The neighbours had sighed and clicked their tongues. Only Suthinia, they said.
Pazel's sister had taken the news with a shrug and a laugh; she was determined not to care. Captain Gregory had just rolled his eyes. 'She'll be back,' he said. 'This isn't the first time, but we can hope it's the last.' Pazel had waited for his mother in silence, too frightened for tears.
As it happened Gregory was right on both counts. Suthinia came back, sunburned and road-filthy but otherwise unharmed. Nor did she ever vanish again — until the Arquali invasion, when every beautiful woman in Ormael vanished, mostly into Imperial hands. No, Suthinia stayed put, because a few months after that mysterious week Gregory himself sailed out of Ormaelport, never to return. To make matters worse, Captain Gregory's sister, who had helped out often with the children, picked that spring to elope to Etrej with a fallen monk. Suthinia, never the most attentive mother, was suddenly on her own.
Pazel liked to think he'd not added to her worries. His father had declared him bright. Dr Chadfallow, their illustrious family friend, had challenged him to become trilingual before his ninth birthday, and he was well on his way. Pazel wanted to sail like Gregory, but once he opened the grammar books Ignus provided, he somehow had a hard time putting them down.
Neda was eleven and at war with everything. She hated her father for abandoning them, Suthinia for giving him reasons to, Chadfallow for not talking him out of it and Pazel for not hating the others with her own intensity. To top it all, her mother and Chadfallow were becoming close. This, she told a mystified Pazel, was a betrayal of the father who had betrayed them.
Pazel just wished everyone would shut up. He loved them, despite a growing fear that they were all insane. Or rather all but Chadfallow — he was a gift from the Good Lord Rin. He had travelled the world; he could speak of medicine and history, wars and animals and earthquakes and ghosts. And in those days he still laughed, once in a long while, and the sound always surprised Pazel with its unguarded joy.
Years went by, and their mother's peculiarities deepened. She locked herself away with books, scaled the roof in thunderstorms, gave Pazel syrups designed to loosen his bowels and then studied the results with a long- handled spoon.
Then came the day of the custard apples. From dawn to dusk, Suthinia had forced a gruel made of the strange fruit on her children, although one sip told them that the drink was dangerous: In fact it proved both poisonous and enchanted. After a month-long coma, Pazel had awoken with his Gift, Neda with her anger at Suthinia redoubled.
Their mother had become a witch. Or stopped hiding the fact. Either way it made her odder and more dangerous. She stopped bathing, and neglected to cook. When Neda moved out it took Suthinia three days to notice that she was gone.
Later that year Mzithrini warships had begun raiding the Chereste coast. The mayor of Ormael turned to Chadfallow, Arqual's Special Envoy, and begged for Imperial protection. Pazel learned another reason to adore Chadfallow: he was the Man With the Emperor's Ear.
One day Captain Gregory's ship was spotted near Ormael, with Gregory himself at her wheel: but now the ship was flying the colours of the Mzithrin. Gregory was at once renamed Pathkendle the Traitor, and Pazel's family shared in his disgrace. The neighbours looked through them; Pazel's friends discovered that they had never really liked him at all. Neda, who had taken work on a goat farm, paid them brief, resentful visits, leaving gifts of sour cheese, but she never again spent a night under Suthinia's roof.
Only Chadfallow was unchanged. He still came to dinner — brought dinner, usually, for Suthinia was all but destitute — and drilled Pazel in Arquali for an hour. He was the best thing that could have happened to a traitor's son. Until he became the worst.
The night before the invasion — about which Chadfallow had breathed not a word — Pazel had found himself seated beside the doctor, under Neda's orange tree, assembling a kite. Pazel could not recall much of what they talked about (his mind was on the doctor's present more than his words) but the last part of the conversation he would never forget.
'Ignus, where did my mother go? That time she ran away.'
'You should ask her, my boy.'
Pazel said nothing; they both knew he had asked a thousand times.
'Well,' said the doctor reluctantly, 'let us say that she went to be with her own people awhile.'
'My father never came back. What if she hadn't either?'
'She came back. You're her son and she loves you.'
'What if she hadn't?'
Pazel's question was a plea. As if he could already sense them, somehow: the fire and the death shrieks, the enslavements, the notion of rape, the battle axe history was about to take to his world.
Chadfallow looked at him squarely. Lowering his voice, he said, 'If she had not returned I would have taken you to Etherhorde, and made a proper Arquali of you, and sent you to a proper school. One of the three High Academies, to be sure. And when you graduated, you would not have received a pat on the head, but a line of your own in the Endless Scroll, which the Young Scholars of the Imperium have signed for eight centuries. And you should have had friends who loved you for your cleverness instead of being jealous of it. And though you may not believe me, in a few years you would have forgotten these dullards and jackanapes, and been at home as never before.'
Pazel was dumbstruck. He couldn't possibly deserve all that. Chadfallow looked at him, almost smirking — until Suthinia appeared from nowhere, pushed the doctor back in his chair, and smacked him hard.
'You'll take him when they bury me, Ignus,' she said. Then she grabbed Pazel by the arm and marched him into the house.
'Mother, Mother,' Pazel said as they rushed up the stairs. 'He meant if I was alone, if something happened to you. Let go. You don't understand.'
'I understand more than you think,' she snapped.
She was hurting his arm. 'You're an animal,' he shouted, inspired. 'I wish you had stayed away. I want to go with him to Etherhorde.'
She dragged him into the washroom, thrust him before the mirror. 'Look at your skin. In Etherhorde they'd take you for a tarboy, or a slave.'
He bellowed right back at her: 'I'm not the colour of Ormalis either!' Which was true, if just barely: he had a bit too much caramel in his complexion, and his hair was too brown.
Suthinia shrugged. 'You're close enough.'
'I look like you,' he sobbed. At that moment it was the worst insult that occurred to him. His mother began to laugh, which enraged him all the more. 'Etherhorde's a proper city,' he shouted. 'Ignus belongs there, and so could I, if you'd just leave me alone.'
She would leave him the very next day, and possibly for ever, but at that moment his words had a curious effect. Her laughter and her fury vanished, and she looked at him with a kind of sad wonder, as if she had only just understood what they were talking about.
'You couldn't belong there,' she said. 'We will never belong among those who belong. The best thing to do is to cobble together some tribe of outcasts, when you're old enough to find them.'
'But Ignus-'
'Ignus is a dreamer. He's thinking of some other boy, some life that might have been, if the world were very different. I don't care if you believe what I say. Just remember it, love, and decide for yourself who told the truth.'
Pazel stumbled, bashing Thasha with his shins. Her body was growing heavy. Fiffengurt was hobbling, favouring a knee.
'This blary guard's right on top of us,' he said in a low voice, glancing nervously at Pazel. 'You'll never be able to — you know.'
'Sure he will,' said Neeps. 'You didn't see us in the Crab Fens, with the Volpeks behind us. My mate here can run like a whiplash hound.'
Pazel smiled grimly. He had a stitch in his side. 'I'll lose them, don't worry,' he said.
'They may not even try to stop you,' said Hercol. But his voice was reluctant, as though something else entirely was worrying his thoughts.
Fiffengurt took no notice. 'I'll miss you, Pathkendle,' he said gruffly, 'damned troublemaker though you
