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Xiao Lian never knew whether Ding Xiang was a hero or a goddess.\nFor all her daily smiles, the girl seemed to know so much: the white snows of the north, the camel bells beyond the frontier, the gentle waters of Jiangnan, the sheer peaks of Xishu... Xiao Lian never knew where she had come from.\nShe could be a chatterbox, always full of strange notions. But Xiao Lian knew that so long as she kept close to this girl, there would always be a meal to eat and a safe patch of ground to sleep on.\nYet little by little, Ding Xiang's stories grew fewer. Those legends and far-off scenes came laced with secrets that could not be spoken. The girl who once spun tales the whole night through became the one who carried more upon her heart than anyone in the Northern Vow.\nThen one day, the old excitement lit her face again. Xiao Lian watched her rattle off stories she had never heard before, all while scrambling to write letter after letter, each for someone different.\nXiao Lian could not read. She only knew that carrier pigeons bore those letters off in every direction.\nShe heard Ding Xiang whisper, all mystery, that she had learned a secret vast as the sky, one she could tell to no one.\n"I'll slip away to the general's side, and have a proper word with him at last."\n"See? Now I know everything!"\nXiao Lian did not know what the great secret was, nor who the general might be.\nBut she never forgot the look on Ding Xiang's face. It was the joy of one who, long in another's debt, could at last repay it; and more than that, a heart brimming with valor, poised to turn the tides of the age.