lantern spark across the marshland gray. But
I ve known you longer than you ve known yourself, she says.
He stares at the dull, thickly glistening swatches of cobweb across the marsh grass ahead of him. Tell me what I m thinking, then.
Oh, the usual. Ishil s tone turns abruptly gemstone-hard and glinting. He feels a chill gust through him suddenly, she s a perfect match for the mother he knows. You wonder how I manage to live with the daily truth of marriage to your father and not just open my veins some sunlit afternoon in my bathwater.
Well
She laughs. Some of the hardness leaches back out of her voice. You re such an old romantic, Gil. Just try to imagine for a moment you d been born female. Breeding or brothel stock, these are your options. We just don t get to carry a blade and carve out our own uncompromising path through the world like the boys .
He's known women who did, across the old warehouse district and down at harbor end. Admittedly not many of them made it out of their teens alive. He supposed not many had ever expected to.
Women know the price of things, Gil. We learn it hard and fast at our mother s knee, helping and caring and fetching and carrying, while our brothers are still playing at knights and foes without a care in the world. The world falls on us early.
You seem to be bearing up, he says sourly. What s the secret?
Children, she tells him with sudden warmth. Bringing them into the world. Seeing them through it. You know that.
He can t face the way she looks at him as she says it. He turns away, eyes pricked through, half blinded. He wonders, with an odd, quiet desperation, how many times the Ishil he knows might have looked at him like that without him ever seeing or knowing.
Is that why you re here? To see me through?
She laughs again, voice utterly unfettered this time. I m here to ask you about the wedding arrangements, Gil. The vow circlets for you and Selys, gold or silver? Red rose petals or white for her bridal path?
What? he asks faintly.
And the invitations, the list? Will you really insist on snubbing the Kaads, or shall we let bygones be bygones? Come on, Gil, don t spoil your mother s proudest hour. I m so happy for you both. Is that so strange?
It s so fucking strange he doesn t even want to think about it. He gestures at the cobwebs to buy time. Listen, I m not getting married to anyone unless we find a way through this first.
Why don t you try over there?
To his annoyance, it proves a good call. There are patches where the webs are frayed and old, clogged with the sucked-dry corpses of insect life and small marsh animals. No sign of any stealthy, articulated motion within. He unsheathes the Ravensfriend just in case, prods about dubiously for a bit, then resigns himself to Ishil being right.
This way, then?
This way, she agrees. Keep right on like that, it s your best path out of here. Now, what about the Kaads? Seriously. Your father thinks they should be there.
I bet he does. Smashing grimly through the old web and the grass, the tiny, dried hanging corpses that swing and spindle about as he passes. Chancellery politics never sleeps, does it?
Oh, don t start, Gil.
So he doesn t. He lets her talk instead. And though he doesn t like to admit it, her voice, trailing at his shoulder, is oddly comforting.
What you don t appreciate, Gil, is that for all your father s cruelties and indiscretions, he has been a great shield through difficult times. You don t know what it was like back in the twenties. We didn t have the Scaled Folk to unite us all back then. Yhelteth was a despised enemy
Yeah heading that way again these days.
But she doesn t seem to hear him. The raiding went back and forth at the borders for years, Gil, news every other week of towns burned and populations marched away in chains. And we were marked. No matter that we were merchants in good faith, wealth in our coffers and a generation of judicious marriage alliances. Still we had the red daub on our door, still we were barred from the Chancellery. Stones thrown at us in the street, spat upon with impunity by urchins. Southern scum, southern scum. In the school we attended, the priests beat my brothers at every opportunity. One of them struck Eldrin to the floor once, called him Yhelteth whelp, kicked him from his desk to the door and out into the corridor. He was five. He came home black and blue, and my father, shamed, could do nothing. My mother went begging to the priests instead, and the beatings stopped for a while, but she never spoke of that visit afterward as long as she lived. Do you know how relieved my parents looked the day I married Gingren Eskiath? Do you know how happy I was for them?
Were they happy for you?
No reply.
He looks back and sees that she, too, has left him.
CHAPTER 20
In the time before this, the Earth was not the way you see it now.
In the time before this, the Earth was ravaged by endless conflict, fought over by races and beings you now remember only as myth and legend.
Weapons of hideous, unnatural power were unleashed, vast energies raged, horizon to horizon, the sky itself cracked open. The planet shuddered from the tread of the Visitors enemies and allies too, the latter chosen in desperation from other worlds and places worse than other worlds, to hold the line against invaders who were probably in the end no more alien.
Whole nations and peoples disappeared inside storms that lasted decades.
Great jagged darknesses larger than mountains moved in the night sky, blocking out the stars and casting deathly shadow on those beneath.
Gates opened, in places no earthly passage should ever have been permitted, and the Visitors poured forth, met in battle, coiled and recoiled, worked their alien technologies in causes it is doubtful those who enlisted them could ever truly comprehend. It was a conflict beyond human reckoning, and mere humans found themselves trapped, cornered, hemmed in on all sides by what had been unleashed.
So Humanity fought, hopelessly, generation after generation, endured unimaginable horrors, changed at levels once believed intrinsic, splintered apart and became a dozen disparate races in itself as if only in dissolution could the race once called human hide sufficiently well from the carnivorous glare of alien eyes .
And then finally, for reasons no longer well understood the wars ended, the Earth spun on along its customary course in relative peace.
And those who were left squabbled over what remained.
No change there then, Jhiral muttered, and Archeth glanced at him in mute surprise.
A brief and pointed silence, and then Anasharal s voice resumed, with biting schoolmasterly emphasis:
Into, this, void
into this void, then, burst the Dwenda, the Aldrain, the witch folk, glittering dark and beautiful, human at least in base form, and claiming a prior heritage, an ownership of Earth predating the conflict though there were those who argued their memories were faulty, hopelessly distorted by their custom of dwelling for long periods in the realm of the Unrealized Possible; and others who believed that Time itself had been somehow collapsed, folded, or maybe just shredded in the wars, so that the past the dwenda claimed did not even belong, correctly speaking, to this version of the world.
But such arguments were at best academic the wars had weakened the walls that held such places apart from the unshadowed world, and the Aldrain were not disposed to debate with the existing populations in lands they considered their own by ancestral right.
They took the Earth by storm and built there, summarily, an Empire that lasted seven thousand years. Many,
