“Weigh down that corner there,” Yechvan commanded. Since the parley earlier that day, he’d been frantically searching for the advantage Telu Myrrh had discovered, arranging and rearranging the worn stones on the map to depict the last known troop locations and their likely destinations. “I said cover it. Gods be damned, do I have to do everything myself?”

  He unfurled the map and slammed a whetstone atop one side, stabbed a knife into the other. Another insufferable gust licked at the tent flaps and the edges of the parchment. The torch protested, blinking out before flaring back to life. Yechvan’s eyes readjusted as he reset the troops to their proper locations.

  A babe wailed, its cry cutting swaths through the howling wind. “To whom are you speaking?” came a woman’s voice.

  “What in the thirteen hells?” Yechvan looked up and realized for the first time that his three companions slept peacefully in their cots, Ulula and Zu competing for the volume and length of their snores. It was a wonder Grask could sleep through it.

  Yechvan wheeled on the human woman sitting on his cot. She was bleeding all over his bed. The babe cradled in her arms was covered in wet and gore, the boy’s fine tuft of inky hair slicked back, tiny dingu dwarfed by the thick cord that fed into her skirts.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She lowered her shift and offered her nipple to the boy, who sucked greedily, groping her breast with a minuscule hand. “I can only keep him quiet by feeding him.”

  Yechvan managed a weak smile for the person who’d taught him to read and write, who had always been his favorite teacher. She’d discovered Yechvan’s gift for tactics, fostered and fed it. He had known her to be a good woman. How she must have angered the gods to be trapped in the afterlife with a hungry, horrified babe that never aged or grew. A child that had never even drawn breath in life.

  “It is good to see you, Fareel,” Yechvan said at last.

  “You as well.” She returned his smile. Tired, pale lips flattened across moon-white teeth. So furious was the babe that he detached his lips and, mouth full of milk, screamed. Rather than admonishing the child, she rocked him and lifted pleading eyes to Yechvan.

  “I heard you died while I was fighting in the Great Northern War,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Is the father still…?”

  “Damned if I know or care,” she spat. “I only spent one night with him before he answered the call to fight.”

  “Why have you come?” Yechvan asked.

  “Eroa take me, but I am none the wiser,” Fareel swore. She stood and bounced the babe while he roared. “It seems you are struggling to focus. You used to have that problem as a child. Do you remember when you first learned to read? You would try to read all the runes at once and then get overwhelmed. You did the same thing when you first started to play Thrice, trying to visualize the entire board, calculate every possibility.”

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  “Gru, I had forgotten you were the one who taught me to play.”

  She had introduced him to the game, though he hadn’t grasped its beauty, its complexity, its intricacies until he was under the tutelage of Dorin Sen in Hodu.

  She gestured toward the map. “You are doing that now. Trying to see every move, every scenario. You must instead slow down and find your suto. You must direct your senses to a smaller group and then smaller and smaller until you discover what is out of place, until you can hear what your intuition is telling you.”

  Yechvan turned back to the table. “What is out of place. See the forest for the trees, except in reverse. I must focus on a single tree…in the forest.”

  Fareel vanished and reappeared in an instant, seated across from him. She tried to coax the babe to suckle, but he wouldn’t. He wailed, and Yechvan lost his concentration.

  Reluctantly, Yechvan tore his gaze from the map, ready to be done with the distraction. “Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing toward the child.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to make him stop,” Fareel replied. “Nor do I know how to leave.”

  She’d been a compassionate and understanding teacher and, under normal circumstances, Yechvan would have welcomed her company. But he was on the verge of a breakthrough that could be the key to saving his people. If he didn’t listen at just the right moment to the fleeting susurrations as they sparked to life in the dark corners of his mind, there was no telling when or if those whispers might once again alight. He looked through the woman’s spectral figure, his gaze fixed on some distant point.

  “Congratulations on your recent victory,” she said, vying for his attention. “Many of the spirits are discussing it; some are wagering on the war’s outcome. I tell everyone not to bet against you, but few pay me heed. They treat me as something of a pariah. There is a kind of hierarchy in the afterlife, if you can believe that.”

  Yechvan laughed. “In life you were selective in your choice of company. Why would you care in death?”

  “I don’t, much,” she admitted. “But it gets lonely sometimes. It isn’t as though my child is growing.”

  Yechvan wanted to ask if she could rid herself of the boy, but he wasn’t sure that was kind. Perhaps she cared for the child. For his part, he found nothing favorable in the situation: a babe who needed protection and food and attention, who would never give, only take. Instead, he asked, “How did it happen?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Fareel stood to display the sheet of blood cascading from beneath her shift. “He was stillborn.” And she had died during an undoubtedly long and painful birthing.

  “Was anyone there with you?”

  “The midwife,” she replied. “It was the middle of the night, and we were lean on help in the orphan’s ward. Since many of the older children followed you and Zu to the front when the war broke out, the attendants were needed elsewhere. The few remaining orphans were barely more than babes themselves and unable to aid the midwife. By the time she summoned someone from the castle, I was gone.”

  There were orphans aplenty after the war, but again, he thought better of speaking.

  “Why do you hold your tongue with me? You rarely do with others.”

  “You taught me it is oft better to listen.”

  “I’m glad to see you learned a thing or two.” She smiled once more, an exhausted, defeated smile.

  Yechvan’s attention wandered back to the map.

  “Shut out all the noise,” Fareel said, her voice now a mere whisper over his shoulder, in his ear. “And listen.”