The Progression

You ask me for the beginning, and the beginning is water. Understand first that I did not choose it, and neither did she. Our own sorcerers did that. They were losing — you will know better than I whether they went on losing — and men who are losing will open anything that has a hinge. Breegarra was a captain of the line, and she stood in the tent and told them plainly what she thought of it, and she was overruled by men with cleaner hands, and then she was sent back out to hold the very ground they meant to use. That is how armies reward an honest mouth. Liana stood at her shoulder as she always did. And I was there, behind them both, because Breegarra would not leave me back among the sorcerers where a woman like me was only another thing on a table. So: not chosen. Collateral. Remember that word when I tell you the rest of it. Of the working itself I keep nothing I can put into sentences. A pressure. A wrongness like a note held too long. Then the river. It ran brown-green under a sky too bright, and the far bank was all jungle, and we came up out of the shallows of the southern shore coughing, with our own mud still on our boots. Noob River, they call it now, and I have never liked the name, but names here are given by whoever survives to speak them twice. She stood up first. I want you to see her as she was on that bank: not a girl newly spilled into a strange place but a woman finished, thirty years of the line in her shoulders, soaked to the collarbone, already counting. Water, height, cover, sightlines. She turned to find Liana — found her, upright, dripping, unflinching as her name — and then she turned to find me, and only when she had all three of us in her eye did she let herself breathe out. Where Bjorn should have been there was a man called Tycho, standing in the shallows with the packs on his back and the patience of a mule. I never learned whether he had come through with us or had simply always been standing there, and in time I stopped asking, because the answers frightened me less than the asking did. I say three because that is what we were. What she became after is a different count. The tome, the fifteen turnings of Kurak's road, the stone that eats distance — she had none of that on the riverbank. She learned it here, in this world, because the thing that had been done to us was sorcery and she would not be ignorant of what had unmade her life. She went and got it the way you go and get a blade you hate the weight of. Every time I saw her use it afterward, her jaw set as if she were losing the argument again, the same argument, in the same tent, to the same men. And me? I danced for them. You may laugh. Wounds close faster near me; they always have. On that bank it was all I had to give, and it was enough to start with.