text: Ahkio had stumbled into the belly of Oma's Temple looking for the secret his dead sister had kept there. Now that he had arrived within the temple's rapturous beating heart, he feared he had made a terrible mistake in pursuing this particular mystery.
  
  The light blinded him. He covered his eyes. Warmth suffused his body, and for a moment he thought he had fallen through the stone monolith in the temple's basement into some bright day. There wasn't supposed to be anything below the temple basements. Yet here he was, bathed in ethereal light, and clearly not alone.
  
  "Kai?"
  
  The voice again.
  
  Ahkio pulled his hands from his face. Squinted. He sat at the center of a circular stone room. The light came from a bank of windows twice his height. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a tall woman with intricately styled white hair bound in jeweled silver pins and combs standing a few paces away. The cut of her long skirt and belted tunic was wholly unfamiliar. She did not move toward him so much as she floated, hands clasped behind her. There was something uncanny in her demeanor. When she moved, nothing else moved – not her dress, her hair. Even her serious expression remained fixed.
  
  He moved slowly to his feet. His hands hurt from his fall. He saw a great streak of crimson and violet bands of light tangling with one another above the windows. They wove strange characters in the air. He couldn't quite make out what they were meant to be.
  
  "We are almost out of time," she said.
  
  "I just got here," Ahkio said, confused.
  
  She gestured to the tangling bands of light. "I have been compromised," she said. "That's our water clock. Quickly now. I am the heart of the temple, and your predecessor warned me you would come. She said she would educate those who came after, but now that I have been… altered, I suspect much has gone wrong."
  
  "My predecessor… My sister, Kirana, the former Kai?"
  
  She withdrew her hands from behind her. They fluttered. It wasn't a motion she was making, but some kind of distortion of her form, as if she were reflected on a pool of water.
  
  "Has Oma risen?" she asked.
  
  "No," Ahkio said. "What are you and how did I get here?"
  
  "We built these beasts to take us to the moon, but that's pointless now, listen–"
  
  "What are you talking about?" He was beginning to think this was a hallucination. He remembered seeing his sister's ghost. He remembered how she had ripped herself from Sina's maw to deliver a message that had, eventually, brought him here. Was this Sina? Had he been transported to the star that carried the souls of the dead?
  
  Her expression did not change, but her tone was not as confident. She pointed to the vast bank of windows. "We broke the sky."
  
  Above her, the snarl of figures continued to whirl. Instructions? Numbers? A ward losing its integrity? He still wasn't certain.
  
  Ahkio went to the windows. They were not the smooth skin of the temple he knew, but metal. Had he stepped through a door to some other world? He gazed at the jagged teeth of the mountains beyond the windows, ringed in wreaths of cloud. It was a foreign vista, but not a foreign place. Mount Ahya rose high from the cloak of mountains, its crown so tall it lost itself to the sky. He saw cities now at the base of the slopes and along the river. Was that the Fire River? The same one that circled Oma's Temple? Shimmering blue tiles seemed to seethe along the rooftops. Brightly-clothed figures moved over sinuous roads the color of obsidian. And something else was circling in the sky, too large for a bird.
  
  "Where is this?" Ahkio asked.
  
  The woman floated toward him. She had no feet. He shrank away.
  
  "This is a shard of time, stuck between spaces. When we broke the sky, we broke a good deal more. Broke reality itself. Do you understand these concepts? Your predecessor had some knowledge of the parallel theory of worlds, but many before her have not."
  
  "I've met people with our faces," Ahkio said. "Is this some other world too?"
  
  "Not another world," she said. "Another time."
  
  "I don't–"
  
  She pointed at the flickering light above the window again. "I have been sabotaged. One of your number put a ward here tailored to your presence. If you do not leave now, you will perish with me. There is no telling what will happen when the heartstone breaks. It could fracture us into a hundred different times or realities."
  
  "Who could get down here but me?" he asked. "I'm the Kai. Only Kirana and I–"
  
  "Only a Kai can cross over into this space," she said. "Only a Kai can speak to the heart of the temple. But she did not set the ward on the heart, only the stone. It will break, Kai, and when it breaks, you will be trapped here with me. Please go."
  
  "Not until I have answers." He pointed to the sky. "Where's Para, in this time? You said this wasn't another world, so where are the satellites, then?"
  
  "The satellites are…" She brought her hands together. "Let us pretend the gods were once one creature. They were a creature we did not understand, one that brought great strife and madness. The effects of this god were felt across the whole of the world. It hung in the sky for years, poisoning us. We had already been planning our escape, there." She pointed to the edge of the eastern horizon, where a massive rising crescent blotted out the edge of the world. "See how large it was? The moon. We planned to escape there through transference. You understand?"
  
  "You wanted to open a door to another world. To the moon?"
  
  "See, you're not so dense. So many Kais I have told this to, so many, and here I am again, repeating it. You never learn." She sighed and turned to stare at again at the bands of light. "Not once."
  
  "How many have you spoken to?"
  
  "Since the breaking of the world? At least a dozen."
  
  "Do you know what date it is? What year?"
  
  "I told you – it doesn't matter."
  
  "Before Kirana, who was the last Kai you saw here?"
  
  "They blur together."
  
  "Please."
  
  Her form went still. He thought for a moment she was ill or having some kind of fit. Then she spoke. "They came after the battle of Roasandara. Kai Saohinla. But after Roasandara was far too late. Oma was in decline. They found me far too late. And the time before that, and before that… always, they came too late. My life is just this. This conversation. Over and over."
  
  "What did Kirana speak to you about before she died?"
  
  "Kai Kirana asked how to control the transference engines to prevent the other worlds from colliding here."
  
  "Engines?" When he thought of an engine, he thought of the devices like wind and water mills that converted energy into motion. Something told him she wasn't thinking of a water mill.
  
  "The beasts."
  
  "You created beasts?"
  
  "The engines are sentient beasts. Surely you know that by now? You have been living inside our beasts for centuries."
  
  Ahkio thought of the warm skin of the temples. Many believed they had souls. "Your beasts, your engines, are the temples," Ahkio said. "The is the literal heart of the temple."
  
  "I have said that at least three times already. Listen, properly controlled, the engines act as great conductors for the energy from the satellites," she said. "We thought we were able to kill the thing infecting our sky and harness its power. But it broke apart instead, and now its pieces travel across our world and many, many others. It poisons a new world every cycle. When Oma rises, all of these disparate worlds come together again. All the stars. All the worlds. Only the engines can stop it."
  
  "How?"
  
  "I am not an engineer, Kai. Now our time is over. Quickly, move to the center of the room."
  
  "Please, I–"
  
  "I am not a god, Kai. Just a woman unstuck in time." She waved at him. He refused to move back. Her hands passed right through him, and he yelped. She really was a ghost. He stepped back to the center of the room, a few inches from a symbol on the floor that matched the one on the stone.
  
  "How do I stop the worlds coming together this time?" he said.
  
  "I can only tell you how we broke the worlds, not how to fix them. I was lost before anyone learned how to do that. Perhaps they never did."
  
  Ahkio stared at the rising moon. It tinged the sky lavender. The double suns were the same – their hourglass form in the sky comforted him. He saw the smaller red sun, Shar, riding high up over their left shoulder. Whatever thing had killed this world, or this… time, was not visible in the sky, unless it was the moon itself. With all that he had seen and experienced since his sister's death, maybe this wasn't so remarkable. She could be a hallucination, a dream. He could have been spirited off to some other world, or some other time, as she said. Reality had become a questionable thing. Nothing would surprise him.
  
  The figures above the windows consisted of fewer characters now. Counting down? Unraveling?
  
  "Not everyone is prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to win," she said. "What will you sacrifice, to stop these worlds from entering yours. Do you know, yet?"
  
  "I don't," he said.
  
  She smacked her lips, making the motion but no sound. "You are the first to give me such an honest answer," she said. "It's time to go back. Step back."
  
  "Who sabotaged you?" he asked.
  
  "An Ora," she said, "one of your own."
  
  "Nasaka?"
  
  "No." Her form flickered. The room trembled, out of focus. Ahkio rubbed his eyes. "Step back, or die here."
  
  "Almeysia," Ahkio said, and stepped back onto the symbol on the floor—
  
  –and woke on the basement floor in Liaro's trembling arms.
  
  "What will you sacrifice?"
  
  Ahkio stabbed his sister Kirana in the eye. Blood gushed from her face, smearing his clothing and skin, until he could not tell where he ended and her body began. She screamed at him with his mother's voice – the same screaming he had heard when his mother was burned alive, and he could not save her.
  
  The same screaming…
  
  Ahkio woke in a drab stone room, shivering but soaked in sweat. The presence of the stone told him he was no longer in one of the temples, which meant someone had moved him a great distance. He pushed out of bed, and found he was wearing little more than a linen shift. He moved groggily to the narrow window and looked out. He was high enough up to gauge that he was gazing west into massive woodlands of bamboo and bonsa and giant everpine. Above it all was the peak of Mount Ahya, its crown lost to cloud. The only place in Dhai with a view like that was the Kuallina Stronghold, at the center of Dhai.
  
  He heard raised voices in the hall. The door burst open, and Liaro and Caisa entered, arguing with a third woman who wore the green and violet apron of a Clan Osono doctor.
  
  "How long have I been here?" Ahkio asked.
  
  The three of them stopped short when they saw him. Liaro was the first to break away. He ran to Ahkio's side and embraced him. "I thought you were lost," Liaro said. "You're the greatest fool in all of Dhai."
  
  "Have I finally usurped that title from you?" Ahkio said.
  
  "A joke! Tira, it can't really be you if you're telling jokes," Liaro said, and though his tone was light, Ahkio noticed that Liaro's brow furrowed, and he peered into Ahkio's face as if half-expecting to find a stranger there.
  
  "We've kept you almost a week," the doctor said.
  
  "It was necessary," Caisa said quickly, and Ahkio sensed the length of his stay may have been what they had been arguing about.
  
  "We couldn't leave you with Ora Nasaka," Liaro said. "We got you out on the Line, just the two of us and some novices Caisa trusted. If Ora Nasaka thought you harmed, she'd have done some other awful thing like light a kitten on fire."
  
  "There's rumor she's…" Caisa began, and then came up short, staring at the doctor.
  
  The doctor frowned. "I'll see myself out, then," she said, and left them.
  
  "She's looking for your Aunt Etena," Liaro said. "Or that's what we've been hearing. She put out word to her little spies about it. No one looks for Etena if they want to keep you on the seat. So if you wondered what she was doing all that time we were hunting down Tai Mora spies, now you know."
  
  "And there's Liona!" Caisa said. "And the emissary."
  
  "If you're well enough," Liaro said, "You should go to Liona first. Your friend Ghrasia says there are refugees swarming the wall. It's a disaster."
  
  "One disaster at a time," Ahkio said. "Who's minding Nasaka in the temple? Has she had full run of it?"
  
  Caisa and Liaro exchanged looks. "We've been busy saving you," Liaro said, "in case that wasn't clear. All your Oras from Raona are there, though – Ora Ohanni, Ora Shanigan, your third cousins–"
  
  Ahkio said, "Liaro, I want you back at the temple. Find out what's changed, and dig more into what's happening with Etena. I can't imagine it will be any easier to find her now than it was before I took the seat. Also, let people at the temple know I'm traveling to Liona. The last thing we need is rumors I'm dead. There was an emissary coming, wasn't there? Gods, if Nasaka's handling that… put off the emissary, too. Caisa, come with me to Liona. I'll need militia to accompany us, and a couple good jistas."
  
  Caisa sniffed. "I'm a good jista."
  
  "Another good jista, then. Move now. We've tarried long enough."
  
  Caisa ran to the door, but Liaro lingered.
  
  "What happened to you, Ahkio?"
  
  He shook his head. "I went somewhere… else."
  
  "But that's the thing," Liaro said. "You didn't go anywhere. You slopped against that stone like a dead man. I couldn't rouse you until the thing cracked."
  
  "It's broken?"
  
  "I thought you were dead, Ahkio. I thought you wouldn't wake up."
  
  Ahkio embraced him again. "Get things prepared for Liona," Ahkio said. Was he mad? Was Liaro? "I can talk more about what I saw later."
  
  "Don't keep me in the dark."
  
  "Don't argue with me!" Ahkio said, more forcefully than he meant to.
  
  "You don't know what it's been like," Liaro said, "loving a dead man."
  
  Ahkio sat back on the bed. "I'm exhausted, and I'm doing the best I can."
  
  Caisa sent clothes and broth, and Ahkio stumbled his way down into the banquet hall to meet with the head of Kuallina and assure her he was all right. Within a day he and Caisa and their little party of militia and six jistas were on the road to Kuallina. The party was too big to take the Line, the great organic transit system that linked the temples and holds. The way to Liona was perilous. Spring was rousing the snarling plant life of the valley, and they fought nests of floxflass and ambervine and pulled two of their number from hidden bladder traps, their mouths newly engaged. They heard roving bands and semi-sentient walking trees nearby for two days, and had to alter their route twice to avoid them. Caisa came down with a hacking cough their last night on the road, and one of the tirajista's coaxed up a great flowering plant tendril from her throat.
  
  "Bad season for traveling," Ahkio told her as she shivered in bed. He fed her broth and took her hand when she asked and told her she wasn't going to die.
  
  "I have too much to do before I die," she said.
  
  "We all do," he said, and pressed her hand to his face and wondered what Liaro would do. Tell some fine joke. Lighten her mood. But his mood was so dark he could see no light as far as he could glimpse into the future.
  
  Ahkio remembered the temple keeper's words again as they approached the great wall of Liona. He was exhausted and drained, full of worry about Caisa, Ghrasia, Liaro, Nasaka, the clan leaders, the impending war, and gods, what had happened to Meyna – too many things for a mind already stretched to the edge of sanity. Liona was a fortress three hundred feet high made of massive cut stones and tirajista-trained vines. Ahkio rode at the head of the party astride his bear just outside the massive gates of Liona, Ahkio could barely see the top of the wall. Liaro was right that this was the immediate issue – the threat of more people pouring in at the borders as the Tai Mora escalated their war was very real. They could be sending anyone in with the refugees. All that killing in Raona meant nothing if they could not secure their borders.
  
  "What's that noise?" Caisa asked. She rode beside him on a great brown bear.
  
  "I don't hear it," Ahkio said.
  
  Caisa rode ahead. He called after her just as their party broke through the woods and into the great meadow burned clean around the wall of Liona. He came up short as they did, struck dumb by the sight ahead of them. Four walking trees, the tallest over a hundred feet high, crashed across what should have been a bare clearing. But it was not empty. It was very much occupied. Camped all along the outside of the wall were hundreds of members of the militia, all dressed in red, and clumps of what must be the refugees, all of them hemmed in by a makeshift thorn fence. The trees bludgeoned their way through the mass of humanity, stirring them like a terrified hive of insects. The trees swung great sinewy tendrils, plucking up the defenseless people below them and depositing them into the great, poison-filled sacks swinging from their massive crowns.
  
  Ahkio waved back at his party. "Help them!" he yelled, and urged his bear forward, though he had no weapon. "Caisa!" he yelled as the bear galloped to catch up to her, its great tongue lolling.
  
  She already had her hands raised. He saw a small whirlwind skitter across the meadow, heading straight for the smallest of the trees.
  
  One of the militia behind him caught up to Ahkio and offered a big machete. He took it and raised it high, barreling at the same tree that Caisa had targeted. The largest of the trees whipped its sticky tendrils at him, moving laboriously into their path on its great undulating roots to protect the smaller tree.
  
  Ahkio glanced back at his jistas. He had no sinajista strong enough to produce a flame – the only thing the trees were truly afraid of. They would need to turn them back with brute force, a slow and dangerous thing with so many untrained people on the ground.
  
  He caught up to Caisa. She yelled, "Get inside!"
  
  "No," he said.
  
  She huffed at him. The air was already heavy as cream. He saw the loop of the main gate open up, allowing him a brief glimpse into chaos as half a dozen figures came out to assist in the fray. He hoped one of them was a sinajista. He saw hundreds more dirty, haggard figures camped inside the lower courtyard. Sina's breath, how many had Ghrasia let in?
  
  He turned his attention back to the big tree. "We need to coordinate with the ones at the gate," Ahkio said. He raised his machete and gestured for his party to come forward.
  
  "Dangerous run," Caisa said. "We didn't bring you back just to–"
  
  "Go," Ahkio said, and slapped his bear forward.
  
  They made a breakneck run across the melee of militia and screaming refugees. A sweeping vine swung past Ahkio's head and caught one of the militia behind him. She screamed as she was hoisted a hundred feet into the air and neatly dropped into one of the poisonous bags at the top of the tree.
  
  Ahkio gritted his teeth and circled back behind the figures that had come out of the gates. He recognized Ghrasia immediately. She was shouting orders to three jistas who broke away from the group. He saw the little feral girl with her, the one from Raona, barking madly at her side.
  
  On seeing him, something in Ghrasia lit up, briefly, before going out, like watching a candle flame flicker and die. He didn't understand it.
  
  "Fire!" he said.
  
  "We have no sinajistas," she said. "We're loading fire archers on the wall. We need to herd them together. Take your party back around the other side and flank them. I'll come up behind them. I have parajistas who can help contain the fire. I can't risk it catching the woods."
  
  Ahkio relayed the order to his group and circled them back around to the north. The trees were spread widely now, grazing at random all across the broken encampment. He rode with Caisa and their companions in a long line, seeking to herd the trees back against the wall. The big tree nearest them turned its attention away from feeding and lashed at them with its sinewy appendages. Ahkio clung tightly to his bear. He wrapped his wrist around the reins twice, hoping he and the bear together would be too massive to draw up into the waiting pods.
  
  The air was heavy, and strong wind blew from the east. He glanced over and saw Ghrasia at the head of her party, and two parajistas coaxing vortexes to come up behind the herd.
  
  Ahkio waved Caisa and the others closer to the tree, yelling at them to keep up the long line of their formation. Just as the big tree began to move inward, the smallest made a break between the two at the center, trying to run diagonally at them.
  
  Ghrasia broke formation and charged after the littlest one. Ahkio raced to meet her, hoping they could pin it back in with the others.
  
  He saw a few dozen fiery arrows flame across the sky from the parapet. One landed just ahead of his bear. It spooked and veered out of control, nearly colliding with Ghrasia. Two of her people had caught up to her. Ahkio's charging bear enraged the other two, and they broke.
  
  Above them, the trees' appendages snapped and shivered. One grabbed hold of Ahkio and pulled. He clung to the bear. The resistance seemed to dissuade it. It lashed away and plucked one of the parajistas from his mount. The man screamed. A heavy whump of air slammed into Ahkio, nearly taking him from his seat.
  
  "That's my parajista!" Ghrasia yelled. She urged her bear forward and reached up for one of the lashing vines. Ahkio watched in a mixture of awe and horror as she grabbed the vine and started climbing it toward the pods in the treetop.
  
  He took a great breath and yelled at his bear for another burst of speed, but the bear was already running at full tilt, slavering. Ahkio raised himself up in his stirrups and took hold of a swinging vine. He was tough and slippery, but he found purchase, and began a stuttering climb after Ghrasia. As the tree tried to tip him into the lip of the pod, he hacked himself free with his machete. Ghrasia perched on a pod opposite him, sawing away at it. She firmed her mouth when she saw him, but said only, "Don't cut open the pods. Cut them loose. The stuff inside will cushion the fall. We may be able to save a few."
  
  Ahkio swung back onto the long branch from which the pod dangled and began to cut. It was hard and fibrous. He glanced back at Ghrasia. "Why did you open the gates?" he said. "All these people drew the trees."
  
  "Are we honestly going to talk here?" Ghrasia said. Her bundle came free, spilling to the ground. She jumped to the next.
  
  "Exile, Ghrasia! You put me in a place to exile you!"
  
  "You haven't seen her," Ghrasia said, but Ahkio had no idea who she was talking about. "Your world is good and evil. But mine is far more complicated than that."
  
  "How do we know they're dajians and not Tai Mora?"
  
  Below them, the feral girl was barking.
  
  Ghrasia gestured to the girl below with her dagger. "I'm responsible for her now, too. Should I kill her as well, like some trash because of what someone else did to her? Those refugees were shaped by Dorinah. She was shaped by the Tai Mora. People aren't born monsters. Monsters are made."
  
  The pod Ahkio worked on finally came free, dropping its contents. He dodged one of the tree's knotted appendages. Smelled smoke. Turned. Some arrows had found their mark, but the fire wasn't taking hold. "I think the wood's too wet!" he said. "Do you have oil?"
  
  "We're out," she said. "Used it all to fuel the refugee fires."
  
  "Curse that, Ghrasia!"
  
  "Exile me or don't," she said. "I can put Arasia in charge of the militia in addition to Liona. But you must make that decision now."
  
  "After all we've–"
  
  "Don't you bring that up. Don't you dare." The vehemence in her voice surprised him.
  
  "But aren't we–"
  
  "No," she said. "I made a mistake."
  
  "Ghrasia–"
  
  "We need to get off this tree," she said. "We're almost at the woods."
  
  He glanced back. The other four walking trees were still well behind them, circled together now by their combined forces. "This isn't working," he said. "We need sinajistas."
  
  "I would conjure one for you if I could," she said.
  
  As she said it, one of the trees behind them burst into brilliant flames. "Oma!" he said, pointing.
  
  Ghrasia gave a determined little smile. The other two trees went up. Ghrasia's smile faded. "Off the tree!" she yelled.
  
  "But–"
  
  "Off the tree, she'll light it up!"
  
  "Who?"
  
  Ghrasia grabbed the vine next to her and swung out toward Ahkio. She caught him around the waist and yelled, "Let go, for the love of–"
  
  The tree's crown burst into flame.
  
  Ahkio let go.
  
  They slid more than seventy feet before the vine began to wave frantically. It came alive again, and curled around them while the smoking detritus of its crown fell all around them in ashy whispers. Ghrasia cut them free. Ahkio held her tight. They fell another fifteen feet to the soft, loamy ground, and landed with a huffing thud.
  
  Ahkio lost his breath. He turned just as the flaming tree crashed into the woods.
  
  Ghrasia crawled to her feet, yelling for parajistas, but they were at the far end of the encampment now, at least five hundred paces from its edge.
  
  "Ghrasia," he said, scrambling to his feet, still winded. "If there was anything between us–"
  
  She rounded on him. "It was a mistake. I know I can rely on you to respect that I've made my decision and leave it be."
  
  "I thought–"
  
  "You thought incorrectly," she said. "When I made the decision I did to open the gates, I also made a decision about our potential future. If you don't know it now, you will." She gazed back at the tree. It crashed into the great rooted trees of the woodland, thrashing. It emitted a terrible hissing sound as its sap bubbled. "We need to contain that fire." She started back down to the encampment, limping.
  
  He ran to catch up with her, and reached for her arm. She yanked it away.
  
  "I revoke consent," she said.
  
  He stopped dead still, as if struck. "It's done, then?" he said, still not understanding.
  
  "It's done," she said. "You're Kai and I lead the militia, and no more."
  
  They strode down into the camp as Ghrasia called for doctors and tirajistas to help cut out the people they had released from the pods. Ahkio was still confused and breathless, uncertain as to why Ghrasia had wanted to change their relationship so suddenly. Yes, the world was mad, but that was a good reason for two people to stay together, not break apart.
  
  Another line of people walked across the battered ground toward them while the great blazing mass of the dying trees guttered at the center of the camp.
  
  A small, hunched figure limped along at the head of the group. Beside her was a very tall Saiduan person who looked very familiar.
  
  "Faralis!" Ghrasia said to one of the men beside them. "That tree in the woods–"
  
  "We're containing it," Faralis said. "I have two on it now."
  
  "We freed people from the kill pods," she said. "I'll need doctors to care for them, if they lived."
  
  Faralis turned and sprinted back toward the hold. All around them the survivors of the attack milled about with glazed eyes. Some shrieked, but most wandered around in shock.
  
  Ghrasia said to the limping girl, "There were people in those kill pods. We could have cut them free."
  
  "There's a reason they're called kill pods," the girl said.
  
  "You're welcome," the Saiduan said, and Ahkio realized why the figure had seemed so familiar. It was Taigan, the Saiduan who had visited the temple and carted away a scullery maid almost a year ago.
  
  Ghrasia grimaced. She turned to Ahkio. "Here she is," she said.
  
  Ahkio still wasn't sure who she meant. The little limping girl had scars on her face, and a serious, graven expression, though she could not have been very far into her teens. Her hair was tangled with frayed white ribbons that matched her dirty dress. She wore an oversized coat that made her look even smaller than she was. When she squinted at him, he felt as if he were being weighed and measured like one of the trees. Burn him or save him?
  
  Realization dawned, then. "You're the scullery girl," he said. "Oma's tears, you're the one who brought these people here?" He looked at Taigan. "What have you done to her?"
  
  Taigan shrugged. "She did this to herself."
  
  More people were crowding up behind the girl. Some were grinning and whispering.
  
  "You're a sinajista?" Ahkio asked the girl. "You took out those trees?"
  
  "I'm more than that," she said.
  
  "She's Faith Ahya reborn!" some young man from the crowd yelled, and a little cheer went up. Ahkio felt more fearful then than he had halfway up a blazing tree. This could get out of hand.
  
  "There's something else," Ghrasia said as the crowd swelled.
  
  He wasn't sure he could bear any more surprises.
  
  Ghrasia gestured to someone from the crowd who began to wend her way forward. "Your wife is here," Ghrasia said.
  
  Mohrai cut between Taigan and the scullery girl. She was as Ahkio remembered, a plump, soft-faced woman with a gaze that told him she was used to getting her way. Her low brow and pinched features put him in mind of an owl. She wore a knee-length purple tunic cinched with a leather belt and embroidered with silver stars. The extravagance was not lost on Ahkio, especially when paired with her flamboyantly curled hair.
  
  "Catori," he said.
  
  "Kai," she said. "I've been looking for you for days. My family's closed the harbor gates."
  
  They all stared at her, including Ahkio, and he wondered if this was the best place to relay this news. "We need to go inside," he said.
  
  "The Tai Mora have blocked the harbor," Mohrai said. He caught a hint of fear in her voice then, "and they are making demands for our immediate surrender."