Eigou carefully unwound the bandages from Ilati's leg, displaying the healing wound. Every cut had already closed, even those used to drain the infection. Where scabs had formed, the edges were not even red and angry. There was no hint of exposed muscle or blood as there had been in the frantic escape. To think, it had only been three sunrises since the sorcerer's herb cure had banished the pestilence in her blood. "There, not half so terrible as you feared."

Ilati had seen magical healing work, but Eigou had done this without the intervention of a god, without an invocation of power. Just his foul-smelling paste of green herbs applied liberally every day. "Is this forest magic?" she asked, turning her leg slightly to see it more clearly in the light of the rising sun.

The old man's golden eye caught the sunlight like a glinting coin. "It is just some herbs and a few tricks."

"Tahmasp is impressed. That is difficult to do." Ilati's leg was still weak and sore, but it was magnitudes better than it should have been for an infection that had nearly killed her. She was already eating normally again, though Eigou had been very insistent that she eat plenty of meat. The others were already awake and getting ready to move camp again: Shir Del and Menes had gone scouting with some of the other warriors.

Sa Dul stood only a day and a half away, the last vestige of civilization before the deep wilderness of Kharsaanu Saquutu. Ilati knew little of the forest except its primeval power and the beautiful cedar wood that came from it. Of course, if Eigou had been telling the truth in his obtuse way, it was also the point of his origin and where he had met her grandfather, the great king. Ilati wondered what other mysteries hid under such branches.

The one-eyed sorcerer sighed. "Speaking of Tahmasp..."

Ilati looked up from the wound with the wariness of a wild animal. "Is this about me impressing him?"

"Yes and no." Her mentor looked grave. "There is a task waiting at Sa Dul, one that I do not think any other could accomplish, and to attend to it would certainly earn his respect."

"Last time you sent me on an errand, Eigou, I nearly died."

He pursed his lips and shook his head. "That was a possibility of conflict. This is a certainty."

Ilati frowned. She was still anything but recovered, even with how well she was healing. Her draw on the bow was as it had once been, but walking and even riding was painful. "Must you speak in riddles?"

Eigou leaned back and regarded her with crossed arms. "No, I need not always, though often I find it useful. In this, though, I will be straightforward. Sa Dul is plagued by a demon. We met a man while you were delirious, a merchant who had come from Ulmanna by the forest road. He spoke of a great misfortune and a howling beast that terrorized the people at night. He said that it came upon one of his guards at night in the street, for they arrived in the late hours, and ripped the poor man in half."

Dread welled deep in Ilati's stomach. The men of Nadar were fearsome foes, but they were still men. Some creature born of midnight and malice like a demon was an entirely different matter. "In half?"

"Such that his torso lay in one street and his legs in another." Eigou studied her expression. "You have dealt once with a creature of the night winds before, Ilati. One more powerful than this creature, whose powers you now carry."

Ilati shook her head. "As a supplicant, Eigou, not a foe. If it could rip a man asunder, how can I stand against it? I cannot even stand against Menes."

Eigou prodded the center of her forehead with two fingers. "That is why the gods gave you this, Ilati." He clucked his tongue reprovingly. "It is well known that a normal weapon cannot slay a demon, not even held by the greatest of warriors. Even magic, many of them may resist or counter. You must find the true way, not the brave way. Your inner eye will aid you a great deal in this endeavor."

"Why me?"

"Who else?" Eigou said. "Would you put Menes against a demon? Shir Del?"

Ilati pulled in a deep breath. "What of you, Eigou?" she asked softly. "You are more powerful than I."

"Wiser, perhaps, but that is only from existing in this world longer than you." Eigou's expression turned stern. "Do you wish to take your war to Nysra or not? If you allow fear to drive you from this battle, how much easier it will drive you from that one!"

She knew he had a point. The King of Nadar was spoken far and wide of as a sorcerer without equal. His flesh could turn even blessed bronze, something that not even every demon could say. "I am not powerful, Eigou. I cannot even hit what I aim that bow at half the time."

"Listen well, o lioness, when I tell you this: power is not what you believe it to be." Eigou's missing eye seemed back in its ghostly form, staring at her with the same intensity as his gold one. "The greatest warrior of them all will be struck by a fated arrow. The mightiest king will be laid low by a fever. The wisest sorcerer will succumb to age. All these things are fleeting, no more powerful than the cities of men were in the Great Flood."

"Then what is power?"

"It is the intangible, the eternal."

"Gods?"

"They are close to it, so very close, but they have their limits," Eigou reminded her more gently. "They are nothing without the mortals they have created to toil for them, for what is strength if not shown, blessing not bestowed, wisdom if not taught? That they are immortal is true, but a wind that blows never making contact with a grain of sand or blade of grass, what impact does it have?"

Ilati ran her fingers over the lacquered wood and horn of her bow. She kept it at her side always, like a proper Sut Resi warrior even though she made no claim to be one. "Menes always says that gods are only as good as how far they can reach."

Eigou smiled slightly, encouraged by that answer. Maybe he thought she was drawing more wisdom from him than she felt like she was. "Would you have feared the power of Lugal, god of Ulmanna, standing in Shadi?"

"No," Ilati said immediately. Her heart hardened. "I would have thought that I had the protection of Zu."

His smile faded into the impassivity of the desert, that blankness of expression that Ilati most associated with the inscrutable Eigou who vexed her with lessons. "And what did you have when Zu abandoned you?"

"Nothing."

"Yet you lived when all other things perished." Eigou's voice held a challenge when he spoke again. "Tell me again what you had. Tell me what made you worthy in the desert."

Ilati's brow furrowed. "Grief," she said finally.

He shook his head. "Look deeper."

"Anger."

Again, Eigou shook his head. "Deeper."

Ilati took a deep breath, realizing that her hand was clenching the bow. "What is deeper than those in my heart, Eigou?" she demanded.

"Your refusal to stop. Your willingness to face oblivion." Eigou pushed his two fingers into her forehead again, prodding meaningfully. "Grief and anger may do many things, but you were their master. You made a choice. There is power in choices just as there is in names, in what you choose to embody and channel, because both come to the truth of a thing." He studied her seriously for a long moment and then rose to his feet. "I will not command you to face the demon in Sa Dul, as I commanded you to seek the well. We may easily circumvent the city and pass it by. But I have given you knowledge of it, and that forces a choice. What Ilati do you wish to be: the girl who died in the temple when her goddess abandoned her or the woman who walked out of the desert bound by her own choice?"

Ilati looked down at her hand on the bow as he walked away. If she did not fight the demon, it would continue to terrorize the town of Sa Dul, but if she fought it, she would likely die. The stories she had heard her entire life of such creatures made small no part of their malice or prowess in battle, and she was not Menes or Shir Del, who carried themselves with such confidence in their skill.

Still, if given the option, she knew what she would be.

"Eigou!"

The sorcerer turned back to face her, his unseen eye burning a hole into her heart. "Yes, Ilati?"

"Is this the easiest it will ever be?" she asked, hating the tremor in her voice.

His expression softened, not with mercy, but with sorrow. It was an expression she had seen before, such as when she told him that she had cried her last tears into the river he had saved her from. A mirror of her own grief, but more ancient in its roots. "Yes."

The answer was not a surprise. Ilati realized she had been expecting it, as if her body realized the truth before her mind did. She bowed her head to the old man. "Thank you for your wisdom, Eigou."

She lowered her eyelashes and did not watch him go, running her thumb along the leather wrapping of the bow's grip for a long moment as she collected herself. She knew only a little about demons despite her goddess's nature, but she remembered enough about purification and driving them off from her life as a high priestess to try and make some preparations. She limped over to Eigou's belongings and pulled out his bag of salt, taking a portion into her hand before hunting out Menes's cookpot.

"What are you doing?" Roshanak asked curiously, looking up from her own task. For such a young girl, she had already become quite good at knapping stone, and was making arrowheads out of some obsidian with a piece of horn and some leather. It was much easier for the Sut Resi to find sources of flint and obsidian or use bone than to rely on bronze, so they worked with what they had.

Ilati knelt down by the fire, rearranging the pieces of broken pottery to take the weight of the pot. She added water from her own waterskin before the salt. "Preparing," Ilati murmured, sitting back on her heels to watch it heat. She looked over at Roshanak's little pile of arrowheads. "May I please have some of those?"

"Uparmiya's are better."

The priestess smiled, stirring the pot until the purity of salt disappeared into the water. "And what if I want help from my young wisewoman instead of my old wisewoman?"

Roshanak set aside her knapping and sorted through her pile, carefully collecting the best ones. "What am I helping with?"

Ilati forced herself not to think of the horrors of a demon's claws or teeth. "Fighting a monster."

The girl studiously double-checked her selection, discarding one. She held five arrowheads in her cupped hands now, blue eyes worried as she looked up at Ilati. "These are the best that I made. Do I need to make more?"

If I have made it to the third arrow, I will be doing better than I ever dreamed possible, Roshanak, Ilati wanted to say. Instead, she nodded. "I think this is enough."

Roshanak nodded. "Uparmiya should fletch them," she said. "I'm not very good at glue yet. Her arrows always fly straight."

"I will ask," Ilati promised as she accepted the arrowheads from Roshanak.

"You shouldn't get them too hot," Roshanak advised. "Mama tells me to keep the heads out of the fire. It makes them brittle."

"Only warm as a body," Ilati promised, checking the temperature of the water with her skin. She added each stone head one at a time, until the five were carefully placed in a circle at the bottom of the salt water in the pot. She bowed her head and covered the pot with her hands. "Your priestess calls out to you, Lady of Tempests. Lend her your strength when these arrows fly, bearing the purity of salt."

"Will it work?" Roshanak asked in a hushed voice.

"I have faith that it will." Ilati did not take the stone arrowheads out until they were warm, and let them dry in the palms of her hand. She leaned over and bumped Roshanak with her shoulder. "Thank you for giving them with love, Roshanak. That will help."

The girl still looked worried. "Is Mama going to help fight? Menes?"

"I will talk to them about it when we reach Sa Dul," Ilati promised. "Not a word about it until then. This is our secret."

Roshanak nodded. Sometimes, her eyes really did seem older than the rest of her. "Uparmiya is at the center of camp with Farhata."

Ilati nodded, trying to focus on the goal instead of her own fear. The maker of bows was Uparmiya's only surviving son, so he and his wives took an almost religious care of her. "Thank you, Roshanak." She gave the girl a squeeze. "I feel much better about it now."

The young Sut Resi touched the tattoo down her own face, a nervous habit that showed she wasn't quite as comfortable with it as Ilati seemed to be. "I will pray to Skyfather that your arrows fly straight and true."

"Uparmiya would be a force to behold if they didn't," Ilati said with a wink.

Roshanak laughed, the tension breaking. "She could fight the monster."

"I am sure she fought many such things before she reached the age of gray." Ilati stood up with her careful handful of arrowheads. "I will be very careful, Roshanak."

Once she was outside and a distance away from the tent, Ilati took each arrowhead and cut a small line into her forearm, blood welling instantly. The obsidian was so sharp she barely felt it. "This is for your hunger, Mother of the Night Winds," she said quietly, holding each arrowhead against the wound it had caused. "Let it whet your appetite for the defeat of the one whose path I cross."

Ilati knew her prayer had been heard when the stones drank in her blood like water into desert earth. She pulled them away as the wounds clotted, catching an extra hint of crimson to the inside of the obsidian. Whether her prayer would be answered or not, only time would tell.