Finally, the Attolian let the pan cool, and when it was safe to touch with a bare hand, he held it out for the old woman’s appraisal. The interior shone like the sun, but the tin had overreached the edge in places and run in untidy streaks down the outside of the pan. The old woman pointed these out. The Attolian shrugged.

Vedra looked both anxious and hopeful, but the Attolian seemed at his ease. At last the old woman nodded her conditional approval, and Hemke invited us in to dinner. He told us we could spend the night in the shed with the goats and even suggested we make ourselves at home in the washhouse, the concerns about water scarcity evidently having faded. I believe he had worried less about the water and more about appearing weak in front of strangers, especially one built like the Attolian.

After dinner there was singing. The Attolian sang another song, a slower mournful one, which I translated for the company. It was about a man who missed his home, and I didn’t really need to say more than that. By the time we left the next day, we were all friends. The old woman told Vedra to give us a large package of food for our trip, and we left her the remaining bits of tin to mend her pots in the future. We filled our skins again at the well, then turned toward the Taymets. We’d reached the first slopes by noon and rested in the shade before we began to climb again. I was sure we were doomed, but I was determined to go on until I dropped.

To my surprise, the going was easier, at least at first, than in those hellish rocky gullies around the mines. There were trails to follow that climbed with some consideration for the people who might be using them, not just for goats. Hemke, without commenting on the Attolian’s heavy accent or our somewhat unorthodox arrival at his farm, had casually suggested that there were ways to go north while avoiding farms on the route and without going by the emperor’s roads. I had translated the directions quietly into Attolian, and the Attolian seemed confident he could follow them. He was picking his way along the hunting trails with little hesitation, whereas I could only guess how lost I would already be if I were on my own.

Eleven days later we climbed over a low stone wall and entered a grove of olives, the huge trees in orderly rows, their leaves casting deep twilight below them. I looked back through the twisting branches at the sun shining on the fearsome Taymets, now unequivocally behind us.

“I don’t understand,” I said. I’d been afraid to say it before, for fear of drawing down a curse on our heads.

It’s true that some of the climbs had been terrifying, and we’d spent most of four miserable days with our feet in the snow, but there had almost always been a trail to follow, even if it was just the path of someone else’s footsteps. We’d sheltered in caves where we’d found firewood stacked and waiting for us. Twice the Attolian had used his bow to bring down a wild goat. We’d eaten and slept well, and Hemke’s detailed directions had delivered us safely to Zaboar. We might have seen no other human being for the entirety of our journey across the mountains, but we’d seen evidence of them everywhere.

Whatever lay ahead, I had climbed the Taymets. If I could do it, what stopped the Medes?

“There’s a saying from Eddis,” the Attolian told me. “Water finds a way. A few people at a time can trickle through, but you couldn’t take an army on that trail. A man can’t climb straight up with his face in someone else’s feet and his feet in the face of the man below. It would take an army a month or more to cross the mountains. Not only would they starve, they’d be picked off by the locals. They’d never get enough men through to be of any use in a battle.”

That made sense to me. “The Namreen can come through, right after us,” I said. They were never not on my mind.

“They could. Or they could just use the trade road,” said the Attolian laconically. “The oligarch might object—or he might not.” He shrugged. “You won’t be entirely safe, Kamet, until I get you to my king in Attolia, but we are out of the empire. That will make it harder for anyone, bounty hunter or Namreen, to take you back.”

Side by side, we walked downhill between the trees to the lower side of the olive grove. The contrast between the salt pans behind us and the fertile country before us was diametric. The Taymets captured all the rain that blew south, and the water ran back down into Zaboar, making it a small but healthy city-state, with farms to feed its populations and the mountains to protect it. It was almost, but not quite, worth the effort to conquer, and it paid a tribute to the Medes to ensure they looked elsewhere to expand their empire. The oligarch might see the Namreen as a threat to his sovereignty—or he might see handing me over as a goodwill gesture to a dangerous neighbor.

Looking out across the green land, all the way to the coast, I could see the blue of the Shallow Sea. The Attolian said he could not only see the city on its shore, he could trace the man-made lines of the aqueducts converging on it.

“There is an Attolian trade house in the city,” he said. “They will know me and will help find a ship that will take us at least to the Middle Sea and perhaps all the way home.”

We walked along the wall to a broken gate and a beaten path outside it. The path led us onto another path, wide enough for a wagon to bring down the olives, and from there every step brought us closer to civilization. The air was cool and the sky clear. It was an easy trip down the farm tracks, and we eventually caught sight of a town below us. The Attolian insisted he could see a sign for a tavern in the open market square, but I suspected it was wishful thinking.

The town was unwalled. Wandering between the houses, we found ourselves at the open village square, not large, with a tree-lined edge and a central cobblestoned area around a spring-fed fountain. There was indeed a tavern with tables under a shaded porch, and the Attolian was smug. He led the way toward it without hesitation. He wasn’t worrying about the Namreen. Inside, he chatted up the tavern wife—the people in Zaboar mostly speak the same language as the Medes—and if she had trouble with some of his heavily accented words, she understood he wanted to buy food. He understood in turn when she held her nose. Blushing, he admitted that we didn’t have coin for a meal and a bath, but she kindly produced a ball of soap and a cloth and waved toward the cobblestoned area and the fountain. There were several buckets chained by the fountain and racks nearby where clothes were draped to dry.

“Give me your shirt,” I told the Attolian, and filled the bucket in the reservoir below the bubbling fountain. I pushed his shirt and mine into water so cold it made the bones in my wrists ache. Scooping a bucket for himself, the Attolian dumped it over his head and then gasped.

“Snowmelt,” I pointed out, too late.

“Gods all around us, I am not sure I want to be clean this badly.” But he rubbed himself with the soap and then handed it to me to use on the shirts while he rinsed himself off, shuddering and swearing under his breath. Then he took over the scrubbing of the shirts while I did the same. Freezing cold and soaking wet, we both wrung out the shirts. As we spread them out on the racks to dry, we saw the tavern wife approaching with toweling for each of us. Shivering, we thanked her again and again and she laughed at our gratitude. She sent us to sit at the tables in front of the tavern and brought us each a bowl of stew from the hearth. We sat there in our toweling and ate, and I think it was the most restorative bath I have ever had in my life. I felt as if I could lift up and fly to the capital, like Immakuk and Ennikar in Anet’s Chariot, but the Attolian was more down to earth, and he was worried about money. He asked the tavern wife if there was anyone taking a wagon down to the coast in the next few days, someone who might let us ride along. She called a boy out of the tavern, obviously her son, and spoke a few quick words to him.