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marshalling other soldiers to the task. Within an hour’s time, I had acquired a variety of supplies, including a long coat of padded cotton, worn sashed over thick trousers tucked into leather boots lined with layers of felt.
    A fur-trimmed hat of felted wool that smelled of lanolin topped the ensemble. I wrinkled my nose at it. “Is this necessary?”
    “Where you are bound, yes.” Peng adjusted it over my ears, tugging it in place. His fingertips brushed the skin of my temples, and he flushed at the unintended intimacy, taking a quick step backward. “It is a dangerous journey. Are you quite certain you must go?” He cleared his throat. “And quite certain that you must go without an escort?”
    Desire.
    I saw it in his flush, in the sudden heat of his eyes. There was a part of me that responded to it, my blood quickening. He was handsome and pleasant, and I was lonely. I did not know how many days or weeks or months it would take before I found Bao. When all was said and done, I was Naamah’s child, and I responded to desire. It was the path I trod and the element in which I swam.
    My
diadh-anam
flared in rebellion.
    “Aye,” I murmured. “I am.”
    Chen Peng bowed. “Will you permit me one indulgence? I would beg you to ascend the wall and behold the scope of your task.”
    I nodded. “All right.”
    He escorted me to the right-hand gate tower. We climbed a winding stair and emerged atop the wall. The sky overhead was impossibly vast, a fathomless vault of vivid blue. I stood silent beneath it, gazing out at the endless expanse of grassy plain that stretched into the horizon as far as the eye could see. There were no farms, no villages. Nothing but grass and sky, and a few dots in the distance that might have been animals grazing.
    “There is not even a road, you see,” Peng said quietly, watching me. “In the summer during peace-times, the Tatars drive their livestock here to trade.”
    I felt Bao’s presence far away, the twinned spark of his
diadh-anam
calling to mine over the leagues. “I do not require a road.”
    “They are a war-like folk.” The soldier nodded at the Emperor’s medallion. “And that will mean nothing to them.”
    “I know,” I said. “But Ch’in is at peace with them now, is it not?”
    He shrugged. “Peace is never certain with the Tatars. I beg you one last time, Noble Lady. Allow me to assemble an escort.”
    The wind was cold on my cheeks. Standing atop the wall, I consulted my own
diadh-anam
one last time, trying to tune out the insistent call of Bao’s to discern the will of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself.
    The open space of the gate yawned beneath the stone ramparts of the Great Wall. A powerful memory came to me unbidden. I had passed through another stone doorway long ago in Alba. It was a rite of passage among my people. Alone, I went through the stone doorway in the valley beyond the hollow hills into a world of dazzling night and shadowy day, a world of piercing beauty deeper and more profound than my soft, familiar twilight, a world where darkness and light were one and the same.
    There, I had waited and waited, until the Great Bear Herself came to me, the Brown Bear of the Maghuin Dhonn.
    At first, She came as a presence so immense She blotted out the stars. The earth had trembled beneath Her tread. With each slow, mighty pace, She had dwindled and shaped Herself to a mortal scale.
    Her eyes had been so kind, so wise, so filled with compassion and sorrow.
    She had breathed upon me, claiming me as Her own; and I had rejoiced, happy to bask in Her presence. And then She had shown me a vision of sparkling oceans filling the stone doorway behind me, and I had understood that I had a destiny to fulfill.
    I still did.
    And I would not find it until I found Bao, and somehow managed to reunite my divided
diadh-anam
.
    I sighed.
    Dangerous or no, foolish or no, this was my quest; and I was bound to undertake it alone. That was the meaning of my memory’s vision,