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alone, thankful for my well-trained sight that allowed me to move safely at night, avoiding bandits and the worst of the sun. Once I had put some distance between myself and Karesh, and felt the brutal impact of the Azhaki desert, I sorely missed Blaise. With his help I could have traveled the grueling distance in a single day. But he had needed to get his people to safety, and not even for Aleksander would I slow him. I would give much to change the world, but not my son. Never him.
    I had hoped that my joining with Denas would give me the ability to follow these magical pathways as Blaise did, but I’d not yet grasped the trick of it. Blaise had suggested that my failure was of my own making. “You need to let go of your physical boundaries,” he said whenever I complained of my inadequacies. “But you won’t do it. It’s the same with your shifting; the reason it’s so hard for you to change form is that you try to hold on to too much of yourself.”
    Blaise had little formal schooling, but he saw things clearly. Now that I was joined with Denas, I was capable of shapeshifting at will, transforming myself into an eagle or a chastou or a fleet-footed kayeet, the fastest runner on earth. But unlike Blaise and his fellows, I found the act excruciatingly difficult. Perhaps Blaise was right, and it was my reluctance to yield control. Or perhaps what I had done to myself—sharing body and soul with a rai-kirah who had no kinship to me—was not the right ordering of the world as I had hoped.
    In the early days of my recovery, Blaise had convinced me to let down the magical barriers I’d built to isolate myself from the demon. He said I should talk with Denas, learn of him. Knowledge and understanding would surely make coexistence easier. The rai-kirah had never spoken, not once. I wondered if my coming so close to death had destroyed him, if perhaps his anger was all that was left, the fading rumbles of thunder as a storm moves out. But then I’d started attacking people, and I quickly rebuilt my barriers.
    Preoccupied with my continuing dilemmas, I pushed my horse through the crowd, taking advantage of a large party forging a path toward the gates. Five warriors rode in a wedge, opening the way for a richly dressed noble. Two columns of soldiers rode behind him, protecting heavily laden pack animals. The troops were Hamrasch warriors, along with a few dark-skinned Thrid mercenaries, but the lord did not wear the gold tef-coat and wolf crest of the Hamrasch. I could not see his own heged symbol.
    “Clear the road of this offal,” commanded the noble, a soft-bodied man with a sleek blond braid. “Cut them if they won’t move aside.” The party had come to a standstill, the fault of several caravan outriders who were trying to use the same space to move several heavily laden sledges pulled by slaves. From a long cylinder strapped to his saddle, the Derzhi noble yanked an arm-length stick of polished wood and struck at a slave who had fallen to his knees when the sledge he was dragging caught the wheel of a cart going the opposite direction. The slave cried out and fell backward, blood blossoming on his forehead. He got tangled in the leather traces and pulled the sledge further askew, spilling its poorly lashed contents onto the roadway.
    The noble’s troops drew their swords and began to force other travelers to step aside. As he waited for the path to be opened, the Derzhi lord paced his horse back and forth beside the slave. Each time the bleeding man tried to rise and untangle himself from the traces, the lord, his face composed, struck him deliberately and viciously with his stick—on the face, on the elbows, on shoulders already raw from the abrasion of the leather harness.
    My bones ached with each blow. My back was scarred from years of such mindless cruelty, and no matter what I told myself of necessity and danger, I could not walk away. I dropped from the saddle, tied my mount to an abandoned tinker’s