They could not spend the night on the shelf. The elk knew before anyone else and began shifting its weight, nose raised toward the western cut.
“Fox rain,” Suth said.
Ysabet examined a clear sky. “What is fox rain?”
“Very local. Very unpleasant. It comes out of a burrow.”
Chaska had her bedroll halfway unfastened when the smell arrived.
They moved.
The nearest shelter was an abandoned charcoal pit with a turf roof over half its rim. A family of red-necked beetles occupied the dry center. Ashaun cleared a strip by the wall with a branch, leaving the insects their mound, and Chaska unrolled the beds without further discussion of scenic camps.
Suth’s elk stood outside, its lights dimmed to the color of banked coals. Pip remained at the opening, looking first toward those lights and then toward the dark.
Ysabet set the mouse’s box beside the bedroll. Pip came to inspect it and lay with its pouch opening against the access strip. The mouse stayed in the box.
“That is allowed,” Chaska told it.
Pip shut both eyes.
The small domestic offense steadied Ysabet enough to ask the question she had kept behind her teeth all afternoon.
“If the old memories are inside it, can they be taken out?”
Ashaun stopped scraping mud from her boot.
Suth laid her cloak beside the fire. “Not in any way I know how to do on a hillside.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
They heard the elk strip bark outside.
“What does it keep?” Ysabet said. “A memory, or a person?”
“Both are made of smaller things. We give them clean names because we would like the knife to find a clean line.”
Ashaun said, “It was made from him.”
“From one living organ he kept when everything else was failing. A store of possible structures. His habits, his strengths, things he learned before he was a tyrant. Things he learned while he was one.” Suth pressed a hand over her knee until the joint settled. “The links that made all those parts work as Azhrak were broken in dormancy. They haven’t simply woken whole in this body.”
“Yet.”
“No. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. But a powerful change may open structures Pip has never used. Sometimes the old organization comes with them.”
Ysabet looked at the thin leg. She had celebrated its return. She still celebrated it. The creature needed to walk.
“So every time it grows—”
“Every time any of us learns something, we become capable of a new mistake. This is a larger problem, not an unrelated one.”
“Could Edris do what he wants?”
“He might do a great deal of damage trying.”
“That isn’t an answer either,” Ashaun said.
“It is the one I have.”
Suth took a twig from beside the fire and drew a branching shape in the ash. One thick stem, many thin shoots. She broke the twig and used the pieces to show where branches had grown into one another.
“Suppose you learned to hold a cup from someone who was cruel. We couldn’t take every movement you learned from them without also taking your ability to drink. Pip’s new body is using old material. We can help it learn other uses. We can sometimes let an unused structure fall quiet. We can’t pull out everything inherited and expect a complete small creature to be waiting underneath.”
Ashaun’s expression did not change. Ysabet was grateful for that. Suth’s example made sense, and made less than enough sense. A cruel person’s cup did not contain the possibility of armies.
“Where can we learn more?” she asked.
Suth erased a branch with her palm.
“The Wild Cradle.”
Chaska sat forward. “Beyond the Teeth?”
“Beyond them if you go by the upper way.”
“They close in winter.”
“Usually.”
“Usually they close earlier than people say they will.”
Suth gave her a thoughtful look. “You’ve flown the southern approaches.”
“Delivered along them. From the safe side.”
“Then you know why I won’t promise an arrival.”
Outside, Pip climbed onto a root to see past the elk. Its thin leg trembled. Ysabet began to rise, stopped, and watched it find a different foothold. It descended without falling.
“What is at the Cradle?” she asked.
“A place where possibilities have not settled into one use. A god once lived there who learned to choose among its forms. It may still live there. I haven’t visited in years.”
“A god,” Ashaun repeated.
“One that had no interest in armies when I knew it. Plenty of interest in damp holes.”
Chaska rubbed her palms together over the fire. “A promising endorsement. Have you got a map?”
Suth produced a roll from beneath her saddle cloth. When she spread it, a dark line under the waxed surface moved away from the warmth.
“No nearer,” she told it.
The line stopped.
Ysabet stared.
“Migrating root grazers,” Suth said. “It doesn’t like a hot camp.”
Chaska reached for her own sketchbook.
For the first time since the ring, Ysabet heard eagerness in her voice that had nothing to do with escape.