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soldiers attacked. Two of those soldiers followed her, shouting threats and curses at her back, and part of her wanted to turn and look behind her even though she knew that could only end in disaster. The soldiers were mounted on horses, and she knew that over open ground they would run her down in seconds. The only reason they hadn’t so far was because they were inside the village walls, and right now the village was a chaotic field of debris sown with bodies and wreckage. Urging their horses faster than a walk would be risking a broken leg for the mount and a nasty spill for the rider.
    But she was headed outside the village. And there, on the flat and sandy plains outside Myria, the picture would be much different.
    Leah, daughter of Kelia, felt a tiny spark of terror at the thought of being caught. A poor city girl who had been forced to move, alone, to her mother’s village to live with strange relatives, the daughter of Kelia would have no idea how to react to this attack. She would have looked for somewhere to run, or someone to hide her, though if the worst did happen she could face it with strength and honor, on her feet.
    Leah sometimes thought she had played that character too long. If she kept reacting as the village girl, she would just get herself killed. Well, if the village girl wouldn’t do any longer, she’d have to try something better.
    Only a few paces outside the village gates, she strangled her fear and stopped running.
    One of Malachi’s sergeants, an honest-looking, blocky man perhaps in his fifties, stood, barking orders, maybe a hundred paces away from the village walls. He was surrounded by a hive of soldiers running or riding this way and that, coordinating the chaos of his raid on Myria. Beside him stood a bald man in the leather uniform of an Endross, idly making blue-white sparks appear and disappear at the ends of his fingertips. He might pose some difficulty, but nothing she hadn’t dealt with before.  
    None of the sacrifices had been brought in yet, thank the Maker—no, wait, not the Maker. The Maker was a village superstition. Seven stones, how deep into her role was she, that even her thoughts were suspect?
    Leah began walking toward the sergeant and his Traveler, letting the daughter of Kelia fall behind her like a shed cloak. She drew herself up, moving with steady confidence, with purpose, the way she had been trained. People responded to body language, to the authority implicit in one’s bearing. And she would need every scrap of authority she could get, if she wanted them to take her seriously.
    Hoofbeats sounded behind her, but Leah kept walking. She very carefully did not turn around.
    One of the two soldiers that had been following her pulled his horse to a stop only a few feet in front of her, so that she would be forced to run another direction. The other rode up to her right and hopped down.
    He snarled roughly at her, reaching to grab her arm. “If you think—” he began.
    Leah did not respond. She did not look at him. She did not even slow down, though in just a few seconds she was going to collide with a wall of horseflesh.
    She twisted her wrist, letting moonlight fall on the crystal she wore on a thin silver bracelet. As she did, she cast her mind out, calling for the power of Lirial.
    And her Territory answered.
    A jagged spike of milky white crystal erupted from the ground, growing in half a second into a five-foot-high stalagmite that stabbed the air inches from Leah’s shoulder. The soldier’s hand was in the way, caught in the act of reaching out for Leah. By all logic the crystal should have impaled the man’s arm, perhaps taking the hand off at the wrist. But Lirial did not destroy. It revealed. It protected.
    And it preserved.
    The soldier’s hand, from his wrist to the tips of his outstretched fingers, had been frozen inside the jagged mound of crystal as if within ice. Unlike ice, though, this crystal would never thaw or melt. And it was hard as