text: Roh smelled sulfur. The scent was so odd, so unexpected on the rolling white tundra, that he reined in his bear and stopped. He and Luna had gone north for three days before turning south, trying to shake their pursuers. For a week they had moved across a featureless tundra, eating mostly rice. Roh tried to gag down the fish Luna caught, but his stomach rebelled, and he vomited it all up. They had been plodding so long on this featureless land that he knew his brain was bound to start making things up. Roh thought he might be going mad when he smelled the sulfur.
  
  "Behind us," Luna said, pointing.
  
  Roh saw a cluster of dark figures coming around a low snow drift. They had not lost their pursuers after all.
  
  "Why do they care about us?" Roh said. "It makes no sense to follow us."
  
  "The Tai Mora are thorough," Luna said.
  
  Roh turned his bear forward.
  
  "We should be careful," Luna said. "That smell–"
  
  Roh's bear trundled up to what looked like a cliff. Roh halted him, and gazed out over a massive crater so large he could not see its end. In the crater below, roiling pools of bubbling gray water steamed in the frigid air. Tangles of frozen steam glittered on the sides of the crater. Ice coated the branches of scraggly trees like spun sugar.
  
  "Any other way across?" Roh asked, stupidly, because he could see there was not. It stretched on and on, this misty, bubbling crater, like a massive giant had taken a huge bite of the world and left spittle and bile behind.
  
  "I've never been out here." Luna looked over his shoulder again. "They'll follow."
  
  Roh slapped his bear. It snorted at him, annoyed, and flicked its tongue, but obeyed, shuffling over the lip of the tundra and onto the pockmarked crater full of pools.
  
  "Are these boiling?" Roh asked.
  
  "Why don't you test it out?" Luna said.
  
  Roh frowned at him, but it was a fair response. Roh knew he was just making noise. The sound of his own voice was comforting.
  
  Moss and spindly grass grew between the pools, leading Roh to believe the ground, at least, wasn't as hot as the water.
  
  Roh had never seen water boiling on its own before. "Will it kill us?" he asked.
  
  "Not before the Tai Mora," Luna said.
  
  Roh called Para and came up with nothing. It was like sucking at an empty spoon, expecting warm broth and getting a mouthful of air. He pulled again, mouthing the litany instead of just repeating it silently, and Para bled into him slowly, reluctantly. He held the breath beneath his skin and waited. He glanced behind them again, and counted the figures. Five. How many were parajistas? Surely not all of them. Why send powerful people after two... his mind wrestled with what he was, what Luna was, but he had to look at himself the way they would. He and Luna were just slaves, not sanisi, or diplomats, or anything else useful. He had taken on Ora Almeysia, a powerful tirajista, a woman with a star in decline, and since then he had fought the Tai Mora twice – at the banquet hall in Kuonrada and in Shoratau, and he was still alive. He could get them through this.
  
  "I'd say we should hide," Luna said, "but there isn't anywhere to go."
  
  Roh stared across the bubbling pools. The Tai Mora were gaining, and they would not stop until they caught them. He looked at Luna. Luna knew how to survive here, and he'd been carrying Roh all week. What had Roh done for Luna?
  
  The air pressure increased. Roh pulled on Para again. It came sluggishly. He pulled until he seethed with power, then murmured a litany to place a protective wall around the two of them. He saw a blue ball of brilliant light speed toward them from the Tai Mora. It burst against his defenses.
  
  The dogs barked and circled. Roh struggled to keep control of his while maintaining the barricade.
  
  The Tai Mora yelled, and their dogs came after them at a sprint.
  
  Roh made his decision, though fear boiled in his gut. "Go, Luna."
  
  "There's nowhere to go."
  
  "Ride! You have the book. Go."
  
  Luna twisted back and forth between the Tai Mora and Roh.
  
  "If you don't go I'll kill you myself. It's better than what the Tai Mora will do."
  
  Luna hollered at his dog to run. He slapped its heavy flank and they were off across the boiling crater, the bear loping through the spaces between the massive pools.
  
  Roh turned on the Tai Mora and let loose a tangle of Para's breath, a dangerous skein of needled air. It moved so fast it would skewer them alive in half a breath.
  
  Something flashed in the sky at his left. He focused on binding his next attack. His first offense crashed into the Tai Mora defenses. They still barreled toward him, weapons snarling from their wrists. He could see their faces now: grim, determined.
  
  He called Para. Nothing.
  
  Roh concentrated harder. He opened himself to the star, and was rewarded with a thin trickle of breath.
  
  The sky flashed again.
  
  A thunderous boom rocked the air, so hard his dog bolted. Roh fell hard on the ground, and lost his breath.
  
  He gazed into the brilliant lavender-blue sky, blinking rapidly. Was he seeing double? There were two stars in the sky, brilliant blue Para and another – a star not due for a year or more, one he had never seen before, but he knew it just the same.
  
  Purple Sina blazed down at him like a bruise.
  
  And Para winked out.
  
  It happened so quickly Roh thought he dreamed it. But with Para's absence in the sky, he also lost his grasp on Para. All he had of Para now was what he held beneath his skin. He held Para's final breath tightly beneath his skin. He felt it burning him up from the inside. Sina stared balefully down at him, unblinking. One final litany. One left, and then… then he was theirs.
  
  The Tai Mora reined in their dogs. He saw their leering faces, and the slobbering dogs. Roh launched himself up onto one shoulder, rolled over, and reached out to Luna's fleeing form. He whispered the Litany of Protection, and released it just as a searing fire blazed across his skin. He screamed.
  
  When Roh came back to his senses, he saw a woman stood over him waving her hand. The air tensed, though he saw no blue mist. She called a star he could not see.
  
  She called Sina, the ascendant star.
  
  "Wait!" Roh said. "Wait! I have–" What? What did he have to offer them, but his own death? Dance, he thought, dance the way you always do. "I can prove very useful," he said. "I was a slave under the Saiduan. Anything is better than being under them. Anything."
  
  A lie – Kadaan had always been kind – but the idea of slavery, of having his hair cut, his clothing chosen for him, his body pushed and pulled at the will of another, was repulsive enough to add weight to his words. His Saiduan was accented. They must be able to hear it in this voice. But if the Saiduan took him a few years before, he would still have it. It fit his role. He pulled off his hood, showed them his shaved head, and then he pressed his forehead to the warm dirt at their feet, the way Dasai had pressed his head to the floor in front of the Patron.
  
  The woman muttered in that not-Dhai language. Roh lifted his head and watched them talk. The taller woman was on his side. He could see it in her face. But the smallest was leery, and the man wanted him murdered. All it took to know was a look. They weren't stoic Saiduan. They didn't fear showing their true faces.
  
  "I'm no threat," Roh said. He didn't dare try to draw on Para now. Its absence still hurt. He was trembling, feverish, though from fear or the shock of losing Para, he didn't know. No one had told him what happened when one's star descended so suddenly. He should have had months of warning from the stargazers. He felt naked, completely vulnerable, in a way he had not felt since he was a child. Two years of Para's ascendance was a lifetime for him, the difference between ages thirteen and fifteen. At twelve he had gone from a gangly, spit-upon nobody to a boy with a chance at becoming something more, something extraordinary. Without Para, what was he?
  
  They talked on. He pushed them. "I have information about the Dhai," he said. The admission came upon him suddenly, like a sickness. "I can help you defeat the Dhai. I know the Kai's cipher." He almost did vomit, then, but what was he without what he owned? He was dead. Dead right here, obliterated in this roiling, nightmarish land.
  
  No more voices. He watched their faces. They knew what the cipher was, then.
  
  "I know it," he said, bumbling on, trying to buy time – for Luna, he told himself, but really, it was for him, he knew it in his heart. "I can help the Tai Mora, your Kai. I have… all sorts of information about the Dhai." He was sweating, and it had little to do with the warm air.
  
  They conversed amongst themselves. The man turned away. The tall woman pushed toward him. She leaned over him, and he cowered, yes, he cowered in front of her, because even if he could fight, fighting was nothing when the person you faced stood under an ascendant star.
  
  "Get up," she said.
  
  He scrambled to his feet. She towered over him by a head. "I'll do anything you say," Roh babbled. "I'm not dangerous."
  
  The other woman said something. Roh thought it sounded very like something in Dhai about being "pretty." They both laughed.
  
  Heat moved up his face.
  
  The tall woman grabbed his chin. Held it firmly. He didn't resist. She tried to meet his look, but he stared at the ground. Luna would tell him to be meek, to stand down. He would not have tried it with Kadaan, but with the Tai Mora, the people who had murdered every Saiduan from the north sea to Anjoliaa…
  
  She licked his face.
  
  Roh stiffened. He willed himself not to tremble.
  
  "Fine, then," the shorter woman said. "But if you run, you understand? If you run, I will cut you open myself, and fuck your corpse."
  
  Roh worked some spit into his mouth. "I understand."
  
  "Go get the other one," the man said.
  
  When the two women left in pursuit of Luna, Roh sank to the ground. The man stood over him, staring. "If you're lying about the cipher, or your temperament, they will do worse than fuck your corpse."
  
  "I know," Roh said. And he did. Oma knew, he did.