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soaked and gritty. “That needs to be changed,” Jani observed while Keffria used the towel. Jani washed, and again thanked the child, before guiding Keffria toward several tables where healers were plying their trade. Some were merely salving blistered hands or massaging aching backs, but there was also an area where broken limbs and bleeding injuries were being treated. The business of clearing the collapsed corridor was hazardous work. Jani settled Keffria at a table to await her turn. A healer was already at work rebandaging her hand when Jani returned with morning bread, soup and coffee for both of them. The healer finished swiftly, abruptly told Keffria that she was off the work detail, and moved on to his next patient.
    “Eat something,” Jani urged her.
    Keffria picked up the mug of coffee. The warmth of it between her palms was oddly comforting. She took a long drink from it. As she set it down, her eyes wandered over the amphitheater. “It’s all so organized,” she observed in confusion. “As if you expected this to happen, planned for it—”
    “We did,” Jani said quietly. “The only thing that puts this collapse out of the ordinary is the scale of it. A good quake usually brings on some falls. Sometimes a corridor will collapse for no apparent reason. Both my uncles died in cave-ins. Almost every Rain Wild family who works the city loses a member or two of each generation down here. It is one of the reasons my husband Sterb has been so adamant in urging the Rain Wild Council to aid him in developing other sources of wealth for us. Some say he is only interested in establishing his own fortune. As a younger son of a Rain Wild Trader’s grandson, he has little claim to his own family’s wealth. But I truly believe it is not self-interest but altruism that makes him work so hard at developing the foragers’ and harvesters’ outposts. He insists the Rain Wild could supply all our needs if we but opened our eyes to the forest’s wealth.” She folded her lips and shook her head. “Still. It does not make it any easier when he says, ‘I warned you all’ when something like this happens. Most of us do not want to forsake the buried city for the bounty of the rain forest. The city is all we know, the excavating and exploration. Quakes like this are the danger we face, just as you families who trade upon the sea know that eventually you will lose someone to it.”
    “Inevitable,” Keffria conceded. She picked up her spoon and began to eat. A few mouthfuls later, she set it down.
    Across from her, Jani set down her coffee mug. “What is it?” she asked quietly.
    Keffria held herself very still. “If my children are dead, who am I?” she asked. Cold calmness welled up in her as she spoke. “My husband and eldest son are gone, taken by pirates, perhaps already dead. My only sister has gone after them. My mother remained behind in Bingtown when I fled; I know not what has become of her. I only came here for the sake of my children. Now they are missing, and perhaps already dead. If I alone survive—” She halted, unable to frame a thought to deal with that possibility. The immensity of it overwhelmed her.
    Jani gave her a strange smile. “Keffria Vestrit. But the turning of a day ago, you were volunteering to leave your children in my care, and return to Bingtown, to spy on the New Traders for us. It seems to me that you then had a very good sense of who you were, independent of your role as mother or daughter.”
    Keffria propped her elbows on the table and leaned her face into her hands. “And this now feels like a punishment for that. If Sa thought I undervalued my children, might he not take them from me?”
    “Perhaps. If Sa had but a male aspect. But recall the old, true worship of Sa. Male and female, bird, beast and plant, earth, fire, air and water, all are honored in Sa and Sa manifests in all of them. If the divine is also female, and the female also divine, then she understands that