text: Taigan sat on the roof of the boarding house, staring out at the spinning spire of Sina in the dawn sky. The sky turned a blushing lavender as the double suns broke across the horizon. Unlike Para, Sina rose before the suns, and set just after them. It amused her to read the tomes of astronomers desperate to understand why the divine satellites did not adhere to a strict, regular path the way the heavenly bodies did. They were not fixed things, the astronomers said, but visitors from someplace else, the divine realm, thrust through the seams between things at uneven intervals. The powers they brought with them were equally unpredictable.
  
  She smoked a Tordinian cigarette, a rare luxury now, and wondered how the battle went in Dhai, or if she had already missed it. It had been weeks since she was pulled back here to Anjoliaa, weeks waiting for the Tai Mora army. She thought she could see the first sign of them now, in the very far distance. The smoke of cooking fires. Far more interesting, however, were the tears in the sky. Along the western horizon she saw broad ripples. As she watched, one tore open to reveal a bloody amber sky on the other side. She called Oma, and the breath that flowed beneath her skin came more easily and with more intensity than it ever had. Stargazers could predict little. She tracked Oma's rise by how easy it came to her. Not long, now.
  
  The window behind her opened. Maralah said, "We're leaving."
  
  Taigan crawled back into the window, and dropped to the floor. Maralah and Kovaas were there, both looking very clean and overdressed.
  
  "Twenty minutes," Kovaas said, and gave Maralah a little bow. He picked up a pack and left them.
  
  Taigan put out the cigarette on the window frame and preserved the butt of it in her coat pocket. The weather had warmed considerably, but even this far south, there was still a chill in the air at sunrise and sunset.
  
  "What is my task?" Taigan asked.
  
  "You're to stay in this room until tomorrow morning."
  
  Taigan raised her brows. They'd begun to grow back, darker and thicker this time. They nearly met over her eyes now. "And then?"
  
  "And then you'll know what to do."
  
  "You could have told me that before I put out my cigarette." More long distance messages, then, playing runner to whatever strange scheme she was up to now. Did she plan a final stand? Taigan hoped so. She had listened to her and Kovaas fucking the last few weeks, and knew something about her had changed. She no longer looked like a walking corpse, a dead person with no family, no hope. Taigan wondered what it felt like.
  
  "Those are vile things," Maralah said.
  
  "It's not as if it will kill me."
  
  "No," Maralah said. She turned on her heel. "Until tomorrow morning."
  
  "Are you leaving me money to eat, at least?"
  
  "The proprietor has been paid in advance for your meals and your room. But only until morning." She hesitated at the door. Glanced back at her, mouth partly open, as if she wanted to give one last order, one final piercing comment. But she did not. She stepped through the door and left Taigan alone.
  
  Taigan went back onto the roof. She spent her day watching the sky, and the approach of the Tai Mora army. They were another day, perhaps two, out, but the city was broiling. Some were shoring up their houses, but many more had left. Only the very stupid or the very desperate stayed – the elderly, the infirm, the stubborn. Watching a city preparing for an army was like watching them prepare for a natural disaster, an imminent storm far too big for them to understand.
  
  She spent the evening in the main tea house playing a game of screes with a very old man whose beard was stark white. She had played screes with Lilia a few times, but it was the first she had seen it in Saiduan. She supposed Anjoliaa, being a port city, was most likely to have picked up the game. The pieces were arranged on a square, checkered board. Twelve white pieces in the middle, twenty four black pieces arranged around the edges. It was easy to see the lesson in it – the white pieces had to win by outmaneuvering a much larger force that surrounded them on all sides, as if in an ambush. Taigan had had enough of being ambushed, so she played the black pieces, and the old man played the white. She admitted to herself early on that she was not good at the game as the white pieces began to trump hers, one after another. The game was not one of attrition, which she thought was interesting. Instead, the goal for white was to move the tall white Leader piece to one of the corner squares on the board without being overtaken by a black piece. Taigan's goal was simply to eliminate the Leader piece by boxing it in on all sides with her superior number of black pieces.
  
  Taigan lost the first game, and the second. As dusk fell and the proprietor came around with some watery soup and weak tea, they began a third game. They were the last two people in the tea house. The old man was another boarder.
  
  As Taigan sipped her tea and surveyed the board she understood why this was Lilia's favorite game. It was not about superior numbers, but isolating one piece. If you isolated just one piece, even if it meant sacrificing all of your own pieces, you would win the game. It was all about the Leader piece.
  
  Taigan nearly dropped her cup. The game. Lilia's game.
  
  The realization came over her so suddenly that it made her a little giddy. Without her power, Lilia was just a strategist. A smart strategist would play the game that would best topple the board. She could play white – outnumbered, but sacrificing all to save the Leader piece. That was a good strategy for the Saiduan, it was the game Maralah had tried to play, but it wasn't very Dhai. If Lilia was playing to win, she would play to put herself next to Kirana. She would box her in. She would play to capture the Leader piece, and watch the rest fall.
  
  That was the moment Taigan felt the ward that had bound her for over a decade break.
  
  She let out a huff of air. Spilled her tea. The old man started. The wound on her back went ice cold, then – nothing. She felt no pull, no push, no heavy gauze around her thinking or her gift and the use of it. It was as if she were lighter. Freer.
  
  Taigan set down her tea. Placed both hands on the table.
  
  "You will lose the third," the old man said. His Leader piece was just two places from the corner square.
  
  Either Maralah was dead, or she had released Taigan voluntarily. Taigan bet on dead, knowing what waited for them outside the gates. But she was not going to waste her newfound freedom finding out.
  
  She stood. "I concede," she said.
  
  The old man grunted. "Poor loser."
  
  "I don't believe in losing," Taigan said, and went upstairs to find her weapon.
  
  Maralah gazed out over Anjoliaa from the height of the eastern foothills. Dusk cloaked the valley. Sina was still ascendant, bathing the world in a purple glow as the moons began to rise and dominate the sky. The great satellite was larger than the largest moon, but only just, and it glowed with its own intensity, not the reflection of some other star. She held its power easily beneath her skin, with hardly a thought; the concentration required now that her star was ascendant, with her at the full capacity of her power, was negligible. From this distance she could also see the Tai Mora army on the other side of the city.
  
  She meant to hold Taigan until morning, giving her a good head start in avoiding her, should she be eager for revenge. In her position, Maralah would have sought vengeance immediately. But as she gazed at the Tai Mora army, her resolve, for the first time in her life, faltered. It was the army they both fought. The army that had come to destroy them.
  
  Maralah had fought it with everything she had, sacrificing everyone she cared for, even Rajavaa, to its bloody extinction. Now she stood on a hilltop with just thirty families, Kovaas beside her, leading them to some rotten, remote fishing village where she thought they could weather out the rest of the war. She wondered if the Tai Mora would hunt them down and kill them, the way her people had with the Dhai, or forget about them. Once the Tai Mora crossed over, what use was there in murdering her people? None. None at all. But she had some experience with armies used to killing. When the killing ended, one needed to have plenty of other work to keep them occupied, or they'd turn on the civilians. She had seen it a hundred times. She knew what she would do.
  
  Maralah glanced back at the families on the ridge. They sat in the broad clearing, resting for a few minutes before the next push. They were quiet as ghosts. She and Kovaas had spent the last week putting together this sorry little band of refugees and encouraging them to flee the city. She and Kovaas had found other sanisi in the city, and given them the location of their final destination – a remote fishing village far to the northeast, one of the early settlements routed by the Tai Mora. Why would the Tai Mora return to a place they had already burned out?
  
  It was a place Maralah knew well, the city her daughter was born in, so many years ago, when she still thought about the future, perhaps too much. She could have ended the pregnancy, but Alaar was… himself on learning of it, and simply assigned her to a remote part of the Empire for a year, at her request. Some days she wondered why she bothered.
  
  Maralah had not raised her, just left her with some fisher family. She had become a skull dancer in a local city temple to Oma, and died soon after it was overrun by Tai Mora. Maralah had not seen her since she was six months old. She did not miss her, not in the visceral way women often said they missed their children, but some days she missed the idea of her.
  
  She wondered if that's all regret was, missing the idea of a thing.
  
  "Maralah?" Kovaas took her hand.
  
  She did not pull away.