Sometimes I stare at the texture of the bricks and the little wall beside the ridge.

I look at the fish and lilyph on Brook, so familiar I could give them names.

I started the rain that collects in the barrel behind the stable.

I try to see the change in any of it since this madness came over the world.

Somewhere, something in the earth must show the signs of where it came from.

But it is as if the earth could not be bothered to leave one word of testament as we are murdered and our blood slips away.

On the 17th night of the year of the Yellow Horse, a weird young woman stumbled out of November

a pass west of the valley mountains and toward the tiny light she saw in the window of a dark cabin.

The weather was freezing and wet. Six inches of snow had fallen since midday.

The woman was on the verge of starvation and suffering the effects of a rat bite on her left ankle.

For a time as she struggled along, limping badly, feverish, she hallucinated that the light was coming from the heavens above her.

Only when she felt the arm of another human being, the first she had encountered in two weeks of desperate foot travel,

that she understand that she was temporarily safe.

She knew herself only by her first name, Henth. She was 19 years old.

Her savior was an infee bold old man named Cedro Vanden.

He had barely been able to lift his bulk from his chair in the remote cabin that was not his own.

But he had sensed someone out there in the awful night and summoned the strength to rise.

He shared what little bread he had with Henth, gave her tea, and rewrapped her frozen fingers.

When she had recovered her senses, she told him she had been a novitiate at the Green Convent 90 miles away.

Vanden himself had been bishop of Gladden in the time before the singers of songs had claimed the land.

Henth told Vanden that the singers of songs had overrun the Convent at the end of spring.

All 20 of the sisters there had been slaughtered, since then she had been her in her own.

...