‘She was too late, Feather Witch. And you insist on calling me Indebted, as if saying it often enough will take away-’

‘Be quiet! I want nothing to do with you!’

‘You have no choice, although if you speak any louder both our heads will top a pike outside the walls. What did the Acquitor want with Mayen?’

She shifted nervously, hesitated, then said, ‘A welcome for the Nerek. They’re dying.’

Udinaas shook his head. ‘That gift is for the Warlock King to make.’

‘So you would think, yet Mayen offered herself in his stead.’

His eyes widened. ‘She did? Has she lost her mind?’

‘Quiet, you fool!’ Feather Witch crouched down across from him. ‘The impending marriage has filled her head. She fashions herself as a queen and so has become insufferable. And now she would bless the Nerek-’

‘Bless?’

‘Her word, yes. I think even the Acquitor was taken aback.’

‘That was Seren Pedac, wasn’t it?’

Feather Witch nodded.

Both were silent for a few moments, then Udinaas said, ‘What would such a blessing do, do you think?’

‘Probably nothing. The Nerek are a broken people. Their gods are dead, the spirits of their ancestors scattered. Oh, a ghost or two might be drawn to the newly sanctified ground-’

‘An Edur’s blessing could do that? Sanctify the ground?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. But there could be a binding. Of destinies, depending on the purity of Mayen’s bloodline, on all that awaits her in her life, on whether she’s-’ Feather Witch gestured angrily and clamped her mouth shut.

On whether she’s a virgin. But how could that be in question? She’s not yet married, and Edur do not break those rules. ‘We did not speak of this, you and I,’ Udinaas said. ‘I told you that you had to wait because that is expected of me. You had no reason to think your message from Mayen was urgent. We are slaves, Feather Witch. We do not think for ourselves, and of the Edur and their ways we know next to nothing.’

Her eyes finally locked with his. ‘Yes.’ A moment, then, ‘Hannan Mosag meets with the Letherii tonight.’

‘I know.’

‘Buruk the Pale. Seren Pedac. Hull Beddict.’

Udinaas smiled, but the smile held no humour. ‘If you will, at whose feet shall the tiles be cast, Feather Witch?’

‘Among those three? Errant knows, Udinaas.’ As if sensing her own softening towards him, she scowled and straightened. ‘I will stand over there. Waiting.’

‘You do intend to cast the tiles tonight, don’t you?’

She admitted it with a terse nod, then walked to the corner of the longhouse front, to the very edge of the thickening rain.

Udinaas resumed stripping scales. He thought back to his own words earlier. Fallen. Who tracks our footsteps, I wonder? We who are the forgotten, the discounted and the ignored. When the path is failure, it is never willingly taken. The fallen. Why does my heart weep for them? Not them but us, for most assuredly I am counted among them. Slaves, serfs, nameless peasants and labourers, the blurred faces in the crowd – just a smear on memory, a scuffing of feet down the side passages of history.

Can one stop, can one turn and force one’s eyes to pierce the gloom? And see the fallen? Can one ever see the fallen? And if so, what emotion is born in that moment?

There were tears on his cheeks, dripping down onto his chafed hands. He knew the answer to that question, knife-sharp and driven deep, and the answer was… recognition.

Hull Beddict moved to stand beside Seren Pedac as Mayen walked away. Behind them, the Nerek were speaking in their native tongue, harsh and fast words, taut with disbelief. Rain hissed in the cookfires.

‘She should not have done that,’ Hull said.

‘No,’ Seren agreed, ‘she should not have. Still, I am not quite certain what has just happened. They were just words, after all. Weren’t they?’

‘She didn’t proclaim them guests, Seren. She blessed their arrival.’

The Acquitor glanced back at the Nerek, frowned at their flushed, nervous expressions. ‘What are they talking about?’

‘It’s the old dialect – there are trader words in it that I understand, but many others that I don’t.’

‘I didn’t know the Nerek had two languages.’

‘Their name is mentioned in the annals of the First Landings,’ Hull said. ‘They are the indigenous people whose territory spanned the entire south. There were Nerek watching the first ships approach. Nerek who came to greet the first Letherii to set foot on this continent. Nerek who traded, taught the colonizers how to live in this land, gave them the medicines against the heat fevers. They have been here a long, long time. Two languages? I’m surprised there aren’t a thousand.’

‘Well,’ Seren Pedac said after a moment, ‘at least they’re animated once more. They’ll eat, do as Buruk commands-’

‘Yes. But I sense a new fear among them – not one to incapacitate, but the source of troubled thoughts. It seems that even they do not comprehend the full significance of that blessing.’

‘This was never their land, was it?’

‘I don’t know. The Edur certainly claim to have always been here, from the time when the ice first retreated from the world.’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten. Their strange creation myths. Lizards and dragons and ice, a god-king betrayed.’

After a moment she glanced over, and saw him staring at her.

‘What is it, Hull?’

‘How do you know such things? It was years before Binadas Sengar relinquished such information to me, and that as a solemn gift following our binding.’

Seren blinked. ‘I heard it… somewhere. I suppose.’ She shrugged, wiping rainwater from her face. ‘Everyone has some sort of creation myth. Nonsense, typically. Or actual memories all jumbled up and infused with magic and miracles.’

‘You are being surprisingly dismissive, Acquitor.’

‘And what do the Nerek believe?’

‘That they were all born of a single mother, countless generations past, who was the thief of fire and walked through time, seeking that which might answer a need that consumed her – although she could never discover the nature of that need. One time, in her journey, she took within her a sacred seed, and so gave birth to a girl-child. To all outward appearances,’ he continued, ‘that child was little different from her mother, for the sacredness was hidden, and so it remains hidden to this day. Within the Nerek, who are the offspring of that child.’

‘And by this, the Nerek justify their strange patriarchy.’

‘Perhaps,’ Hull conceded, ‘although it is the female line that is taken as purest.’

‘And does this first mother’s mother have a name?’

‘Ah, you noted the confused blending of the two, as if they were roles rather than distinct individuals. Maiden, mother and grandmother, a progression through time-’

‘Discounting the drudgery spent as wife. Wisdom unfurls like a flower in a pile of dung.’

His gaze sharpened on her. ‘In any case, she is known by a number of related names, also suggesting variations of a single person. Eres, N’eres, Eres’al.’

‘And this is what lies at the heart of the Nerek ancestor worship?’

‘Was, Seren Pedac. You forget, their culture is destroyed.’

‘Cultures can die, Hull, but the people live on, and what they carry within them are the seeds of rebirth-’

‘A delusion, Seren Pedac,’ he replied. ‘Whatever might be born of that is twisted, weak, a self-mockery.’

‘Even stone changes. Nothing can stand still-’

‘Yet we would. Wouldn’t we? Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present. With its seemingly endless excesses, its ravenous appetites. Ever the same rules, ever the same game.’

Seren Pedac shrugged. ‘We were discussing the Nerek. A noble-born woman of the Hiroth Tiste Edur has blessed them-’

‘Before even our own formal welcome has been voiced.’

Her brows rose. ‘You think this is yet another veiled insult to the Letherii? Instigated by Hannan Mosag himself? Hull, I think your imagination has the better of you this time.’