Lakisa looked over at the priestess curled up next to the stove. Her eyes were closed, her breathing deep and even.

  “They’ll kill her,” Lakisa said.

  “You don’t know much about these people,” Kafele said. “It isn’t about killing her. It’s about asserting whose stories are true.”

  “I know she should tend the shrines. There’s power in her gift, and she should keep doing it instead of inviting them to burn her up. She isn’t going to be reborn like she thinks. She’ll die, and the shrines with her.”

  Kafele sat down on the floor across from Lakisa and passed her a wooden bowl filled with lentil paste and bits of rabbit meat.

  “You aren’t gifted,” he said.

  Lakisa’s hand trembled. A foolish reaction, she thought, after all this time.

  “No. My mother sold me.”

  Outside, she heard loud voices from the meetinghouse, voices that soon tapered to a murmur. The knot in her stomach eased. She set down her bowl and pulled at her purple robe, wrapped it closer around her body.

  “You never asked her name,” Kafele said.

  “What?”

  “The priestess,” he said. “Her name is Anicka.”

  Lakisa glanced over in Kafele’s direction; the shadows leapt across his sharp features.

  “Pardon,” Lakisa said, “but why are you here, honorable?”

  “I wanted to travel to the other side of the world.” He set down his tea and held up his hands so the long fingers touched and made a circle. “Nahlia’s on the other side of the world, here, the side closest to me, much farther south than here. Tish is on your side, in the far north.” He stared a moment at the globe he’d made with his hands, then pulled his fingers apart and picked up his tea.

  “It’s far,” Lakisa said. She did not mention that she had taken extensive classes in geography, and knew exactly where Tish was on a globe.

  “It is.”

  “But, pardon honorable,” she saw him wince at the title, but she could not help it, “it’s a long way to travel, and to what end?”

  “I thought I could help people here.”

  “You left your kin behind. Your people. You gave all that up for –” Lakisa glanced around the little sod hut, “for this?”

  “Sometimes, to accomplish something of worth, you must be willing to give up everything else.”

  “And now you are a ghost,” she said, “with nothing.”

  “Like you,” he said.

  “Like me,” she said.

  A handful of voices sounded again, like a gaggle of geese startled into flight. Kafele got to his feet and stood next to Lakisa by the window. A long snake of lanterns wound out from the meetinghouse, throwing shadows across the villagers’ faces. The lantern-bearers marched across the muddy road toward the house – men and women, even young children.

  Kafele motioned for Lakisa to follow him. He woke the priestess, Anicka. The three of them sat still by the stove, listening.

  “You must let me go,” Anicka said. “I am ready. I have given this girl my words.”

  The shouting started. A hail of rocks and mud battered the outside of the house. The turkeys screamed and squawked and fell silent. Faces smeared in dirt and blood appeared at the windows. Hands gripped the window frames, left red fingerprints. The hooting and howling grew to a tumultuous roar, like water tumbling against stone.

  They called out in harsh, angry voices. They pounded on the door. Blue orbs floated in the darkness. Muted lantern light fell through the windows. Lakisa could make out their words now: violent obscenities, screams for the blood of the demon, screams for the ashes of the priestess, cries for the death of the ghosts.

  “If they take me—” Lakisa said.

  “Stay still, girl,” Anicka hissed. “They are here for me. It is my time, not yours.”

  One of the windows shattered.

  And then they were at the door.

  The birch door was strung together with hemp, a hasty bundle that bent and cracked under the weight of the villagers. The adenoak staff did not hinder them. The first of them smashed through the door, hands coated in blood and turkey feathers. Her feet were muddy. She carried a birch staff. The others fell through behind her.

  They attacked the room. They attacked all things Nahlian.

  They ripped down the silk curtain and shred it. They smashed the stove, sending ashes and cinders across the carpets. They broke the chairs, overturned the food, cut open bags of lentils, smeared turkey blood over the door and across the windows. They screamed and howled and tore apart Kafele’s bedding. They ripped the pages from his books. They sprayed ink across his clothes. Through the shattered doorway, Lakisa saw that they had trampled through Kafele’s garden, ripped up the plants, ground them into the wet soil.

  Beside Lakisa, Kafele sat still and straight, his face set in a dour frown. The villagers who approached him gazed into his face and turned back to the house and screamed.

  “Ghost!” they cried. “Ghosts and demons!”

  They started a fire with Kafele’s bedding, ignited the clothes and the pile of shredded books. The house itself caught soon after.

  Kafele took hold of Anicka. Lakisa grabbed the sleeve of his robe and kept behind him as they fled, pushing through the mob that beat at them with staffs and threw stones as they passed. Kafele shouted at Lakisa to move toward the half-finished brick judicial house. They crouched inside the roofless building. Inky smoke curled out the windows of his little sod house, disappeared into the night sky.

  Lakisa breathed fast and deep. One of the stones had cut open her forehead, and blood ran down into her eyes. She had twisted her ankle along the walk, and it throbbed now as she stared out the doorway at the last of the villagers. No one approached them.

  By the time the fire died out all the villagers had crept home.

  When all was still Kafele moved from his place in the doorway and sat down with Lakisa and Anicka against the cold brick walls.

  “You see,” the Anicka muttered, rubbing at the purplish bruises spreading across her pale arms. “They know what needs to be done, even if you don’t.”

  #

  Morning dawned cold and drizzly. Lakisa woke to see Kafele walking about in the remnants of his garden, kicking at the broken plants with his booted feet. Feathers and turkey blood littered the ground.

  She glanced behind her to where the priestess crouched, retying the blue sash around her waist. Lakisa stood, tested her weight on her ankle. Painful, but bearable. She touched the thin scab on her forehead, wondering what other bruises marked her body. She limped over to where Kafele stood. Behind him, the cold husk of his house lay, hideously disfigured and fringed in black char, like a corpse.

  “There’s not much left to salvage, honorable,” Lakisa said. She gazed at the small grouping of family houses, the muddy footprints. Some of the women were up, making trips to the well at the edge of the village, whispering to one another in low voices.

  “The territorial government can offer her sanctuary,” Lakisa said. She hadn’t wanted to mention that, though Kafele certainly knew it as well as she did. Exiling a priestess looked no better on a judge’s record than the burning – or stoning – of villagers.

  “She doesn’t want it,” Kafele said.

  “Pardon?”

  “She wanted a clerk to record her words, that’s all. I told her we could offer her protection in the city. She refused.”

  “But then why… why did we defend her last night? Why not just give her up?”

  “I could not,” Kafele said. “I was not ready. She is ready, but I am not. I came to this place thinking I could help them. What I did not realize is how little I understood them. There is a reason for what they do. They see things I cannot see.”

  From the meetinghouse at their left, three figures emerged. Bavram and his daughters. Lakisa wondered if they were the elected voice of the village.

  Bavram stood as tall as Lakisa did with her sandals on. She hadn’t noticed how big he was before.

  “Where’s that woman?” Bavram asked Kafele.

  “Here!” Anicka said. She crawled out from the brick structure and came to stand beside Kafele. The bronze rings on her sash tinkled.

  “We’re letting you come back and tend the shrines,” Bavram said.

  “Oh, you are?” she said haughtily.

  “You think I’m afraid of this demon, woman?” Bavram snorted.

  Anicka glanced over at Lakisa. “You recorded this?”

  Lakisa pulled the little yellow book from the pocket of her robe.

  “Good,” Anicka said. She looked back at Bavram. “I will not speak to the gods anymore, Bavram. It is time to become one. That is my choice. Not yours. As it has ever been.”

  The priestess walked, not out to the little wooden footbridge over the dirty river where the shrines were, but toward the well at the edge of the village.

  Lakisa walked after her. “What are you doing?”

  Bavram and his daughters followed Anicka as well. From the meetinghouse, curious men peeked out at the priestess striding through the heart of the village. Two women stepped away when the priestess approached, clutching at their children.

  Anicka stood within a step of the stone well rim before Lakisa realized what was happening.

  Lakisa reached out to grab the woman’s jangling sash.

  The priestess slipped free of Lakisa’s grasping fingers and climbed onto the rim of the well with the agility of a much younger woman.

  “You all listen!” Anicka called to the little crowd. “These demons want you to turn your back on the gods and the old ways.” She pointed at Lakisa. “They make our girls deaf. They tell them terrible stories. You burn me when this is over. You release me, as is my right. We need gods to protect this village again. We are dying.”

  And then she stepped back, into the well.

  Lakisa saw Kafele’s dark form move, too late, to grab for the gray-clad form that disappeared into the mouth of the well. Lakisa heard a heavy splash as the woman’s body hit the water.

  The natives pushed in around Lakisa, pressing forward to look down into the well, but they did not cry out; they did not curse and shout. Lakisa saw nothing in this crowd that reminded her of the screaming horde that attacked her the night before.

  Bavram stood behind her and muttered, “Fish her out. It isn’t what I wanted, not now. But if this is all we have, she can be ash.” And he pushed his way forward to stand beside Lakisa. He did not look at her as he said, “You believe in gods, ghost girl, skinny girl in demon’s robes?”

  “I believe in justice,” Lakisa said. She moved away from the well, and Kafele stood in front of her.

  “Your first native case,” Kafele said. “Now you know what it is to be out here. Now you understand what we are up against.” He walked away.

  Lakisa looked back at the well, then up at the faces of the natives. She listened to their warbling Tishinese voices babbling superstition and nonsense.

  And she was suddenly angry.

  Lakisa strode after Kafele. “You wait!” she called. “You just wait!” She caught up to him and took hold of his sleeve. “It was your duty to bring territorial justice here! What kind of a woman does that, forsakes her life and jumps into a well? What kind of judge lets –”

  “You’re the native, Lakisa.” Kafele looked away from her, back to the trampled garden and fire-gutted house. “You tell me why you accepted that her gods, her truth, was not real, just because you were deaf to it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Kafele started walking again, walked until he stood in the midst of his ruined garden. Lakisa stumbled after him, waiting for her answer, waiting for this Nahlian demon to give her the answers they had all given her, those black and white lies that tolerated no questions.

  “I brought everything I own with me,” Kafele said. “I crossed the sea, a sea you’ve never seen. And I came here to this cold, wet place. Here they call me demon and say they turn into gods when they die. Here they call me Outsider and make their daughters into ghosts and turn their women into ash. But I have to accept… There are things happening here that I don’t see and I can’t understand. I do not see the gods. Is she here, looking after them? They say she is, and all the godspeakers before her. I thought I was right. I believed it. But here… I don’t know.”

  Lakisa lifted her gaze to his face. Kafele’s gray-eyed stare met hers. And when she stared into Kafele’s face she saw not a territorial judge, not an Outsider, not a demon, but a man; just a man alone at the edge of the world, who knew as little about the truth of this place as she did.

  “I apologize,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I apologize. I should not have come here. This is a world here I don’t understand.”

  What Kafele said that night to the men and women in the meetinghouse, Lakisa did not know, but the men followed him back to the burned husk of his house afterwards. They did not mention the torched house or the drowned priestess. They helped Kafele clean and repair the house. They wiped the soot from the one intact window, restored the stove to working order, swept up the lentils from the floor. Tomorrow, the men said, they would repair the roof beams, replace the windows and put down a wooden floor in place of the scorched rugs.

  Bavram was among them. He was the last to leave. As he went to the door he turned back and gazed at Lakisa. A frown deepened the lines of his round face. He said, “I know you don’t understand us, ghost, but when you make your marks you tell those demons I tried to make it right. You tell them.”

  He trudged back into the darkness.

  “I’ll never understand my own people,” Lakisa said.

  “Maybe that’s because you’re a different people,” Kafele said. “Not Tishinese. Not Nahlian. Something else.”

  “A ghost,” she said.

  That night, the village fished out the priestess’s corpse and burned her in a great pyre at the center of the village. Lakisa watched from the little porch outside Kafele’s house. She had an old shawl of the priestess’s wrapped around her shoulders. The fire rose higher and higher, burning hot enough to consign the priestess’s body to ash. In the morning, they would crush up her bones and throw it all out into the fields. Lakisa knew because her people had done the same to her older sister, when she could no longer see the gods and refused any other fate.

  Lakisa gazed at the embers circling into the darkness, following them up and up into the mostly dark sky. A movement outside the circle of men and women caught her attention, and she stared out past the warm glow of the pyre. There, at the edge of the village, she saw a hulking form; a great misty white beast with massive jaws and broad hands. It met her look. A shiver of icy fear ran down her spine. Then the creature moved off and away, deeper into the forest. Lakisa let out her breath.

  “What is it?” Kafele asked. He came up behind her from the house. She started.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A… creature. A beast.”

  “A demon,” he said. Not a question.

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Isn’t there?” he said. “That’s what they teach us in Nahlia, and even here in the native schools. But there are beasts, Lakisa. There are demons. There are gods. There are ghosts. They are not always people.”

  “Even if… there were… I should not be able to see or hear them. I am deaf.”

  “Perhaps you were not deaf,” he said, “just dreaming.”

  #

  Lakisa met the carriage the next morning. She knelt in Kafele’s ruined garden, patting the soil down around Tishinese seedlings she had gathered from across the river. Kafele was helping the villagers work on the brick judicial house, spreading layer after layer of brick and cement. The clouds had pulled back from the sky, and the sun shone through, drying the mud into fragile dirt mounds and baked footprints.

  This carriage driver was bold enough to stop on the brick walk right in front of Kafele’s house. The driver hopped out, swept a neat bow and said, “All is prepared, honorable.”

  Lakisa stood, wiping the dirt from her robe. She saw Kafele approaching from the brick house. The sun was high and hot, and Kafele wore no tunic to cover his dark shoulders. His hands and face and chest were speckled in brick dust.

  “You’ll express my greetings to Nethifa Neb-hele,” Kafele said. “I will tell her you comported yourself well.”

  “Thank you,” Lakisa said. She looked him in the face when she said it, but found her eye drawn to the village square behind him where the villagers were sweeping up the priestess’s ashes. Above the charred remains of the pyre, a dusty presence whirled. Lakisa shivered.

  “You’ll come back to preside over other cases?” Kafele asked. “The judicial house will be done within the month. I’ll need a gifted clerk here.”

  “That’s up to Nethifa Neb-hele.” She stepped up to the carriage.

  Kafele grabbed her sleeve. She stepped back down, gazed up at him.

  “Is there something -?” she began.

  He took her hand. Startled by the gesture, she almost pulled away, but his grip was firm. “It’s easy to forget who you are,” he said, “when you’re far from home, when you have no people. Don’t forget, Lakisa.” He pressed her hand to his cheek, an intensely intimate gesture Lakisa had only seen between Nethifa and her most valued students and lovers.

  “Pardon, honorable… Kafele, I –”

  He released her. “Go,” he said. “You did what you came to do. Perhaps you learned more than you were prepared to learn.”

  The carriage driver hopped into the front of the carriage. The engine sputtered and whirred to a start. Lakisa looked back at Kafele until the carriage turned up the brick road and topped the hill. She could not see him anymore, could not see the little village by the river. She wondered what her mother would say to her now, if she saw her sputtering away from the village in this little carriage, leaving behind a dead woman, angry men, and the ghosts and demons they feared and misunderstood. The ghosts and demons that were not just terrible stories, not like Nahlians said.

 

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