“Not everything, Your Excellency,” I said. “I was given love and strength by the actions and example of the mother and father who meant to raise me and were killed because of me. I know affection and constancy because of the loyalty of my dear cousin Bee. My aunt and uncle fed and clothed me in the same manner they fed and clothed their own girls, so I learned fairness from them. We girls were taught deportment, fencing, dancing, and sewing, as well as how to read and write and do accounts and to use herbs to make the last of winter’s store of turnips and parsnips taste palatable. So I learned both a trade, and how to make do. I refuse to agree that everything I am is due to my sire breeding me on my mother. I am not a horse or a dog, to be described in such a way. Even horses and dogs can be raised poorly, or well.”

Perhaps, becoming heated, I had raised my voice.

“Passionately argued.” A faint smile calmed his face. “Very well. Your actions and your loyalty to your cousin have convinced me you are not a servant of the spirit courts, they who are our implacable enemies. I believe you have earned the right to have a few of your questions answered.”

Bee touched clasped hands to her lips, then lowered them. “From everything I have learned, it seems your people somehow bred or created the women who walk the paths of dreams. Your people infested us, if you will, with the curse of walking the Great Smoke in our dreams. You did so because you want us to walk into the spirit world and unearth a nest and guide its hatchlings into the mortal world.”

“That is correct.”

“But we can also glimpse meeting places in the future.”

“Your visions allow you to find a nest. All the rest is coincidental, not of importance to us.”

Bee’s expression sharpened to her axe-blow glare, and I was sure she was about to say something cutting, but instead she sat back. “Surely nests hatch without our help.”

“They do. And they have across the passing of many generations. Understand that we are far older than your kind. It is the way of my people that our mothers live in the Great Smoke. They lay their eggs on the shore of the spirit world. The eggs hatch in the spirit world, and hatchlings seek water, through which they fall into the Great Smoke. After a time swimming there, those who survive surface into this world, for it is here we must grow to maturity. Thus the cycle starts over. But in recent ages, our ancestors began to notice that fewer and fewer were reaching this world. We came to believe that the creatures of the spirit world were deliberately devouring the hatchlings in the hope of eating them all and thus causing us to die out completely.”