Regina grimaced. She had never told her daughter how she, too, had been used by Ceawlin. “I had no choice.”

“There is always a choice. I think your mind has died, or your heart—”

Regina grabbed her by the chin and forced her head around. “Enough. Look at me.”

Brica resisted, but she had never had her mother’s physical strength. Her head turned, and her eyes, smoky gray like Regina’s, met her mother’s.

Regina said, “Do you think you are the only one who has made sacrifices? You are precious to me—so precious. If I could save you from harm I would. But there is something more precious still, and that is the family. If we had stayed in Britain while Artorius got himself killed posturing on the battlefields of Europe, we would not have survived him for long. And if you had married Galba, your children would have been farmers, their minds dissolving in the dirt, and within two generations, three, they would have remembered nothing of what they once were—”

“But they would exist,” Brica snapped. “My children. Mother, it was my choice, not yours.” She pulled her face away. “And now you’re looking for your own mother, who abandoned you all those years ago. Whether or not she lives, you are selfish and morbid. Your relationship with your mother no longer matters. You do not matter. All that matters is me, for my womb is not yet dry, like yours. The future is mine—”

“No. The future is the family.” And even you, my beautiful child, Regina thought sadly, are only a conduit to that future.

Regina’s determination was strong, clear, untroubled. She was dismayed, she admitted to herself, by the iron coldness she saw in Brica. It was as if the recent events had crushed the life and warmth out of her—and thoroughly wrecked her relationship with her mother. Well, a lifelong battle with Brica would be hard, but Regina was used to hardships, and to overcoming them.

And it wasn’t as if Brica could get away. Ironically the narrowness of her upbringing on the farmstead and the dunon, against which Regina had always railed, now left her stranded and baffled away from her home ground; Brica couldn’t leave Regina’s side no matter how much she wanted to.

Now they were both distracted, for they approached the city itself.