Tortall by Tamora Pierce

teardrop-shaped opening floored in embers.
    The god spoke again in its twined voices. “Teky, three times we have asked, and three times you have given the wrong answer. One more chance do we give you to enter our service, to return the balance to our faithful. If you truly wish to carry on the work you have begun, then what do you see?”
    And there they were, tall, short, plump, dark, pale, old and young and in between, a mass of black, with eyes so bright I thought they might burn me. Last time the god had said the answer lay in my talk with Fadal. Poor Fadal, who believed the veils were chains, until I made him—her—reconsider it, briefly, at least.
    I looked at those fields of women, my sisters.
    “Power,” I said.
    The teardrop opening to the fire’s heart collapsed. I lifted my head. The heart was dark, as if something great had drawn the life from the fire.
    The life was gone somewhere else, too. My father’s hand was cold against my cheek.
    Through that long night I wept and said the prayers. I rebuilt the fire to sew his shroud, and the next day I built his pyre and sent his spirit flying in the flames to the god we both loved. I gathered wood to replace all I had used, then went back inside to decide what I could do with my life.
    It was nearly midnight when I remembered my father wished me to return to my aunt.
    “I don’t want to go,” I said aloud. The donkey snorted and glared at me.
    I looked at the fire and remembered the god had said she—he—would help me. The next village did expect a wandering priest. There had been female wandering priests before, but … I looked at my trembling hands: a girl’s smooth, young hands. Then I considered the power of the veil and my last words to my father, spoken in my grandmother’s voice.
    I had a bit of mirror in one of my packs. I scraped some ash from the hearth onto a plate and considered the look of age.
    Two days, and much practice, later, I let a young man help me up onto a platform my hosts had set for me in their barn. “Is that all right, Omi Heza?” he asked me nervously. I had wrapped myself in my grandmother’s name like an extra veil, for strength.
    I looked at a sea of male faces. It was so familiar, and yet it was not, because my father was not behind me.
    “You cannot teach us!” cried some man. “You are a woman!”
    “And if you were my grandson, I would give you my cane for disrespect!” I cried. Suddenly light spilled all around me, and other voices, a woman’s and a man’s, spoke entwined around mine. “Do you doubt I speak with the god’s voices? Will you walk farther from the true flame?”
    As silence spread—as the men knelt, as that dreadful light began to fade—I said in my own, old-woman voice, “And bring the women and girls in here. I am too old to go on teaching once to the men and boys, and once tothem. From now on, I teach all together, as the balance is meant to be.”
    Three days later, with a thirteen-year-old boy to be my new companion, I set forth, bound for the next village. I rode my donkey, as befitted my age.

N AWAT
    In the Copper Isles, a tale is told of a crow who fell in love with a mortal woman and changed to human shape, as all crows can change, for her. Their love was sealed in the fire and blood of the Great Revolution that carried Queen Dovasary Balitang to the throne of the Isles. In that time crows, humans, and the black globe-creatures called darkings joined the rebel armies. Together they restored the native humans called raka to rule over their islands once more. This crow and his human love stood at Queen Dovasary’s left hand, where all secrets were kept.
    Some secrets reveal themselves after a handful of months. At the usual time following that revelation, Nawat Crow held one of his shrieking wife, Aly’s, hands as she gripped an arm of the birthing chair with the other. Nawat was so tense that feathers kept popping from his human skin, which made the midwife uneasy. Aly, who