The tent shivered behind her. Voran pushed through the flap, sodden with sleep. How strange that their roles should be reversed now. He was always the early riser in Vasyllia, but since they had begun the journey, he seemed incapable of getting up with the sun.

“Porridge again, swanling?” He complained, but with enough of a smile to make rejoinder unnecessary.

It was the first time since they left that he called her by his “little name,” and it warmed her more than the unseasonable sun. He had been categorically against her going on the pilgrimage. Only the most convincing stubbornness she could muster—never easy for her, especially toward Voran, who was almost a father to her—managed to sway him. He punished her with dour silence for the first day, and only spoke to her in clipped phrases the second.

“I’ve added dried apples this morning, Voran.”

He ate with the relish of a famished wolf. Poor Voran. He had changed so much since the coming of the Pilgrim. He was restless by nature, but this unquiet bordered on manic.

“Voran, what happened with Sabíana?”

Lebía couldn’t help noticing that Sabíana had left their house that morning weeping. She was not even there to see them out of the city with Dar Antomír.

“Lebía, why do you ask me such things?” His face was beet-red. “You are too young to understand.”

“Am I? Too young to see that you deliberately wounded the woman you claim to love?”

“It was not…” He stopped, breathed, and sagged a bit in the shoulders. “You are right. It was deliberate. I have not been able to put her face out of my mind since then. I do not know why I spoke to her like that.”

“Voran, I am not accusing you. I just want to understand. You know I love you.”

The creases in his forehead smoothed into his quick, winning smile. “Oh, swanling. Sometimes I forget about the weight of pain on your sixteen years. You want to know the truth?”

Lebía nodded, purposely not looking at him, intent on her fingers plaiting the rough bark. There were a few cuts on them, but only in the uncallused places.

“When I asked Sabíana to marry me, I did it like a madman jumping off a cliff. I never thought she would consider me, not after…”

He closed his eyes and sighed. His usually thick, curly black hair was mangy, hanging in strands around his shoulders. He had not shaved in weeks, but he looked the better for it, his angular features set off pleasantly by the messy chin-beard.

“Swanling, it’s a terrible thing, our human nature. We spend all our energies on getting things we never expect to receive, but if by some miracle we receive them, they start to lose their luster very quickly.”

“You didn’t expect her to say yes?”

“Well, I hoped she would. But then the Dar had to agree as well. I was sure she was being kept for some Lord something-or-other in Nebesta. When he agreed, and blessed our union wholeheartedly, I thought my joy complete. I saw my life then as it would be. Lord Protector to Darina Sabíana, a life of luxury in the palace, the love of a passionate woman whose beauty has no compare in Vasyllia, children on the bear rug before the hearth.”

“Sounds like our father’s life when we were children.”

“Exactly. That was the first thought to give me pause. Then the small, still voice deep inside me. Not enough, it said. I still longed for something with no name, or someone whose name I had not yet found. That was the first time I heard the song of the Sirin.”

Lebía’s heart raced. She thought she was the only one who knew the longing that sometimes comforted, but sometimes emptied.

“Everything changed after that?”

“Not immediately. I was always with Sabíana in the palace, walking the secret cloisters and the summit cherry groves. Those were moments of happiness I had never known. Poor Sabíana. She doesn’t know what longing is. She is all fire, all desire, all forward movement.”

“Voran, do you love her?”

He stared at his porridge, his eyes never more green. He plucked at his chin-beard.

“I do, Lebía. I always have. I just didn’t know there could be a feeling more powerful than the love of a man for a woman.”

It took the better part of an hour for the mothers to convince the boys to come out of the tarn to begin the morning leg of their journey. As it was, the crowd of pilgrims usually left far later than was probably necessary, but there were nearly a hundred people on the pilgrimage of all ages, and it seemed some had come more for the change of scenery and the joy of good company than for a religious experience.

Lebía loved watching Voran race back and forth on his black charger every morning, tightening up discipline among the warriors. She was proud of him, even if she laughed at him silently for being a touch pompous in his manner. He had no idea how ridiculous he looked.

That entire day, Lebía walked alone. By the evening, she had grown lonely again, and almost regretted coming. Finally, Voran rode to her and dismounted, handing his reins over to one of the younger warriors. Voran looked eager to speak, his mood lightened by the warmth of the day.

“How much longer, do you think, until we reach it?” Lebía asked.

“Well, the weeping tree is supposed to be not far from the Nebesti border on the side of Vasyllia’s lands. Roughly one hundred miles through mostly mountainous terrain. At the rate we’re going? Two weeks, maybe more.”

“Will we come near Nebesta, the city?”

“No. The Dar’s road splits in two at the Nebesti border. We go straight, the road to Nebesta goes left, hugging the border along a narrow valley until you hit the city at the end of the valley. It’s beautiful, you know. All wood where Vasyllia is stone. A confluence of two rivers and some of the most gorgeous forests you’ve ever seen.”

“I wish I could see it.”

“You can see the border range over there.” Voran pointed at a series of jagged peaks that started at their left and reached all the way to a point directly ahead of them. They looked like the rotting teeth of an old man. Fog encircled the tips of the left-most peaks, and something darker than fog swirled there as well.

“Strange,” said Voran. “That looks like smoke.”

He stared at the column of cloud reaching toward Vasyllia from the Nebesti side. It was pinkish in the late morning sun. Then he shook his head, thoughtful, before turning back to Lebía with a smile.

“Lebía, here I am blabbing away. And you have not yet told me why you so wanted to see the weeping tree.”

Their road led straight ahead to a dip between two drum-hills, the left crowned with aspens, the right with birches.

“It’s easier for you, Voran. You are an intimate of the Dar. I sit at home. Sometimes the pain of our parents’ absence is like a physical illness. There are mornings when I can’t rise from bed.”

“You hope the Living Water will heal that wound?”

“To be honest, I don’t think it will. But yes, I hope.”

“There is something else, then?”

She found a barrier between her thoughts and her words. To speak was as hard as to move a boulder covered with moss from a riverbed.

“Voran, there is something very wrong in Vasyllia. The omen merely confirmed it for me.”

“Yes, I have begun to feel it as well, swanling.”

“It sounds terrible, what I am about to say. It has hurt so much, seeing how everyone was willing to attack our father in his absence, when he couldn’t defend his name. With such obvious enjoyment, too. People who allow that cannot be good. Now, I don’t even care much for Vasyllia anymore. I’m going on this pilgrimage because I can no longer stay in the city.”

Voran looked thoughtful.

“Lebía, I agree with you. But do you know what the Pilgrim told me? He told me Vasyllia was everything. He told me I must never let it fall. As if I could do anything about it.”