SINCE LEAVING THE boy Rafe with his uncle, Kosar had wandered the bustling streets of Pavisse. Trengborne had sometimes numbed his senses with its blandness—the smell of dirt, the taste of cooked sheebok, the sounds of farming and families going about their mundane lives—but here they were opened up once again. The odors, the sounds, the sights of the streets amazed him for a while, worn traveler though he was, and he realized that his history had been gradually smothered by the constant glare of the Trengborne sun, and the idea that he had found his niche. The realization did not please him. He had been enjoying the life he had made for himself. There had even been a sense of reparation there, the idea that in a way he was making up for the damaged life he had been living. Not redemption, never redemption. Simply repair.

Now he was back in the world. He mourned Trengborne and its people, he was terrified and shocked by what he had witnessed and he needed to talk to someone friendly. This very fact proved just how far he had drifted from the life of a wandering thief.

He had spent only a few moons here but he had made friends, fellow rogues and vagrants who were happy spending their lives in taverns and food halls, exaggerating their exploits and commanding respect from like-minded exaggerators. Kosar had never embellished his past, nor glamorized it. Sometimes he had done his best to downplay what he had been, what he had done. Already, back then, he had been changing.

One of the friends he had made had been very special. He sought her now. He thought that she might know something about what he had seen back in Trengborne, the Red Monk that had slaughtered the village, what it all meant. She was a true traveler, a descendant of the Shantasi race that had been brought to Noreela in slavery thousands of years before. Their original home was long forgotten; some said it was an island to the east of Noreela, thousands of miles away across an uncrossable ocean. Others believed that the Shantasi had actually been brought into being by errant shades in the mountains of Kang Kang, their pale skins camouflage against the snow, their purpose to provide those incorporeal souls with premature flesh and blood homes. The Shantasi themselves were perpetually silent about their origins, but they could not hide one of their greatest gifts: knowledge.

A’Meer Pott had also been Kosar’s last lover.