Morg Ana stood in the road at dawn and counted the line of travelers waiting to be turned to salt. Twenty-three. Yesterday it had been thirty. She was six-armed and grey as a millstone, a crown of cracked bone sitting crooked on her brow, and she had guarded every road into Aquilonia since before the city had a name. She asked riddles. Wrong answers ended in salt. The right answer, someday, from the right mortal, would end with an heir at her side. That was the bargain she kept with herself. That was why she still stood in the road. The first man in line grinned before she spoke. "A candle," he said. "The answer's a candle. Or a river. Or a name." He rattled off nine more before she'd opened her mouth. Behind him, a woman clutched a greasy slip of paper covered in scrawled answers. A boy mouthed words from a folded pamphlet. None of them had listened for the riddle. None of them cared. Morg Ana let the man finish. Then she asked him what walks the road he had not walked. He said, "A candle," and crumbled into a pillar of white grains. The wind took his shoulders first. The line did not shrink. Two more travelers stepped forward from the fields, pamphlets in hand. She walked into the city. The rumor was loudest inside a tavern near the market, a wooden barn of a place hung with dangling pots and strung peppers, its awnings striped like a festival tent. She ducked under the doorframe. Six arms folded, she listened. A drover was selling answer-sheets for two coppers. "Straight from a man who passed her," he said. "Straight from the giant's mouth." Coins clattered onto his table. No one had passed her. She would know. She was the one who counted. Morg Ana set one hand on the drover's table. The boards split under her palm. The tavern went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a roof beam cracks. "There is no sheet," she said. "There is no cheat. Tomorrow at dawn I will stand in the road, and I will ask one riddle to all of you at once. Wrong answers salt. Right answers pass. Bring your papers if you like." She walked back to her house at the edge of the fields, a small stone thing with a crooked chimney and runes cut above the door. She sat on the step until dark. At dawn she returned to the road. Eighty-one came. She asked her riddle. Eighty of them answered from the pamphlets. Eighty of them fell to grains, and the wind lifted the salt into a long drifting shape with hollow eyes that stared at her once before it broke apart over the fields. The eighty-first stood alone in the road and had not spoken yet.

The eighty-first traveler was gone. Morg Ana stood in the empty road and stared at the place he had been. The wind still moved salt across her feet in thin white lines. She counted the drifts by habit. Eighty piles. One space where a man had stood and said nothing and then walked away while she watched the salt settle. He had passed her test by refusing to take it. That made him the only mortal in the world she could not yet judge, and she needed to judge him. She walked back to her house at the edge of the fields and sat on the step. An heir had to be tested. A silent man was not an answer. He was a held breath. She could not crown a held breath. She had to find him, put a riddle to him alone, and hear what came out of his mouth. Inside, the salt from the road had gathered in the corner of her front room. It stood waist-high, a bright mound of crystal points and pale grains, catching the light from the doorway. It had drifted in on its own after the mass challenge. She had let it. Eighty travelers were inside that heap. She set two hands on the floor beside it and two on the wall and two flat against the crystal. "Stand up," she said. The heap shifted. Grains climbed grains. A shoulder formed, then a second. A long neck rose from the pile. The salt built itself into a thin figure with hollow sockets where a face should be. It had no mouth. It did not need one. It bent its head to her. "One of you walked away from me," Morg Ana said. "Eighty-one came. Eighty stayed. Find the one who left. Bring him to my road. Do not harm him. He is mine to question." The salt figure tilted its head. Grains fell from its jaw and climbed back up its chest. It stepped past her, ducked the doorframe, and moved into the fields on legs that hissed against the grass. It left a faint white trail behind it. She watched until the trail thinned to nothing. She sat down on the step again. The heap in her front room was smaller now, but still bright, still sharp at its edges. Enough salt for the errand. Enough salt to walk the city and the tavern and every alley the silent man might crawl into. Somewhere in Aquilonia, a man who had watched eighty people fall to grains was hiding behind a barrel or under a bed. He did not know yet that the salt of those eighty was walking toward him on her order. He would know soon. She would have her answer from him, one way, or the salt would bring him to the road and she would ask again. In the meantime, Shapechanger decided to go on an adventure!