Raider did not sleep that night.
He sat on the windowsill until the night market closed, and then until the lanterns guttered out one by one, and then until the sky over the Sea of Sand turned the colour of iron.
He was twelve years old, and he was doing sums that had nothing to do with numbers.
All his life, he had believed the world simply was what it was. The strong cultivated and the weak served. He was the only mortal, so he was the only servant. It was not kind, but it was the way of things, the way rain fell downward and fire burned upward. Even his resentment had been the resentment one holds against the weather.
But there was a city below him where the way of things was different.
Nobody here had decided that mortals were tools. So it had never been true. It had never been the way of things at all — it had been a choice. Two hundred people had looked at one child who could not cultivate, and every single one of them had chosen, day after day, year after year, to keep him as a lesson instead of raising him as a person.
The millstone in his chest ground on and on.
Strangely, what surfaced in the end was not the beatings, nor the insults, nor the cold. What surfaced was a raspy voice in a cave of light, and a question.
"Tell me, what do you know about the Dao?"
He had answered: nothing. And his Master had chuckled and said the words Raider had turned over every night since.
"That's for you to tell me. I believe each person has their own Dao... others disagreed, back then. As for what the word itself means... you decide. And then you decide what to do with that."
You decide.
Raider watched the first light crawl across the golden sea at the end of the world, and he decided.
He could not undo twelve years. He could not make the Clan into something it had never been. But the Settlement was going to change. It would become a place where the way of things was chosen, and chosen well — and no matter what it cost him, it would never, ever keep a slave again.
The thought settled into place with a strange physical weight, like a first stone laid at the bottom of a wall. It was not grand. It did not feel like the legendary Dao of an unrivalled expert.
But it was his, and he had decided it, and for the first time since climbing out of that abyss, the wind-bone's pulse and his own heartbeat felt like they were keeping the same time.
When Bee hammered on his door at breakfast time, they found Raider already dressed, hood back, eyes clear.
"You look different," said Bee suspiciously. "Did something happen?"
"Yes," said Raider, and did not elaborate.
...
They spent the day in the markets, and Raider learned that the world could be purchased.
It began at a clothier's, on Gregor's insistence. Raider walked in wearing the patched, oversized cast-offs he had worn out of the Settlement, and walked out in sturdy travelling clothes of deep grey, cut for his size, with boots that fit and a cloak that had never belonged to anyone else.
He stood in the street for a moment, not moving.
"What now?" sighed Bee, who was learning to read these pauses.
"Nothing," said Raider, tugging at a sleeve that was precisely as long as his arm. "I've just never had clothes before. Only... leftovers."
Bee turned abruptly to study a stall of hairpins, and their voice came back suspiciously flat. "Well. Grey suits you."
At a chart-maker's shop, Raider found something better than clothes.
Maps.
He had heard the word all his life and imagined something like a list. What hung on the chart-maker's walls were worlds — the East Canyons rendered in inks of red and gold, threaded with roads, dotted with cities, tribes, wells, ruins and warnings, and at the eastern edge, a long sweep of empty gold labelled in flowing script: The Sea of Sand.
Raider bought a traveller's map of the whole East Canyons with money Gregor handed him, and then stood at the counter studying his purchase so intently that the chart-maker began to preen.
He found East Cliff City easily. He traced the roads west and found the region of nameless canyons where, by his rough guess, the Barren Settlement hid.
The map showed nothing there. Not a road, not a well, not a name. Home was a blank space that the world had never once looked at.
'Good,' he thought. 'That keeps everyone safe.'
And then, unbidden: 'Somewhere on a map, there might be a blank space where I was found.'
He rolled the map carefully, and did not share that second thought with anyone.
Through it all, Gregor taught, in the low unhurried voice of someone naming birds: how money was made and moved. The caravans bought canyon hides and sold coastal silks. The forges bought beast bone and sold tools. The inns sold rest, the escorts sold safety on dangerous roads, the pill-houses sold bottled years of another person's cultivation. Every stall was someone's answer to the same question: what do I have that others need?
"The Clan is wealthy, by the way," Gregor mentioned. "A few hundred years of hunting and gathering in a rich wilderness, with almost nothing to spend it on. What we carry today wouldn't be missed if we lost it."
"Then why did we never..." Raider gestured at everything — the markets, the roads, the world.
"Fear," said Gregor simply. "Wealth attracts eyes. Eyes are the one thing the Settlement cannot afford." They paused. "That is the reasoning, at least."
Raider thought of the blank space on his new map and understood the reasoning perfectly. He also thought, with the stubborn clarity of the sleepless: 'Hiding is not the same as living.'
By midday, Bee had appointed themselves guardian of Raider's education in the truly important things, which meant food. They ate skewers of glazed meat from the mortal woman's corner stall — she remembered their hoods from yesterday and added an extra skewer "for the small quiet one", which outraged Bee, who was taller. They drank iced fruit water. They ate a folded flatbread stuffed with spiced beans that made Raider's eyes stream, to Bee's genuine delight.
It was, all told, the finest day of Raider's life to that point. It had cost the Clan a little coin and history nothing at all.
That too, he noted, was possible.
...
Far to the west, in a Settlement still counting its cracked walls, Clan Chief Soho sat in his darkened hall and finally, truly, sobered.
For days after the disaster, his mind had refused to settle, sliding off what had happened the way water slides off oiled cloth. Now, in the quiet, the thing had finally landed on him with its whole weight.
The slave could not be beaten.
He had gathered a sea in his hand and thrown it, and the boy had waved a stick of bone and erased it. Whatever had happened in that abyss, whatever the boy had crawled out carrying, it did not sit anywhere on the ladder of realms the Clan had climbed for two hundred years. There was no training toward it. There was no scheming around it.
"We should have killed him years ago," said Alexander from the shadows by the wall. He had taken to standing there, these past days, where his father's slump could not be seen and his own face could not be read. "When he was nothing. A fever, an accident. No one would have—"
"But we didn't," said Soho flatly. "And he isn't nothing, and here we are."
"So we do it now. He sleeps, doesn't he? He eats. He's still—"
"You felt that wind, boy." Soho's voice was not angry. That was the worst of it. "You felt it from underground, through stone and formation. Tell me honestly, standing where you stand: do you believe he can be killed by anything this Clan can do?"
Silence.
"Then we wait," said Soho, staring at nothing. "Power that falls from the sky is not the same as power that is climbed to. He found a treasure; a treasure can be exhausted, or lost, or outgrown. And you—" for a moment, something of the old fire came back into the Clan Chief's eyes as they fixed on his son, "—you were breaking records before that thing ever fell into a hole. His fortune will dry. Your talent will not. The Clan can tell the difference, given time."
Alexander said nothing. In the dark, slowly, his hands closed.
Wait. His father wanted to wait, while the slave stood in the place that was his.
He was still standing in the dark long after Soho had gone.
...
On their last evening, while Gregor settled accounts and Bee mourned every stall they had not eaten from, Raider walked alone to the cliff's edge.
The setting sun had turned the Sea of Sand to fire. Clouds drifted below his feet. Behind him, a million people were lighting their lanterns; ahead of him lay the whole golden width of the sky.
"We can stay another few days," said Gregor, coming to stand beside him. "There is more to see. There always is."
"No," said Raider. "I've seen what I needed. I want to go home."
He heard his own word choice and let it stand. Home. It was a strange thing to call the place he had been a slave. But the vow he had made at dawn lived there, not here, and a vow was a kind of home.
"There's one more thing," he added. "On the way back — teach me how the Clan earns. Hunting. I want to arrive carrying something worth more than what we spent."
Gregor regarded the boy in his new grey clothes, twelve years old, planning his return like a chieftain returning from an embassy.
"As you wish, Young Master Raider," they said, and this time the title didn't sound like a joke at all.
Raider looked out over the burning sands a final time.
'The way of things is chosen,' he thought. 'So we will choose better.'
The wind rose off the edge of the world, and the bone in his hand hummed with it, long and low, like agreement.