“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“The river is running the wrong way.”

Let the gods into your life and you rapidly lose faith in the natural laws. The little birds stopped pecking, and they all fell over dead. I had a stomach full of dead birds for a moment as I thought that he meant the river had truly reversed its direction. He only meant that he had been mistaken during the night about which way it was flowing.

The magus sat down and put his head in his hands. “I lost my sense of direction in the town,” he said. “We haven’t been following the river downstream toward the pass. We’ve been going upstream. The ground was rising gradually, but I didn’t notice until we reached this steeper part. I have no idea where we are.”

Sophos sat up blinking just then, so no one noticed my sigh of relief. “What’s the matter?” he asked, looking at the magus, who explained. All he knew was that we were on the far side of the dystopia from the Sea of Olives. That was why the road we were following had turned. Upriver there was no more arable land. There was no way of knowing how far the track we were on might lead us up the river. The ground would rise and get rockier and more difficult to cover. As far as the magus knew, there might be no bridges at all before the dystopia ran into the foot of the mountains, where we would be trapped.

“There’s a trade route on the far side of the river, and I’m sure there are some villages, but I don’t know why any of them would want a bridge to the dystopia.”

“What about this road we’ve been on?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“It’s been getting narrower,” the magus said, “and beyond here it turns into a track and probably dead-ends at the next farm. I went to look.”

“So what do we do?” Sophos asked the magus.

“We keep going,” I said. “We can’t go back without running into a search party.” I rested my head against the stone for another moment. “We’ll stick to the river and hope that there are enough rocks to slow down any horses. There’s no reason for us to have gone this way, and they’ll probably concentrate their searching in the other direction.”

“We could hide in the dystopia for a while,” suggested Sophos. “We could cross it and go back through the Sea of Olives.”

The magus looked sideways at me. “We couldn’t get across the Aracthus.”

“We could wait until Gen is better.”

“What about food?”

Not being at all hungry, I had forgotten about food. “At least we have plenty of water,” I said optimistically, and started to get up. I felt like one of the damaged clocks that my brother sometimes worked on. The magus bent down to give me a hand. Sophos turned to help as well.

“Do you really think that they’ll search for us? Won’t beheading us start a war?” he asked.

I considered the prestige value of cutting the head off one of your enemy’s premier advisors and compared it to the drawbacks of an all-out war. “She might let you two go”—I nodded—“to avoid a war or to delay one until she’s ready.”

“What about you?” Sophos asked.

“She might let me go as well. But she’d probably like best to catch me and let you two slip away.” No one was going to start a war over me, and I could be tremendously useful if I could be induced to work for her. I shivered, and something that wanted to be a groan came out of my mouth as a sigh. We had to stay close to the river because if we were going to be caught, I planned to throw myself in.

Once I was on my feet, momentum carried me forward. We followed a goat track that ran across the rocks right beside the river. The crumbled stones on the path rubbed the skin off the bottom of my feet, but I could see better, and we moved a little faster than before.

As we walked, mostly single file, Sophos continued to talk. “Gen?” he asked. “If you could be anywhere you wanted right now, where would it be?”

I sighed. “In bed,” I said. “In a big bed, with a carved footboard, in a warm room with a lot of windows. And sheets,” I added after I’d taken a few more steps, thinking of them rubbing against my sore feet, “as nice as the ones they sell on the Sacred Way. And a fireplace,” I added, expanding the daydream. “And books.”

“Books?” he asked, surprised.

“Books,” I said firmly, not caring if the magus thought it was odd. “Lots of books. Where would you be?”

“Under the apricot tree in my mother’s garden at the villa. I’d be watching my little sisters play, and anytime I wanted one, I’d reach up and pick another apricot.”

“They aren’t ripe this time of year.”

“Well, say you can be any place any time you like. Where would you be, magus?”

The magus was quiet so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“I’d be in the main temple,” he said at last.

“Urgh,” I said, still associating the temple with boredom—a lot of people chanting and incense everywhere. My new, vehement belief in the gods had made me no more tolerant of the empty mumbling I’d seen in temples all my life.

The magus wasn’t finished. “Watching the marriage of Sounis and Eddis.”

I made a face. “Why are you so keen on this marriage?”

“The king needs an heir, and that heir needs to inherit Eddis as well as Sounis.”

“He does have a nephew,” Sophos pointed out.

“I’m sorry, of course he has an heir,” said the magus. “But he needs a son of his own for the throne to be secure. Which means he needs to have a wife.”

“And why should his heir be entitled to Eddis?” I asked.

He thought I deserved a complete answer, which shows more than anything how much his opinion of me had changed. “Entitled not just to Eddis but to Attolia as well,” he said. “You would have no way of knowing, Gen, but these three countries are free only by a rare combination of circumstances. The earliest invaders overran our country because they wanted us to pay them tribute. They were slowly replaced by the Merchant Empire, which mostly wanted our trade, and those overlords we eventually drove away. We could do that only because the Merchant Empire was busy fighting a greater threat elsewhere, the Medes. The Medes have been trying for a hundred years to expand their empire to span the middle sea. Soon they will want not only our land but to drive us off of it. For years and years they have fought what remains of the Merchant Empire, and while they fight, we are free. But when they are done fighting, Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia must be united to fight the winner or we will be subjugated as we never were before. There will be no Sounis, no Attolia, no Eddis, only Mede.”

“You’re sure the Medes will win?”

“I’m sure.”

It was something to think about while we trudged along. We were rising above the river; the bank grew steeper until it was dropping straight down six or eight feet into the water. We walked on a narrow trail of dirt packed on top of stones. To the left of the trail the stones were piled even higher. The river was narrower and deeper the further we went upstream. I could hear it churning as it forced its way through its narrow channel. The opposite bank was only a few hundred yards away, and once we passed a tiny, empty village. There were no trees, and the sun grew hotter. On our left the stones rose higher, cutting off our line of sight at every twist in the path.