‑aunt Phillipa; she had felt the way Marac did now, a little cautious, a little shy, on her best behavior, but not really ill at ease. These people were utterly human. But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

Borri helped herself to another portion. She nodded at Marghe’s almost empty bowl, raising her eyebrows. Marghe shook her head.

“It’s not to your taste?”

“It was good, very tender. I’m not very hungry.”

Borri frowned. “Are you well?”

Marghe glanced at Aoife, considered. She did not have to tell it all. She pulled the FN‑17 from her pocket. “Every ten days I take one of these. When I do, they take away my appetite for a while.”

“What are they for?” Marac asked.

Borri held out her hand. “May I see one?”

Marghe hesitated, then twisted open the vial and laid one of the softgels on the outstretched palm. Aoife watched Marghe intently.

“I’m not from here, the north,” Marghe said carefully. “I take these so that I don’t catch a virus, a sickness, from you.”

“Why did you come up here?” Scatha asked. “Where were you going?”

“I was going to Ollfoss. In Moanwood.”

Borri rolled the softgel around on her palm and nodded. “A bezoar. Prevention. Just as we used to dose ourselves with ellum root when we went south to trade, to stop bowel rot.” She picked up the softgel, sniffed it.“What sickness is it you protect yourself from?”

“I don’t know what you call it. It takes forty to sixty days to develop and can start with a cough and itching eyes.”

“Followed by aches in the joints, sore gums, high fever?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Sometimes.” She looked at Marac and Scatha, who were smiling. “Do you know what it is?”

Scatha laughed. “Baby fever!”

Marghe looked to Borri for confirmation, and the healer nodded. “It’s not common, but sometimes a baby is born early and two moons later comes down with fever. Rarely, they bleed from the nose or the eyes and then their hearts run away, beat themselves to exhaustion. If that happens, they die. Otherwise they cough a few days, and scream enough to try their mothers’ patience, but recover fast enough.” She looked at the softgel thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard of a grown woman getting it. Not Echraidhe or Briogannon, not at Singing Pastures or Ollfoss.” Her eyes were very bright when they met Marghe’s. “Not even in far‑away places across the Oboshi Desert or the Western Ocean.”

Scatha leaned forward. “Where are you from?”

Aoife stirred. “Marghe is Echraidhe now.” She held Scatha’s gaze, then Marac’s. There were no more questions.

After the meal, Aoife and the two younger women left for Aelle’s tent. Borri stayed where she was, rolling the softgel absently between her fingers while Marghe banked the fire and collected the bowls to take outside and scrape clean in the snow.

“Put the bowls down,” the healer said mildly, “and come sit with me.”

Marghe settled cross‑legged opposite her. The healer held the softgel up to the light.

“This is like nothing I know of. Here, take it back.” Marghe dropped it into the vial, stowed it away in her pocket. The healer watched her. “Marghe, where do you come from that you’re so afraid of baby fever, and Aoife is afraid to let you speak?”

Marghe said nothing.

“Don’t fear Aoife on account of me. What you say here is between us two.”

Marghe wondered if that was true. “What do you know of the world?” she asked eventually.

“Much,” Borri said dryly. “What is it you think I don’t but should?”

Marghe felt her cheeks go red. “I meant, what do you know of the physical shape of your world?”

“‘Your’ world?” Borri said thoughtfully. She leaned back a little, but Marghe saw the muscles around the healer’s eyes tighten.

She decided to trust Borri. “There are many; the moons in your sky are worlds, but nobody lives there. The world I come from is something like this one, but the people are different, and the diseases.”

“Have you told anyone else this?”

“Only Aoife. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Listen to me.” She laid a hand on Marghe’s knee. “Aoife was right to protect you. You must never, never speak to anyone of what you’ve just told me. No one.”

The hand on Marghe’s knee was brown; a vein blue‑snaked across it from below the base of the thumb. Marghe lifted her eyes from the hand to Borri’s face and could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “ Aoifeprotect me? Who from?”

A draft blew a spark from the fire. Borri sighed. “ Aoife’s, soestre. Uaithne.”

Aoife and Uaithne? “ But I thought…”She thought Aoife had no family; she thought that, like her, Aoife was alone. But soestre usually lived together as family; as tent sisters, if not lovers.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Ask Aoife,” Borri said. “It’s not my story to tell.”

Aoife would never tell her, they both knew that. She tried another approach. “Why would it be dangerous for me if Uaithne found out I’m from another world?”

“Not just dangerous for you. For all of us.” She glanced at the entrance flap, and Marghe hoped Aoife and the two younger women would be a long time at Aelle’s.

“Something happened to Uaithne a long time ago,” Borri said eventually. “It disturbed her mind. She believes she’s the Death Spirit returned. We have a story, an old story, about the goddess of death and how we came into this world.”

It was quiet and dark outside, with wind slow and steady from the northeast. Marghe wondered what the stars would look like this far north: Jeep’s sun was one of a huge constellation. Beyond the clouds, the sky probably blazed. She wished she could see it.

She levered a few taar chips free and shoveled them into the sack. Aoife, Borri, Marac, and Scatha were inside rearranging the tent. She had volunteered to refill the sack; she did not want to be near Aoife at the moment, not until she had time to think over what Borri had said.

She touched RECORD. “The Echraidhe have a legend that clearly links the virus with their reproduction, and with their retention of languages and customs already dead a thousand years before they left Earth. They tell of a death world, a spirit world which contains all the peoples and monsters there ever were.” Marghe found herself adopting the same singsong cadence Borri had used. “In this spirit world, death is the goddess of all. Or almost all. Long ago, some of these spirit people renounced death: there must be more, they said. Yes, said the goddess, you shall find out. And she cast them forth. At length, they came to a place where the goddess in her normal guise could not follow, a place of strange beasts and too many moons.

“But in this place where the goddess was not, her spirit still lived, though sleeping, in the hearts of fully half the people, and in this place, her spirit awoke and claimed them in a great sickness. But the goddess is ever‑merciful. To those who survived was given a miraculous gift: children. It is said that the spirit of these people lives on in their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters, so that all who come after may remember back to what once was, and what may be again. However, it is also said that the spirit of the goddess of death has come to live within all who survive, waiting. It is said that she will rise again in her chosen one, and that there will be an accounting.”

To Marghe, most of the story was clear enough. It was a fable of the original settlers’ journey from Earth and their arrival here, the place of strange beasts and too many moons. The goddess of death was, of course, the virus. According to the story, the virus somehow made it possible for the survivors to conceive children. The memory references of the fable were not clear, though the allusions to a Chosen One were not too different from the kind of messiah myth found in scores of cultures.

What was unusual was that Uaithne, Aoife’s soestre, believed that the Death Spirit had returned within her. Borri had not told her how Uaithne had come to believe this, but apparently the tribeswoman was adamant, saying she was only waiting for a message. Borri, like Aoife, believed that if Marghe let it be known she was from another world, Uaithne might think she was the messenger. And nobody knew what Uaithne would do then.

Thick indigo clouds moved overhead like a school of whales.

Borri and Aoife had both told her: stay quiet. For their own sakes, or hers? Was this something she might turn to her advantage? And did they know Uaithne was already watching her?

She sat back on her heels and watched the sky. It matched her mood: slow‑moving, benthic. What had happened between Uaithne and Aoife, the two soestre? She needed to know.

Over the next few days, Marghe watched Aoife. In a tribe where women prided themselves on self‑sufficiency, Aoife was more alone than any. She was liked and respected, she was Agelast, but Marghe never saw her smile, never saw her reach out and pat someone’s hand while they talked, or lean her head on another’s shoulder. None shared her bed. Even the Levarch and her family, Borri, and her own daughters, Marac and Scatha, were kept outside, unable to reach through her solitude.

Out on the plains with Marghe, Aoife seemed content. Marghe understood that, too. Grief was not a spectator sport. After her mother had died, she had spent hours roaming the Welsh hillsides, her only company the sheep that still lambed on the bleak hills in spring. But Aoife’s was a constant grief, a wound that could not heal: Uaithne was still alive.

Once, when they were alone with the herd and the wind, Marghe cut out a limping taar from the rest and dismounted to check its hooves. Aoife reined in and joined her. Marghe lifted the beast’s forefoot to look at the tender spot.

“Tell me why he’s limping,” the tribeswoman said.

“I think it must have been ice. Gone now.” She let go of the leg and slapped the taar on the rump. Aoife nodded approval and then went to her saddle pack and took out a palo. She held it out to Marghe.

“You know enough to have this.”

Marghe hefted it in her hand. It was as long as her forearm and thick as a spear shaft, made of polished hardwood. Near one end was a carving of a horse. Not a shaggy Echraidhe mount: Pella.

“You made this for me?”

Aoife said nothing. Marghe flicked it experimentally; it snapped into a slender pole almost two meters long. Another flick of her wrist telescoped it back in on itself. She did not know what to say. Wood was precious, but it was not only that: Aoife had made this, carved it, polished and stained it in secret. For her.

Aoife held out her hand for it, showed Marghe the tiny leather strap at the end. “This is to secure it for traveling.”

Marghe did so, then fastened it to her belt. It hung to mid‑thigh. She ran her finger down the carefully stained wood. “Aoife, thank you.” But Aoife was already swinging back into her saddle.

On their way back that afternoon, they saw a figure galloping away into the stretching white at a furious pace. Aoife bowed her head, as at some old hurt, and Marghe knew it must be Uaithne.

“Where does she go at such a pace?”

Aoife turned her face away as if she had not heard.

Chapter Seven

EACH DAWN BRIGHTENED later and later. Aoife started taking Marghe far out onto the plains, past the grazing grounds, beyond the sight of smoke from the fires. They used their palos to clear away patches of the hard‑packed snow and the tribeswoman showed Marghe a world she had never dreamed existed. A world of frozen ice moss, of fist‑sized scuttlers called ruks, of the snow worm. She learned how to catch the worm, how to bite off the tail and drink down the viscous, sugary fluid until all that was left was an empty, flaccid skin, like a lace. That could be toasted and eaten, or used like a leather thong. They ate ruks, too, but these Aoife had to catch. Marghe, though she was learning to use a sling, was hopelessly slow compared to the hard‑shelled snow crabs. Perhaps because they did always defeat her, she disliked the taste: the flesh was greasy, acrid enough to bring tears to her eyes. Aoife made her eat it because it was good for her bones. Marghe, remembering the vow she made herself to stay as fit as she could, complied.

Sometimes they just rode, eyepits stained dark against the snow glare, while Aoife told stories of Tehuantepec before the coming of the tribe. Tehuantepec, she said, had long ago been a plain waving with grass, peopled by dark spirits. Marghe wondered about climatic change. On cold nights, Aoife continued, when these spirits still roamed, they might trick an unwary rider from her horse, then eat her, or the horse.

Marghe asked about the stones.

“They have always been,” Aoife said, shrugging. “They were there before we came, will be there long after the plain has returned to a sea of grass.” Every year, she said, they went there to feel the magic, to thank the spirits that sang every spring and made the grass grow and the taars quicken. The spirits in the stones sang all year. Listening, Marghe remembered their electromagnetic hum.

Sometimes Aoife told stories of tribal honor, of raids on the Briogannon, another tribe who dwelt on the plain; of raids on the herds of Singing Pastures and, in times past, on the forest gardens of Ollfoss.

“But why not just make trata with other communities?” Marghe kept wanting to know. “You’d both benefit.” She had seen how small their population was. They needed trade, cultural diversity. Genetic diversity, too, though she did not know how that worked. Without the taking of strangers like herself, they might die out. They might die out anyway.

“Echraidhe do not stoop to trata.”

“Why not?”

“We take what we need, not bargain like farmers,” Aoife would say. “The old ways work well enough.”

“Old ways are not always the best ways.”

And Aoife would shrug and fall silent. Moments later, she would begin an instructional tale about the Echraidhe code of tribe before self. In such a hostile environment such a code was necessary for survival, Marghe knew; she had encountered it on the harsh world of Gallipoli, in old Scottish clan ties of Earth. She wondered what needs Aoife subjugated for the good of the tribe. She found the complexities of such an honor code hard to sympathize with. Aoife was always patient. “Selfishness is for younglings,” she would say.

Sometimes, when even Aoife admitted the weather was bad, they would sit in the yurti. Marghe held the wool for Aoife while she wove, or helped her mix with water the acrid powder that was stored in the foretent: Aoife told her it was made from the dried leaves of corax, a black, leathery succulent found in the northern forests in summer. It made a powerful bleaching agent.

Marghe listened carefully to anything Aoife told her, not knowing what might prove useful later. Despite the fact that Aoife was partly responsible for her capture, for her remaining a virtual prisoner, Marghe watched the tribeswoman enjoy having her there to teach, and felt unhappy; she knew she would be prepared to do this woman injury, if necessary, to escape. At these moments, she would take a deep breath, put aside the confusing thoughts, and help Aoife smear the bleach paste onto raw wool with a bone spatula.

Borri, and Marac and Scatha, also spent more and more time in the yurti, for as the Echraidhe reckoned it, this was the Moon of Shelters. Soon it would be the Moon of Knives, when only the unwary or the desperate would ride far from the hearth.

The Moon of Knives, Aoife said, was the time of great blizzards, of the howling cold that swept over the Ice Sea from the north. Strange beasts traveled on the breath of the ice wind. From the wastelands they would come, across the frozen waters. While the land lay quiet under the days of dark, nine days of night barely lightening to gray before deepening again to full dark, the beasts would roam northern Tehuantepec. The creatures of the Great Forest–the tree‑dwelling yanomao, the glimmer flies, the rare and beautiful jewelfeet–would be driven deep into its snow‑shrouded fastness by the cyarnac and the goth. Cyarnac, it was rumored, were four‑legged, smaller than a horse and swifter than the wind. Those who had seen one and survived said they were as alien and cold as the great mountain glacier, and that they drew heat from a woman’s body and soul as swiftly as meltwater. Thick‑furred and white as bleached bone, they kept their hairless young in pouches and ate anything that moved.

Marghe listened, appreciating the storytellers’ art, analyzing the content.

The goth were different. Tall they were, half as high again as a big woman astride a big horse. Gray and gaunt, they were creatures of the cold mist and the dark places under trees. They stood on two feet, and a woman who had seen one, Aoife said, told of strange, flat eyes which she swore on her mother’s blood were intelligent. Intelligent or not, the goth were said to live on lichen and bark scraped from the sides of trees and under the snow. Their faces were round, like platters, their mouths horny‑lipped. Their fur was shaggy and streaked and it was said that a woman could stand next to one in a forest and not know it was there until it moved.

Marghe wondered if these half‑mythical goth could be the builders of the stone circle, driven from their usual habitat by warm‑blooded aliens. But none of the Echraidhe would admit to having seen one themselves. It was all tales from the past. Perhaps they were long dead.

Near the end of the Moon of Shelters, when foul weather had penned the Echraidhe in their yurtu for more than two days, the tribe gathered in the enormous yurti of the Levarch, the story tent. Most were drinking. The circular tent was low and the air heavy with the smell of unwashed women, their fur and leather clothes, grease, and the animal stench of taar chips. It was very hot.

Marghe took a long swallow of ale; her face was already flushed but she filled her bowl with more of the dark, slightly bitter stuff. Cuirm, the Echraidhe called it; a great improvement on the ever‑foul locha. She looked around the tent. The former Levarch, Nehu, whose old voice was like the whispering of dry leaves, was telling a tale of a young Echraidhe adopted by the beasts of the forest. Even to Marghe it sounded well‑worn, the phrases ritual and well‑practiced. And the Echraidhe were restless.

She sipped at her ale again, licked foam from her lips. Even the Levarch was flushed and wild. Aoife sat a little apart, knotting bright colors, occasionally looking up from the thick strands under her hands. A half‑full cup stood on the floor by her knee. Borri lay with her head on Aelle’s lap. On the opposite side of the hearth, Uaithne stared fixedly at a point two handsbreadths above Aoife’s head. She did not drink from her cup. To Marghe, unused to so much ale, it seemed that Uaithne’s hair flamed with violent thoughts. The air was bright and thick with sexual tension.

Nehu’s tale wound to its ending and, as was then her right, the old Levarch requested a story about a raid from Mairu. Mairu stood and held her palms outward for silence; the Echraidhe quieted. She struck an over‑solemn pose and told the tribe she would tell of a time, last spring, when she and her soestre had, by trickery, parted the women of Singing Pastures from the possession of four sacks of grain, a sack of dap, and a saddle. She pranced and postured and pulled faces, exaggerating her cunning and her victims’ stupidity. Roars of laughter, and shouted interruptions from Fion, her soestre, accompanied the story as Mairu ruthlessly reduced the women of Singing Pastures to creatures with no more wit and wisdom than snow worms. Though the end of the tale was greeted with stamps and shouts of approval, Marghe heard the heat and wildness surging and building in the tent. At the back of the tent, two women were kissing in endless, slow intensity; their furs were undone. Marghe watched a weather‑dark hand stroke soft breasts and became aware of her own muscles coiled sleek and plump under her too‑tight skin, of hot air rubbing at her throat and widening her nostrils.

She could have taken her sexual energy and smoothed it down, but she wanted to let it burn through her, she wanted to enjoy being alive. She turned away and gulped from her bowl. The ale made her reckless.

She scrambled up and held out her palms for silence. The tent quieted abruptly.

“Women of the Echraidhe… Though the snow lies but a fingerwidth from these walls, though the air is cold enough to freeze the milk in a taar’s tit, let my words take you to a faraway place where women sweat in the heat and bathe naked in mountain springs to cool their skins.”

Oh, she had their attention now. They were leaning forward, bowls halfway to mouths; even Borri was sitting up. She winked at Aoife, took a huge swig of cuirm, and realized she was drunk already. Haii! What did she care?

“Tonight, I will speak to you of strange lands and beating hearts, of stone that burns under the ground like dry dung, and of passion, power, and intrigue.”

And so Marghe spoke of her recruitment and passage to this world. She dressed it up as a legend‑quest: a powerful tribe of one country discovers the richness of a neighboring country and determines to take what it needs. But those who enter this strange new country with their arrogance and superior weaponry suffer through ignorance. They set off great burns in the unstable south and western grasslands and many die; they ignore the wise women of the country and fight the burns in such a way that they get worse. As if this was not enough, many of the newcomers begin to fall sick and die of a mysterious disease.

Marghe was enjoying herself. She transformed Company into a group of bickering tribal elders arguing over the selection of a suitable daughter for a trading mission. This chosen one was then prepared for her task. The initial survival training she had undergone years ago on the deserts of the Kalahari and the cold crags of the Rockies needed no significant changes, nor the laborious learning of another language. She did not have to force her eyes to sparkle with tears when she told of the death of the woman’s mother, or the final leavetaking from the beloved green hillsides and gray stone of her country.

The Echraidhe traveled with her through memories of the alien smells and tastes, sounds and sights, of the ugly slashed land around that outpost in the strange country, Port Central. They listened while she spoke of grasslands that still smoldered, of the determination of the herders there to claim reparation, of the wonders of Holme Valley and her own passage through Singing Pastures. She made them feel, as she had felt, the exhilaration and fear, the freezing cold and stifling heat of her journey alone over the years to reach here, this place. Tehuantepec.

It was a great success. Marghe leaned against the wall of sound, the roar and stamp of approval, swaying. It felt good to be seen as human. She looked over at Aoife and saw the scar twist in a slight smile. Before she knew what she was doing, she held out her palms again. She looked at the Levarch.

“I’ve told a tale. Now it’s my right to ask one to be told?”

“It is.”

“Then I ask that Aoife speaks of how she came by her scars.”

Silence congealed around her. She looked about in confusion. Several women looked away. “Aoife?” she said, swaying.

“I will not.” Aoife’s eyes were flat and hard, like stones.

Marghe did not understand. She had expected Aoife to tell some tale of daring, of wounds heroically gained, of being named Agelast. Instead… this.

The Levarch cleared her throat. “Marghe asks only her right. But this story rightly belongs to Uaithne.” Heads turned, waiting.

“I obey the Levarch in all things.” Uaithne’s voice was light, unperturbed. Marghe felt sick. How could she have been stupid enough to get drunk? Uaithne held out her palms in the ritual gesture and began. The tale she told was plain, without exaggeration or mime, and in third person:

“At the end of the grazing season nineteen summers ago Uaithne and her soestre Aoife made a pact that when the time came for them to choose their real names, they would join together in the deepsearch and go back further along their memories than any of their tribe had searched before. A common youthful declaration.

“The time came. They withdrew to their yurti, linked together in the deepbond of soestre, and tranced together for the deepsearch into the memories of their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. As everyone gathered here knows, deepsearch is exhausting. No matter what one swears in youthful exuberance, one usually does not go farther back than three or four generations. But Uaithne and her soestre were fine and brave, strong young women who believed that together they could do anything. And so they tried. They tranced deeper and deeper, further and further back, to the foremothers of their foremothers’ foremothers. And further. Back to when Echraidhe and Briogannon roamed Tehuantepec as one tribe, back to before the tribe left the forest for the plain, back to the Beginning when all peoples lived together in one place, Ollfoss, deep in Moanwood.

“For Aoife, this was enough, more than enough. She had seen all the women who had given life to each other, generation after generation, in a long line leading to the present, and herself. She knew her place in the world. She had chosen her name.

“It was not enough for Uaithne. She wanted to go further back than any woman had gone before; she wanted to see what was on the other side of the Beginning. She dived deep, then deeper. Aoife struggled, tried to stop her soestre, scared for both of them: if they went too deep, they might be unable to come back up to their true place in the world, to themselves. And neither had the strength for much more. But the two women were soestre, deepbonded so that when one hurt, the other suffered; it was a bond that was knitted into their lives and experience, as necessary as breathing.

“Uaithne dragged Aoife further down.

“Aoife knew that if she did not stop this, they were lost. She did the only thing she could: she broke the deepbond.

“Somehow, Aoife dragged herself back to the present. Uaithne lay still and white and silent beside her. Aoife tried to wake her, to call her back, but she was young and did not have the skill.

Uaithne, deep in trance and not expecting the dissolution of the bond that had kept them close enough to share dreams all their lives, had been unprotected. Now her mind wandered alone amongst the strange herd of memories, unable to find the path home.

“Aoife ran to find old Macha, Borri’s teacher. It took many days for Macha to find Uaithne and bring her back to herself. When she did return, she screamed herself raw. She was ill for a long time. And afterward, she could not bear the sight of her former soestre and she was taken to live in the Levarch’s yurti.

“Time passed. To those who were concerned it seemed that the estranged soestre did begin to heal, in their own separate fashions. While Aoife spent much time not talking to anyone, Uaithne seemed to recover from the broken deepbond and took to riding out to visit the Briogannon.

“At the time of the new Moon of Sweet Grass, Uaithne and a woman of the Briogannon, Fellyr, went before the elders of that tribe and swore themselves to each other. Afterwards, as is usual for those of different tribes, they decided to start a child each as evidence of good faith. Now, although they were lovers and soon to be tent sisters, they had neither skill nor knowledge of one another to trance together deeply enough to mutually quicken each other and conceive soestre. They would link together just deep enough to quicken together, Fellyr decided. But Uaithne had not tranced since she had chosen her name, and was afraid. When Fellyr tranced and quickened, Uaithne did not, but said nothing. Thus deceived, the Briogannon woman was happy to say a temporary farewell to Uaithne, who was to journey back to the Echraidhe for the blessings of her family and Levarch, and to collect her share of horse and herd, before traveling back to the Briogannon greengrounds.

“At that time, the greengrounds of the Briogannon were three days’ ride from the Echraidhe yurtu. On the second night of her journey back, Uaithne was lying in her nightbag, composing herself for sleep, when a patch of cloud uncurled itself from around the spring moon, and light poured down from the sky and through the open flap of her tent. “Try once again,” the moon seemed to say, “and I will watch over you.” And so Uaithne did. She deepened her breathing and slowed her heart, and fell into trance.

“At first, all was well. She heard the voices of her foremothers calling but did not listen; she was here to pay heed to her body, to listen to the rhythms of blood and egg, to quicken life. But one voice, stronger than the others, called and for just a moment Uaithne listened. The moment stretched to hours, the hours to days as the voice drew Uaithne deeper into the past and through the barrier that is the Beginning. To this day, no one knows how long Uaithne stayed in deep trance, rigid and hardly breathing. When she came to, the snows lay heavy on the roof of her tent and her skin hung loose on her bones.

“When she came at last to the yurtu of the Echraidhe, all marked how thin and strange she looked. To those few who asked, she said nothing. When the Levarch, worried, spoke to her sternly, Uaithne said only that she had spoken with the goddess of death, that she was her chosen representative in this place, the Death Spirit, and that she awaited the sign to begin the accounting long spoken of. She would not be gainsaid. She resumed her life with the tribe. She made no mention of Fellyr of the Briogannon nor of her oath; thus, no word was sent, no message knot delivered to her lover, still waiting at the Briogannon greengrounds.

“Time passed, and Fellyr grew worried at her lover’s absence. Without pausing to consult the elders, she saddled her horse and rode hard. After two days without rest or sleep, crazy with worry and hunger, she came to the summer camp of the Echraidhe. She saw Uaithne working alone by the taar pens and slid from her horse, into her lover’s arms, sobbing with relief. But Uaithne thrust her aside and told her that she no longer wished to partner a Briogannon, that she had other tasks, that she withdrew her oath.

“Now, when Fellyr the Briogannon realized she had been cast aside with as much thought as one would discard a worn boot, her worry turned to rage and grief and she slid her knife free. Uaithne, as no one would dispute, is a fine fighting woman: she knocked Fellyr aside and took the knife in her own hand.

“Fellyr lay sobbing and broken on the sweet new grass and, instead of pity, Uaithne offered violence.

“Aoife, who had caught the Briogannon’s panicked mount out by the Levarch’s tent and was searching for its rider, came upon the two a heartbeat before murder. Uaithne had her knee on Fellyr’s chest, oblivious to anything but the keen‑edged knife lying across the soft throat beneath her. There was no time to call out. Instead, Aoife leapt and knocked Uaithne aside.

“Uaithne fought like a demon, as though she did not know she struggled against the woman who had been her soestre. The blade caught Aoife across cheek and nose, the haft smashed into bone. Half blinded by her own blood, Aoife fumbled in the grass for a stone and swung at the side of Uaithne’s head. She had to hit her twice more before Uaithne dropped the knife and collapsed onto the white‑faced Fellyr.

Someone added a chip to the fire. It spat into the silence. Marghe felt the ale ungluing her world, slipping it free from its moorings. If she moved her head, the world would spin. Uaithne raised her bowl and tilted it toward Marghe in mocking salute. “Did you enjoy your tale?”

“It is not finished,” the Levarch said heavily. She turned to Marghe. “The Briogannon woman returned to her tribe. There she renamed herself Ojo, which in their speech means evil eye. A year later, when her daughter was born, she named her Ojo also. The elder Ojo and her tent sisters have sworn blood feud against Uaithne. They have raided us many times. I fear there will soon be tribe feud between us. Now, instead of Echraidhe and Briogannon exchanging news and lovers, we guard our herds day and night.”

Marghe woke up long before dawn with the splitting head and stretched‑tight feeling of a hangover. The tent was cold and filled with the soft breath of four sleeping women. She was thirsty, but the water jug was empty; her bladder was full.

Shivering, clutching the jug, she staggered outside to relieve herself. Snow crunched under her boots, loud in the predawn quiet. Her urine smelled hot, toxic; it pattered and steamed as it burned into the snow. She stood up, kicked more snow over it, and laced up her furs. If only she could dispose of last night’s mistakes as easily.

The herd trough was thick with ice, and she had to bash it through with the bone propped against the fence. She dipped the jug in; icy water made her hands ache to the bone. She drank, thought she might throw up, then drank again and refilled the jug. She tucked her hands under her armpits, glad of the ache. She deserved it.

One of the Echraidhe guarding the herd, a fur‑wrapped bundle on a horse, nudged her mount over.

“It’s a while until dawn,” she said, curious.

How they hated to ask direct questions, Marghe thought, and just nodded, hoping the woman would leave her in peace. She idly considered knocking her from her horse and riding out of here. But the guard always stayed just out of reach, hand on knife. Elementary precautions. Even if she could escape, it would be pointless. Aoife would track her down within hours.

“You’re the second one up so early,” the woman volunteered. “Uaithne rode off north and east before the moons set.”

The tribeswoman had been guarding the herd all night, Marghe realized, and had probably not heard about the stranger woman humiliating Aoife in public. She could not know that Uaithne’s was the last name Marghe wanted to hear. Marghe borrowed one of Aoife’s tactics and simply ignored the guard until she clucked her mount back into the middle of the sleeping taars.

Marghe contemplated the snow on her boots. Uaithne often disappeared for days at a time; no one knew where she went. Why should this be any different? But she sensed that it was.

She had other things to think about. After another drink of water so cold it burned all the way down to her stomach, she set the jug back down in the snow and pulled her wristcom from a pocket.

“As the Echraidhe use it, the term soestre means those who are born after their mothers somehow synchronize their bio‑rhythms and, through a process which I assume bears similarities to the control by a trained person of her otherwise autonomic nervous system, stimulate each other’s ova to divide.” It sounded bizarre, but the Echraidhe reproduced somehow, and unless the entire tribe was crazy or lying, then some of the daughters of these women, the ones they called soestre, were not genetically identical to their mothers. Which was impossible. Except it happened. How? “Tentative theory: that this ovular stimulation by another somehow encourages genetic information that is recessive to become dominant.” That might account for some of the differences like eye and hair coloring. But what about height, or bone structure? She did not know enough to be certain whether or not these could be explained by the differences the fetuses encountered in the womb.

She drank some more water.

“The deep trancing necessary for reproduction has acquired mystical aspects for the Echraidhe. The rite of passage is attended by a ritual trance, called deepsearch, which, the Echraidhe claim, allows the adolescent to somehow access the memories of her ancestors. The trancing is so deep that psychosis may occur, or may go on so long that it becomes physically detrimental to the subject.”

The Echraidhe accepted access to memories of past lives as casually as others believed in their gods, in reincarnation, in hellfire and damnation. She would not make a judgment on the matter.

She clicked RECORD again, then changed her mind and hit OFF. There were only a few hours of chip space left. She could speculate any time. When the chip was full, she would have to lift her face from the here and now, from her perspective as a woman researching a primitive tribe, and face her future. But the chip was not full yet.

Inside the tent she laced the flap closed behind her. There was just enough light to make it back to her nightbag without treading on anyone. Aoife stirred.

“Aoife?” There was no reply, but she could feel Aoife watching her in the dark. “I’m sorry. I…” There was no way she could explain how she felt. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

The next day, and the day after that, Aoife got her up before dawn and kept her out on the plains until after dark. Marghe wondered if the tribeswoman was keeping her out of harm’s way.

This time, there was no storytelling. Aoife was grim, speaking only to explain how to tell the difference between the vein and artery in a taar’s neck, and which was the right one to cut if she needed a quick kill, or to explain how to hold the skinning knife to take a skin whole from a just‑butchered taar. There were endless lessons, and it seemed to Marghe that Aoife was trying to teach her in one winter everything there was to being an Echraidhe. She wondered at that. Before the night in the Levarch’s tent, Marghe would have thought Aoife’s actions arbitrary, but now she wondered what the tribeswoman saw ahead to prompt this hard, uncompromising work.

Marghe still resented Aoife, because she was her guard, the one who watched her constantly, the one who stood between her and freedom. But as they labored on the plain, Aoife patiently repeating what must have seemed to her a basic lesson, Marghe trying over and again to master something any Echraidhe child could do with ease, she came to see that they were not that different. Aoife only did what she thought was right–and Aoife, too, was alone.

At night, they both lifted their heads at the sound of hoof‑beats, lowered them again when the hoofbeats passed and it was not Uaithne.

Five nights after the incident in the Levarch’s tent, Marghe woke up in the dark, listening. Hoofbeats. Uaithne. Pulling on her boots was difficult; they were as stiff as her arms.

The sky was almost clear of cloud. It was the dark of the moons, but stars were strewn in a thick twist, like old jewels, across the sky. The air was crisp and bright. She could hear the horse clearly. Others did, too; tent flaps were unlaced, and feet stamped in the snow to warm hastily donned boots.

Aoife appeared at her shoulder, stood close.

“It’s Uaithne,” Marghe said, and felt the tribeswoman nod. Suddenly she wanted to put her arms around the small, fierce‑faced woman and hold her close, protect her from more hurt. A rush of loneliness made her throat ache.

The drum of hoofbeats got louder; they heard the harsh breathing of an animal pushed too hard. Then it was there. Someone held the horses while Uaithne slid from the saddle and held up both arms.

“It has begun,” she shouted. In the starlight, the blood on her hands looked black.

Chapter Eight

THAT NIGHT THE sky remained clear, fading from black to a dark, almost navy blue near morning. The air was bitterly cold, brittle as glass. The change in the weather signaled time for the herds to be culled, the old and weak killed that the fodder might last the rest of the herd over winter and that their flesh and bones and blood keep heat in the tribe’s veins during the Moon of Knives and the Moon of Silence, when the world itself seemed to slow to a stop and hesitate before spinning on to spring.

Shards of light thrown up by the snow had the taars shying and skittish as Marghe and Aoife and others, on foot, herded them all into one pen. The women called to one another, shouted at the stupid beasts that milled in confusion, cursed when one enterprising animal made a run for the open plain. Uaithne’s braids burned in the sun like rivers of hot Irish gold as she chased it and brought it down in a tangle of legs.

Marghe wondered how the taar had felt, running to freedom one moment, brought crashing to the snow in a gust and swirl of laughter the next.

Marghe surreptitiously did her best to keep the herd between herself and Uaithne, Uaithne whose teeth flashed whiter than snow as she laughed and lunged her horse this way and that, Uaithne who was strong and healthy and unconcerned about what she had done. A few laughed with her. The shocked silence of last night had given way to mutterings which had become resignation, then calm acceptance: Uaithne had killed a Briogannon, yes, had plunged them into a feud with another tribe that might be the death of them all before spring, but she was also Echraidhe, one of them, their sister, and her madness–if it was madness–was bright and proud and beautiful.

Aoife said nothing. She had remained silent since the night before.

The Echraidhe separated out the culls. It was hard work, and confusing: women slapping at rumps with palos, twirling nooses, cutting out taars from the rest seemingly at random and herding them to one end of the pen. Marghe watched Aoife and tried to follow her lead, using her palo to nudge an old or thin or limping taar away from its more healthy siblings, Once she almost got trampled by two taars running blindly from the swinging palos and had to scramble on all fours across the dung‑spattered snow. She looked up to find Uaithne watching her with an almost sexual intensity. She flushed. Uaithne laughed and turned away.

The morning wore on and Aoife still said nothing. Marghe was nervous. She stayed too fast and light on her feet, blinking too often, throwing her noose and missing, jerking her head up at every shadow, thinking it was Uaithne. By the time Mairu whistled and stopped everything for food, Marghe was exhausted. Marac and Scatha and two other youngsters she did not know brought around bowls of dap and grain. She ate.

Someone stood next to her, her shadow sharp against the ice‑granule snow. She looked up, expecting Aoife. It was Uaithne. She leaned against the fence; her hood was down and snow clung to her hair. Her skin was creamy, fresh, with a delicate flush of exertion, and very smooth. Her gloves were tucked under her belt, next to her knife. The carving on the bone handle was worn smooth with use. She smiled.

“You should eat that before it freezes,” she said, and nodded at the fingerful of grain and butter Marghe still held halfway to her mouth. Marghe, knowing she would be unable to swallow it, put it back in her bowl. Aoife was nowhere in sight. Uaithne took out her knife and began picking dirt and grease from under her nails. “Why do you stay?” she asked conversationally.

“Why do I stay?” Sun gleamed on the tiny golden hairs on the backs of Uaithne’s fingers and ran like bronze along the polished black blade. Marghe wondered if she had killed the Briogannon with the same knife, pushed it deep into her stomach and twisted.

“Yes,” Uaithne said. The knife twitched, drawing blood. She did not seem to mind. “Why do you stay, and why did you come?”

Because you forced me, Marghe wanted to say. Because you pointed your spear at my stomach and Aoife threw me across her horse. But Uaithne was staring out across the snow, and Marghe sensed she was no longer waiting for an answer, that she already had her own.

“And why did you send the other one? To test me?”

Other one? Where was Aoife? She dared not turn her head away to look for her.

“But I passed her tests,” Uaithne went on. Blood dripped onto the snow, perfect round ruby drops. “Oh, she threatened me, searching for weakness, but I laughed at her promises of demon voices that curve around the belly of the world, of light that kills, of rafts that glide on rivers of air faster than the fastest horse can gallop.”

Sleds. The woman was talking of comms and lasers and sleds.

“I showed her the ways of the Death Spirit, I showed her I was worthy. I ignored all her pleas and killed her slowly, one piece at a time. One piece at a time.” She seemed to shake herself back to the present. “So why have you come? To test me again?”

One morning when Marghe was eight and running through the door on her way to play outside in a hot, steamy rainfall, her mother had caught her by the arm and told her she could not play until she had tidied her room. Marghe had pulled free and said plaintively, “But I already did that.” She must have sounded a lot like Uaithne did.

Unthinkingly, she said the same thing now as her mother had said then. “I don’t believe you.” But she did.

Uaithne dipped her bloody hand in a pocket and pulled free something that glittered in the sunlight. Marghe reached out reflexively and took it. After so long handling only bone and wood and leather, the metal felt slick and slippery.

A wristcom. Broken.

“See, the same as the one you wear.”

Marghe examined the wristcom. No way to tell whose. Fear pushed at her guts like an expanding bubble of air. “When did you take this? How long ago?”

Uaithne shrugged. “Sixteen moons, perhaps less.”

Winnie. She had killed Winnie. “You killed my assistant.” She was angry now.

Uaithne shrugged again. “I cut off her fingers, then her toes, but she kept testing me, threatening me with the light‑killing demons on rafts, to see if I would stop. So I cut off her arms, to show I was worthy–”

Marghe shook her head, trying to shake the world away, but the sun stayed in the same place, her breath still steamed in the cold, this woman was still talking about murdering Winnie Kimura, torturing her to death.

“–she died squealing like a two‑day‑old foal until I cut out her tongue. She lived a long time. You send strong messengers.”

Deep breaths. In. Out. “I sent no one,” she said, then remembered she had just told Uaithne that Winnie was her assistant.

Uaithne smiled slyly. “She said you would come, and here you are. You almost fooled me, too, coming on a horse instead of a raft. But I know who you are. I’ve met you before.” She shifted the knife to her other hand. Blood stained the hilt. A ritual cadence crept into her words. “You have spoken to me in my waking dreams, for I have tranced and I have seen Death. Now we are in a living trance, and you have come. Speak to me, sing to me, tell me what you need of me.”

Madness and worship glittered in her eyes like chips of ice, and Marghe was afraid. Fear spiked under her ribs and fluttered under her skin. Sweat burst out on her face and began to freeze.

“Marghe.” The voice came from behind her. Marghe only dared turn her head slightly. Aoife was standing there empty‑handed, balanced like a dancer, ready, eyes fixed on the knife in Uaithne’s bloody hand. “You are not needed here, Marghe,” she said softly, still not moving. Uaithne was swaying now. “Go help Borri in the yurti.”

Marghe backed away slowly, out of reach and out of earshot, until her legs threatened to give way and she had to stop. Aoife spoke to her soestre softly, moved a step closer. Uaithne stopped swaying and Marghe wondered what she had said. Aoife rested her hand gently on Uaithne’s arm, still speaking. She pointed to the taars. Uaithne nodded, listening. Aoife talked on. Uaithne smiled, clapped her hand on Aoife’s back, returned her knife to its sheath almost as an afterthought. She laughed and walked away. Aoife joined Marghe.

They walked back to the yurti in silence. Marghe was perturbed by her sense of security in Aoife’s presence, recognizing the feeling for what it was: the passing of responsibility for her personal safety from herself to Aoife. That scared her almost as much as Uaithne had.

She dreamed of the cull: red knives flicking, blood pumping over well‑muscled arms wrapped around the necks of terrified taars and running into clay pots. Only fill them half‑full, Aoife said, or the pots will break when they freeze. And Uaithne picking up a bowl, nodding to her and smiling, and drinking, drinking until sticky red poured down her chin, slicked her furs, began to fill the tent like a dark whirlpool. Learn to swim, Uaithne whispered, learn to swim, and the children of the Echraidhe laughed and splashed and played as the blood rose higher and higher until it lapped thickly at her chin.

Marghe surged up out of her nightbag, panting. Everyone was asleep. The hearth still glowed; the inside of the tent was red and full of other people’s breath. She groped in the dim light for her overfurs.

It was snowing, a soft, silent fall. She walked away from the yurtu, away from the pens, past the Levarch’s tent, until she was alone in the dark quiet. Soon it would be time for the days of dark–nine days of twilight. She hated Tehuantepec.

According to her wristcom, it was still early, hours before dawn. She could just keep on walking out here, forever, until she was exhausted. The snow would cover her tracks. She would probably die of hunger and exposure before Aoife found her. Maybe dying was better than staying here, like this, like some domestic animal kept for its breeding potential–its ability to bring fresh blood, new genes to the pool.

Breeding potential. She laughed out loud as she walked and the laugh was swallowed by the soft snow, the same empty dark that waited to swallow her. The dark was many things: the cold, the alien world, the virus, her own fear. Her FN‑17 would not last forever. But if she managed to escape, she would die of cold or be caught. She stopped walking. Snow fell on her face, her hair. But if she stayed here, she might die anyway. She walked again. But if she ran, they might send Uaithne after her, with her knives that cut off toes and fingers and tongues…

She sat down in the snow, careless of the freezing cold, and pulled out her wristcom. She would externalize her thoughts. She was a rational woman. All she needed to do was list her options, then make the most sensible decision.

“Problem: the long‑term survival of SEC representative Marguerite Angelica Taishan. Options: to give up and stay here in the camp of the Echraidhe; to attempt escape right now; to attempt escape at some point in the future when the Echraidhe may be less vigilant. Pertinent information to be considered: One, assuming escape is possible, where does she go? She’s lost. Even if, by some miracle, she managed to reach Port Central before the experimental vaccine is all gone, she might still die. However, medical facilities will be available.” She paused, thought a moment of the conversation with Lu Wai about the virus. “The most important thing to consider, direction‑wise, is that she must be under shelter when the vaccine runs out and the virus hits.”

She pulled the FN‑17 from her pocket, tipped the softgels carefully into her palm, and counted them one by one back into the vial. “Assuming the incubation period is thirty days, and reckoning in a safety factor, estimated onset of the virus is approximately four moons from now. If, therefore, she attempts to escape, she should head for the nearest shelter, wherever that may be.”

It was too dark to look at her map, but she had examined it many times before. It did not help much. She had tried to estimate the distance covered on horseback from the ringstones to the Echraidhe camp, but she had spent much of that journey upside down over a saddle and without access to her compass. The camp could lie anywhere within a circle whose radius might be seventy or more miles. Using a discarded leather thong, carefully marked to her map scale, she had measured possibilities. From everywhere but the most southwesterly segment of the circle, Ollfoss, or at least Moanwood, was closer than Holme Valley. Practically, then, it would make sense to head north and east, to Ollfoss. How far north, and how far east, depended on her exact position, which she did not know.

“Second consideration: should she wait out the onset of the virus here, in the camp of the Echraidhe? Borri seems to be a competent healer. Weighed against this is the danger posed by the tribeswoman Uaithne.”

Her legs were going numb. She closed her eyes, took the three deep breaths that triggered light meditation, and sent blood pumping around her veins, squeezing into the capillaries in her fingers and toes. Her legs began to warm. She shivered.

“Third consideration…”

The wristcom blinked amber: no chip space left. She stared at it. It carried on blinking. She turned it off, put it in her pocket, took it out again. Maybe this was a dream, too. She touched RECORD. The tiny amber light blinked, making her fingertips glow orange. It blinked for nearly a minute, then automatically shut itself down.

Marghe sat in the snow thousands of millions of miles from home, alone. Now there was nothing left. She did not weep: this far north, her tears would turn to ice and cut her cheeks.

Moon of Knives.

Marghe and Aoife rode less often. Even with extra clothes on under her overfur, Marghe froze. Now she understood the moon name: the cold slashed at her lungs like a thousand knives. Aoife made her a snow mask, a pad of taar felt to fit over her nose and mouth. It was still hard to breathe, but she went out as often as possible. Whenever the fire glowed in the yurti, she saw her dream of Uaithne, and of blood. Out here she could forget Uaithne for a while, gaze into the endless white and the ever‑changing sky, listening to the soft crunch of their horses’ hooves, the creak of leather.

Once, when they were out riding, Aoife leaned forward and Marghe saw her attention flow to a single point on the horizon. It was like watching a rough river funnel into a gorge. She followed the tribeswoman’s gaze and saw a black speck that might be a rider. Aoife’s hand hovered by her sling. A rush of adrenaline took Marghe by surprise and she had her own sling out and her reins gathered tight under a thigh to leave both hands free before she figured out what she was frightened of: Uaithne.

The black speck disappeared over the horizon. Aoife spoke without looking at her. “There is no danger.”

Marghe tucked her sling back into her belt, took up the reins. They rode on in silence for a while.

“Aoife, Uaithne killed a… member of my family. Now I think she wants to kill me.” Her voice was muffled behind the snow mask.

Aoife did not stop scanning the horizon. Her reply was mechanical. “You are Echraidhe. Your only family is Echraidhe. Uaithne is Echraidhe. She will not kill someone in her family.”

“You wouldn’t, no. But, don’t you see, Uaithne isn’t Echraidhe any more, not in her head. She thinks she’s the Death Spirit, beholden only to the goddess of death herself. Right now, the only thing that’s kept me safe is that she can’t quite make up her mind whether I’m here to test her or whether I’m the great goddess herself.”

Aoife said nothing.

Marghe tore off her mask. “Listen to me. The woman is insane. She’s already tried to kill you, her soestre, a member of her family, an Echraidhe, and now she’s plunged the entire tribe into some kind of feud that none of you want. What more proof do you need before you do something to stop her?”

“There is nothing to be done. Uaithne is Echraidhe, I am Echraidhe. You are Echraidhe.”

Marghe tried to marshal her thoughts. “Think of it this way: for the good of the horse herds, you geld the young stallions and kill the ones that persist in righting. Uaithne is like a mad stallion; she’s pulling the tribe apart. She must be curbed.”

Aoife looked troubled. “She is Echraidhe, not a horse.”

“Yes, which means you will have to think how to deal with her. Find a new way. The old ways sometimes aren’t enough.”

“They have always been enough.”

“No. No, they haven’t.” Marghe could feel words bubbling under her tongue like lava. “How many yurtu are there pitched for the winter camp?”

“Fifty‑four.”

“How many were there pitched at the winter camp when the old Levarch was Agelast?”

Aoife was silent. Marghe pressed her advantage.

“More than fifty‑four, and probably all were crowded, not half‑empty the way they are now. Look at what that means, Aoife, face it: the Echraidhe are dying. They’ve always been dtying. Ever since they split from the Briogannon. Ever since the tribe stopped trading, stopped mixing with others. There’s a…” How could she say minimum population density? “A small tribe needs trata. Look at the health of the children, little Licha and Kaitlin. They need more than taar butter and grain to keep them well in the snows. They need green stuff, fruit, fish. Things that can only be found in trata.” She took a deep breath. “You’re Agelast. Stop Uaithne. Trade with the Briogannon instead. Old ways are not always the best ways.”

They were still walking the horses forward through the snow. Aoife stared sightlessly at the horizon. “We are at feud,” she said finally, “done is done.”

“Change it.”

“It has not been done before.”

Was Aoife asking her how? “Take Uaithne to the Briogannon, say to them: Here is the Echraidhe who did this thing. What she did was wrong. We’re sorry. We’ll pay reparation and make sure it never happens again. Let’s find a way to stop the feud.” Aoife was still listening. Marghe felt her way carefully. “Situations change. Sometimes people have to do new things, things that have never been done before. Everything your foremothers did was new once. You will be the next Levarch. Take this opportunity to save your people.”

Aoife was silent a long time. “I am Agelast. It is my part to uphold the Echraidhe way.” And Marghe heard the rush of bitterness in that voice, the burden of always having to do the right thing, always having to uphold the Echraidhe code, even when she was hurting. “We are at feud,” she said, and did not look at Marghe.

On some days as they rode, Aoife spoke so little that Marghe found herself drifting into thoughts and daydreams about her childhood in Macau. But as the days passed, Marghe’s daydreaming turned to escape. She imagined herself sneaking from the tent at night and somehow stealing two horses from under the noses of the guards, saddling one, using the other as a pack animal. There was always snow in this scenario: warm snow that would hide her tracks, keep her out of sight of Aoife and Uaithne, snow that drifted with her, showing her the way to Ollfoss.

Sometimes, Aoife rode at her side and they were both escaping.

One day, a day when it was less cold than of late, Marghe surprised herself by reining her horse in front of Aoife and forcing them both to a halt. She pulled off her snow mask. “The two women, the two you said had been captured in the ring‑stones before me, tell me what happened to them.”

Aoife considered. “The first was caught in the time of my foremothers. The Levarch then was wild and cruel. They say the stranger was slaughtered and butchered, the pieces of her body hung over the stones until they rotted.”

Marghe wondered if this was the example, the memory that Uaithne had used to guide her torture of Winnie Kimura. “And the other?”

“She is dead also.”

“When was she taken?” Had they given Winnie to Uaithne to play with?

“I was there. I was very young.”

Not Winnie, then. “How did she die?” Marghe asked softly.

“She took her own life.”

She took her own life. If the Echraidhe did not kill you, despair would. “How long was she held hostage, Aoife?”

Aoife looked at her a moment without speaking. “When a woman trespasses amongst the stones of the ancestors, she belongs to the Echraidhe. She becomes Echraidhe. Like horse and herd, she belongs to the tribe. Like me, like you. The woman we took lived in our yurtu as one of us for twenty‑six winters.”

Marge imagined how it would be to live amongst these people for almost twenty years. She stared sightlessly at the snow between the horses’ hooves. Her throat felt tight and strange.

“Thank you,” she said to Aoife.

Aoife shrugged helplessly. “Put your snow mask back on.”

Marghe considered that. ”Before I do, answer me this: Which direction is Ollfoss?”

“An Echraidhe does not need to know this.”

”No.” Marghe hesitated, then lifted her eyes to meet Aoife’s. “If I tried to escape now, would you kill me?”

Aoife pointed to the sling at her belt and shook her head: she would not need to. Her face had the set look that Marghe had learned meant she was unhappy.

Her snow mask halfway to her face, Marghe paused. “You care, don’t you, Aoife?”

A small silence.

“Then why don’t you simply give me directions and let me go?”

“I can’t.” Her voice was harsh. “You’re not mine to give away. You belong to the tribe.”

“I don’t belong to anyone! I’m not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Lookat me! I’m a woman.”

Aoife raised troubled eyes. “No.” She turned her horse, brushed at her face. “Put your snow mask on before we ride back.”

Without warning, Marghe thumped her mount into a gallop away from the camp.

Time seemed to stretch oddly, and she felt a fierce exhilaration. She was going to get away. Aoife wouldn’t stop her! Laughing, she leaned forward over her mount’s neck and urged it to fly, to put the Echraidhe forever behind it. The gelding stretched his stride and Marghe burned with the hot joy she had not felt since the first time she was able to slow her heart rate.

Then her horse stumbled and the snow came flying up to meet her. She lay for a moment on her back, winded.

This was not happening. She was on horseback, galloping to freedom, not lying in the snow.

This was not happening.

Aoife cantered up and peered down whitely. “Are you hurt?”

Marghe saw her slip her sling back into her belt. Of course. How had she been so foolish as to think otherwise?

Aoife had to help her back onto her horse. She had sprained an ankle in the fell. They rode back in silence, Marghe too numb even to weep.

The hours of daylight grew less and the days darkened, along with Marghe’s hopes. Sometimes she forgot about her injured ankle and tried to walk, then was puzzled when she fell over. Borri would find her and rebandage it, tutting over the swelling, trying to tell her that if she did not take care, the ankle would never mend properly. Marghe did not care.

Now Marghe’s dreams were not of escape, but of all the kinds of death she had touched upon in her life: the death of her father’s radical dreams and of his warmth to her; the death of her own ideals; the death of her childish self on the way to becoming adult; the death of her mother; the death of all those thousands here on Jeep. Sometimes, in waking dreams, sitting by the fire in Aoife’s yurti, she would weep over a bowl of blood‑rich soup, imagining the silver‑slit eyes of the taar that had died to feed her; only the eyes of the taar in these dreams were always brown, like a cow’s.

The days of dark wrapped Tehuantepec in a seamless twilight. With no hard daylight to anchor her, no sharp shadow edges to keep the world of the Echraidhe a real world where people ate and breathed and relieved themselves, Marghe slipped and spun inside her dreams. These people had abducted her, submerged her in this timeless otherworld that was no more real than the underwater palaces of those other abductors, the Sidhe, the unearthly faerie who stole human children, twisted their souls from their bodies, and filled them instead with dark glamor. Nothing was real.

She tried to run away twice more, hardly knowing what she did. Each time, Aoife brought her back and Borri shook her head, wrapped her up, and tried to make her eat. At these times she did not hear Borri when she spoke to her; she ignored Aoife’s gentle hands that rubbed life back into her feet after half a night on the plains without her boots. She did not hear Borri say to Aoife that she should not be allowed to have her knife in this state, or hear Aoife tell the healer that the knife was Marghe’s, and not theirs to take away.

There was no escape from here, except in her dreams.

When she was out on the snow with the taars, she did not see the herds. Sometimes she imagined they were sheep, like the ones on the Welsh hillsides where she had walked while her mother was dying–dying and coughing her lungs up and crying, and always, always, saying, “I’m sorry, Marghe, I’m sorry,” and making her feel even worse, making her feel even more strongly that it was all her fault.

There was no escaping death. When her FN‑17 ran out, she would die here among the Echraidhe, coughing up her lungs like her mother. Alone. She no longer cared.

The days of dark passed and gradually a few minutes of daylight became an hour, then two hours. It grew still colder, and clouds covered the sky like a caul.

Marghe patiently coaxed her ancient mount to a trot. This was the last day before the taars were driven into their winter pens and she and the young woman who herded them had not bothered to take them far.

She could not remember the young Echraidhe’s name. She must have been told it three times but she could not be bothered to make it stick in her mind. What did she care for a name?

Marghe sighed as a taar wandered in search of more plentiful grazing. She resisted kicking her horse into a faster pace. The mare was an old one, on her last legs. Since her last attempt at escape she was refused young, swift horses. If she or her mount had to be killed, the Echraidhe would prefer to waste a less valuable animal.

She slid her palo to full length and goaded the taar back to its herd mates. She glanced at the reddish patch of sky where the sun was sinking toward the horizon, hidden by cloud. The taar settled comfortably back amongst its fellows and showed no signs of wandering off a second time. Marghe unstoppered the skin of locha at her saddlebow and took a swig. She looked at the sky again; it was brighter than before. She looked at it a long time, took another swig. That was not right. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, restoppered the skin, and called to the young Echraidhe, pointing.

“Haii! The sky!”

The tribeswoman stiffened. “Fire!”

Marghe wondered at that. Fire? On Tehuantepec’s snow? The Echraidhe woman was standing in her stirrups. “The Briogannon raid at last. The yurtu burn!” Then she was off, thundering toward the glowing sky, loosening her sling as she rode.

Marghe sat still a moment, considering, then wheeled her mare in the opposite direction and jabbed her heels into its ribs.

The snow flew in clods around her ears. Marghe refused to allow herself to think; she would just ride the ancient animal to its limit. She kept her mind blank, aware only of the heaving flanks between her thighs, the thick reins running over her fingers. She rode easily, as disconnected from what was happening as a child bobbing on her back in the ocean, lost in the sky and cloud. Then it was dark and the horse had slowed to a stumbling trot. She blinked and reined to a halt. Again, the sky was clear, utterly silent and still. The moons hung two‑thirds full, and she was cold. She twisted in her saddle. Nothing but white quiet. Where was she?

With her eyes closed, it was easy to picture her map. Then she revisualized the taars, the setting sun, and the direction of the burning yurtu, and calculated. She had fled due north. Ollfoss lay north and east; she would find it, somehow.

She turned the mare’s head in the right direction and kicked her to a walk. All she had to do was keep going, not think about the fact that she had no food, no shelter, no sling, no spear, and no fuel; that even being a captive of the Echraidhe might be better than dying out here, alone, in the frozen wastes. For now, it was enough to be free. That was important. Freedom meant something, didn’t it? Her furs tickled her chin and she pulled the snow mask tighter.

When the moons set, she was still riding. She realized she had been searching for a suitable stopping place: a stream, a bush, some shelter–anything that stood out on this endless stretching white. There was nothing. There would be nothing. She reined in and dismounted, and the mare hung her head while she uncinched the saddle. When she pulled off the headstall, the icicles hanging from the mare’s shaggy mane broke off. She started to rub the poor creature down with her gloved hands before she remembered something Aoife had told her: the snow and ice in a horse’s coat could act as insulation the same way a snow tunnel could shelter and insulate a person.

She squatted, pulled off a glove, and rubbed snow between her fingers. Dry snow. Good building material. She took a careful swig of locha and began.

First, she took off the headstall to hobble the mare, who could scrape up snow from the moss and find her own grazing. The saddle went on the snow. Marghe knelt next to it and began scraping snow up around her. She managed to curve the walls in slightly, but when she tried to make a roof the way Aoife had shown her, it kept collapsing under its own weight. She tried several times, first with lightly packed snow, then with snow she had packed almost solid, finally by trying to form a cement of ice by running her blade along the snow. Nothing worked. Stubborn, her father had always said, stubborn as a Portuguese donkey. Not today. She curled herself into a tight ball, laid her head on the saddle, and went to sleep.

She woke about two hours later, rippling and shuddering, her muscles pulled so tight against the cold that her bones ached. No more sleep tonight. She did some breathing and stretching before saddling the mare. Even that made her dizzy. She needed food. She had none–all she had was a half‑full skin of locha. She leaned her forehead against her mount’s shaggy flanks. There was still time to retrace her tracks to the yurtu. Her stomach did a slow roll forward. No. Not again. She had plenty of furs, her palo, a knife, the locha, a horse. A few days, just a few days. She could last that long. She pulled herself into the saddle, set the mare’s head toward Ollfoss, and nudged her into a walk.

The second night, she simply lay on her back and wriggled until snow covered everything but her face. She woke to a world of seamless white and hunger sharp as a rodent’s tooth. The sky was soft and milky, like the plain; it was as if she stood inside a hollow pearl. It made her dizzy. She finished the locha and hung the empty skin back on her saddle. If she found nothing to fill it with, she could always try to eat it.

This time she had to kick the mare to get her moving.

Marghe woke on her third morning alone to find that her hunger had passed from pain to a dull ache; she knew she was hungry, but she no longer minded so much. The snow underfoot was as soft and white as the furred back of the mythical cyarnac. Today, it was beautiful. She smiled to herself as she looked around. Everything seemed dusted with crystal. When she brushed snow from her sleeves, every fiber of her overfur was magically clear. She studied her saddle dreamily: every pore on the leather was distinct. She could have spent hours watching the light in tiny droplets of ice on the mare’s coat. Hunger was no longer important. She heaved the saddle onto the mare and blood flowed warm and strong through her veins. Her limbs felt smooth and light. Today, she felt… fine.

The mare kept her head down, cropping the frozen ice moss, while Marghe tightened the girth. The wooden buckle slipped easily into its usual hole and the buckle itself nestled comfortably into the slight bed it had worn into the leather. But the straps were too loose. Too loose. She took a step backward and forced herself to see loose skin and jutting ribs instead of individual hairs. Her horse was starving. So was she.

The mare pawed aside more snow, cropped. Marghe watched and licked her lips, thinking of ice moss. When it was cooked and dried it could be ground like flour and made into flat cakes. Raw, it would not be poisonous, but probably indigestible. But she had to eat something.

She squatted and scraped bare a small patch of moss. She yanked it up, a clump at a time, and set it aside. There was something else she wanted to try first. The ground was hard as iron; she had to lean her weight onto her knife blade and twist the point until she loosened a tiny lump of soil like frozen gravel.

It took hours to cut a vertical hole about the size of her forearm. Her mare kept cropping and pawing, cropping and pawing.

Marghe rolled up her sleeve and thrust her bare arm down the hole. She closed her eyes against the searing cold, began her breathing. In and out, in and out. Hold. In. Out. Hold. In the left nostril, out the right. Hold. The extra oxygen made her dizzy. She visualized the corpuscles rushing red and busy through her arm to her finger, back up to her shoulder, through the pulmonary vessels, the heart, and out again in a gushing rush. Hot red. Hot. And full of information. She sank her entire awareness into her arm. Listened with it, extended her own electromagnetic field as she had learned to do, dowsing. Out and out, thinner, diffuse. Wait.

There was nothing at first. No trace of snow worms, as she had hoped. Then she sensed a far‑off scratching, pushing. A ruk.

She opened her eyes. What had Aoife said? The need breeds the skill.

Keeping her breathing soft and her movements slow, she unfastened the palo from her belt, pulled it to about half its length, and wedged her knife behind the fastening strap. Then she crouched over the hole, makeshift spear poised.

The ruk came, beetling its way through the stone‑hard ground. Every sense open, every muscle ready, Marghe waited. The ruk came closer; she could hear the rasp of its thick armored skin against the dirt. A snout pushed through one wall of the hole and Marghe thrust. Hunger made her slow. The ruk scuttled away, back the way it had come.

As she had known she might, Marghe vomited up the raw moss as soon as it reached her stomach. The mess steamed in the brittle air for a moment before beginning to ice over. The temperature was still dropping. She sucked snow to take away the foul taste in her mouth and willed her breathing steady. She must think now, or die.

Aoife had told her tales of tribeswomen who punched holes in the neck veins of their mounts and drank the blood. But she was unskilled, and the horse would probably bleed to death before cold plugged the vein. It was an old, half‑starved beast; it could not afford to lose even a cupfull of blood. She needed it alive. Her only hope was to get to Ollfoss, or at least the boundaries of Moanwood where she could make a fire, collect nuts, shelter herself from the snow… Even with the horse, she might not get there. Without, she certainly would not.

There was nothing to eat here and the temperature was dropping. She would head east and hope.

Before she pulled on her gloves, she took a long look at her hands. The’bones showed gaunt through white skin. There was not an ounce of fat left on the whole of her body; the cold had melted it away. In a matter of days her body would be scavenging upon itself, absorbing muscle until she was nothing but loose skin and bone. A generous estimate would give her another four or five days, survival, if she carried on as she had been doing. To reach the forest she knew she needed to stretch those four or five days into at least seven or eight. She would have to close parts of her body down when they were not needed. It was possible, theoretically; she knew how. But this was not a controlled environment with monitoring hookups and attendant medics, and she was already seriously undernourished.

She climbed into the saddle. The clouds were low and rounded, as featureless as a basket of eggs. An alien sky. All alone under an alien sky. Somewhere up there, Sara Hiam was sitting in the Estrade, wondering if her vaccine worked. Somewhere up there, too, was a satellite that if it just came nearer and lower could pick up her SLJC, beam it to the nearest relay, to Danner. A sled could get here in four or five days. Oh, and then she would have hot tea, or soup, and bread, and the smiles of a woman she knew. And all the time she ate and drank and had her hands bandaged she would be heading back to Port Central, to safety.

No, she had done enough dreaming. The only reason she should look at the sky was to determine the weather. She was alone. No one was going to rescue her. Not Sara or Danner, not Lu Wai or Letitia. Not even Aoife. As Cassil had said, she was alone, an orphan under this sky. No one knew her. Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

Once she had her mount headed in the right direction, she began trance breathing.

Marghe never really remembered the next few days. She rode in half trance through the white and cold and silence. Sometimes there were brief flurries of snow. Twice each day she would swim up from her trance to swing from the saddle and dig out ice moss for the horse, which was getting too tired to find its own. While the horse ate, she would concentrate on opening and closing veins around her body, sending her blood pounding into hands, feet, and face where patches of skin were white and dead from frostbite. Each time, it became harder to shake off her trance and force her body to move.

When she slid from the saddle on the sixth day, her legs would not hold her. She crumpled onto the snow and had to persuade blood around her body before she could stand and clear snow for the horse. When she tried to remount, she could not. The leg in the stirrup trembled and shook but could not lift her body. Fear, sudden and sharp, flashed under her skin, setting a muscle by her eye twitching. Her breath whistled. She had to get back into that saddle. She leaned her face against the mare’s ice‑shagged withers and rested a moment. She could do it. Blood to her upper arms, to her thighs and calves. Breathe. Gather.

She part jumped, part hauled herself up by the saddle horn until she lay belly‑down across the mare’s back. She dragged her right leg over and was astride and upright. She swayed as the horse started its slow, plodding walk.

It was the wind that woke her, driving hard and cold into her left cheek from the north, from a sky the gray yellow of lentil scum, a sky full of snow.

The horse was stumbling and weaving; Marghe could feel it tremble and sag at each step. The wind died and the first flakes of snow wobbled down like moths. Within minutes the wind was back, driving the flurry into a blizzard of ice blades. She could think of nothing to do but force the horse on. Ice and snow whipped through fur and hair, past eyelashes and under fingernails, to reach places Marghe had thought long numb. The horse staggered, but righted itself.

Marghe tried to guess at how long the storm would last; at least a day, maybe two. She doubted she would survive it. It would take too much effort to stop her mount and climb down, so she simply allowed the horse to wander as best it could. She felt very peaceful.

When the mare fell, she did so without warning, her front legs crumpling like scythed wheat. Marghe fell free and looked at the wreckage, then crawled over to touch the mare’s neck in apology; the horse was alive, but would not be getting up again.

The blizzard hissed around her. Her hands were so numb with cold that she could hardly feel the bone haft when she pulled out her knife; she had to hold her eyes to slits, and the snow gathered on her lashes made it impossible to see if she was grasping it properly. Spicules of ice clung to the mare’s mane; she stroked it, and sang. Singing seemed like a good idea. It was some wavering tune she remembered from her first childhood visit to a temple. She wanted the mare to hear something other than the blizzard before it died.

While she sang, she scraped a mound of snow up against the big vein that snaked along the thin neck. Then she showed the old mare her blade, smiled, and pushed the knife in.

The blood was impossibly red, pumping onto the white snow. The mare sighed and her eyes glazed as the moisture froze. The pumping blood slowed to a trickle. Marghe cursed and scrambled to the saddle to get the empty locha skin. She held it up to the vein, but the container’s mouth was too narrow; the skin stayed flaccid, with only about a cupful of blood inside. Marghe scooped up a mouthful of bloodied snow. She held it on her tongue until it melted and warmed. It was sweet, metallic. She waited a little while before her next mouthful. It stayed down.

There was already a drift of snow gathering by the carcass. Not much time. She picked up the knife again and sawed at the dead mare’s belly. Her hands were clawed with cold and the knife was small. She kept dropping it. Again and again she picked it up and hacked. It was very messy, very tiring. She could hardly see. Now and again she stopped to rest, wipe the ice crystals from her eyes, and swallow another mouthful of bloody snow. By the time she was finished, her furs were slimed from cap to boots, but she had several slices of raw meat lying beside her in the snow. She opened her furs and dropped the red, slithery strips inside against her skin where her body heat would stop the meat from freezing.

The blood had given her a little energy, but there was still hard work to do. She shoveled at the snow, dragging great armfuls alongside and between the forelegs, then the hindlegs, of her dead mount. The saddle had to be cut free; she hauled it to lie halfway between the stiffening, outstretched legs. Then she pushed snow against legs, carcass, and saddle until a waist‑high wall rose around her. Using her knife again, she made a great, three‑sided cut in the mare’s hide. With all the subcutaneous fat gone, it was easy to shear the skin away from the internal membranes in one piece. It was more difficult to drag the flap of skin, about two feet square, over her head and pull its edges down to meet the snow wall.

The result was cramped and stifling, but a shelter of sorts. It was all she could do. She huddled down around her precious cupful of blood and few tatters of meat, all that kept her from death, and breathed deep into her belly. There was nowhere to go from here.

Marghe’s feet were numb now and the blizzard still raged. She chewed on her last strip of meat, knowing that this one, like all the others, would not give her enough energy to keep warm.

The day wore on. With her snow mask pressed tight against nose and mouth, and her face pressed against the fur of her hood, she could hardly breathe. She could not get rid of the persistent image of herself as a blowfly egg, waiting to hatch into a maggot in the rotting flesh of the horse’s carcass.

The numbness in her feet crept to her knees. She was not sure if it was frostbite or a result of her restricted circulation, but moving would mean lifting the skin flap, and the wind would whip away all her hoarded warmth in a heartbeat. She was too weak to survive that. If the blizzard did not stop soon, she would grow weaker and weaker until her heart stopped.

She did not want to die. Even now, half suffocated and starving, with patches of skin dying on her face and hands, she refused to give up. This was not how her life was meant to end, frozen and stinking and alone, forever listed as missing, unless she turned up entombed in an iceberg drifting down the eastern coast between the mainland and the Necklace Islands. She refused to die.

Think.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Westerners teach their children how not to think, and Relax, let it come in its own time. Right now her hunger and fear were blotting out everything else. She needed a clear mind, a relaxed body; she needed to be still, and let it come. Perhaps there was a solution to all this, a solution as perfect, elegant, and obvious as the benzene ring.

Her hands were numb now, as well as her legs. When she unstoppered the locha skin, the tiny movement sent agony into all fingers except the third and fourth on her left hand. She drank the last mouthful of thick, clotted blood and then rubbed her hands as best she could inside her gloves. Feeling did not return to the two fingers. Frostbite–a clear signal that parts of her body were now shutting down permanently.

Think or die.

But could death really be any worse than this pain in her back, pain from curling around a bottle of blood almost inside the belly of a dead horse? Might it not be preferable to feeling bits of herself die of frostbite, and rot? Death, whatever else it was, would surely be peaceful, not like this constant diamond hiss of cold, this endless grinding fear and pain and struggle. If she just gave up, gave in, who would know, and what difference did it make?

She did not have the answers.

Why was she trying so hard to stay alive? If she lived through this, she might not live through the virus. If she survived the virus, Company might blow the planet to pieces. Life was nothing but a series of fruitless struggles. A sudden memory of herself as a three‑year‑old dropped into her head like a screen menu. She was in the roof garden of their house in Macau, high above the sweet smells of rot and rice wine, squatting next to an old plastic pail in which she had placed a handful of earthworms. The worms wriggled and humped their way up the sides of the pail, slipping now and again, but persisting, getting closer and closer to the rim, and freedom. She watched them with the utter concentration of all three‑year‑olds. Every time one reached the top, she leaned over and carefully flicked it back down to the bottom. It was not cruelty that prompted her; she simply enjoyed watching things try. And those worms kept trying, blindly, stupidly, stubbornly, and eventually her three‑year‑old self got bored and tipped the pail up, and the worms slithered out and burrowed safely into the dirt.

Very well. She would try to wriggle out of the pail; there would be time to worry about the quality of the dirt afterward.

Her first deep breath triggered a coughing fit that wracked her body enough to momentarily crack open the frost‑rimed skin flap, admitting a slice of air so cold her eyes streamed. She rubbed her face into the fur of her hood to dry them–ice would blind her. She was well‑practiced; her second deep breath, then her third, triggered deep muscle relaxation.

The trick to meditation was to let the mind sit in a quiet soft place full of ease and warmth. Marghe imagined that she was curled up, not under a piece of skin covered in blood‑smeared snow in the middle of a blizzard, but on the mauve and green rug that lay in front of her fireplace in Wales. She could smell the applewood logs burning; flames rubbed themselves lazily up against the soot‑stained bricks, shimmering with distant hot worlds in yellows and reds. She stared into the flames a while to see what she could see.

Hours passed. Occasionally, she put on another log from the basket, or threw on a handful of salt and sugar and watched the flames burn lavender and spring green. Then the basket was empty, only wood chips left, and the logs were burning down to embers. The embers dimmed.

She wanted to stay curled around the last remnants of warmth, try to sleep. Get up, her inner voice said, get up, but she did not want to leave. Get up, said that voice again, there are no ideas here. You must get up.

Oh, but it was hard. The door from her familiar room led to a high flight of dank stone stairs. No railing. Each step seemed taller than the last, and the higher she climbed up out of her trance, the more slippery the stone became. It would be so easy to lean backward just that little bit too far and go tumbling down, back into the room that was still warm. She set her teeth and climbed, and gradually her legs became numb and she felt her fingers turning blue and cold and curling into claws. All except two. Her ears hurt.

She woke to dark, sour quiet. Although she was too weak to move, her head was very clear. Meditation had produced no magic formula, no elegant solution to her problem. There was nothing more she could do. It was midwinter, the last day of the Moon of Knives here in the wild Echraidhe country of Tehuantepec, and the only thing left for her to do was to choose her way of dying. The warm room would be a good place in which to die. Perhaps she should go back there, put on the last of the wood chips and just fall asleep forever. There was nothing noble about dying a slow and painful death, surrounded by nothing but empty silence.

She took a slow, deep breath, let it out gently. Took another. Exhaled abruptly.

Silence?

When she breathed the next time, it was strong and deep, a breath that pumped her blood vigorously through those blood vessels that would still open, dragging with it oxygen, life. Her arms tingled with the effort of pushing up the snow‑covered flap. She peered out. Snow and sky lay pearly white and quiet. The blizzard was over.

Moving sent pain shooting through her legs. There was no way she could stand up yet. She crawled out from underneath the flap; when she was halfway out, it cracked and broke. The light was blinding after so long in the dark. She had no idea what time of day it was. Late afternoon, maybe. On all fours, she looked around. She began to laugh. She leaned back against the carcass and laughed at the sky, laughed until icy air tore into her lungs and set her coughing and she had to pull off her snow mask and smother her mouth with her hand. Even then, her shoulders shook.

To her left, looming dark on the horizon, lay the forest. Food, shelter, and firewood lay a couple of hours’ walk away. If she had gotten to this place just a little before the blizzard started, she would have seen. She would have smelled it, as she did now: an alien, green smell, the smell of strange trees unfurling in the dark, furtive and strong. Just two hours away. Half an hour on a horse. But her horse was dead and it was all she could do to sit without collapsing.

Hope gave her the strength that would have come from food, or warmth. The worm prepared to try one last time to wriggle up out of the pail. She pushed herself from sitting to kneeling, from kneeling to balancing on one foot and one knee. She had to lean against the carcass before she managed to drag the other foot up to join the first. She stood, and swayed, but did not fall over.

One step at a time, she told herself. However long it takes. She put one foot in front of the other. Not so bad. Then the other one. Look at me, she wanted to shout, look at me! It was like learning to walk all over again, with legs that did not belong to her. Her heart thumped soggily inside her ribs, but it did its job. She took another step and nearly fell over. Don’t think about it, it’s easier if you don’t think about it.

She opened her mouth and began to sing the first thing that came into her head: a nursery rhyme she had learned when she was five. I know a teddy bear, blue eyes and curly hair, roly‑poly round the town, knocking all the people down… She sang all the verses. The song faltered often and her legs trembled like reeds, but she refused to stop. The trees drew nearer. Or what looked like trees. What if an alien forest did not have nuts, or berries, or anything she could eat? Never mind that, just put one foot in front of the other, and sing.

Each step became a test of will. Eventually, she lost the struggle and fell over. She crawled. She had sung all the verses of the nursery rhyme. She began to make them up. I know a dinosaur, green of eye and red of claw, romping stomping round the town, having fun chowing down, I know a dinosaur… Her world narrowed to the stretch of ground under her hands and knees, the eighteen inches she could see before her without lifting her head. Her voice wavered like a newborn’s while she crawled on, over roots and fallen tree debris, not seeing.

Something moved.

She looked up, blinked, tried to focus. There, behind a tree. Sweet gods. It must be seven feet tall. Goth? Cyarnac? Had she come all this way just to get eaten by something like a huge teddy bear? I know a teddy bear, silver eyes and lots of hair, zipping ripping on the plain, kitting until we’re all slain… Maybe she was imagining it. Yes, she had imagined it. No such thing as giant teddy bears. She crawled on.

A woman stepped out from nowhere.

Marghe blinked again, waited for the mirage to disappear. When it did not, Marghe reached slowly, painfully for her knife. The woman’s taar skin boots and cap, the sling and palo on her belt, were all too familiar, even if the carved disk of bone at her belt was strange and her face was one Marghe had never seen before. She would kill, the woman or herself, before being taken hostage again.

The woman stepped closer, but not within knife range.

“I am Leifin. Daughter of Jess and Bejuoen and Rolyn. Soestre to Kristen.”

“Where are you from?” Marghe’s voice was a whispery croak.

Leifin leaned forward, trying to catch what she said. “I am Leifin. There is no need for your knife.” She took another step forward. “How are you named, stranger? Who are you?”

Marghe thought about that. Who was she? She was not sure. “Where are you from?” she croaked again. The knife point glittered before her eyes.

“Where am I from?” Leifin gestured behind her. “Ollfoss. Three days’ walk away or more.”

The knife point wavered. Ollfoss. Ollfoss. Marghe fell on her face in the snow.

Chapter Nine

THE GYM’S NEON strips were too bright after the cool grays of Jeep’s winter light. Danner stripped out of her fatigues and into fencing whites. Time now, she thought, to lay aside the question of what trap to set for the spy in their midst, Kahn was already warming up, whipping her foil back and forth, shadow‑lunging. Danner pulled a foil free of its holding field on the wall, tested it. She had been mulling over the spy problem for weeks now, getting nowhere. She clipped on her face guard. Later.

Kahn waited, her en gardeperfect but for a slight overextension. Danner studied her. That overextension had to be bait–but if she did not take it, she would never learn the lesson that Kahn obviously intended. She could take the blade in a bind, quarteto sixte;that should at least make her seem not wholly naive.

Neon swam down her blade, twitched as Kahn effortlessly cut over and landed the buttoned tip against Danner’s throat guard.

“The derobement,” Kahn said. “I’d like you to try it with a disengage, then lunge.”

This time it was Danner who assumed the slightly overextended en garde.

“You’re bending your wrist again.” Danner straightened it. “Better. Don’t lean forward so much.”

The world focused down to the two blades, her own steady, waiting, Kahn’s moving closer, reflecting light like the scales of a predatory pike. Danner moved. Point under, feint, lunge. Kahn parried, beat aside Banner’s foil, bent her own blade against Danner’s chest.

They parted.

“Again.”

Kahn’s mesh mask glittered like the compound eye of an insect. Metal mask, metal foil. Metal.

Danner assumed the en gardemechanically, thoughts elsewhere.

Metal. If Company abandoned them, these foils would be useful, not as weapons but as trade. She extended her arm. The blades were steel, on these foils at least. Some of the others were composites, some energy blades, some smart blades. Kahn was a traditionalist: learn the basics first, she had said, you can always adapt a sound technique. So they used steel‑bladed foils with aluminum bell guards and brass pommels. Three different metals.

Kahn laid her foil alongside Danner’s. Danner started the automatic derobement.

All different kinds of metal: different trade values. And there were other metals available, like the chain‑link of the fence.

Kahn beat aside her blade, thrust hard. “You’re not paying attention.” She feinted and thrust again, forcing Danner to parry and retreat. Then she came in with a corkscrewing motion. Double bind. Danner disengaged, managed to parry Kahn’s thrust to the low line, riposted. She was panting.

“Better.” Kahn drove her back.

The fence. It was important, but she could not concentrate with Kahn’s blade flashing. The fence. Metal. If they took it down, melted it…

Kahn’s button punched into Danner’s solar plexus. Kahn tapped her foot. “You need to–”

Danner held up her left hand, trying to get her breath. “Wait.” Kahn stepped back, head tilted to one side.

Danner transferred the foil to her left hand and used her right to pull off her mask. “The fence,” she said. “That’s how we’ll do it. It’s perfect. And it’s metal.”

“So when we take down the perimeter fence,” Danner explained to Sara Hiam, who peered out from the tiny screen in Danner’s mod, “our spy, whoever she is, should find that worrying enough to call the Kurst. We’ll be listening–Sigrid up there, Letitia down here–we’ll catch her. Or them. And… well, it would just make me feel better if we took down that perimeter. There’s no history of violence from these natives; it simply serves to make us feel like we’re trapped inside, while they have the run of the entire planet. Makes good sense from a psychological point of view.”

“You don’t need to sell it so hard.”

Danner leaned forward. “But you know what the real beauty of it is? The fence is metal. Tons and tons of metal we can use as trade goods. If we get stranded here. I thought about it while I was fencing with Kahn. All the metal in those foils. We could melt it down–”

“I’m surprised you didn’t think of sharpening up the foils and using them as weapons.”

Danner did not know how seriously Hiam meant that. “The metal would be more useful as trade goods, I think,” she said carefully. “And we have plenty of other material available for weaponry. Projectiles are our best bet in a world like this: bows, slings, spears. All of which can be made without metals. And we have ceramics people who can figure out how to work this olla, for blades, if we need them. What metal we do use will go on things like plows, adzes, scissors, needles, chisels… tools.” Sara was looking at her with a curious expression, almost fondly, and suddenly Danner felt embarrassed. All her ideas suddenly sounded like the fantasies of a young girl who had once dreamed of riding a horse over the plains, yelling, waving her bow and arrows, and challenging the wind.

“You’ve done a lot of thinking.”

“Yes.”

“Good. So have I. Danner, you need to find a way to get the three of us off this platform without the Kurstfinding out. Just in case. I have one or two ideas, but there are problems.”

It was night, and Vincio was off duty, when the call from Sara aboard Estradecame through to Danner’s office.

“Hannah, we have the signal.” The doctor looked over her shoulder, said something. Danner’s screen split: Hiam on one side, Sigrid on the other. Sigrid was a pale woman, with washed‑out eyes.

“It’s the same frequency, Commander.”

“Hold on.” Danner used her wristcom. “Dogias. It’s coming through. Same frequency. Keep this channel open.” She spoke to Sigrid. “Any direction yet?”

“No. But a preliminary scan shows it at the north end, maybe northwest end of Port.”

Danner spoke into her wristcom. “Dogias, Sigrid says north, northwest.”

“I hear and obey.”

Danner sighed.

“Problems?” Sara asked from the screen.

“No. Just Dogias being herself.” She shook her head. “Hold a moment.” She punched up Lu Wai’s call. “Sergeant, we have the signal.”

“Yes, ma’am. I heard. I’m here with Letitia. I’m on it.”

“Initial direction is north, or northwest. Take Kahn.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And keep this channel open.”

“Yes, ma–”

Dogias interrupted. “I think the signal originates about three hundred meters in from the perimeter.”

Danner pulled up a map of Port Central. “There are a lot of buildings there.”

“Not all on the net.”

Danner looked at the screen. “Sigrid, can you tell us whether it’s a net signal or personal relay?”

Sigrid smiled faintly as she worked. “Not net,” she said eventually.

“Damn,” Dogias said. “Could be anywhere, then.”

Danner knew better than to tell her to keep looking. Dogias knew her job.

“Lu Wai here. Suggest Officer Kahn and I run standard enter‑and‑search pattern.”

“Negative. Repeat, negative. Leave it to Letitia and Sigrid to pinpoint. Where are you now?”

“About five hundred meters from the perimeter. Between guard posts six and seven.”

“Any activity?”

“Plenty. We’re right by Rec.”

“Status?”

“Conspicuous. Both in full armor.”

That was not good. She wanted this action to be inconspicuous. Two armored Mirrors were unusual enough to excite comment from the women going to and from the bars and screen theaters of Rec. “Keep Kahn armored up but out of sight. You strip to usual guard attire. I want this kept quie–”

Sigrid interrupted. “I have a bearing. Using you as zero, signal emanating from north 336, west 42. Give or take five meters.”

Danner split her screen again, added the coordinates to her schematic of the complex. Three small buildings directly behind Rec. “Dogias, we have a possible in the Rec area storage and office row. Can you confirm?”

“A moment.” Dogias hummed to herself. “Well, well, well,” she said, sounding pleased. “I can tell you exactly where she is. Tell Lu Wai she’ll find the spy hiding behind the beans.”

Danner bit back her irritation. “Sergeant, Dogias–”

“Understood, ma’am. I overheard. Suspect in dry goods storage. We’ll apprehend.”

“Negative. Take containment positions, and hold.” She hesitated, then reached for her helmet. “Sara, Sigrid,” she said, as she checked her equipment, “I’m going out there. Keep monitoring. All communications from now on come via my command channel.” She clipped down her helmet, pulled on gauntlets, and tongued on the in‑suit comm system. “Dogias. Keep monitoring. All comm through command.”

“Thought you sounded like you’re talking from the inside of a garbage can. Will do. She’s still talking, by the way. Want to hear what she’s saying?”

“It’s not coded?”

“Well yes, but I’ve had a couple of minutes. She’s used a fairly simple variation on–”

“Negative on that suggestion.” Talking would only distract her. “Record only. Unless in your judgment the communication suggests immediate danger to any of my personnel.” She thought of Sara. “Or those aboard Estrade.”

It was snowing. Her suit warmed rapidly, and the starvision visor turned the world smoky gray, ethereal, with the snow drifting down in black flakes. The grass was frozen, but she could not hear the crunch of her footsteps: all sound, all vision, all sensation was filtered by her suit. She was isolated from the world, just as though this were one of her first virtual‑reality training missions as a cadet.

She walked through the night, her mouth dry with the familiar taste of adrenaline. Once she saw a small mammal scuttle through the grass, a lighter gray against the grainy background.

Kahn was standing perfectly still by the north wall of Rec. Without Danner’s starvision, she would have been invisible.

“Kahn, I see you.” Kahn slowly scanned the area, then raised a hand in acknowledgment. “Stay put. From now on, if you see anyone pass by here, detain her.”

“Acknowledged.”

Lu Wai was crouched underneath one of four lit windows.

“I’m fifty meters behind you,” Danner said quietly, walking. “Is she in there?”

“Yes.”

“Exits?”

“Just one, east of the building. And the windows. We need Kahn up here.”

Danner squatted next to Lu Wai and slid up her visor. “Agreed.”

On the command channel, tinny now because of the outside air, she heard Lu Wai ordering Kahn to join them beside the window. The sergeant turned to her. “Suggest Kahn and I take the entrance, bring the spy into custody.”

Danner nodded. “I’ll send Kahn along when you’re in position. Wait for my signal before you proceed. And do it quietly.”

Lu Wai nodded, and slipped into the dark. With her visor up, it seemed to Danner that the sergeant disappeared. Good. The whole thing should be contained. She risked a look over the windowsill. The light was dim; she saw vague shapes–sacks, she supposed–and what had to be the spy, holding a comm to her mouth. Talking. She could not see who it was.

She tongued for a channel change. “Sara. She’s still talking. Is the Kursttalking back?”

“Sigrid says there’s definitely two‑way communication. She also says, and you should find this interesting, that the Kursttransmission comes directly from their bridge.”

Danner nodded to herself. It was the confirmation she needed: whoever was in there was talking to and spying for Company hierarchy, with everyone’s full knowledge and consent, except the command on Jeep. It was a relief; now she would no longer wake up in the night, wondering if she was being paranoid. Danner was surprised at the sudden bitterness she felt at the confirmation. After all, she had expected this.

Kahn arrived. Danner sent her to join Lu Wai.

The spy had not moved. What did the woman have to talk about for so long? Danner began to wish she had had Dogias patch it through. Was the spy talking about her?

“Dogias, do you recognize the voice?”

“Nope. No one I know. But judging by the way she’s talking to the first officer up there, she’s a Mirror, and not a lowly foot soldier either. Lieutenant, maybe.”

Danner only had six lieutenants. She knew all of them, had promoted all of them personally. The betrayal bit deep. She wanted to know who it was, now, but she restrained herself. They had to let the woman finish her message; the longer the Kurstwas kept in the dark about Danner’s discovery of their duplicity, the more Danner could learn, the more time she would have before… whatever was going to happen happened.

“This is Dogias. Sounds like she’s winding up the conversation.”

“Sergeant, any minute now.” She flipped channels. “Sigrid, please monitor the Kurst. I need to know the instant they switch off.” She flipped back. “Sergeant, I want you both armored up, just in case.” She risked another glance through the window. “I don’t think she’s armed, so be quiet, be smooth. I want her silenced and subdued inside this building. Not a whisper to escape. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged.”

“I’m right here outside the window if she chooses to come this way.” She slid down her visor. The world turned gauzy. Her heart pumped.

“That’s it,” Dogias said suddenly in her ear.

“ Kursttransmission ended,” Sara confirmed.

“Go,” Danner said. She edged away from the window to give herself the space to maneuver if necessary. It had been five years since she had been involved in any kind of action. She had forgotten how adrenaline made legs wobble and defied the suit thermostat. She shivered.

Nothing happened. Surely Lu Wai and Kahn should be there by now?

Yellow glare flooded her vision for a split second before her visor compensated: in the storeroom, her Mirrors had turned on the lights. One armored figure, Kahn, Danner thought, had her weapon out and was covering Lu Wai as the sergeant confiscated the spy’s wristcom and wrapped a cling around her arms and waist, then her ankles.

“Subject immobilized.” Lu Wai’s voice was calm.

Danner slid up her visor and strode to the door. Her thigh muscles felt too big, too tight: adrenaline reaction, rage. Now she would see.

The storeroom smelled of dust and grain and the faint ozone hum of clings. The spy was not wearing a helmet.

Lu Wai saluted. “Sublieutenant Relman, ma’am.”

The spy was half sitting, half lying on some sacks. Young. Short black curls. Round face that normally looked relaxed, but now reflected her physical discomfort.

“Sit her up straight,” Danner said to no one in particular. Kahn obeyed. Helen Relman, who worked under Captain White Moon. Who answered directly to Ato Teng. How far did this go?

“Lieutenant Relman, you are being held on suspicion of behavior likely to endanger fellow officers. You will be taken to an appropriate holding place and questioned. Do you have any questions of your own at this time?”

Tell me it’s all a mistake, Danner wanted to say. Explain everything.

Relman said nothing.

She was pumped up with adrenaline, with over‑oxygenated blood hissing through her veins; that silence was too much for Danner. “Goddammit, Relman!” She wanted to shake the woman until her teeth rattled, but settled instead for pacing up and down. “Why in hell did you do this? You think I’ve treated you badly?What?”

“You said I would be taken to an appropriate holding place before being questioned.”

“This is as appropriate as anywhere.” She hit the wall stud that darkened the windows, then folded her arms. “I’ve got all night.”

Relman appeared to think. “I would like my partner, Bella Cardos, informed of my whereabouts.”

“She’s involved in this?”

Relman looked startled. “No. But she’ll worry.”

Danner turned to Lu Wai. “Sergeant, find Cardos, bring her to an adjacent office. Tell her only that she is to be questioned in regard to an offense that may endanger the safety of fellow officers.”

“I told you she’s nothing to do with this.”

”I don’t believe you,” Danner said mildly. “You may choose, of course, to try and convince me otherwise with some pertinent information.”

No reply.

“We have all the time in the world,” Danner said, knowing it was not true, knowing that now that they had Relman, things would move very fast indeed. Relman’s cheeks were pale except for some broken blood vessels around her nose. Danner thought it made her look like she had a bad cold. The woman was just realizing what kind of position she was in.

“You have a choice, of course. Tell us everything, let us verify it; we’ll take that into consideration. Or you could keep quiet and hope that something happens, some miracle to change the situation in your favor.” Danner kept her voice steady, calm, reassuring. “That hope, in my opinion, is not only unreasonable but foolish. I don’t think you want to continue being foolish.” Surely the woman could not believe that the Kurstwould come down just for her.

“We’ve got nothing to tell you.”

“ ‘We’ ?”

Relman flushed, but said nothing.

Danner sighed. Stupid woman. “I don’t really know why you’re behaving like this. You’ve nothing to gain from it, and a lot to lose.” She looked around, found a folding stepladder made of slippery gray plastic, pulled it opposite Relman, sat down. “In all likelihood, you will never leave this world. None of us will. Think about that: we’re the only people you will ever see, ever again. And we’re not happy with you, we won’t forgive you. Not even Bella. And no one will forget. Is that what you want?”

Danner stopped. She was not getting through: Relman did not yet see the seriousness of her situation. She stood up. “I’ll be back, when you’ve had some time to think.”

Outside, the air was cold and wet and smelled of snow. Danner nodded to the women who were leaving Rec in ones and twos. Halfway back to her office, she called up Lu Wai. “Sergeant, I want you to take Relman over to sick bay and check her over. She might be suffering some shock. See that she gets something to eat. Don’t talk to her until she starts talking to you. When Cardos is found, explain to her what’s going on; if you can persuade her to help us, give them five minutes alone. Whether or not Cardos is cooperative, keep them both in sick bay. Separate rooms. Use the usual procedure for reporting sick personnel to their superior. Give out that both Relman and Cardos seem to have contracted some rare infectious illness, no visitors allowed. If Captain White Moon kicks up a fuss, refer her to me.”

Let Relman stew a little in her own juices.

Her outer office was dark. The lights came up automatically when she entered, but the room still felt dark around the edges, the way empty spaces always did. In her inner office, she stripped off her gauntlets, flexing her hands a couple of times. Her head ached.

She massaged the bridge of her nose and called Dogias.

“Letitia, I need that conversation as soon as you can get it to me. Don’t send it over the net. Bring me a disk by hand.”

“If you can’t protect the net, what makes you think you can protect your system? I’ll transfer it to audio disk and wipe my comm. Your office in twenty minutes.”

Dogias was infuriating, but right as usual. Twenty minutes. She went through the empty outer office to make herself some tea.

A four‑year‑old memory superimposed itself behind her eyelids: the smile of victory on Helen Relman’s face as she stood straight while Danner attached the sub’s shoulder pips. What had Relman been thinking that day? Danner sighed. She doubted she would ever get the same pleasure from a promotion ceremony again.

She would probably never hold another promotion ceremony.

Her eyes stung. She rubbed at them impatiently. She had better things to do than indulge in old memories.

Back in her office, tea steaming in front of her, she punched in Sara Hiam’s code. “This is Danner. We have a woman called Helen Relman. Sublieutenant. She’s not talking, but there’s at least one other person working with her. Name or names unknown. Dogias will have the tape to me in just a few minutes; that might help.” She took a sip of her tea. “Or it might not.”

She put down her tea, rubbed at her forehead. “Sara, what if this woman won’t talk?”

“Make her,” Hiam said bluntly. “There are several drugs available to your medics that are efficient and painless.”

“I don’t like the idea of drugs.”

“Who does? But do you have the right to not use them to get information that might be vital to the survival of hundreds of people, just because of your squeamishness?”

Danner sighed. This was the last thing she needed.“I thought you might be a little more sympathetic, both to me and to Relman.”

Sara laughed, a flat, ugly laugh. “Sympathetic? Danner, I’m feeling too damned scared to be sympathetic. Every time I’start to fall asleep I imagine the gunnery officer aboard the Kursthitting the trigger by mistake. When I do sleep I dream about never waking up. Drug the woman, find out what you can.”

“I may not have to.”

“Maybe not. But don’t spend too long trying it the other way.”

Over the next day, Danner tried everything she knew: threats, cajolery, sympathy. Relman stayed silent. Time was running out. She decided to give Cardos, who seemed to understand the danger of Relman’s situation better than Relman herself, one more try.

When Danner brought Cardos over from her secured room in the medical wing, Kahn stood up from her chair outside the glass‑paneled sick‑bay door and prepared to go in with Cardos.

“Stay here, Anna. Let her go in alone.” Danner gestured for Cardos to go on in,

“Ma’am?”

“We’ll just wait out here.” Danner refused when Kahn offered her the chair.

Time passed slowly. The sealed skin patch in Danner’s pocket felt larger than it was. She brushed it with her fingertip. Don’t make me use this, Relman.

When Cardos came back out, she was shaking her head. “Nothing. I could try again.”

“Would it do any good?”

“I…No.”

“Officer Kahn will escort you to your room.”

“Shall I call Sergeant Lu Wai here first, ma’am?” Kahn asked.

“That won’t be necessary. And when you return, take a position at the other end of the corridor.”

Kahn looked surprised, Cardos scared. “You won’t hurt her?”

“No.” She would not have to. She stepped into sick bay.

The room was small, low‑ceilinged; the walls were a soft spring green. It held two beds, a screen, and a framed print on the wall opposite the door. There were no windows. Relman was clinged to the nearest bed; she looked better, not the awful pinched white of the evening before.

Just you and me, Relman.

“One last time, Relman. Tell me what I need to know.”

Relman ignored her.

“This isn’t a game, Lieutenant, and my time and patience have just run out. I don’t want to drug you, but I will.”

This time Relman looked at her. “No, I don’t think so. Using drugs against another’s will is illegal and unethical. I know you, Danner, You won’t do it.”

Relman really believed that, Danner thought, and then was angry: with Company, with Hiam, with Relman herself for forcing her to do this.

“God dammit, Relman. Listen to me. Really listen. Forget what you know about fair play and employee rights. Right now, above our heads, people aboard the Kurstare trying to decide whether or not to kill us all or simply abandon us. I need what you know. Hundreds of lives may depend upon it, and that supersedes all my notions of right and wrong. Believe me, I will use drugs.”

Relman paled a little. “Then go ahead. I’m not telling you anything.”

Stupid, stupid woman.

Danner took the foil package from her pocket. When she tore it open, it released a faint antiseptic smell. Use a pre‑op patch, Hiam had said, a muscle relaxant. She’ll stay awake for twenty minutes or more, and she won’t care what she talks about. I’ve had people tell me the weirdest things while they’re under.

Danner rolled up Relman’s right trouser leg and slapped the patch harder than necessary behind her knee. She could have saved herself this, Danner thought fiercely, it was in her hands. I’m not to blame. I’m not. But as she waited, she wished she were a thousand miles away.

After two minutes, Relman began to hum. Danner recognized the tune as one that had been popular on Gallipoli about eight years ago.

“Did you know, Hannah,” Relman said conversationally, “that clings are erotically stimulating? Something to do with the electricity, I think. Makes all my nerves feel alive, and my body–”

“I don’t want to know about your body. I want you to answer my questions. Who is the other spy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you–” She would try another way. “Is there another spy?”

“Oh, yes.” Relman nodded. “Oh yes, yes, yes.” She could not seem to stop nodding.

“How do you know?”

“She talks to me. On my comm.”

“Is she someone you know?”

“I don’t think so. The voice is all funny–comes through a digital coder. But I always know it’s her because she uses a code number.” Relman smiled brightly, eager to be helpful.

“How often does she contact you, and why?”

“Now and again. To tell me who to listen in on, stuff like that. I have to do what she tells me, but not only what she tells me. I called the Kurston my own initiative. I thought, ‘Why should Danner be able…’”

Relman’s voice trailed off, and she frowned. There was a sudden stink of feces. She giggled. “Oops.” Then she smiled again, as though it was a tremendous joke that she was incontinent and incapable.

Danner gritted her teeth. It was not her fault; she had needed this information. She had had no choice. Relman had.

“Why did you do it, Relman?”

“Well, ma’am, you didn’t seem quite right.” Relman grunted; urine pooled on the bed, dripped slowly to the floor. “First of all, you sided with SEC and the natives against Company. Then it, well…” She trailed off, smiled at nothing in particular. Danner waited. “We’ve been here almost five years, and the last four all we’ve done is mark time: no serious exploration, no mining. And then there’s the mods. The mods the mods the mods.”

Danner waited. “The mods?”

“You know, officers and technicians are decorating them. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. Disturbing. Yes. Disturbing, disturbing, disturb–”

“Why?”

“And you’ve been reducing the guard complement. And Mirrors wear armor less and less, and off‑duty civvies are handmade. Think of that, a Mirror wearing handmade clothes…” Relman suddenly seemed to focus. “And when I heard you’d ordered the fence down, what was I supposed to think?”

“You could have come and asked me.”

Relman went on as though Danner had not spoken. “It just seemed to me that you’ve been undermining us, ma’am. Gradually making us seem less and less different to the natives.” Her words were slow now, and slurred. ”Maybe you want us to be natives. But we’re not. We’re not. Only this bit of the world’s ours. And you wanted to take down the boundaries, muddle it all up, let them in. We are who we are, but you’re letting it all get confused. We don’t know why we’re here any more.”

Silence.

“Relman?”

“So confused…” The words trailed off into a snore.

Danner stepped closer, looking down at her officer. Relman, who had seemed so young, so eager. Whom she had led to this. So confused…

Danner did not want anyone else to see Relman like this; she rolled up her sleeves.

When she left, the clings were at her belt, and Relman, clean and naked, was covered by a light sheet, sound asleep. Danner dropped the used pre‑op patch in a receptacle and used her command code to lock the door. When she reached the end of the corridor, Kahn stood to attention, face carefully bland.

“Relman’s locked in. Check on her visually in about twenty minutes, then join us in the convalescent room.”

We don’t know why we’re here any more. Was Relman right? she wondered as she turned down another cheerfully painted corridor to meet Lu Wai and Dogias.

The pastel‑toned room with its huge picture windows was empty. She watched the snow falling outside. We don’t know why we’re here any more. She had not been able to answer that at the time, but now, watching the snow, the alien sky just beyond the fragile glass of the window, she could. They were here to survive.

“Any way we can,” she murmured, as the door behind her opened.

“Any way we can what?” Dogias swung off her jacket, began to brush the melting snow from her hair.

“Survive.” Danner turned back to the window. She saw Dogias’s reflection sling her jacket over the back of a chair.

“Well, survival’s always a good place to start.” Dogias combed through her hair with her fingers. “Why do they keep these places so hot?” She wiped her wet hands down her hip shawl. “So, did our caged bird sing?”

“Eventually.”

Dogias gave her a hard look. “But?”

Danner sighed. “But I hated it, Letitia.” She would not tell Dogias about the drugs. That was between her and Relman. “What she said disturbed me. She thinks that what I’ve been doing, all the sensible precautions like reducing the guard duty–because who needs guards when the natives just want to stay away?–like letting things relax a little because we’re going to be here for… well, a long time at least… She thinks all my orders are designed to undermine us. To demoralize and confuse everyone. I’m beginning to think she might be right.”

“Well, I’m not confused.”

“No, but…”

“But what? Everything yo’ve done has made sense to me.”

“But is it the kind of thing another commander would have done?”

“Who cares? You’re the only commander w’ve got. You can have my opinion, if it matters to you. I think you’ve done much better than any other commander I can think of. After all, you’ve learned on the job; you’ve got the right skills; you haven’t tried to apply irrelevant rules to an extraordinary situation. You’ve put common sense and compassion before policy. The way I see it, that makes you a superb commander for the people here on the ground. It might not look too good to those who aren’t here. To Company hierarchy.” Dogias raised an eyebrow. “But we kind of knew that already.”

Danner’s smile was halfhearted. “I always thought that what I was doing was for the best. Relman’s a good officer. I wouldn’t have promoted her otherwise. But she doesn’t like what I’ve been doing. It scares her. How many others does it scare?”

Dogias tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “The situation scares us all. Those who are less brave than others will look to something, someone, concrete to blame. Which means you: you’re the one giving orders that won’t let them hide behind the idea that this is like any other tour of duty. But some of us are brave, or at least brave enough not to blame you for everything.”

Dogias had a point, but there was more to it than that. “Everything I’ve done I’ve justified with logical‑sounding reasons. But I’m beginning to suspect my own motives.” She took a deep breath. “I think, deep down, I wanted this to happen. I wanted to stay here, on Jeep.”

“You think you’re the only one?”

Danner did not know what to say to that.

Lu Wai and Kahn came in together, “I’ve been thinking,” Danner said abruptly, before they could do more than nod in Letitia’s direction. “We have a sublieutenant out of action. She needs to be replaced. Lu Wai, you are now promoted to sublieutenant, effective immediately.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Lu Wai stole a glance at Dogias, who shrugged.

“Officer Kahn, you are to assume the duties, rights and responsibilities of sergeant. Also effective immediately.”

Kahn nodded. “Ma’am.”

“Both of you will report directly to me, until I say otherwise. Your immediate superiors will be informed.”

Danner said nothing about formalities. They did not ask.

Given Company’s recent actions a ceremony, with its pledges of loyalty, would mean nothing.

“Sit down, please. All of you.” They did. Danner felt momentarily lost. Company doesn’t matter anymore; my commission means nothing. She took a seat among them: Letitia and Lu Wai sitting close together, Kahn picking something out from under a nail. Good women. Her silence lengthened. “I trust you,” she said eventually. “I hope you trust me.” Another pause. “I need… I need your help to make some decisions.” Danner waited for the looks of pity or contempt–decision‑making was her job, her burden, no one else’s–but their attentiveness did not waver. She wondered why she was finding this so hard. Trust them, she thought. Just trust them. “Dr. Hiam, on Estrade, and her two crew need to be brought down from orbit. I thought that between us, we could find a way to do it safely–without anyone on the Kurstbeing any the wiser. It goes without saying that the longer we can keep things here looking normal, the longer we have to organize ourselves before Company does whatever it is they’re going to do. Every extra day helps.”

Silence.

“Basically, we need to get the gig up there, on an apparently normal mission–”

“Taking someone up.”

“–and back down again, containing four people when it should only contain one pilot, without Kurstgetting suspicious.”

“Why don’t we just ask around and see who wants to get off‑planet, there’s bound to be someone, then send her up with the pilot?”

Danner shook her head. “I daren’t. The fewer who know about this and are in a position to communicate with the Kurst, the better.”

“Are you asking for one to us to volunteer, then?” Letitia asked slowly.

“Not yet.”

The silence was long. Danner watched the snow fall outside. Last winter, the snow had formed drifts of eight or nine feet in places. Hiam had assured her that this winter would be milder.

“What’s Kurst’s position relative to Estrade?” Kahn asked suddenly.

“I’m not sure.” Danner tapped a request into her comm. “Variable, according to this.”

“A regular variable?”

“Yes.”

“And are the two sometimes out of line‑of‑sight, obscured by Jeep itself?”

Danner tapped some more. “Yes.”

“Ha!” Dogias crowed, reaching over and poking Kahn on the thigh.“Ana, you’re a genius.” She turned to Danner. “How long would the two be out of line‑of‑sight?”

Danner sighed, and requested that information. “Six hours.”

“Long enough?” Dogias asked Kahn.

“Maybe,” the Mirror said thoughtfully. “Tight, though.”

“Maybe you two would like to explain.”

Kahn gestured for Dogias to take it. “The Kurstis a military vessel, equipped with the best in sensors and detection equipment. I should know, my assignment before Jeep was working on a cruiser’s systems. The only thing is, when the object you want to scan is obscured by a large body, you have to use a separate set of sensors, which need careful and exacting reprogramming, or”–she grinned–“rely upon rough data. Very rough data. If we send up the gig during this six‑hour period, they’ll have to choose. So what they’ll do is check their rough data first.” She looked to Kahn for confirmation. The Mirror nodded. “All we have to do is make sure their rough data will satisfy them enough so that they don’t feel the need to go through all the trouble of the second, more accurate scan.” She stopped, pleased with herself.

“And?”

“And so as long as we stick something alive on that gig, they won’t know if it’s human or not.”

“An animal?”

“As long as it’s big enough,” Dogias said.

Danner wondered where they could find an animal big enough.

“Would it have to be one large one? How about several small ones?” Lu Wai asked.

“That should do it.”

Danner considered. It could work. They could even pilot the gig up by remote. The less personnel risked, the better. Tapes of conversation should satisfy audio requirements. Yes, it could work. For the journey up. “What about the rest?”

“How badly do we need the station’s systems?”

“We need them. They control the satellites: our communications and microwave relay, weather information…”

“More than we need the Estradecrew?”

“Personnel come first,” she said firmly to Letitia. Do they? a little voice whispered. What about Relman? “Why, what were you thinking?”

“If we rigged the platform to explode a few minutes after the gig took off Hiam and the others, then it’s likely that no one would bother with a complicated check of the gig on its way down on a routine mission. They’ll be too busy trying to find out why the platform blew.”

“There must be a better way.”

“Maybe we could rig some other explosion–maybe one of Estrade’s OM vehicles or something.”

Kahn nodded thoughtfully. “That might be possible.”

Danner looked from one to the other. “Any other ideas? No? Right, Kahn and Dogias, I want you to work up the details of what we’ve discussed. Bring them to me by…day after next?”

Dogias and Kahn nodded.

“Good.”

“Ma’am?” Lu Wai asked.

“Yes, Serg–” Danner smiled. “–Lieutenant.”

“What about Relman?”

“Let her go.”

“Ma’am?”

“She’s suffered enough. Confiscate her wristcom, and Cardos’s, and send them off on some make‑work mission. As far from here as possible.”

“Cardos is a cartographer.”

“Then have them start mapping the area south and west of here. That should keep them busy for a while, and give Relman time to think. She’s safe enough as long as she can’t communicate with the Kurst.” She stared out of the window. “We need every healthy woman we can get. There’s so much work to be done. We’ll have to prepare for wholesale evacuation of Port Central, in case the Kurstdecides to sterilize this area.” Sterilize. How easy it was to use euphemisms.

The sky was solid gray; the snow was still falling.

“I miss the sky,” Danner added, to no one in particular. “The thought of never again seeing a light blue Irish morning above wet green fields makes me want to weep.”

“I like it here,” Dogias said.

“I miss home,” Lu Wai admitted, “but I don’t think we’ll ever see it again.” She touched Letitia’s hand. “This isn’t such a bad place. It could become home.”

Danner suspected that for Lu Wai, home was wherever Dogias was. “And you, Ana?”

“I was born on a station orbiting Gallipoli,” Kahn said. “Earth isn’t home. The place they’d send us if we ever left here certainly wouldn’t be home. This may not be, either, but it’s a good enough place.”

Yes, Danner thought, it may be a good enough place, but how would they live here? And when the dust settled, what would be her place on this new world? She was a military and security commander; all she was good at was giving orders. She knew nothing of communities and the way they worked. She wished Marghe were here; an anthropologist would be invaluable.

“If only we really knew what it’s like to live amongst these people,” she said, frustrated.

Letitia and Lu Wai exchanged glances. “But we do,” Letitia said slowly. “Kind of. Or, at least, Day does.”

“Day? Officer Day, the one that got rescued from the burn by that skinny native, before the virus hit?” Dogias nodded. “But she’s dead. Isn’t she? The virus.”

“I believe she’s listed as missing, ma’am,” Lu Wai said.

“You mean she’s not dead?” The truth hit her. “You know where she is!”

“Yes.”

The sled hummed next to what was left of the northern perimeter gate as Lu Wai ran it through ground checks. Though it was only midmorning, it was dark enough for twilight; wind drove thick snow almost horizontally through the gloom. Inside her hood, Danner kept her eyes slitted against the flakes and half walked, half ran across the grass to the sled. Dogias was on the flatbed, securing the last of the supply cases.

Danner tapped her on the shoulder. She had to shout over the wind. “Remember, tell her it’s all unofficial. According to the records, she’s still listed as missing, and it’ll stay that way no matter what, unless she wants it different. Tell her anything you think will persuade her, but just get her here.”

“Do my best,” Dogias shouted.

The foul‑weather cab hatch slid back and Lu Wai leaned out. “Let’s get going. The weather will only get worse.”

Dogias jumped down from the flatbed and slid into the front seat; Lu Wai pressed the hatch‑seal button, cursed, and began to crank it down by hand.

The sled lifted off the ground with a whine. Snow hissed underneath it and bit at Danner’s ankles.

The sled eased forward, gathering speed. Within two minutes, all Danner could see to the north was snow.

She felt suddenly lonely. Two weeks would be a long time without Dogias’s irreverence–maybe three weeks if the weather got worse. Danner had ordered them to return immediately if there was any problem with communications; it was too dangerous to be out in this weather if they lost touch, or if their SLICs went down.

That made her think of Marghe: no SLIC, no communication, hundreds of miles to the north where the weather, according to Sigrid, was brutal.

She started to walk away from the perimeter. Half‑dismantled, and deserted because of the weather, this part of Port Central already looked like a ruin.

Danner split her screen: Nyo on one side, Sara on the other. “Is it, or is it not, possible to move that damned satellite to pick up Marghe’s SLIC?”

“Well,” Nyo said, “we could move it, yes, but we might not be able to get it back. And that would screw up what comm you’ve got down there.”

“The SLIC might not even be operational,” Sara pointed out.

Danner ignored that. “Let’s just assume that it is.”

“It really wouldn’t be wise at this point,” Sara said. “What would the Kurstthink when they saw a satellite being moved? We can’t afford to do anything alarming, nothing that looks like change.”

Hiam was right. Danner would just have to forget Marghe, trust to the representative’s luck and toughness. And the vaccine. When Day got to Port Central, Danner could see if there had been any word through the viajeras on Marghe’s progress. Without Marghe to negotiate trade and friendship between Port Central and the natives, to gain a foothold on this world she would have to rely for now on the personal link between herself and Day, and the natives who had saved her life, Oriyest and Jink. And upon the more impersonal trata agreement between Cassil of Holme Valley and herself as commander of Port Central. And on hope.

Damn small things to base a life, many lives, on.

Chapter Ten

MARGHE AND LEIFIN were three days traveling through Moanwood to Ollfoss. Later, Marghe could not have said whether it was a year or no time at all. She remembered little: occasional fractured snapshots of trees that were not quite trees, whose roots were greater around than their crowns or which possessed no crowns at all; musty, sharp smells of small nesting animals; pain in her hands and feet and face. Most of all she remembered one day falling down on the snow‑dusted floor of the forest and lying on her back, dizzy, while leaves, or what might have been leaves, whirled around her head. She had laughed aloud, but the forest swallowed her thin bright ribbon of laughter and she quieted as she realized it was she who was the alien here; that the dark and the green around her would remain unaffected by her, could not digest her if it tried. Like cellulose in the gut of a carnivore, she could not be assimilated. Alien.

The rest of the journey was a jumble: Leifin climbing on top of her, keeping her warm; soft wet stuff in her mouth that Leifin had already chewed for her; Leifin sneaking something from her pocket then shouting at her to stop, stop, and Marghe realizing she had Leifin’s hand between her teeth and her gums hurt, but refusing to let go until Leifin put the vial back into Marghe’s pocket.

She remembered nothing of arriving at Ollfoss. She had imagined how it might have been, since: stumbling out from under the dark canopy onto the blinding white snow; past the open‑walled shelter that housed nothing but a small metal gong; along the snow‑covered path that ran between the bathhouse, built over the hot spring, and the famous vegetable gardens of Ollfoss; on to the houses and outhouses and gathering places that looked like stone versions of the tents of the Echraidhe, with horizontal slit windows and wooden shutters under their eaves of sod, and careful stone channels running down the corners of the sloping roofs. Low houses, sturdy houses, built to survive snow and the rushing, runneling thaws of spring.

More days followed spent tossing in fever; shouting in hoarse Portuguese for someone to turn the lights on; trying hard to swallow soup and crying when she spilled it; feeling pain in her hands and feet and face. Being tied down. She remembered faces looming over her, serious or smiling, but all strange.

So gradually that she could not have pointed to one day in particular and said, There, that was when I began to really recover, Marghe realized that what she thought were restraints on her arms and legs were bandages of cloth and moss. Her spinning dreams steadied down to a world where certain faces reappeared again and again in connection with lifting her over to the fire, bathing her with warm water, feeding her, trimming the wick on the horn‑shaded lamp that sat on the trunk by one whitewashed wall.

The face that appeared most often, the one accompanied by pain in her smeary fever dreams, was a dark, walnut‑faced woman, Kenisi, who untied the cloth and removed the moss, rubbed something into the pain, replaced the wrappings with fresh moss and clean cloths. She was smaller, quicker than Borri, but she had the same eyes as the Echraidhe healer. Marghe tried to smile the first time she realized what Kenisi was doing, but split open her healing lip.

After a while she began to stay awake enough to sit up on the narrow bed she occupied, and to greet by name the other faces: Leifin, of course, the one with the shifting‑sea eyes and the thin mouth, who often brought a knife and sat whittling wood; Hilt, a tall woman whose hair, just a fraction darker than the coffee color of her skin, was the shortest Marghe had yet seen on this world. Hilt was a sailor, from North Haven, in Ollfoss to visit her blood sister Thenike, a viajera.

As Marghe began visibly to gain strength, Kenisi allowed other visitors, women from neighboring families. Some, like Leifin, wore the cap, furs, and sling of the tribes; others, like Hilt, wore felt cloaks and knit caps; still others, a mix of homespun, pelts, and felt. Many wore jewelry: bright olla beads in strings around necks and wrists or dangling from wooden ear‑cuffs, brooches carved and painted in strong colors. Some lived in Ollfoss; others were either living in Ollfoss for the short term or visiting kith or lovers for the winter. All were curious: here was a woman from somewhere totally other, who had survived the Echraidhe and won through Tehuantepec in the winter.

Marghe ignored all their questions. She found she could not think about the Echraidhe, the snow and ice, the way she had nearly let herself die. She still did not know why she had made herself struggle to survive, nor if she was glad she had.

Instead, she concentrated on her body. The next time Kenisi came to change the wrappings on her hands, rather than staring up into the thick rafters that sloped to a point over her head, Marghe asked some questions of her own.

The two crusty scabs where the two smallest fingers on her left hand should have been needed no explaining, but Kenisi pointed to the mottled finger on that hand, and the little finger, missing its nail, on her right. “This one, and this, should heal.” She let Marghe look, then rewrapped them carefully and started to unwind the cloth around Marghe’s head and ear. “There’ll be scars here–” a cool touch of her finger above the left eyebrow–“and here.” Where she touched just behind the ear, Marghe flinched. “Hurt?” Marghe nodded. Kenisi rubbed it gently with the ointment. “You’ve lost part of that ear, too. Nothing your hair won’t hide.”

Marghe was grateful for the healer’s matter‑of‑fact tone. It gave her the courage to ask, “Is there anything else? My feet?”

Kenisi smiled, fissuring her face. “They’re a mess, but they’ll heal.” She stopped rubbing ointment into Marghe’s face. “Think we’ll leave these wrappings off for now, see how it goes,” she said, and started on Marghe’s feet.

Marghe was glad Kenisi had already told her they would heal: they reminded her of half‑flayed baby seals, an unhealthy mix of purplish black skin and red raw flesh. She turned away, glad, suddenly, that she had not been able to look into a mirror since she had woken.

Later that day, Leifin brought in a young girl with long, unbraided hair. They were both carrying food. Stewed fish, fruit, water: soft stuff. Marghe’s teeth still rocked in her gums. It would be a while before she was up to chewing meat or fibrous vegetables. Leifin introduced the girl. “Gerrel, daughter of my blood sister, Kristen.”

Gerrel, Marghe saw, was trying hard not to stare at her. Her face. She touched it gently. “What does it look like?”

“Like you ran into a tree,” Gerrel said. She appraised Marghe frankly, shook her head. “Like you ran into a tree twice.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

Gerrel’s expression said she doubted it. Marghe concentrated on eating the food while Leifin and Gerrel took out her pot and brought it back freshly scrubbed with snow and smelling of some aromatic.

After that, Gerrel often brought Marghe’s food by herself, and helped wash her down, or moved her to the fur‑draped trunk against one wall while Kenisi and a woman called Ette laid fresh covers on the bed. When Marghe asked, Gerrel went to get lukewarm water and a cake of hard soap. While Gerrel washed her hair, Marghe tried to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge.

“Who is Ette related to?”

“She’s from Kristen’s family.”

Marghe frowned, remembering. “Your mother and Leifin’s blood sister?”

Gerrel carefully teased out a tangle. “Kristen’s my blood mother.”

“But you don’t live with her?”

“No. Her family lives in the house with the two chimneys: her and Namri, Ellyr, Rathell, young Hamner, and baby Gin.”

Marghe shook her head; still uncertain about who belonged in what house.

“Careful. You’ll get water all over the place.”

“So who do you call your family?”

“There’s Wenn, she’s the oldest, and Kenisi, of course.”

“The healer.”

“She’s really a cook. She’s the one that makes most of what you eat. Bakes bread for other families, too. And during harvest, it’s always our family’s cookpot that everyone lines up at. You should see her festival cake!” She scooped Marghe’s soapy hair up in one hand, pulled the bowl of water closer. “Lean forward so I can rinse this off.”

Marghe did.

“Leifin and Huellis have baby soestre, Otter and Moss. Then there’s Thenike, who’s here right now but not often, because she’s always off viajering in that boat of hers, and her blood sister Hilt. This is the first time they’ve both been home together for ages. And then there’s me.”

“So why do you live here?”

“Thenike’s my choose‑mother. Wenn said I should come and live here with Thenike’s family because she said I’d end up clashing with Kristen. Something like that, anyway. I’ve been here since I was an infant.”

Adoption, or fostering. “And who’s Thenike related to? Apart from Hilt.”

“I don’t know. But she’s been part of the family since before I have.”

Gerrel was a mine of information. Huellis, she said, was Leifin’s partner, but everyone knew that it hadn’t started because of love: Leifin had wooed her because of the bad trata agreement between their family and Huellis’s, years ago. Now that they were part of the same family, the trata agreement had to be renegotiated, and their family was richer than it had been. Huellis and Leifin seemed to like each other well enough now; at least, Huellis had stayed.

Gerrel was not afraid to ask her own questions. Marghe did not always answer them, but the girl seemed to accept that there were some things Marghe was not prepared to talk about.

Gerrel asked one question Marghe knew she would have to find an answer for, eventually: “Leifin rescued you and brought you here. The family’s caring for you. How will you repay us?”

Two days later, on a morning when sunlight slid now and again through the window slits set up near the roof and made her want to be outside, Marghe was sitting up in bed and pondering that question. Across her knees lay several objects: the vial of FN‑17, her fur mittens, her knife, her palo. All gifts from women she had barely known. All she had in the world.

She touched them one by one.

The vial was almost empty, and there was one less softgel than there had been. She hoped that somehow, during her delirium, her subconscious body clock had told her when to take it. She was unsure how long she had been here, but it felt as though it was almost time to take another.

The mittens that had been tawny brown when Cassil first gave them to her were dark, crusty with blood and slime. They stank. Unless they could be cleaned along with the rest of her furs, wherever they were, she did not even have any clothes.

The knife, too, was stained; the hide wrappings around the haft looked splotched and diseased. The stone blade had a new chip she did not remember. That should be possible to grind out. She touched it gently with her fingertip. Cold. Rough. Like Shill and Holle, who had given it to her.

She picked up the palo last, hefting it in her right hand. In the light, a long way from the harsh Tehuantepec snow, the carving seemed cruder than it had amongst the tents of the Echraidhe. Aoife had made this, for her.

She put it down next to the knife.

All the gifts had been made for her; not bought in a bright hive of commerce in one quick afternoon, but crafted on cold winter nights by the light of tallow, or cut from the steaming bodies of animals while the sky rushed overhead. The wood had been seasoned, whittled, carved, polished, stained. The knife had been old when she received it: a comfortable, familiar friend to someone, given with love. Even the FN‑17 was the product of personal sweat and effort by Sara Hiam.

These things were all she had. These things had kept her alive. She would never be able to repay the givers in full.

When Gerrel came in with soup and a dish of the rough gray‑brown Ollfoss bread, Marghe was still staring at the things on her lap. Gerrel put the tray on the floor and cleared them away. “They smell,” she said, and tugged the coverlet, smoothing it. She laid the tray on Marghe’s lap. “Neat’s‑foot and onion soup.”

It smelled like asparagus, and was almost clear, with a hint of brown that could have been the wooden bowl, or caramelized onion. Cheese, just beginning to melt, floated on top, It looked too hot to eat right away. Marghe picked up one of the small loaves.

“It’s best if you soak the bread, then scoop some cheese on,” Gerrel said.

Marghe tore off a piece of bread. “What’s neat’s‑foot?”

“I knew you’d ask that.” Gerrel pulled two leaves from her pocket. They were the size of bay leaves, milky with pale green veins. “When you first pick them, they’re clear, like olla, and these bits”–she pointed to the veins–“are dark green. But if you don’t use them right away they go cloudy. Like this.”

Marghe was having a hard time with the stringy cheese.

“No, like this.” Gerrel broke off her own piece of bread, dipped it in the soup, twirled it expertly until it was wrapped in cheese, and popped it in her mouth.

“Ah. Like spaghetti.”

“What?”

Marghe explained about spaghetti. Gerrel listened carefully. “Gerrel, do you believe anything I tell you?” she asked suddenly.

Gerrel looked confused. “Why? Isn’t it true?”

Marghe suddenly wanted to cry. “Yes, it’s true. It’s all true.”

Later that afternoon, Marghe had a visitor.

She came in quietly, smiled, gestured to the end of Marghe’s bed with a raised eyebrow, and sat when Marghe nodded.

“I’m Thenike.” Her voice was textured, rich with harmonies.

Marghe dredged her memory. “Blood sister to Hilt.” Like Hilt, she was taller than average, though not by much. Her skin was darker than the sailor’s, and differently textured: close‑pored. Her features were planed to bones and hollows and looked strong, like the exposed roots of a mature tree. Unlike Hilt’s, her hair was long, coiled up on her head, dark and glossy, like the wood of massive trees that were too dense to float: mahogany, teak, silkwood.

“Gerrel tells me you’re a viajera.”

Thenike smiled. “I bet that’s not all she’s told you.”

“True. Though she couldn’t tell me how I can repay your family for my care.”

Thenike said nothing for a while. “As you say, I’m a viajera. Your story would be worth a great deal to me. If you feel up to it, telling me how you came here would pay part of the debt to the family.”

“My story in exchange for all this?” Marghe gestured around her.

Thenike studied her. “Mine isn’t the only say. If it was, then, yes, it would be your story in exchange for all of this. It’s not always easy to give a story to a viajera. But I do have some say, and if you give me what I need, then part of your debt will be discharged.”

“Who decides the rest?”

“The family. All of us. In this instance, because Leifin was the one who brought you, she will have a great deal to say. But back to your story. It won’t be easy, but if it’s done right, both of us will benefit, I think. Are you willing?”

This was a good opportunity to see firsthand the way a viajera worked. “Yes.”

“Then we’ll begin today.” She looked up at the shutters of the unglazed slits that passed as windows. “It’s stuffy in here. Outside, it’s cold, but sunny. Perhaps you would like to breathe some fresh air, see the sky?”

“Yes.” She would have to do better than just yes. She made an effort. “I’d like that.”

“I’ll find you some clothes.”

Thenike lifted the lamp off the trunk and rummaged for a while. “Here.” It was an enormous tent of a cloak. She pulled back Marghe’s covers. “Swing your legs out. There. Yes. And I’ll help you with these.” Marghe recognized the fur leggings: her own, cleaned. “Now, put this on. Over your head. Put your arm over my shoulder, no, lean on me, and up.” And Marghe swayed onto her feet, draped in the felt cloak.

“How’s that? Can you try a step?”

Marghe nodded, and did. Her feet hurt ferociously. It must have shown on her face.

“It’ll hurt, but a few steps won’t do any harm. Time you were up and about.”

Marghe took another step, winced. “Lean on me,” Thenike said.

After being inside for so long, the sharp, clear air made Marghe cough, which hurt her feet even more. The sun shone–a thinner yellow and from a lighter blue sky, but it was sunshine and the world was still here. She stood and wheezed and not all the tears that she wiped from her cheeks were from her coughing.

“I’ve prepared a place for you, as you see.”

Thenike helped her sit on the pallet that waited on a sunlit patch of moss by the wall. Marghe leaned back, eyes closed, and soaked up the illusion of warmth. She knew Thenike was watching.

“Do you get a lot of sun here in Ollfoss during the winter?”

“This will be the first winter I’ve spent here for four years,” Thenike said, “and the last time it was nothing but cloud until the Moon of Aches.” Marghe opened her eyes to find Thenike smiling. “But, yes, all the other winters I’ve been here, the clouds unwind now and again, and the plants in our gardens and nurseries unfurl their bright new leaves, and we eat well. How is the winter where you come from?”

“I come from many different places.” So many.

“Whichever you choose. It’s in my mind that I’ll have seen none of them. Tell me what you wish.”

And Marghe told her of winters in Macau when the sky was the gray of an upturned fish pot and the air smelled to her six‑year‑old self of rice wine and sea, and carried with it the excitement of the casinos and the sharp fear‑sweat of men gambling more than they could afford to lose. She told of the whiter hills of Portugal as she remembered them from the last time she had visited her father: the cold blue skies, the wind that slid through her clothes when she walked a goat path in the morning. She did not know what winter would be like at Port Central.

The sun disappeared behind a bank of cloud that looked as though it had been carved from slippery gray soapstone. Marghe watched, tired after so much talking.

“A suke sky,” Thenike said.

“Suke?”

“Like the belt sukes some of us wear.” Thenike reached under her cloak and pulled out a round disk, drilled through at the top and threaded with a thong. She untied it, handed it to Marghe. “My suke.”

It was half the size of Marghe’s palm and unpainted, smooth on the back, slightly rounded, carved on the front with a fish. The carving was clean‑lined, stylized, well‑executed. An emblem of some kind.

“You did this?”

“It was my mother’s.”

“She’s dead?”

Thenike smiled. “No. Her lover carved her another one, this time with two nerka instead of one.”

“Nerka?”

“This fish. Blue‑backed fish that live at sea but come back to High Beaches every spring to spawn.” As if sensing Marghe’s fatigue, Thenike seemed happy to take over the talking duty. “Hilt and I were born in North Haven; that’s where she makes her home, when she’s not at sea. My home is everywhere.” She gestured around her. ”Ollfoss, North Haven, High Beaches, Pebble Fleet. Up the Ho and down the Sayesh, along the Huipil and on the banks of the Glass.“

“Sounds like you still like to stay on the water.”

“Yes. I have a skiff, the Nid‑Nod. You know the nid‑nod? It’s a silly bird that lives in the marshes out by the river Glass, and in the Trern Swamplands. She has long legs and a longer beak too heavy for her head, which she’s always lifting up and down to see what’s happening. The nid‑nod, the story goes, is convinced that something good is happening somewhere close by and she’s missing it.”

Marghe smiled, remembering a number of people who acted that way.

The sun came out again and they enjoyed it quietly.

“Time to get you back in, I think.”

Marghe did not demur; she was tired. It hurt more to get back to her bed than it had leaving it. Thenike helped her onto the bed, but let her take off her own cloak and fold it. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Early if the sun’s shining.”

When Thenike was gone, Marghe realized she had not once mentioned Wales, or her mother. Or her mother’s death.

The next day the sun was shining; Thenike came while Marghe and Gerrel were sharing a breakfast of goura chunks and pulpy nitta seeds. “Ugly plant, the nitta,” Gerrel had told Marghe, “all waxy pods and roots, and the seeds are hard to get. I don’t know why we bother with them, taste like wirrel droppings,” But Marghe liked them, and accepted Gerrel’s share.

“You should eat those,” Thenike observed in her rich voice, “they’re good for you.”

“You eat them if they’re so nice,” Gerrel said, unconcerned,

“Unfortunately, I don’t like them any more than you do.” She smiled. “But I value my health. If you don’t eat nitta, make sure you put extra gaver pepper in your soup, like I do,” Gerrel pulled a face. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell the story of Torren and the healer again.”

Gerrel sighed, and spooned some seeds from Marghe’s dish to her own. Thenike pretended not to notice. “No need to rush your food on my account,” she said to Marghe, “the sun will wait. It’s warmer than yesterday.”

When they were outside, Marghe looked at Thenike. “The story of Torren and the healer?”

Thenike smiled. “Torren was a young girl who thought she knew best and did not always eat her nitta seeds, or wear her cap in the middle of winter. One day she got sick and went to the healer. The healer turned her away, saying, why should she help Torren when Torren always refused to help herself?”

“So what happened?”

“It depends. Sometimes Torren repents, sometimes the healer relents, sometimes Torren dies.”

Marghe pondered that. “So viajeras teach. What else do they do?”

“Depends on the viajera. We witness agreements between kiths and communities; we judge disputes; sometimes we allot land to herders.”

“Land that you hold?”

“No. There’s a great deal of common land. When a family moves, or hits a burn, or simply splits into two, they need to use other land. Viajeras remember which land is in use, and which of that available land would be suitable for the family that’s asking for it. We remember. We remember which family might quarrel with which, and make sure they’re given the use of lands that don’t adjoin. We travel and tell news, we sing songs and spin stories; we lead pattern singings and deepsearch, we heal broken bones and old resentments, but mostly we remember.”

Marghe got the feeling that she was missing something, but had no idea what.

Thenike grinned. “But being a viajera is not all of who I am. I’m also a bad cook and a good sailor, and dangerous to meet over a game of knucklebones.” Marghe did not look satisfied, “Did you expect more? I’m not a sage or a holy woman. I have skills that I use as a viajera. Just as you have skills that you use as an anthropologist.” She said the word carefully, only having heard it once, the day before.“Everything I do can become part of that work, if I choose. Just as it can and does for you, if you choose.” She stared up at the sky, which was swirling like scum on top of a boiling pot, letting the sun through for brief moments. “If I wasn’t a viajera, didn’t have the skills of a viajera, I’d be someone different. A sailor, perhaps, like Hilt, leaving North Haven in the spring and only coming back in the autumn after crossing Silverfish Deeps as far as Eye of Ocean and back again.” She sounded wistful. “And you. What would you have chosen to do if you had not come here, to be an anthropologist?”

Marghe thought about that. “I don’t know.”

“What do you like to do? In the winter when you walked the hills in Portugal, or lay on your stomach on the roof watching the fisherfolk of Macau”–again the careful words, strange in her mouth–“what was it that you wished you had the time to do?”

“Explore,” Marghe said, surprised. “Go places I’d never seen before. Exciting places, where dragons might just be real.” She laughed, delighted at her discovery. “I always liked to follow paths, see where they went, who they led to. A map, a new world, a strange country–they’re all like puzzles where I have to put the pieces together to feel comfortable, to understand how things are. Once I understand, I feel too comfortable. Then it’s time to move on, find a new place, new people. New discoveries.”

“Always?”

“So far,” she said slowly, suddenly unwilling to go any further with this.

Thenike nodded. “And these places you go, the people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”

Marghe forced a smile and waved the question aside. Like strange shells that you find on the beach… She did not want to think about it. “What kind of sky would you call this?”

“A chessel sky,” the viajera said. “If I was in my skiff, I’d be looking for a place to put in. We’ll see a bit of wind.”

“Chessel?”

“If you feel up to a little walk, I’ll show you.”

Marghe had to breathe deeply, steadily, and lean on Thenike as they walked the snow‑dusted path to a building half‑hidden under the trees. The sloping roof was covered in old snow, gone icy and gray, and the slit windows were shuttered from the inside. Unlike most of the other buildings of Ollfoss, much of it was underground.

The steps leading down to the sturdy‑looking door were not steep, but Marghe took them one at a time, like a child.

Inside, it was cool and dim, full of barrels, slablike tables, sacks and stacks and huge clay jugs. She ran her hands over one: stoppered with a rough clay seal. Food storage. Thenike used a wooden pole, curved into a hook at the end, to lever open a couple of window shutters. There was a milky, sickly smell Marghe could not identify, and overlaying that, something thin and sharp.

“A chessel,” Thenike said, pointing.

It was a wooden cheese vat. Thenike leaned her pole up against a whitewashed wall and pulled off the gauzy cloth covering, sending a gust of sharp not‑quite‑cheese smell in Marghe’s direction. In the vat, the whey looked scummy, rancid, like the sky.

“This is where we make butter and cheese, and store what milk we don’t use on any day.” She slid the stone lid off a good‑sized bowl. “Yeast. For the bread.” She slid it back. “Through here are the vegetables.” There were mounds of roots and tubers, leaves drying in bunches and bulbs hanging from the roof. Thenike reached into a barrel, pulled out a small, round fruit, sniffed it. “Soca. Here. Can you smell the spice? That means it’s not ready yet. We pick them at the end of the Moon of Shelters, leave them here in the dark until they’re ready. When they’re ready they smell terrible, like bad feet, but they taste like rain after a drought, like wind on a calm sea.”

To Marghe it seemed that the storage cellar was full with enough to feed a thousand people for a year, and it occurred to her that she had never really seen whole‑food storage before. At Port Central, there was probably more protein, more vitamins, stored in a tenth this space, all in the form of concentrates, flash‑frozen choice cuts, and prepeeled mixes.

The chessel sky was wrapped right around the sun by the time they emerged. A cold wind bowled snow dust along the paths, Marghe’s scars ached. She shivered. Here she was in Ollfoss, the place she had been traveling toward for two years in order to… study the people like shells found on a beach. She was not sure she wanted to do that anymore. Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.