The marsh smelled cleaner than the town.
Ysabet reached the third drain before sunrise. Beneath its stone mouth a thread of brown water moved between reeds. A curlew watched her from a broken marker, then flew off with a complaint that sounded personal.
Quirin waited farther along, sitting on his upturned feed bucket. He had brought a walking stick and a flask. He offered the flask first.
“Water.”
She drank. “I hadn’t accused it.”
“You looked hopeful.”
He let her sit on the low bank. For a while they watched insects lifting out of the drain, glittering briefly where the east brightened.
“Azhrak,” he said.
The name meant ruins. It meant the black spearheads in roadside shrines, though until that moment she had not known the connection. It meant a painted figure in a childhood primer, all blades and height, with small soldiers laid out beneath it like paving.
“No,” she said.
“I haven’t told you what I mean yet.”
She shut her mouth.
“Forty-three years ago, at Falling Bells, the allied gods broke him. They shattered the things that held him together and carried the pieces away separately. That’s the history people can agree on. Whether they saved everyone they could, whether any of them wanted more than his defeat—those are other questions.”
“Pip isn’t forty-three years old.”
“I doubt it is forty-three days old in this form.”
“Then why that name?”
Quirin unscrewed the flask, took a small drink, and watched the drain.
“Some beings leave a seed. Not a human child. Not a complete mind packed into a nut. A living beginning with patterns it can use to grow. There were reports of one missing from his remains. The reliquary you described was supposed to have been empty.”
“Supposed by whom?”
“The people who failed to find it.”
Across the marsh a boatman struck the side of his skiff with an oar, driving birds off its rim. The ordinary noise helped. Ysabet pressed her left fingertips into the damp ground.
“He put men into one mind,” she said.
“Many minds into a shared will. Men and women. He wasn’t particular about that.”
“Were they all forced?”
“No.” Quirin looked at her then. “Some asked. Some were dying. Some had spent years afraid of making the wrong movement while people beside them died. Imagine knowing exactly where everyone was. Imagine your pain shared until you could stand again.”
She could imagine too easily. Her right hand was cramped inside her sleeve. For one shameful instant she wanted to offer the ache to someone else.
“And afterward?”
“Afterward they couldn’t leave.”
The curlew returned to the marker, considered them, and decided against landing.
“Whole valleys fought as if they were a single body,” Quirin said. “Whole valleys died that way too. There were villages where the people at home carried supplies because the soldiers needed them. Then because the soldiers wished it. Eventually there wasn’t much room between the two.”
Ysabet thought of Edris’s kneeling guards. Of the man rising as though his knees had forgotten how.
“Will Pip do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know the name.”
“I know old reports and a drawing. I’ve seen sacred beasts described as divine infants because someone wanted a temple to pay for their food. I’ve seen an ordinary change go wrong because an old remnant was put against living flesh. This creature may carry a seed. The ring’s effect makes me think it does. That doesn’t tell me all the seed contains.”
She pulled the packet of notes from inside her coat, turning past the page about the hare. The words she had written before Edris arrived looked almost foolish now: Would not eat flour sack. Slept in it.
Quirin leaned nearer.
“Keep that.”
“It isn’t useful.”
“It may be the only observation on that page nobody bought.”
A cart creaked onto the road behind them. Both waited until it passed, the driver watching his mule’s ears rather than the two people on the bank.
“What do I do?” Ysabet asked.
“Get information Edris doesn’t control. Don’t let him keep provoking whatever is old inside it. And don’t wait in the yard for a petition with three seals.”
“I have other animals.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t put them in a cart and hope.”
“No.”
His agreement irritated her. She wanted an answer large enough to carry all the things she could not leave, and he sat on a bucket giving her single words.
Quirin reached into his coat and unfolded an old strip of map.
“The Wild Cradle,” he said. “There was a sanctuary beyond the northern forests. Before the great orders had much money, tamers studied the first lives of gods there. Not very safely, from the accounts I’ve read. But they knew that first lives existed.”
He put a finger on a mountain pass. The map ended before it reached the mountains.
“This doesn’t go there.”
“It gets you to someone whose map might.”
“Who?”
“Mother Suth. Naturalist. Follows the lantern elk in autumn.”
Ysabet almost laughed. “North is large.”
“The elk use three crossings. Only one after the reed flowers lose their white tops. If she is still following them, you may find her before the first ridge.”
He laid the map on her notes to stop it curling. The morning light caught old pinholes along its edge.
At home Pip would be waiting beside a hamper, with one leg drawn useless beneath it. She rubbed her thumb over the nearest pinhole, then asked Quirin to show her the crossings.