Below the Step

Nobody in the world agrees about what happens when you die. In the iron kingdoms they weigh you. In the river empire they wait for you to come back. Every one of these ways is old, and every one of them works. Sefra was born to both banks of the same river and belongs to neither. On the near bank the dead come back. On the far bank they are weighed. At sixteen she stands below the step at a rite that was never meant to admit her, holding a wooden tally where the others hold iron. The pan dips. The school across the water wants what she can do. She does not know yet what it runs on: a debt, paid in the one currency she cannot earn back. The school is about to teach her what that costs. A serial fantasy.