“It’s dead,” said Medric sadly. “Maybe she hoped to save a few of its words. Are all the books dead in their coffins?”

Sitting together on the floor, they opened the boxes one by one. All the books were burned, some practically to ashes. They had looked in half the boxes when Zanja reached for one, and felt such heat sear her palm that she jerked her hand away.

“Ah!” said Medric, nodding vigorously. “That one.”

“Do books have memories? I think it remembers the fire.”

“It must still be alive, then, don’t you think?” Medric lifted up the box, very gently, and opened its lid. Within lay the burned remains of a large book, titled Encyclopedia of Livestock.“Zanja, what have you found? An amazing thing!”

“Amazingly dull, maybe,” said Zanja in dismay.

“Oh, I don’t think so. Let us see what it has to tell me.” Medric delicately put his hand to the smoke‑stained, half‑burned cover.

Eventually, Zanja went downstairs and found the librarian asleep in her chair and Emil busy washing a paste brush. The shoemaker’s hammer had fallen silent; perhaps she had gone shopping in the cool evening. This soon after the solstice, the sun would not set for hours, but the shadows in the street below were long and black, and a cool breeze relieved the heat of the stuffy parlor. Emil looked up from his bowl of cloudy water.

Zanja said quietly, to not disturb the old woman, “You’d better come upstairs.”

In the attic, Medric still sat upright with his hand upon the Encyclopedia of Livestock.His eyes moved wildly, focusing and re‑focusing on sights only he could see. His face moved also: Zanja read in rapid succession fear, horror, humor, and a sudden surprise. Earlier, Medric had uttered a small cry, but now his lips moved in an inaudible conversation.

Emil said in a low voice, “He must not be disturbed.” He sat in the chair to wait, and Zanja squatted by the stairway to listen for the shoemaker or the librarian. But the small house remained silent. Medric began to chuckle, and then a few tears slid down his face, and then he blinked and fumbled for his spectacles, took them off, and rubbed the crease in his nose. “Is that you, Emil? Is Zanja still here?”

She stood up out of the shadows.

Medric closed the book box but held it tightly in both hands. He looked pale and distressed, not at all like a man who has foreseen a hopeful future. But all he said was, “We need to keep this book.”

After supper, in their rooms above the wheelwright, Zanja lay upon the bed with her boots on so that Emil and Medric could sit in the two chairs and continue holding hands, as they had done during dinner. Lovers long separated deserved some time alone, and she was thinking of how she would insist on sleeping on the floor in the other room, which wasn’t much more than a garret. She might point out that she had not gotten so accustomed to sleeping in beds that she couldn’t be comfortable on the floor.

Medric, who had scarcely spoken all evening, said to her suddenly, “Do you remember Raven’s joke?”

Enlightenment was imminent, but Zanja found herself reluctant to ask for it. She said, with some effort, “Is Raven’s joke finally ended? Will something finally change?”

“I don’t know why I’m dreaming your stories,” said Medric complainingly.

Looking at him, she thought she saw a man as reluctant to answer questions as she was to ask them. She said, “Delay won’t make whatever you’ve seen less terrible, Master Seer.”

“I know. And don’t call me that. There’s another story in which Raven steals and eats pieces of soul. I think I’ve heard you tell it.”

“I remember it,” said Emil.

Medric said, “What would it mean if you said of someone that Raven had eaten her soul?”

Zanja sat up. The blank shock of her midsummer madness felt like it was threatening to return. She thought wildly of the silent, distant, unresponsive ravens that had tracked her travels, of her and Emil’s peculiar card reading the day she left home, of Karis angrily–or resolutely–letting her go. There was a pattern here. “You dreamed of my death,” she said.

Medric took off his spectacles and set them down on the tabletop, as though he never wanted to see anything clearly again.

Emil said in his steadiest voice, “There are so many kinds of death. Raven’s digestion could be a kind of transformation, couldn’t it? What did you dream, Medric?”

Medric said in a strained voice, “I dreamed that you cut Zanja’s heart out, and fed it to the Raven.”

“And then?” said Emil.

“The Raven shit out an owl, and the owl flew to a Sainnite garrison, with its feathers on fire.”

“And then?”

“The owl told the Sainnites a story, and as they listened, the garrison burned down around them, and then they themselves were burned to ashes.”

“And then?”

Medric said nothing. Zanja asked, “What kind of fire was it? Transformation? Or destruction?”

“I hope it’s transformation,” Medric said.

In the long silence that followed, Zanja felt that strangeness come upon her, like the strangeness of a fever, a distance that is almost delirium. Had not a seer once predicted that the Sainnite people would meet their demise at the hands of an Ashawala’i warrior? And had Zanja not wondered, since her life was first spared six years ago, what she had survived for? But surely, she protested silently, it was not for simple revenge, a revenge she did not even want any longer.

She looked closely at Medric then, wondering whether he was thinking much the same thing. Was it irony or justice that one Sainnite seer’s visions had led to the destruction of Zanja’s people, and a second’s would lead to the destruction of his own people? And was Medric considering now, as she was, whether the cost would be worth the result?

The room grew dark. None of them thought to light the lamp, and though the windows all were open, eventually the only light came from bright stars and a crescent moon. Zanja remembered: when she, her clan brother Ransel, and a half dozen other katrimwere all that remained alive, they had deliberately lit their campfire on a steep peak that overhung the demoralized Sainnites below, so that the enemy would be unable to forget for even a moment that unrelenting death still stalked them. The surviving katrimhad left the bodies of their massacred people to molder in the Asha Valley, a prosperous tribe of some eight hundred, all dead, and since then most of their fellow survivors had been killed. Now they had planned a trap that could kill or maim a great many of the enemy, but to spring the trap, one more would have to die.

They had chosen the one by lot, and when Zanja finally won the toss she was relieved: relieved at the end of the dreadful game, relieved that she no longer would spend the days and nights fearful that Ransel’s crazed bravado would get him killed. It was ridiculous, really: they all were destined to die, and only desire for more revenge had kept them from choosing suicide. Yet, more than anything Zanja feared that Ransel might be hurt unto death, and it might become her duty to give him a quick and merciful ending. Of all the dreadful prospects that had haunted her in those nightmare days, that had been the most awful.

She had been chosen by lot to die, and yet Ransel was dead now, while she still lived. She had crossed the boundary into a new life, but she had never entirely forgotten that the gods had first selected her for death.

She said to her brothers huddled together in the darkness, “Will precedes insight. If we are to see beyond my death, to understand how, or why, or what it is for, we first have to accept that I willdie.”

She saw a movement in the shadows: Emil shaking his head in refusal, though for fifteen years his friends had gone to their deaths at his command. “I am to kill you with my own hand, for the mere hope that someday I’ll understand why? No, I won’t do such a thing.”