The lake water was very cold, and the breeze that blew along the beach was tight and held the chill of autumn coiled inside of it. Cloedeya had led Manrie and Little Praeda onto the strand and shown them the valghasta that the outgoing tide had left tangled in the pebbles. He had shown them how to bundle it so that the inner strands would stay sweet and lemon flavored, while the drying strands on the outside would take on a ripe, licorice flavor. Yet he had done so pragmatically, quickly, his manner glum, and with none of his usual effusions over flavor. And then he had disappeared, going back up to House Zairiset to collect the wagons and take them to the bridge, where the feast would be held when evening came.

  Without his enthusiasm, the task of collecting the grass was just a chore. Manrie tried to make it more fun by channeling his voice. “This grass will make your teeth feel as if they had been scoured with sunlight, and banish the memory of every bad taste you’ve ever had in your mouth.” Praeda looked at it suspiciously. Manrie tried again. “Its flavor will cool your throat. You’ll feel like you’re drinking sherbet for days after you eat it.”

  “No it won’t,” Praeda said.

  Manrie sighed and bent forward to gather more grass. It was the height of summer and yet the morning sunlight was weak. As if its heat had been strained out by the witch’s malevolence as it slanted across her island in the middle of the lake.

  “May I help you?” a voice asked, and she glanced back to see one of the daughters-in-law of House Zairiset standing behind her. The tall and beautiful one. Her sharp cheekbones and the tight bridge of her nose brought her face forward, as if she were constantly leaning in to hear the answer to some question. Her eyes were silver but flecked with gray, the colors so similar that Manrie wanted to study the difference. She was fascinated by those eyes as the clean, eager face turned towards Praeda and the morning sunlight shone through them as if they were water. Her hair was amethyst touched by silver, and looked very soft. Seeing it made Manrie’s fingers tingle.

  “It’s boring work,” Manrie told her. “It will spoil your robes.”

  The woman looked at her and she found herself blushing. “It took me seventeen days to make these robes, to spin the thread and weave the cloth and cut it and sew it. If I spoil them, I can hide in my chambers for another seventeen days, making another set.” She flashed a sudden grin, then knelt on the sandy pebbles and began to gather the valghasta in her long hands.

  “Let me…let me show you how,” Manrie said, and knelt next to her. She willed Praeda to come and join them, thinking that the little girl could somehow screen her from the intensity of the woman’s presence. But Praeda wandered down the strand to stand at the edge of the water, throwing pebbles into the lake.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked.

  Manrie was tempted to give her a false name, or rather a secret one, a name that only this woman would know. But she said the two drab syllables of her real name instead, and felt a spark of anger at her own embarrassment.

  “I’m Koenbahki,” the woman said with a little twitch to her mouth. “It’s not much better than Manrie.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Pruetahna is always saying that it’s a common name. A common name for a common girl, she says. Sindri says I should ignore her, but Sindri loves Alohwa, so everything is easier for her.”

  “You don’t love your husband?”

  Again the mouth twitched. Thin lips, but pert and humorous. Manrie wanted her to taste one of the strands of valghasta. “I should, I suppose, and we try. He’s very kind to me. And I try to sound like Sindri and Pruetahna, although no one can really sound like Pruetahna. She sounds like a flock of crows fleeing a roof when she’s in the throes. And Sindri makes little squeaking sounds, like an axle that needs grease. But I’ve promised not to make fun of her for it.”

  “It is…” Manrie tried to pick her words carefully, “an embarrassing house to be in.”

  “Yes. And the slaves are always tittering about us, although it’s Pruetahna that they find most amusing. But Jandro seems to love her. It’s amazing. I never thought that he could love anyone, all the time that we were growing up. He was selling scraps from his father’s sweet shop to the rest of us from the time that he could walk. Never gave anything away. Never wanted to trade. He only wanted money. I suspect that’s what he wants now. Maybe he thinks of Pruetahna as one big coin.”

  “She’s kind of coin shaped,” Manrie said shyly, and then, quickly, “her posture, I mean.”

  Koenbahki laughed, a high, ringing sound that seemed too big for her body. It was ungainly and a little crude, the laugh of a kitchen slave, not of a scholar. Its reverberated off of the cliffs behind them and made her suddenly shy. She bent and gathered another skein of valghasta. Waves lapped the beach, and Manrie looked for Praeda. She was still throwing stones into the chill water.

  “You knew her husband, when you were children?” Manrie prompted. It took courage to say it, which annoyed her. Why should she be afraid of talking to this woman?

  “Oh yes. We all grew up in Yenceyan, Jandro, Sindri, and me. And then Mueslahvin began his revolt.” Her voice faltered. “My father was a great admirer of Mueslahvin. Soldiers came to the door, and we fled, following Mueslahvin and his men to the fort.” She raised her head and looked to the west. “A tinker came through yesterday morning. She said there had been a great battle. That Mueslahvin is dead.”

  Manrie considered what she knew of Yenceyan. She had heard the name Mueslahvin before. “Wasn’t he the king’s friend?”

  “He was the king’s seneschal. He was a good man. He cared for the people, and the nobles hated him for it.”

  “And your family was with him?”

  She nodded. There were tears in her eyes. “Jandro came to the fort and said that he had met a rich woman in Raesidae, and that she was looking for wives for her two sons. My father insisted that I go with him. He didn’t say it out loud, but I think he knew that they were doomed. All of the people who had followed Mueslahvin.” She dropped her gaze. She gathered a skein of valghasta with her long fingers. “So Sindri married Alohwa and I married Craejo and now I live in a house where I must low like a cow every night or pretend that I have my flow.” Her fingers shredded the valghasta as she spoke. Realizing what she was doing, she attempted an apologetic grin. “We’ve met before,” she said. “You don’t remember me.”

  Manrie dropped a handful of valghasta in surprise. “You and me?”

  Uncertainty flashed in Koenbahki’s eyes. “Weren’t you with Cloedeya when he came to Yenceyan?”

  “Me? No. I’ve only known him…” Manrie paused. “For two moons. Even less. Since just before Hiraherra.”

  “But…” the beautiful face went still, and then the woman laughed. “Of course. It couldn’t have been you. That was ten years ago, and you would have been a child. I was a child myself, and I thought that the girl with him was very sophisticated.”

  “Girl? Was it Big Praeda?”

  “No, that wasn’t her name. She had hair like yours, though.”

  “No one in the caravan has hair of my color.”

  A shrug. “Then she must have gone somewhere else. But I followed her around for days. She was nice to me. Cloedeya came to prepare a feast for the funeral of the king’s uncle. He asked my father if he could use the bakery, and my father said yes, of course. Beautiful bread came out of the ovens, then, and my father’s bread has been better ever since.” A pause. “Was better.” She sighed, looking inward, gathering herself. Another weak smile. “Cloedeya kept thanking him for teaching him how to truly bake. My father loved Cloedeya. He named my youngest brother after him. They had a feast for me and Sindri, the night before we left the fort. Father kept telling everyone that his daughter would be living in the house where Cloedeya was born, although it’s not true. Cloedeya was born in one of the clients’ shacks to the west.”

  “He seems very unhappy here,” Manrie ventured, but her mind was on her mysterious predecessor. She hadn’t thought that people would leave the caravan, or had assumed that they’d be talked about, if they did.

  “Everyone is unhappy here,” Koenbahki said. She paused and shrugged again. “Because of the witch.”

  Praeda, bored of skipping pebbles, came walking back along the strand. “Manrie, don’t you have enough of that already?” she asked her little voice sharp with boredom.

  “Cloedeya doesn’t seem to remember me,” the girl said quickly. “He looked right at me last night and didn’t seem to see me. Could you…could you ask him if I might join you? Just to help with the feast tonight, of course.”

  “Just for tonight’s feast?”

  The woman blushed. To cover her embarrassment she stood and wiped sand from the knees of her robes. “Yes, of course. What else?”

  Manrie occupied herself with bundling the sheaths of valghasta together. “If you like.”

  Koenbahki loitered for a moment, then said, “Well, I really have ruined my robes. I’ll go and scrub them. The day should be warm enough to dry them. You will ask him?”

  “Yes.”

  Manrie took her time tying the valghasta bundle, and then asked Praeda to help her strap it to her back. By the time she stood, bent under its weight, Koenbahki had disappeared up the beach. “She was very beautiful,” Manrie said, because she had to say it to someone.

  “She only talked about herself,” Praeda said. Yet when they arrived back at Zairiset House, she ran up to Cloedeya and said, “One of the wives wants to help with the cooking.”

  He stared down at her with a distracted expression on his face. The wagons were packed up and were just about to turn out of the stable yard and go down the long tunnel into the street. “The wives?” he asked.

  “Her name is Koenbahki,” Manrie said, coming up to them. “She says she knew you in Yenceyan.”

  His mismatched eyes widened. “The baker’s daughter.”

  Manrie nodded.

  “Well, we can always use the extra hands. But I have already been to the kitchens here and asked the cook to manage the baking for tonight.” He picked Praeda up and put her on the back of the horse, then pulled on the reins and the sleeping wagon started forward. It was too late for Manrie to deposit her burden in the pantry wagon, so she walked beside him.

  “You should get another wagon,” she suggested. “It’s getting too cramped for me and Praeda and Uku.”

  She was afraid that he would say that it wasn’t needed, that they would all be gone from the caravan soon. Instead he nodded. “I had thought to, when we got here. I’ve known the Nahrm wagonwright since childhood. Perhaps tomorrow.” He glanced at her, seemed to notice her distress, and said. “Tomorrow I will ask him to start building one. But we will have to return here for it. We’ll leave for the Man on the Mountain’s house in the morning.”

  Manrie was certain that her relief showed on her face. “I don’t like it here. Everyone is unhappy. They don’t seem to care that we’ve returned the dead to their graves.”

  “They care,” he said. “Only they are used to a certain mood. Because of the witch, or their belief in her. She only curses some of them, yet everyone is cursed in Raesidae.”

  “But not you.”

  He smiled then, the first time he had smiled since they came into the town. “I found that one can run away from curses. Or at least from a cursed place.”

  “Why do you come back here, then?” She was surprised by the frustration in her voice.

  He considered the question. “I always say that it’s because they need me the most. The worst places need me the most. But I wonder if…well, the only thing that can counter a curse is a blessing. And blessings are easy to make. The land itself blesses us with food. It feels…necessary to bring that blessing here.”

  They came onto the bridge, the horses’ hooves clattering on the slabs of stone and the wagon wheels sending a shudder of sound to meet the voice of the river below. Cloedeya led the wagons to a resting place at the center of the bridge’s span, pressed tightly up against the north wall. As soon as he had done so, another wagon appeared on the eastern bank and began trundling across. The bridge was wide enough to hold at least four wagons, passing abreast each other. This wagon was open, and loaded high with casks. “Salt fish,” Cloedeya said. “The Jahnajeel sending their trade goods to Yenceyan.”

  “Not in a caravan?”

  “The King of Yenceyan keeps patrols on the road. Word is that there was a revolt, but it’s been put down. The roads are safe. The people west of the mountains are considered primitive, but in many ways they are better organized than eastern people.”

  Cloedeya fell silent again as he lifted Little Praeda down from the horse and turned back to the wagon to open the side. Melsa and Big Praeda, emerging from the other wagon, were also more silent than usual. Melsa took the bundle of valghasta and inspected it, giving Manrie a weak smile. Shortly thereafter Uku and Taeyaho appeared carrying large baskets. They had been collecting among the houses, and disgorged a cornucopia of fish and early summer vegetables. These served to lighten Cloedeya’s mood. Manrie was set to shelling peas, which her hands had learned to do automatically. She watched the others as she worked. Taeyaho was still beautiful, she thought, but his beauty had dimmed somehow. She could look at him easily now, without a sense of shy surprise. Uku was not beautiful, but the memory of her fingers in his mouth made her flush, and she wanted to lay her head against his broad stomach. Attraction, she thought, was a strange thing, and as she worked she imagined making an entry in the bestiary, a composite creature that was Taeyaho and Uku and Koenbahki as she stood on the beach, not a monster necessarily, but something that stood just beyond the possible, and looked like people do when bright sunlight obscures their features.

  A figure appeared on the west end of the bridge, and she blushed, thinking that it was Koenbahki. But then she looked again, and saw that it was a veiled figure, and a half-shelled pea pod dropped from her hand. She looked around for her friends. “Uku,” she called. He was sharpening knives at the end of the table where she was working. He followed her gaze. Cloedeya came out of the pantry wagon. He stared at the figure. Then he strode towards her. He was carrying a bunch of carrots, and for a frivolous moment Manrie thought that he meant to use them as a weapon. But he paused on the bridge and laid them down on the stones, as if they were an offering.

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  The figure walked forward. She walked past him without turning her head. In the morning sunlight Manrie could see that her clothes were made of tatters. As if she had gathered and dried sea grasses, and sewn them into a veiled headdress and robes. She was tall and she walked imperiously. If she had been passing through a field, she would have expected the blades of grass to bend out of her way. She came abreast of the wagons but her head didn’t turn towards them. A gull that had been wheeling above the bridge let out a cry and suddenly dived for a loaf of bread, as if ordered to distract the caravaners. Manrie became aware of someone sobbing. She thought it might be the woman, then realized that it was Little Praeda. It was daylight and the spirits were vanquished, and still she panicked in her thoughts, trying to remember where Praeda’s veil had gotten to. Then the woman was gone, disappearing down the road to House Jahnajeel.

  Cloedeya brought his carrots back to the wagon. He was pale, and also oddly embarrassed. “What is it?” Melsa asked him, her voice tense.

  He wouldn’t answer, but Tafaemi, who had been lounging in the opening of the sleeping wagon, said “Isn’t it obvious? That was the witch.”

  “The witch?” Melsa said, then gave a dismissive laugh.

  “Yes, of course. And you said she wasn’t real.”

  “Even if she is real, she never leaves her island.”

  “Cloedeya thought it was the witch.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Melsa turned to him. “Did you Cloedeya?”

  “Why else would he offer her carrots?”

  Cloedeya’s expression was pinched. He seemed to be holding a silent argument with himself. “She felt…” he looked around, as if hoping someone could find words for him.

  “She felt like the dead beside the river,” Taeyaho said. “On the other bank. That first night that Manrie and Little Praeda were with us.”

  “But the dead are back in the barrow,” Manrie objected.

  “Yes,” Cloedeya said miserably. “I know they are. But Taeyaho is right. It felt the same.”

  Tafaemi snorted. “You will tell yourselves anything, to deny that there’s a witch.”

  “I don’t deny it,” Cloedeya said. “I only say that people use the witch as an excuse to do whatever they want.”

  “We are talking too much about this,” Big Praeda said brusquely. She had resumed her task of picking through the valghasta and sorting out the fresh from the dried. The others began to return to their tasks.

  “Hello,” a new voice said, and they all looked and saw that Koenbahki had come onto the bridge. She was wearing the same robes, which were dark around the knees where she had scrubbed them. She had caught her silver and amethyst hair in a kerchief, and her sharp, clean features looked suddenly girlish. As if she had dismissed ten years of aging with a change in hairstyle. *She’s my age,* Manrie thought, and wondered if she herself were capable of the same trick, if people noticed her shifting from girl to woman throughout the day.

  “Koenbahki,” Cloedeya said, and there was relief in his voice, and his usual kindness. He set the carrots down and went to her. “I remember you as a little girl! I am sorry I didn’t recognize you last night. We were tired, and your mother-in-law is…somewhat distracting.”

  Koenbahki laughed. “She enjoys shocking people. Was she always like that?”

  A shadow crossed his face, but he smiled through it. “She used to be very beautiful. All of the patriarchs were in love with her, and her husband could not contain her. But there was a joy in this place because of her, despite the jealousies. I was too young to wonder how she might age.”

  Koenbahki nodded. “I’ve heard some of that. They even say that she was the mistress of Odril Jahnajeel, and that poor Maedreth was made to watch them together.”

  “Is she still alive? Maedreth?”

  “It’s hard to tell, because of her curse.”

  “What curse?” Little Praeda asked, reminding them that she was listening.

  Koenbahki knelt to address her directly, a friendly, easy-going gesture that didn’t seem to lessen Praeda’s suspicion of her. “She never wants to be seen. People make jokes about it. How you can be alone in a room and then have a feeling that someone has come in, and a little voice says ‘don’t see me.’ It’s even become a game among the children. But the funny thing is that people don’t really see her anymore. Not even her own children. Of course, they have their own curses to worry about.”

  Little Praeda turned her face away and buried it in the skirts of Manrie’s robe, but Manrie was curious. “What curses?”

  Koenbahki turned her face up, and Manrie felt her breath catch in her throat. “Haelahza always has her words stolen by other people, and Braedsmi never notices anything that isn’t delightful, and Nuhrmer stinks. Braedsmi never notices, and Nuhrmer never hears Haelahza when she tries to tell him to take a bath, and so they’re all cursed together.”

  Manrie laughed. “Well, that’s horrible,” she said, and then worried about how her reaction would be perceived.

  But Koenbahki winked. “It is horrible. Wait until you meet them. Only now they wear veils all the time, and say that the dead are whispering in their ears.”

  This seemed to bother Cloedeya. “Not anymore,” he said tersely, and turned back to the other table, coddling his carrots in his arms.

  Koenbahki’s face fell. “Did I offend him?”

  “I don’t know,” Manrie whispered to her. “Everybody is in a bad mood. Do you want to help me with the peas?”

  They worked together throughout the morning. Koenbahki’s hands were long and her fingers were agile. She sorted the good peas from the bad. Manrie found her work slackening as she watched those slim fingers picking up and casting aside the pods that had were too fibrous, their hardness indicating that the peas inside of them would be inedible. It brought her back to a memory from her childhood. Her father’s hand picking between sheafs of grain, and her mother’s worried voice, saying that all of the grain had come from the same field, and now half of it was inedible, the husks too hard to thresh, the kernels inside too small to produce enough flour.

  “Cloedeya?” she called, to escape the memory, “why do crops go bad?”

  He looked up at her, and the gaze of one eye wandered past her while the other focused worriedly on her face. “We don’t know. It never happened in my youth. Famines were caused by locusts then. Or drought. Now, sometimes the land simply decided to return to the wild.” Then he shrugged, and smiled. “But there is so much land. We never go hungry.”

  At noon they all gathered around one of the tables and ate. Cloedeya had made a wonderful curry, and he watched their faces anxiously as they sampled it, as if worried that it might taste of his dolorousness. But it was delicious, tasting of citrus and anise from the valghasta, and cumin and cinnamon, turmeric and ginger. The fish nestled inside it was so tender that it fell apart in Manrie’s fingers, and she worried that Koenbahki would find her coarse, but the other girl ate with so much relish that the front of her robes became smeared with the yellow sauce. She laughed when she noticed, and Manrie laughed to, and then looked around at the others, to see if their laughter would catch. But the rest were intent upon their plates. All but Uku, who was looking at her with an expression of regret. “We’re making a mess,” she called to him, and he said “smear, muddle, disarray.”

  Koenbahki seemed unbothered by the sadness of the others, and after lunch they went to the foot of the bridge and washed the plates in river water. “We’re hundreds of miles from the World’s Teeth,” she said, “but I still think I can feel the ice in the river. Even in summer. Pruetahna makes the slaves heat a bath for her every day, but I prefer bathing in the river. I come down here with Ahleis Nahrm and Waendha and Naepinghi Ehwaeya.”

  “You have friends here,” Manrie said, feeling almost disappointed.

  “Friends? I suppose so. It’s funny, I’ve had other people around me all of my life. Other children to play with, boys to flirt with. But when something happens to you, well…well then you know whether all of those people are really friends.” Then she grinned. She was refusing sadness. As if she had commanded that this would be a happy day for her, a day when grieving would be set aside. “Where are you from, Manrie?”

  “Libreigia,” Manrie said, and Koenbahki’s eyes widened.

  “Libreigia! But that’s on the other side of the mountains!”

  “Yes. But just on the other side. Not nearly as far away as Drachahda or Lawhahkla.”

  “Are you going to tell me you’ve been there, too?”

  “Well, yes. I’ve been to most places. I traveled with my master. And sometimes alone.”

  “Not with Cloedeya?”

  “No, although he’s been most places, too.”

  “All I’ve ever been is here and Yenceyan. Although I traveled halfway to Ispilu once.”

  She made Manrie tell her about all the places they’d traveled, and the afternoon passed quickly as they picked the leaves off of herb stems and ground spices in the mortar and pestle. The other cooks listened to their chatter, and began to smile, and tell their own stories, and the mood of the morning slowly lifted, so that the midafternoon sun found them laughing, and pausing to listen to Taeyaho sing, and teasing Uku by asking him for synonyms for all of the words they could think of. Only Tafaemi remained unhappy. She didn’t join in either the general work or the laughter, but moved to the pantry wagon, where she sat in the open side and handed out whatever people needed. She was working on some private dish of her own, grating and kneading, but she threw a towel over it whenever anyone came near.

  Men began to appear as dusk came near, carrying tables from the great houses. The bridge began to fill, but a space was kept clear at one end, and musicians came and started tuning their instruments, and Manrie realized that they had prepared a floor for dancing. She had danced many times, of course. In Libreigia the slaves and the apprentice scholars would dance together at the summer solstice and the two equinoxes, and the Lady’s court in Hasra was full of dancing. But she felt shy of dancing, now, even though Koenbahki began to swing her hips as the musicians played a little tune to warm up.

  The patriarchs and matriarchs of the First Families appeared in short order, followed by their clientele. The Zairiset were obviously the largest, and Pruetahna bobbed at the front of them, leading their procession with her jittery hips. Her husband walked proudly at her side, and her tall son and his wife followed. But her other son was strangely bereft, looking around as if he had lost something. Manrie saw him notice Koenbahki and give a double take, but it would, apparently, be beneath his dignity to approach his wife and ask that she join him at his side. Instead he sat with his mother and looked dolefully at her, until she left Manrie’s side and went to him. She didn’t sit but stood beside him, flirting, and Manrie looked down quickly at the pot of rice that she had been stirring.

  The Nahrm and the Ehwaeya seemed united in their smallness. Like the Zairiset, they had made sure that their best tables were set closest to Cloedeya’s wagons, and their clientele fanned out away from them, sitting at smaller and shoddier tables that spanned the bridge. The matriarchs and patriarchs were all dressed very finely, in brocade robes that were probably too hot for summer, but they had slaves who wielded huge blue gorpsarra feathers, fanning the sweat away from their masters.

  The Jahnajeel were the last to arrive. They came onto the bridge and found their places at the tables that were furthest to the east. Manrie looked closely at the veiled triplets. She couldn’t help sniffing the air, but Nuhrmer Jahnajeel’s famous odor could not contend with the scents of Cloedeya’s cooking. She could tell who he was because she could easily identify his sister Haelahza, who’s posture seemed angry and defiant, and his brother Braedsmi, who immediately removed his veil and grinned around at the other families with an expression of idiotic delight.

  Two other figures appeared on the east end of the bridge. One was the tall and imperious woman in the tattered veils. The other was small and seemed to hide within the other’s shadows. The tall woman couldn’t really be the witch, could she? Wouldn’t all of the people she had cursed turn on her and throw her from the bridge? The two figures didn’t go right to a table, but came to stand in front of the wagons. Cloedeya faced the woman in the tattered veils. He was charring chicken on a brazier.

  “Don’t see me,” her companion said in a small voice. “Don’t see me.”

  The tall woman in the tattered veils said nothing. She stared into Cloedeya’s face, and some secret seemed to pass between them. Then she turned and went to the Jahnajeel’s table, where she sat with great primness and stared into the air in front of her, treating her companions as if they were beneath her notice.

  Cloedeya wiped his brow. But then he looked to the others and they began to carry platters that were heaped with rice and curry and pickled vegetables to the tables. The musicians began to play, and voices broke out in exclamations of delight. Manrie carried a laden platter to the Zairiset’s table and caught Koenbahki’s eye, and heard her say to her husband, “But you see, I am ruining my game by tarrying with you here. I must go and serve your feast.”

  “As long as we might have another feast later,” he leered indulgently, and his mother gave a great peal of laughter.

  Pruetahna waited placidly as her husband loaded her plate from one of the platters. She dipped her arthritic fingers down into the curry and raised it to her mouth. Manrie watched her taste it, thinking that those withered lips must coat anything that passed through them with the dust of age. So she wasn’t surprised when Pruetahna’s face twisted into a scowl. “What is this?” the matriarch asked. “What is this slop that Cloedeya thinks he can poison us with?”

  She stood, as if offended, and her bewildered husband stood with her. “My darling, what is amiss?”

  “Taste it! Taste the food! It is like eating excrement!”

  He bent obediently forward and pulled a dollop onto his fingers. He sniffed at the morsel, then tasted it with the tip of his rather sharp tongue. His face fell into an expression of disgust. “Unpalatable!” he declared.

  Manrie glanced back at Cloedeya. He was staring around wildly. Many of the matriarchs and patriarchs were having the same reaction. Groans of disgust and angry expletives were drowning out the music. Manrie darted a hand forward and picked a morsel of fish from the platter. It was even more succulent than it had been at lunch. But members of the First Families were rising from their tables. Not all of them. Some were eating lustily.

  Pruetahna Zairiset was pushing her way past the rickety tables of her house’s clients, as if in a hurry to escape the bridge. But when she came to the last one, where the slaves sat, she paused. Manrie watched as she sniffed the air and her shrunken head tilted down towards the platter of food on the table. She pushed a slave aside and darted a hand forward and brought it dripping with curry to her mouth. “But this is delicious!” she cried, arresting the flight of the others.

  Then all was pandemonium for a few moments, as patriarchs and matriarchs displaced their slaves and sat down at their shabby tables to gorge themselves on the curry. The slaves milled about in confusion. “It’s all the same dish!” Cloedeya called above the clamor, and then, when no one would heed him, he began going about among the slaves and ushering them to the tables of prominence that sat nearest to the wagons. It was as if the entire social world had been shaken and rearranged. The musicians began to play again, and a few people began to dance, their fingers stained with turmeric.

  The members of the caravan stood together, watching in amazement. After a few moments had passed, Cloedeya said, “we should eat.” So they sat together on the tables that had been cleared of all but the last platters, and began to eat.

  “I can’t eat this!” Tafaemi spat, throwing down her plate. “It tastes like slag!”

  “Perhaps you should try the food at one of the farthest tables,” Melsa suggested, with a glance at Cloedeya.

  Tafaemi stood up and pushed her way through the crowd, coming at last to the Zairiset’s table and taking the place beside Craejo that Koenbahki should have occupied. “Who is she?” Koenbahki whispered to Manrie, watching with a kind of amazed jealousy.

  “Tafaemi,” Manrie said.

  “Tafaemi? Not Tafaemi of Tzurfaera?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s a great beauty! Or at least she’s said to be.”

  “Well, that’s her. In all her glory.”

  “But don’t you see?” Melsa was whispering to Cloedeya. “You’ve been cursed. That is the witch, and she’s cursed you.”

  “How?” he asked, as near to anger as Manrie had ever seen him.

  “Your food. All of the bad people, the cruel ones, the ones who manipulate others and insist on their own importance, they’re at the farthest tables. And the kind ones, the compassionate ones, they’re right by us. Slaves and First Families all jumbled together.”

  “How is that a curse?” Big Praeda asked.

  “Is it me?” Cloedeya said slowly. “Do I get to decide who is good and who is bad? I don’t want that. That *is* a curse.”

  “Why?” Big Praeda snapped.

  But he turned to her with tears in his eyes. “Who am I, to judge others in that way? My food is for everyone, not just for the people I approve of.”

  “Well, they’re all eating,” Big Praeda pointed out.

  Their argument was interrupted by a strange pall that suddenly fell across the diners. Every head was turning to the west. The sun was sinking beneath the tall walls of Zairiset house and casting its shadow down the road. It reached almost to the crossroads. There were figures walking down the road from the barrow, undulating in the falling dusk. One by one the musicians realized that something was happening, and the sounds of their instruments dropped away. Manrie found that she was standing. Other people were leaping to their feet. They watched in horror as the dead came back onto the bridge.