Whatever the guards had answered, Saia didn't hear it. She was lucky that all her birds were already perched on a solid surface, otherwise they'd have dropped to the ground as if dead. All of her focus was on the four people leaving the Arissian outpost, on their words and clothes.

Monks. Monks on the other side of the sea, away from the mountain, as unlikely as it seemed. But she recognized their uniforms, and there was no mistaking the word 'abbot' for another: it was the exact same in her own language.

Her viss was buzzing so violently it had started spilling onto the ground, so she redirected it outward, expanding her domain. The monks' pockets were empty, but the baskets in their hands were full of grains.

“Do you need an escort?” one of the guards at the door asked.

“No, thank you,” the oldest monk of the group answered. “We don’t fear these lands. We’ll send back some of our bread as thanks.”

The guards near the door and the ones looking from the window cheered by raising their weapons. Saia wanted to say many things, so many that she felt stuck. It probably was for the better: all of them would have betrayed her in some way.

The monks climbed onto the cart. The three younger ones secured the baskets in a pile so that they wouldn't fall, while the oldest sat behind the beastplant and took the reins. Saia wanted to stop them, or follow them until she discovered where they lived. And then...

And then she didn't know what she’d do. Ask questions, probably. Find out whether they were the same kind of monks that lived on the mountain or just some people who looked like them. Find whether they had gods, or knew what spheres were.

But she couldn't deal with both the monks and Mayvaru at the same time. So she forced herself to focus again on the guards, who had regained their stance as if she wasn't there anymore.

“Bread?” she repeated. “So they can buy wheat but I can’t?”

One of the guards snorted, while the other looked at Saia with annoyance.

“The monks have a special deal with our commander.”

“I want to make the same deal,” Saia said, keeping her voice calm, even if her buzzing energy made it very difficult to stay polite.

“The monks make bread to feed the faithful,” the guard replied with a deepening crease on his forehead. “You want to give it to some birds. Get lost.”

And with that, he looked away, but the spear transformed into a sword in his hand as a last warning.

There was no pushing forward, not with words at least. Which was fine by Saia: she couldn't hold still anymore. The thought of going back with empty hands after promising help was unbearable. She just needed to be smart about her next move, to prevent the fault from falling onto the nearby villages. Making it look like an accident.

“You don’t understand,” she yelled, making her voice so loud the guards forgot their hostility for a moment and looked at her in astonishment.

The birds started flying, apparently scared. It required a lot of viss and focus on Saia’s part, since they were many and all of them were heavier than they looked. The winds she used to raise the bigger ones were noticeably strong: she hoped the guards would have considered them the result of too many wings flapping at the same time.

The flock flew over their heads and proceeded toward the field. Saia put her hands in her now short hair and ran toward the fence, feigning desperation. The shouts of the guards followed her, but they didn't step away from their post, maybe thinking the fence was high enough to keep her out.

It wasn't. She jumped, along with the antelopes, the dogs and the other animals she'd taken with her up to the outpost, and landed on the other side. The guards split up, swearing in a stream of words. One approached the fence and shouted to give the alarm, the other ran inside the tower. A dart flew toward Saia from a window on the first floor, but she deviated it slightly. She steered her animals out of range, because if any of them was hit she'd have to either simulate their death or let the guards discover that they weren't actually alive.

“Stop, come back!” she yelled at the statues, to keep up the pretence it was all an accident. It hindered her plan of showing her perfect control over them, and thus her similarity to Mayvaru, but she could always start the rumors somewhere else once she was done with the outpost.

There was another door at the base of the tower on the other side of the fence. It allowed the guards to access the fields, even if they could only leave three at a time. Saia didn't wait for them to get a hold of the situation and dove behind the animals into the wheat. The plants were tall enough to disguise her and the smaller statues. She kept yelling at them to stop for the benefit of the guards, and at the same time used her winds to make every one of the darts miss in a plausible way. Hopefully, by then they were convinced it wasn't an organized coup from the resistance. She suspected they'd still have punished the local population if she walked away from there with an armful of wheat.

She focused on a small group of birds that were far enough not to attract the immediate attention of the guards. She carved a cavity inside their bodies, transforming the excess viserite into rats and squirrels, then she made them eat the wheat. They tore away the ears whole and stuffed them in their bellies. Even once they were full, they didn’t hold nearly enough to feed a household, so she focused on the antelopes next.

The operation was more complicated, because the guards were aiming at them and they couldn’t hide completely in the field. She resolved to fill one at a time, keeping up the chaos with the rest. She'd lost one year during the preparations for the fight, and now was quickly losing a second one. She hoped ten years of viss would be enough to deal with both Mayvaru and Beramas, or to find Dan and run away from there if she failed.

Once the antelopes were almost full, she bent the wheat with a gust of wind to let the guards see that they were eating. They yelled and cursed, wasting even more darts to scare the animals away. Saia hoped it was enough to lift the blame from the locals: after all, they couldn’t eat food that had already been ingested by an animal. As long as nobody realized they were statues, the fault would have fallen entirely on her.

There were twenty people running around the fields between guards, soldiers and servants, and just as many animals wreaking havoc. Saia tried to keep track of everything, but a dart slipped past her winds and hit one of her dogs. Two soldiers stopped to puzzle over the animal’s apparent indestructibility and lack of a reaction. It was time to go.

Saia gathered all the animals around her, dropping the pretence that they were out of control. The guards were too panicked to notice anyway, at least not until later, after the rumor of what had happened already spread. She ran toward the fence, preparing to jump over it. One antelope tumbled and dropped to the ground, unresponsive to her attempts to control it. Saia felt her domain shrinking on multiple sides. The cause was still hidden by the wheat, but she didn’t need to see the rats to know they were there.

Mayvaru had noticed, and thought it necessary to intervene.

Saia stopped, the statues forming a loose circle around her. She sent winds outward, slowing down the advance of the rats. She considered her options: she could run away and try to reach Darasa, but it was too far from there, with plenty of space for Mayvaru to gather animals and set up traps, once she had figured out where she was going. Her best bet was to force her to come out and fight, without giving her time to prepare.

It was a problem she’d been thinking about since listening to Caydras’s story about the hunters: Mayvaru could choose to attack without showing up, consuming Saia’s viss while keeping herself far from her range. She couldn’t let her.

She dove back into the wheat, the statues surrounding her to shield her a bit from outside eyes. Birds started to gather in the sky, so she sent her own flock soaring to confuse them.

She stopped and knelt between the plants, letting the animals move in a circle around her. She changed the shape of her own statue into the one of an Arissian sheepdog, then made it stand. It was a quick imitation, imprecise in every detail. She opened her bag and took out the last fur she had left. It was a coat of long brown hair, the top sewn to form a sort of hood, with two protruding pieces like crude ears. She put it on, adjusting the color and texture of her statue to match the fur. She made the statues settle, dispersed the rats with a gust of wind, even if they were too many to be flung too far, and stepped out of the field.

The guards cried out at each other to stop. Some of the soldiers even lowered their weapons and stood straight, looking at her as if expecting an order. Her disguise seemed to be working.

“Stand down,” she said with Mayvaru’s voice.

They faltered, weapons changing shape in their hands as if they didn’t know what to do with them. Saia stepped forward, then lunged toward the nearest ones. They dispersed, screaming.

She pushed a soldier down, making him disappear in the tall wheat, then put him to sleep. She needed them to feel in danger for her plan to work, to feel like Mayvaru was attacking them, as impossible as it seemed.

Her plan could have failed to attract her attention, even if Saia had her same powers. She could have swarmed her with animals and defeated her like she did with the hunters. But she was the kind of person that kept an enemy alive for the sole purpose of killing her opponents without ruining her reputation. Would she ignore someone attacking her own people while wearing her face?

“Go back into the tower,” Saia heard someone say in the same voice she had used an instant before. “Leave us alone.”

Mayvaru emerged from the wheat, surrounded by rats and beavers, with other creatures lurking behind her.

Saia kept the fur on. It was the only thing forcing Mayvaru to stay there, to prove she was on the Arissians’ side and not the one attacking them. Still, the situation wasn’t good: Saia was far away from the ruins and the traps she had prepared for Mayvaru and her animals. Even Serit was too far.

She observed the area in front of the tower, where the rest of her statues were, together with one of the quick carriages that the Arissian military used to move around. She couldn’t expand her domain to reach them, because the wheat was full of rats. Their numbers were growing: the more she waited, the more would arrive. But the guards were still returning to the tower, moving with caution between the animals. She didn’t want to involve them. And she needed to think.

“Who are you?” Mayvaru asked.

Saia wanted to smile, but she didn’t know enough about the patterns of that body to change its expression.

“Can’t you guess?”

Mayvaru sighed and pinched her eyes, in a gesture that was surprisingly human.

“No, I mean… I know who you are: the foreigner that can control viss. I don’t know what you are, nor what you’re doing here. I should have captured you the moment you stepped on the ship.”

“You could have tried,” Saia said. Part of her wished she had: with all the viserite laying around and the sea cutting off any entrance that the animals could use to get on the ship, it would have been a more balanced fight.

“Beramas wanted to. But the sculptors were interested in you, and we don’t want to interfere with them.”

Saia wished she could read her viss to see whether she was lying. If her words were true, it meant that the sculptors weren’t already corrupted, and maybe would have accepted to help…

She forced the thoughts out of her mind. Mayvaru was only talking to gain time for her animals to arrive. She made one of her antelopes step forward, apparently to position itself in front of her like a shield.

“And,” Mayvaru said, showing her fangs. “We had a kid to capture.”

The antelope froze. Saia felt frozen too, despite the buzzing of her viss compelling her to kick those teeth out of her mouth, to do something.

Nothing showed on the surface. Nothing on her voice, when she spoke.

“I thought you had to deal with some sort of resistance, here. I heard they managed to destroy an outpost.”

Mayvaru showed even more teeth, even if the bend of her lips suggested the opposite of a smile.

“So you work with them? Good to know. If you yield now, the villages will be allowed to harvest.”

Saia thought of Vizena’s manipulations: she used to make plenty of promises to sway people on her side, then betrayed them as soon as she got her way.

She opened her arms wide, a gesture that enveloped all the animals Mayvaru had brought.

“They won’t need to, with all this fresh meat.”

Mayvaru snarled. Saia made the antelope jump, adding the strength of the wind to that of her viss. It flew toward Mayvaru’s face, turning in mid-air into a spike of rock.

The rats jumped forward.