I came fully awake as I sat up and cracked my head on the thwart of my upturned canoe. The pain cleared my head. I felt under my bedroll for my knife, hoping I hadn’t made enough noise to attract the attention of whatever—whoever? —had waked me. I didn’t hear footsteps. I was just starting to drift back down into sleep when I heard the voice speaking from the high ridge above the brushy bit of riverbank where I had camped, meaning to get a good night’s sleep before venturing into Sheneshe. The speaker must have been just about directly above me.

“This is the third night, and the second asking,” the voice said. A man’s voice, elderly, melodious, and exhausted. “If I knew anything more to say to change your mind, I would say it.”

“And it would not change my mind. My answer is no.” The answering voice was younger, harsher.

A sigh. “Then all I can do is sit with you until dawn.”

“Until three nights ago, I might have thought that was kind of you.”

“Arlin,” the old man said, “the Law was given in kindness, but that kindness was meant for the people, not the Keepers—or the breakers either.”

I could hear the capital in the old man’s voice as he said ‘the Law.” I heard something else too, something I couldn’t put a name to, something that set my teeth on edge. Though perhaps that was only the fear that came from the rumors I had heard...

Gossips in the towns downriver had told me that no woman in her right mind would paddle on upstream past Sennipol to Sheneshe. When I observed that I could paddle as well as most men, they sighed and said no sane man would go that way either. When I inquired whether there were rapids, they explained that the problem was not in the river, but in Sheneshe itself-- that its folk were unchancy.

“Unchancy how?” I asked. “Lawless? Cruel?” Some stared blankly at me or shrugged, plainly parroting something they’d heard and never thought to question. Others looked hard at me and then held their hands up before their chests, fingers splayed—the curse-warding sign. Some made it vaguely toward the north, toward Sheneshe. Some made it toward me. Maybe the shadow of what I’d left behind, the reason for my flight, was in my eyes. Maybe they thought the cursed place drew accursed travelers to itself. They might have been right, at that.

In Sennipol, the last town downriver from Sheneshe, there was a deal of curse-warding and a bit of muttering and spitting; I left the inn with all discreet haste. One man, a thin stooping fellow with ragged clothes and haunted eyes, followed me back to my boat and tried to give me an answer.

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