A Woman Warrior Born

On the twentieth day crossing the western Timaret, Breea spent the morning staring at the western horizon. It was getting closer. Many believed the world was flat and that you could reach the edge and fall off. The Scholars of Limtir knew that this was not true, but still the horizon approached. Beyond the edge was a lightness that did not look like anything she had ever seen. She thought of the maps she knew. By Taumea’s reckoning they had traveled nearly a hundred leagues and should almost be upon the Leuvat Sea. She urged Letet into a trot.

  Near the edge, the land simply fell away. Letet balked and would go no closer. Breea dismounted and walked to the precipice. Vertical cliff where she stood swept out far below to meet a multi-hued plain cut into geometric greens, tans, and soil-browns. Sparkling borders to the fields had to be canals, some the size of rivers. Beyond the cultivated plain lay an expanse of bright turquoise stretching to a pale, distant horizon. On the margin of blue and green, a white-walled city shimmered in the sun. Within the wall, rooftops were a mosaic of red and gray sprinkled with points of bronze and copper brilliance. At the city’s southern extent, a broad prominence was held by a fortress of black stone. White specks on the water could only be ships, and there were hundreds of them. Roads were pale threads too far away to see movement.

  A few leagues to the north, a river poured in multiple falls from clefts in the plateau. Its descent made clouds of white mist bridged with rainbow. Beyond, the plateau rim curved to meet the sea. In the other direction, the coastal plain and sheer rim stretched away together.

  No tales heard on winter nights at home had created visions this vast. As a little girl, wedged between scholars, draped in their robes, she had listened with wide eyes and fertile imagination, but with only Limtir for scale a place such as this had been beyond her reckoning. Limtir shrank before the scope of it.

  Hoofbeats came up beside her. After long, silent gazing, the three followed the cliff edge until they found piles of weathered blocks guarding an old road cut leading down. The sun was westering by the time they reached the coastal plain. What the day’s ride had revealed of the outer world silenced them all, and in wordless quiet, they made camp beside a spring.