their lives.
'Let me guess,' he ventured. 'Your mother refused, said that they would need to learn the perils and complexities of statecraft to survive as Princes-Imperial.'
'Something like that,' she replied.
'So you trusted him. Kelmomas, I mean.'
'Trusted?' she cried with open incredulity. 'He was a child! He adored me-to the point of annoyance!' She fixed him with a vexed look, as if to say, Enough, old man… 'He was the reason I ran away to find you, in fact.'
Something troubled the old Wizard about this, but as so often happens in the course of heated conversations, his worries yielded to the point he hoped to press home. 'Yes… But he was a child of Kellhus, an Anasurimbor by blood.'
'So?'
'So, that means he possesses Dunyain blood. Like Inrilatas.'
They had sloshed across the stream and were now climbing the far side of the gully. They could see the rest of the company above them, a string of frail forms labouring beneath the monumental trunks.
'Ah, I keep forgetting,' she said, huffing. 'I suppose he simply must be manipulative and amoral…' She regarded him the way he imagined she had regarded countless others on the Andiamine Heights: as something ridiculous. 'You've been cooped in the wilds too long, Wizard. Sometimes a child is just a child.'
'That's all they know, Mimara. The Dunyain. They're bred for it.'
She dismissed him with a flutter of eyelids. She had no inkling, he realized-like everyone else in the Three Seas. For her, Kellhus was simply what he appeared to be.
In the first years of his exile, the hardest years, Achamian had spent endless hours revisiting the events of the First Holy War-his memories of Kellhus and Esmenet most of all. The more he pondered the man, the more obvious the Scylvendi's revelatory words came to seem, until it became difficult to remember what it was like living within the circuit of his glamour. To think he had still loved the man after he had lured Esmenet to his bed! That he had spent sleepless hours wrestling with excuses-excuses! — for him.
But even still, after so many years, the appearances continued to argue for the man. Everything Mimara had described regarding the preparations for the Great Ordeal-even the scalpers accompanying him! — attested to what Kellhus had claimed so many years previous: that he had been sent to prevent the Second Apocalypse. Achamian had suffered that old sense several times now while feuding with Mimara, the one that had plagued him as a Mandate Schoolman travelling the courts of the Three Seas arguing the very things Kellhus had made religion (and there was an irony that plucked, if there ever was one). The anxious urge to throw words atop words, as if speaking could plaster over the cracked expressions that greeted his claims. The plaintive, wheedling sense of being disbelieved.
Maybe you need it, old man… Need to be disbelieved.
He had seen it before: men who had borne perceived injustices so long they could never relinquish them and so continually revisited them in various guises. The world was filled with self-made martyrs. Fear goads fear, the old Nansur proverb went, and sorrow, sorrow.
Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps everything-the suffering, the miles, the lives lost and taken-was naught but a fool's errand. As wrenching as this possibility was, and as powerful as the Scylvendi's words had been, Achamian would have been entirely prepared to accept his folly. He was a true student of Ajencis in this respect…
Were it not for his Dreams. And the coincidence of the Coffers.
The old Wizard continued on in silence, mulling the details of Mimara's tale. The picture she had drawn was as fascinating as it was troubling. Kellhus perpetually distracted, perpetually absent. His children possessing a jumble of human and Dunyain attributes-and half-mad for it, apparently. Games heaped upon games, and sorrow and resentment most of all. Esmenet had fetched her broken daughter from the brothel only to deliver her to the arena that was the Andiamine Heights-a place where no soul could mend.
Not hers, and certainly not her daughter's.
Was this not a kind of proof of Kellhus? Pain followed him, as did tumult and war. Every life that fell into his cycle suffered some kind of loss or deformation. Was this not an outward sign of his… his evil?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Suffering had ever been the wages of revelation. The greater the truth, the greater the pain. No one understood this quite so profoundly as he.
Either way, it was proof of Mimara. Our words always paint two portraits when we describe our families to others. Outsiders cannot but see the small peeves and follies that wrinkle our relationships with our loved ones. The claims we make in defensive certainty-that we were the one wronged, that we were the one who wanted the best-cannot but fall on skeptical ears since everyone but everyone makes the same claims of virtue and innocence. We are always more than we want to be in the eyes of others simply because we are blind to the bulk of what we are.
Kellhus had taught him that.
Mimara had wanted him to see her as a victim, as a long-suffering penitent, more captive than daughter, and not as someone embittered and petulant, someone who often held others accountable for her inability to feel safe, to feel anything unpolluted by the perpetual pang of shame…
And he loved her the more for it.
Later, as the murk of evening steeped through the forest galleries, she slowed so that he could draw abreast, but she did not return his questioning gaze.
'What I told you,' she eventually said, 'that was foolish of me.'
'What was foolish?'
'What I said.'
This final exchange left him sorting through melancholy thoughts of his own family and the wretched Nroni fishing village where he had been born. They seemed strangers, now, not simply the people who inhabited his childhood memories, but the passions as well. The doting love of his sisters… Even the tyranny of his father-the maniacal shouts, the wordless beatings-seemed to belong to some soul other than his own.
This, he realized… This was his true family: the mad children of the man who had robbed him of his wife. The New Anasurimbor Dynasty. These were his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. And this simply meant that he had no family… that he was alone.
Save for the mad woman trekking beside him.
His little girl…
Back when he had been a tutor in Aoknyssus, he took up the antique Ceneian practice of considering problems while walking-peripatetics, the ancients had called it. He would trudge down from his apartment by the Premparian Barracks, through the wooded pathways of the Ke, and down to the port, where the masts made a winter forest of the piers. There was this defunct temple where he would always glimpse the same beggar through a breach in the walls. He was one of those unravelled men, unkempt and withered, slow-moving and speechless, as if dumbfounded at where the years had delivered him. And for some reason it always knocked Achamian from his stride seeing him. He would pass gazing, his walk slowing to a numb saunter, and the beggar would simple stare off, beyond caring who did or did not watch. Achamian would forget whatever problem he had set off to ponder and brood instead about the cruel alchemy of age and love and time. A fear would clutch him, knowing that this, this, was true solitude, to find yourself the feeble survivor, stranded at the end of your life, your loves and hopes reduced to remembered smoke, hungering, suffering…
And waiting. Waiting most of all.
His mother was dead, the old Wizard supposed.
Making water or mud has always been an irritating challenge for her. She cannot simply retreat behind a tree as the others might, not for the sake of modesty-a sentiment that had been pummelled from her in childhood-but out of a keen awareness of men and their lustful infirmities. She has to plunge deeper, beyond the possibility of craning looks. 'A glimpse is a promise,' the brothel masters used to say. 'Show them what they would steal, and they will spend- spend! '
She squats, her breeches crowded about her knees, stares up into the veined complexities of the canopy as she relieves herself. She follows the dark lines of silhouetted limbs scrawling across foliated stages, ragged screen set across ragged screen, each brighter than the next. She doesn't see the figure… not at first.
But then its shape is unmistakable: human limbs clutched and hanging about arboreal. Unlike other forests,
