Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel

you’ll need it.”
    It was his sword.

6
    T hey left Cailan two weeks before Greenseed, the festival of first planting. It was early for travel, but the two young Blessed were eager to begin their annovair, and Asharre, once she’d made the decision to go, was eager to leave her unwanted memories behind.
    The ride gave her time to take the measure of her companions. Evenna was a soft-spoken beauty who carried herself with a solemnity far beyond her seventeen years. The young Blessed had blue-black hair that she plaited and looped around her head in a healer’s halo, a style among the Illuminers that dated back to Alyeta the Redeemer. Oralia had worn her hair the same way. She had moved with the same quiet grace, too, and her clothes carried the same fragrance of wormwood and wintermint, anise and aloe. Healer’s herbs. The perfume of ghosts.
    Asharre tended to avoid her. It was no fault of Evenna’s, but it was too easy to catch the girl in the corner of her eye and forget, for an instant, that it was not Oralia riding beside her.
    Falcien’s company was easier to bear. The other Illuminer had the small, wiry build of an Ardasi knife fighter. His coloring was southern as well: olive skin, eyes and hair of a rich, mutable color between brown and black. His accent was pure Cailan, though, and he laughed easily with the others about things that had happened in the city when they were young. He had never been an outsider. Not like her.
    Her companions gave her space. Sometimes Asharre caught them looking at her scarred face, or at the two-handed caractan she wore across her back, but they kept their questions to themselves. The caractan was thicker and heavier than the longswords favored by the Knights of the Sun. Though it had an edge and Asharre kept hers sharp, it was a weapon made to crush rather than cut. It seldom saw use outside the White Seas clans, for none but Ingvall’s children had the strength or stature to wield it effectively. Still, strange as it must have been to them, neither the Blessed nor Heradion asked about her sword.
    She was content to let them wonder. The ride settled her spirits, allowing her a tranquility she hadn’t felt since Oralia’s death. It wasn’t until Heaven’s Needle dwindled to a sparkling mote on the horizon that Asharre realized how much Cailan had been her sister’s city. There was hardly a handspan at the Dome of the Sun that did not carry a freight of memory. Away from it, at last, she could see the world with her own eyes.
    It was more beautiful than she remembered. Asharre had never been on the road without a certain wariness, if not outright fear. Her first journey had been away from their homeland, guarding her sister through hostile territory, toward the unknown. She knew when they left that they would never return. Afterward she had traveled onlyas Oralia’s protector, and while they had seldom been in real danger after that first year, she had never let down her guard.
    Now she did, a little, and looked at the world unfolding.
    They rode past untilled fields blanketed by yellow straw and wrinkled, frost-kissed leaves. Ancient stone walls and dark green hedgerows separated one farmer’s land from the next; gnarled apple trees and pollarded willows dotted the hills between. Mastiffs barked at them from farmhouse yards, while small, timid deer darted through the trees.
    The land grew rockier and the hills steeper as they continued. Village walls changed from simple boundaries to solid fortifications of mounded earth and stakes. Then those, too, receded in the distance as the earth became too stony to support farmers. Two weeks north of Cailan, all Asharre could find to mark human habitation were thin brown goats cropping at weeds between the rocks.
    The last town worthy of the name was Balnamoine. It marked the informal boundary of Calantyr; though the villages and mining towns to the north belonged to the realm on maps, in