text: Anavha recovered from his injury in Coryana's house outside Galina. He bled badly, but she said there was very little true damage. Her worst fear was infection. She packed his wound with honey and lemon juice and some other terrible things just to be certain.
  
  Natanial had picked him up after punching Zezili senseless, and said he was taking Anavha to the infirmary, but he didn't. He rolled Anavha into the back of a bear-pulled cart and paid a boy to take him to Coryana's.
  
  "Be quiet and wait for me." The last thing Natanial said to him.
  
  Days dragged into weeks, and summer brought with it heat and muggy days. News came from the north that Saradyn's army had suffered a terrible loss. The rumors caused unrest in the town, and Coryana made it clear through her gestures and the limited number of words they both knew in one another's languages that she didn't want him to go far. He worked with her in the garden, and practiced his concentration exercises in the afternoon. In the evening, he wrote poetry, and though Coryana understood none of it, she nodded as he spoke, and smiled like one of Zezili's sisters humoring him.
  
  The day Tanays, Saradyn's second in command, declared himself king of the region, Anavha sat out on the stoop with Coryana drinking sugar water and watching red birds flit through the forest canopy. He could stay here and wait for Natanial forever, or for Zezili, or for Tanays to find him, or Saradyn – if he still lived. His whole life had been here, sitting on this porch, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
  
  That night, he said goodbye to Coryana and thanked her for her kindness, and she nodded and smiled like she knew what he was saying and tucked him into bed like a child.
  
  Anavha waited until she had put out the lights and the moons had risen. Then he rose from his bed, packed the few clothes and books and papers he had traded for, and walked into the middle of the garden, barefoot. He carried his shoes in one hand. He wanted to feel the dirt under his toes one last time.
  
  Then he opened a door.
  
  Tordinian poetry, not beautiful, but what it unlocked in his mind was lovely – a path to another place, another life. He peered at the sky on the other side, fearing he may have wound the snarls of Oma's light into the wrong configuration. But no, that was his sky. His moons.
  
  And there was a little rocky path leading down to a tiled city lit with a thousand lights, all twinkling like the stars come to the ground.
  
  He stepped through the door. The air warmed. It was hot, almost sticky out here. The drone of the insects was loud. He glanced once behind him, at Coryana's house, and saw someone on the porch.
  
  It was Natanial.
  
  Natanial did not move from the porch, though. Just watched him.
  
  Anavha raised his hand. Greeting or goodbye? Both. All of it.
  
  Natanial raised his in turn.
  
  Anavha remembered their last day together, before Natanial went after Saradyn and the army.
  
  "What am I supposed to be out here?" Anavha had asked. "What am I without her?"
  
  "Power is a funny thing," Natanial said. "You get to decide what to do with it."
  
  "The way Zezili did?"
  
  "She made her choice. Now you get to make yours."
  
  "I'm not… I don't… that's not who I am."
  
  "Then don't make Zezili's choices."
  
  Anavha released his hold on Oma, and the door between Tordin and Aaldia closed, and his past with it.