“Almost. Even winter doesn’t visit the wastelands. It hisses with steam. They say it came with the devastation.”

“Barbarians believe in the story of the devastation too?”

“It is not your exclusive realm, princess, to know of our origins. Vendans have their stories too.”

His tone was not lost on me. He resented being called a barbarian. But if he could play such a heavy hand with the term royal, tossing it in my face like a handful of mud, why should he expect different from me?

Once we were down from the mountains, the air became warmer again, but at least there was always a breeze sweeping across the plain. For such a great expanse, we came across very few ruins, as if they’d all been swept away by a force greater than time.

When we made camp that night, I gave them the option of untying my hands so I could relieve myself or riding next to me for the remainder of the journey with my clothing soiled. Even barbarians had lines they chose not to cross, and Griz untied me. They didn’t bind me again. They had made their point, an exacting reminder that I was a lowly prisoner and not a guest along for the ride and I had better keep my hands to myself.

The next few days brought more of the same landscape, except when we passed an area where the grass was burned away like a giant scorched footprint. Only a few unburned bundles of straw and some lumps of indiscernible remains were left behind. Green sprigs shot up between the burned stubble, already trying to erase the scar.

No one said anything, but I noticed Eben look away. It didn’t seem possible that this had been a settlement in the middle of nowhere. Why would anyone build a home way out here? More likely it was the result of lightning or an untended vagabond campfire, but I wondered about the few lumps of rot that were melting into the black footprint.

Barbarian.

The word was suddenly tasteless in my mouth.

Several days out, we came upon the substantial ruins of an enormous city, or what was left of one. It rolled out almost as far as I could see. The strange foundations of the ancient town rose above the grass, but none of them were more than waist high, as if one of the giants from my story had used his scythe to evenly mow it all down. I could still see hints of where streets had once run through the stubble of ruins, but now they were covered with grass, not cobble. A shallow brook trickled down the middle of one street.

Stranger than the half-mown city and streets of grass were the animals roaming through it. Herds of large deerlike creatures with finely marked coats grazed among the ruins. Their elegant ribbed horns were longer than my arm. When they saw us, they scattered, jumping and clearing the low walls with a dancer’s grace.

“Luckily they’re skittish,” Kaden said. “Their horns could be deadly.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“We call them miazadel—creatures with spears. I’ve only seen their herds here and a little farther south, but there are animals throughout the savanna that you won’t see anywhere else.”

“Deadly ones?”

“Some. They say they come from faraway worlds and the Ancients brought them here as pets. After the devastation, they were loosed, and some flourished. “At least that’s what one of Venda’s songs say.”

“That’s where you get your history? I thought you said she was mad.”

“Maybe not in all things.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone having one of those exotic creatures as a pet. Perhaps the Ancients really were just a step below the gods.

I thought about the gods a lot as we traveled. It was as if the landscape demanded it. Somehow they were larger in this never-ending vastness, greater than the gods confined to the Holy Text and the rigid world of Civica. Here they seemed greater in their reach. Unknowable, even for the Royal Scholar and his army of word pickers. Faraway worlds? I felt as if I was already in one, and yet there were more? What other worlds had they created—or abandoned like this one?

I put two fingers to the air for my own sacrilege, a habit instilled in me, though I did it with none of the sincerity that surely the gods required. I smiled for the first time in days, thinking of Pauline. I hoped she wasn’t worrying about me. She had the baby to think of now, but of course I knew she did worry. She was probably going to the Sacrista every day to offer prayers for me. I hoped the gods were listening.

We camped amid this once grand but now forgotten city, and while Kaden and Finch went to find some small game for dinner, Griz, Eben, and Malich unsaddled and tended the horses. I said I would gather firewood, though precious little wood looked to be available here. Down by the brook, there was a copse of tall bushes. Maybe I’d find some dry branches there. I brushed my hair as I walked. I had vowed I wouldn’t let them turn me back into the animal I’d been when I had arrived at the vagabond camp, filthy, with matted hair and devouring food with my fingers … little more than animals.

I paused, my fingers lingering on a knot, twisting it, thinking of my mother and the last time she had brushed my hair. I was twelve. I had done my own hair for years at that point, except for special occasions when an attendant arranged it, but that morning my mother said she’d take care of it. Every detail of that day was still vivid, a rare dawn in January when the sun rose warm and bright, a day that had no right to be so cheerful. Her fingers had been gentle, methodical, her low aimless hum like the wind between the trees making me forget why she was arranging my hair, but then her hand paused on my cheek, and she whispered in my ear, Close your eyes if you need to. No one will know. But I hadn’t closed my eyes, because I was only twelve and had never attended a public execution.