And she did. Mor pressed her ear even closer to the gap, for Skylene began speaking softly. Good, she thought. Yes, do give the Akaran truth. Let it be a punishment to that weak side of him that embraces guilt.

Skylene spoke with her usual conciseness, laying out the details in a dispassionate manner that Mor herself could not have pulled off. It was hard to know truth from myth, but some among the divine children had been entrusted with keeping the Auldek's oral history. They passed on what they had learned to the People. The clans of Ushen Brae had once been much more numerous. Theirs had been a warrior culture, rooted for millennia in intertribal strife, a culture in which men lived to die in battle, risking everything to earn a place in the warrior halls of the afterworld. They worshipped a god of war, Bahine, and a pantheon of lesser animal deities, warriors all.

"If they had stayed such," Skylene said, "there would never have been a quota trade."

But things did not stay that way. Though the tribes were rich in fertile land and resources, the constant warring made for feast or famine, triumph or destruction. They might have been strong with swords and axes; when the Lothan Aklun arrived, they thought them hounds fighting over scraps.

"Arrived?" Dariel interrupted. "From where?"

Skylene admitted that she did not know. But they came and, soon after, the league did as well. "It was so long ago that the truth is hard to know for certain, but some believe that the Lothan Aklun and the league were in partnership right from the start, as if the Lothan Aklun discovered Ushen Brae, saw the potential for trade, and called on the league to sail the seas for them.

"The thing is, Dariel," Skylene said, "the Lothan Aklun did not want to trade in ore or spices or oils. Even the mist was important only because the Known World wanted it so. For some reason, they wanted to base their trade of slaves on quota, on souls. They created the soul catcher. It's not a thing. Not a device or tool, exactly. It's the place where the life force is taken from one and given to another. We don't know how it works, or why. There are words written on the floor, they say. Perhaps the spells are written there, or perhaps in some way it focuses the Lothan Aklun's power. With it, they can take the life force from one body and place it into another, on reserve for when it's needed. This is the reason why Devoth didn't die when that arrow burst his heart. He has many lives within his skin. Killing one is anguish, but goes away."

Dariel said, "This is making my head spin. For weeks you tell me nothing. Now, suddenly-"

"Yes, well, your respite is over. Don't faint on me just yet, though. The result of all this is the Ushen Brae of today. The Lothan Aklun traded mist for quota children, and they took them and sold them to the Auldek, who paid great sums for them. The Auldek, in turn, used the slaves to run their world, to build their grand cities and produce a greater flow of wealth than they and the Lothan Aklun could ever have produced themselves. See how it all works?"

"Not really. I mean, I do, but what kind of men would think up such a system?"

And you thought your people were devious, Mor thought. You're children by comparison.

"Everybody in it is exploited," Dariel continued, "except the Lothan Aklun themselves."

"Ah, yes," Skylene cut in. "And now, with them dead, we have a host of new problems to face. Perhaps you should have a drink of water. I have a few more things to say that may make you dizzy."

C HAPTER

Make her fly higher!" Aaden called.

"As high as she can go!" his friend Devlyn added.

"I don't make her," Mena said. "I just ask. She chooses on her own."

"I know, but she should go higher. If I were her, Id go up and up and up. I wonder how high she could go?"

As high as she wants, Aaden. As high as she wants." Mena smiled, watching her nephew's upturned, enraptured face. His mouth hung open with the unanswered question. For a moment, Mena was tempted to snatch up one of the grapes left over from their lunch and drop it on his tongue. Instead, she formed the image of rising in her mind and wished it toward the creature.

The aunt, nephew, and his friend sat on a quilted blanket that had been laid out on the short grass of the Carmelia, the massive stadium named in honor of the seventh Akaran king's wife. Around them, the flat field stretched out in all directions, running right up to the walls that hemmed the exhibition grounds. Beyond that, terraced levels of bleachers rose up, enough contoured benches to hold thousands of spectators. They were empty at the moment, though, save a few cleaners working their slow way down the aisle. These Mena barely noticed. The four Numrek guards who stood on watch were more conspicuous, spaced throughout the bleachers in an approximate square around Aaden, their special charge.

Above them, Elya soared through the air. She, of course, was what so captured the boy's attention. Seemingly in answer to Aaden's request and Mena's thought, she steadied her wings and tilted into a slow, circular flight, lifted higher on thermals of warm air.

"You'll get a stitch in your neck if you keep looking up like that," Mena said, winking at one of the three servants that stood attending them. The young woman smiled back.

Aaden showed no sign of having heard her.

Eventually, Elya was but a speck in the sky.

"She's going to disappear," Devlyn said. He was a handsome boy, slightly taller than Aaden, dark haired but with features that did not clearly mark his ethnicity.

"She won't, will she?" Aaden asked, his enthusiasm exchanged for concern. And then, as if something had just occurred to him, "Tell her to come down now."

"But you just told me to send her up! She's barely gotten started."

Mena joked with them for a time, playing with their growing anxiety. When both boys began to look truly troubled, she set an arm on Aaden's shoulder and did as he requested. She was no surer now how the communication between her and the creature worked than she had been at first. There were no rules to it, no way to explain or quantify it. She simply thought to Elya, and Elya responded. It was not words Mena used but visual images. As now: she saw the world from high above and imagined plum meting down, the contours beneath her taking shape, the outline of Acacia amid the shimmering cobalt sea, the terraced palace and the lower town and the spit of land upon which the Carmelia lay, three people waiting on a square of woven fabric. She imagined all this and knew that Elya would both think it and understand what Mena meant by it.

That was just how it seemed to work, with images and also with emotions. Elya could pick up Mena's frame of mind readily. Sometimes Mena realized what she was feeling only because of something Elya did in response to it. When Mena grew pensive, thinking about Corinn or concerned about Dariel on his mission far away, Elya might make faces at her, invite her to fly, or simply draw near and let joy radiate between, like heat from her body.

At other times Elya knew when to withdraw. When Mena and Melio were intimate, for example, Elya acted as silly as any maid making a show of embarrassment for having caught them entwined in the bedsheets. She backed away with her head low, stepping lightly on the balls of her feet. Had her skin not been hidden beneath her soft plumage, Mena reckoned she would have seen her blush. Yes, between them there was no other word for it than what she had shouted to Melio back in Talay: love. Elya had brought a new level of love into the palace. Much needed.

As the avian and reptilian and wholly unique winged being plummeted down the last few hundred feet in a headlong dive, Mena greeted her with thoughts of affection, of admiration for her beauty, and thanks for the many ways she kept Aaden enthralled. Elya fell toward them with her wings close to her body, her head stretched forward and tail straight as an arrow behind her.