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while chasing fluttering spores in a dry summer storm the year before. She ran to the spring now, not directly because she feared pursuit, but by a circuitous route. She dropped below the fields into a gully, crossed a river, climbed a hill, and then finally came to her spring by traveling downstream from its sources.
    She undressed, trembling from shock and rage, laying her tunic and sandals on a large rock beside the stream and setting her small knife carefully on top of them. She threw herself into the water, gasping from the sudden cold shock.
    The spring was deep, and with the chill of the water prickling her skin, Qayna sank to the bottom. The solid reality of the rock beneath her bare feet and hands reassured her that the earth and its limits were unchanged, and when the pressure on her lungs became so real that it began to pain her, she surfaced.
    Abil stood above her at the water’s edge, and behind him waited the Messenger.
    “Am I so bad then, Qayna?” Abil asked. The look on his face was petulant and wounded, a look such as Shet might wear if a prized toy had been taken away from him. Something else lurked in the expression, too, a note of violence that Abil could not entirely hide. “Am I so bad that you will not have me?”
    Once Qayna and Abil would have played together freely, naked and thoughtless. Now she stayed in the water, trying to keep her body from his eyes and unable to think of anything but the strange and terrible revelations the Messenger had delivered the previous winter about Mother, Father and the First Precept. As if he were thinking of the same thing, Abil couldn’t keep his eyes off her body, and stared at the water in front of her and the rippling, distorted images it bore.
    “Am I a beast?” Qayna replied. There was no word for slave in the tongue of her birth, as there was yet no one to enslave. “Am I a mere thing that has no say in its own use? Am I a garment to be worn and cast aside, a tool with which to harrow up the earth, a lamb to be slaughtered?”
    “It is the First Precept,” the Messenger intoned. Between the canyon walls that enclosed the spring, his words rolled like the cracking of the heavens. He hesitated. “Do you choose to disobey the will of Heaven?”
    “You would not have me choose at all!” Qayna shouted. The heat of the anger warmed her against the water’s cool bite. “You would have me only lower my head and submit! That is not the joy of the Garden, that is not the path of my Mother!”
    Abil crouched beside the water, beside the stone on which she had laid her things. Perhaps he meant it as a way not to appear threatening, but it brought him closer to Qayna and that felt like an invasion. Besides, squatting on his heels, he opened his tunic and exposed his body in a way that reminded Qayna uncomfortably of the fact that he, like she, was no longer a child, and that his body, too, had prepared to obey the First Precept.
    “Let’s choose to obey together,” Abil said, grinning. “We could choose to do otherwise together, but let’s choose to obey.”
    “Obedience is sacrifice,” the Messenger trumpeted. His voice was loud and brassy, but Qayna thought she heard the faintest note of compassion in it. “To obey is to sacrifice the other things you might have done, the other possibilities you might have enjoyed. If those other possibilities were always and in all respects bad, obedience would be painless. Every commandment is a summons to obedience, a call to sacrifice on the altar.”
    The horrible, ineluctable tone in which the Messenger spoke, and the tiny trace of warmth in his voice, only made the content of what he said completely unacceptable, even though, Qayna realized, the words were true.
    “I’m not ready!” she cried, treading water. “Not now! Can I not wait?”
    “It is the First Precept,” the Messenger repeated. “You must choose now.” The gigantic being’s voice softened considerably. “I, too, have no