"I'm sorry, I cannot sell any of it to you," the merchant repeated, his voice terse, his face turned away. "It's all been... reserved." He stood in his barn, his legs spread apart, his arms crossed over his chest. Behind him, firewood was piled up in neat stacks reaching up to the rafters.

"Is that so," Kaya replied, looking at him with narrowed eyes. "That is strange. You know, I have just been to your neighbor's barn, and she also said that all the firewood had been reserved and she could not sell me any. Someone has been reserving an incredible amount of firewood around here. I wonder who that may be?"

"None of your business," the merchant gave back gruffly, turning away, his posture tense. "Couldn't tell you. Various people."

Kaya looked down on the ground. Her scar was beginning to show, an angry pale line across her dark brow.

"Just go," the man said, his voice low, almost pleading, his face averted.

Kaya nodded slowly. "I will," she said. "I won't put you at risk. I can see that you have been threatened. There is danger, and it is up to you to decide how much of it you are willing to face. It is your life and your decision, not mine. I have no right to take it for you."

Kaya looked up at the merchant's face, speaking with quiet intensity. "You know that my livelihood depends on this. I am running a warmlings oven, and without firewood, I cannot run it. I have been buying wood with you all these years. So you know. You also know that I want us all to participate in the Choosing. Like everyone else in Yurvania. They don't get threatened for it. They don't have to risk their lives or their livelihoods for it. If we do, here in Shebbetin, then there's something wrong, very wrong. We know there is. We have been suffering from this for ages. And we will set it right."

Her eyes sparkled. "There are many ways to contribute. You decide. What is it that you can give, and when you are ready to do it." With one last long gaze into his eyes, Kaya inclined her head and left.

* * *

The moon had grown half-full again and was looking in through Kaya's window with a pale evening face. Kaya tapped the dwindling pile of firewood behind her oven. "We cannot go on like this," she sighed, turning to Slunyew and Ngyrya. "People are very brave, smuggling firewood to us in small bundles. But, really, this isn't working. They are all taking risks, and what for?"

Kaya grumbled. "We still keep running out of wood. And, worse, we keep running. From one secret meeting place to another. We have no time left to do anything else any more." She sighed again.

Slunyew underlined her words with a deep bear rumble, tugging relentlessly at a white curl beneath his cap.

Ngyrya wrapped her shawl more tightly around her big turban. She cleared her throat. "Perhaps we could buy directly from the traders, when they come up from the valley? They come from outside Shebbetin. Surely, Naydeer would not have threatened them?"

Kaya looked at Ngyrya thoughtfully. "No, she would not. Not yet, anyway. She does not expect us to do this."

Kaya ran her hand over a chopped bit of wood, slowly, teasingly, as if beckoning an answer to come forth from its midst. "We would have to buy very much. Not only to be independent for the rest of the winter, but also because those traders only sell bulk. They sell to barns, not to individual people. We might just make it into their field of vision if we buy wood for the oven for half a year."

Kaya turned around to face Ngyrya. "And we would have to pay upfront. All that coin, ready in advance."

* * *

Enim cleared his throat. "I was wondering," he said, stealing a glance at Manaam's lounging figure, "if you would be able to lend me some coin." He cleared his throat again. "I have some rather large expenses coming up. I do have regular income, of course, and will be able to put a small amount aside each moon. However, since I'll have to give the whole sum upfront right now, I am not able to do it without help."

Enim bent his head, then looked up, directly into Manaam's eyes. "I can, of course," he said in a low voice, "tell you what exactly these expenses are. And why they are necessary. I will tell you, everything, and honestly. If you wish to know."

Manaam held his gaze. "No." He leaned back in his chair. "No need. Not at all. I am not involved in any of this, it is not my affair. And I will be able to honestly say that to anyone who might ask. All I have done is lend coin to a friend, an artificer working for me, who had some personal expenses he could not cover at the time." Manaam looked at Enim with a wry half-smile. "And I was able to help out."

* * *

Kaya hauled down a last batch from the cart. Slunyew, Ngyrya, and a handful of others were busily carrying the wood in, stacking it up nicely, finding some clever arrangement to make such a huge delivery fit into the various rooms and nooks of the oven house.

"Excellent," Kaya beamed at the merchant. "Very good, indeed. Thank you so much." She wiped the sweat off her brow that had formed there even in the winter air.

"So," Kaya continued, "you are staying in Shebbetin till tomorrow, and then headed back?"

The woman nodded.

"You're at the Sky Inn?" Kaya got another nod for this, and went on, "A very nice inn. I like it. I sometimes have meals there with my friends, and I have met some very good new people there too," she smiled up at the merchant, and got a friendly grunt in reply.

* * *

The merchant sat in the tap room of the Sky Inn finishing up the last spoonfuls of thick broth, feeling grateful for rest and nourishment. People around her were laughing and debating, and tuneful songs in several voices drifted in from the back room. She let out a deep sigh, leaning back in her chair and stretching her legs out under the table.

"Excuse me," a voice said. She turned her head and her mouth fell open. The woman standing beside her was a butterfly. The merchant stared. She had seen a butterfly before, from a distance. But this... this was... She stared some more. This butterfly was like an apparition. Of incredible beauty. An ethereal being from a fay world. A shimmering gold-green, with dark green hair flowing down her back, billowing out like a cloud. Her body was round, and full, and only a few feet away.

The merchant closed her mouth with a conscious effort.

"Good evening," the butterfly said in a warm, melodious voice. "I am sorry to interrupt you like this. You are the wood merchant come up from the valley, aren't you? My friends have mentioned you to me. I hope you would not mind if I joined you for a while?" She let her voice end in a question, her eyebrows slightly raised, a soft smile playing around her lips.

The merchant nodded, or shook her head. She gestured vaguely toward the chair beside her and made room.

*

They had emptied their mugs, gotten fresh ones, and emptied those as well. Cahuan was toying with hers, softly turning it this way and that, spreading the spilled drops on the boards out more evenly. "You see," she said, "this is how it is, around here." She let go of the mug, laying her hand down flat on the table like a conclusion. "So if anyone comes up to you telling you stories, weigh them carefully. Should they try to intimidate you, or bribe you, you know who they are. And you can choose, freely, consciously, who you want to be yourself." Cahuan finished with a gleam in her eye.

The merchant's head was spinning.

Behind her back, a thin young man with a meticulous hairstyle entered the inn and silently moved closer until he came to a halt right behind their table. For a moment, he just stood there, his angular body stiff and rigid.

Cahuan turned and froze.

Joonster looked down at her with an expressionless face. His voice was low, monotonous. "You will excuse us. We have business to discuss."

Cahuan's throat was dry. She knew very well who Joonster was. But she did not know what to do. She looked at the merchant, who said nothing.

"Well, I am sure it will not take very long," Cahuan decided. "I will simply wait." She got up and sat down at a table by the wall, nearby and in full view of the two on them.

Joonster seemed annoyed, although Cahuan could not have said how she thought she could tell that from his restrained demeanor. She watched Joonster talk.

She had meant to go to the merchant again afterward. But when Joonster stood up and seemed ready to leave, it was to him rather than to the woman that Cahuan turned, following some spontaneous impulse.

"Joonster," she said somewhat shyly, "will you come and sit with me too for a little while?"

Joonster halted. He wavered, his thin face pale and impassive. Then he nodded, very cautiously, and took a step away from her at the same time.

Cahuan exhaled. They sat down, stiff and awkward.

"I know you are working for Naydeer," Cahuan began, a little hoarsely. "I assume you have come here tonight to tell the merchant that it is not a good idea to sell wood to the likes of Kaya."

Cahuan cleared her throat. "I am working with Kaya. And I have come here tonight to say that it is a very good idea to sell wood to the likes of Kaya." She paused. "No," she amended, "not true. This is not exactly what I have told the merchant. That is not what matters most either."

Her voice was gaining strength. "I have told her about life in Shebbetin, as I see it. How people have no access to healers. How children are locked up in work cabins, and how we even have to struggle to take part in the Choosing. About all the things that are missing in Shebbetin, even though they exist everywhere else in Yurvania. Why not here? And why should that idea be so much of a threat? Trying to get healers and learning into Shebbetin. Why? These are good things, for everybody, aren't they?"

Cahuan looked at Joonster, her eyes intense. Then she dropped her gaze. "I am sorry. I did not mean to petition you like this. You don't have to reply to that. These are the things I care about. This is what we work for. But you know that already, I suppose. And you know, just as well as I do, what I am talking about. You have lived through all of this yourself. You are one of us, after all, one of the people of Shebbetin, who have a life like that."

Cahuan's restless fingers pulled at her cuff, and a piece of knitting fell from her sleeve pocket. A half-finished cap for a small head in need of warmth. It had slipped off the needle, and all her craft and labor was unraveling. Cahuan caressed the thick fabric in the middle, as if the artful loops might tell her what to do next.

When Cahuan finally spoke again, her voice was soft and low. "I do not know what kind of strain you are under, what pressure. What you have gotten yourself into with Naydeer, and why. I don't know what sort of orders you have received, or will receive in the future."

She bit her lip. "I am scared. Very scared. Where is all of this going?"

Joonster made no move. His face was expressionless, unreadable.

The woolen thread wrapped around Cahuan's finger so tightly it cut off the flow of blood. "Will you ever be ordered to hurt one of us? Or kill us? And if so—would you do it? Where will you draw the line?"

Cahuan let her hand circle back, freeing herself. "Would you be able to get out? If you wanted to?"

She did not expect an answer, as he must have known. She was still speaking as if to herself, thinking out loud, letting the questions hang in the air. Giving voice to the questions that hung in the air, in their lives, anyway.

"If you wanted to get out and needed help, would you come to us?" she asked.

Joonster snorted. The first actual reaction she had gotten from him. "You have some amazing powers, I gather, that would save me from harm?" he sneered.

Cahuan smiled, bitterly, with him. "No," she said. "I do not."

She pulled on the woolen string, unraveling yet another bit of set pattern.

"Actually," she amended, "I do not know what powers I have. I keep finding out, each time I try. And I am often surprised. Both ways," she added wryly.