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was here she felt most at home.
    She was tall for a woman, and habitually dressed like a man. Her body was all lean muscle and hard planes. Her face was leathered by sun and experience, her sun-bleached hair caught in a pony-tail, her pale blue eyes always moving as she leant from the window of the tower room in the Brochena Palace. The Nesti had given her the room to practise in.
Anywhere with a view
, she had asked, and they had given her views of city, desert, mountain and sky in every direction. It was a hard but generous land, full of hard but generous people.
    She wished for a moment that when this was all over she could stay here, though she knew that was impossible. She had loved the desert from the first, the sands calling to an emptiness inside her.
I’m going to miss this place
–
even the stench of the souks, where men piss against walls and every manner of litter is left to rot, where dung is fuel and bathing is done in a river that looks like a sewage canal
. But coffee hung in the morning air; she could smell it even here, and the colours of the silks and the calls of the traders and the ever-present singing and chanting of the priests … these would haunt her for ever.
    Sipping a thimble of spiced coffee, she tried to picture her wet, gloomy homeland, but she couldn’t. Brochena was too vivid for such fancies. The air was chilly this morning, and a ground mist clogged with campfire smoke hung over much of the desert lands. Winter was approaching, though the days were still hot. The rainy season was over for 927; it would not be until Julsven next year that itrained again, and by then the Moontide would have come, the Leviathan Bridge would have risen from the sea and Urte would be plunged once again into war.
    She was about to turn away when a redwing swooped and called brightly before landing on the ledge outside the window. The bird had no concern at her handling it to extract the message from the pouch tied to its leg. She recognised Gurvon Gyle’s sigil on the pouch and his face flashed inside her mind: lean, spare, certain.
My lover
–
can I still call him that when I’ve not seen him for a year? My boss, anyway. The keeper of my fortune
.
    She almost pocketed the message without reading it. She didn’t really want to know what it might say. But that would be foolish. She exhaled heavily and unwrapped the note. It was brief and to the point.
Wear your gems
. Little else was needed; those three words said everything.
Wear your gems
: it was Gurvon’s pet way of saying, ‘Action is imminent: pack your bags and be ready to leave at a second’s notice.’
    She did a brief mental inventory: her bedchamber was almost empty, save for a small chest for her clothes, a few gifts from the royal family – some Jhafi shawls and a bekira-shroud for going out in public – and her sword. She wore the turquoise periapt that helped her channel the gnosis at her throat. It wasn’t a lot, not for a lifetime of struggle. Of course, she also had gold, a career’s worth of gold … entrusted to Gurvon.
    She’d met Gurvon Gyle when she joined the Noros Forest Rangers in 909. She’d been twenty-one. A half-blood daughter of half-blood parents, she had graduated in 906, too late to join the First Crusade when it stormed Hebusalim. Her elder sister Tesla had been there and nearly died. Elena had enlisted with the Volsai, Imperial Intelligence. By 909, when it was clear rebellion was coming, she, like all the Noros-born agents, deserted and joined the Royal Noros Army as scouts. Gurvon Gyle, newly arrived back from the Crusades, was her captain. He had a world-weary, cynical charm that made her smile, and he hadn’t mistaken her for a weakling, unlike most. They had bonded sharing missions, and when she finally slippedinto his tent one cold wet night somewhere north of Knebb, the horrors another of Betillon’s massacres fresh in her eyes, he had appeared to need her as much as she needed him.
    The Revolt had been