Selenay’s eyes widened, and her mouth made a silent “O” shape.

“What’s more, they used to pick up every stray boy-chick they could get their hands on and throw him in with the rest!” Laika continued. “Not to mention the ones they kidnapped, not a few of ’em from our own people. They didn’t have much use for girls until they were of breeding age, but boys—oh, my, yes! That’s why they were taking such pains to keep our littles alive, so they could turn them into Tedrels. Now you’ve got a camp full of orphans and other youngsters over there that the Karsites are not going to want. You’ve killed off their fathers and protectors, if they even have mothers, their mothers are probably halfway to Rethwellan by now and might not have waited about for them, and what are you going to do about it?”

“Won’t the Karsites just take them?” Selenay asked, looking to Alberich.

“Probably—no,” he said, reluctantly. “Karse needs no extra mouths that come not with hands that can work. And—they are heretics, and the children of heretics, and what is more, even their own blood, to the Sunpriests’ eyes, they are not—or no longer are—Karsite.”

He did not elaborate on what that meant, but there was something very unpleasant stirring in the back of his mind; something like a—protovision. An intimation, not of what would be or what was about to be, but what might be.

A vision of the Fires of Cleansing. And the fuel that fed them.

“I don’t want to sound utterly callous and hardhearted, Herald, but, not to put too fine a point upon it, what can we do?” the Lord Marshal asked. “They’re on Karsite land, in Karsite hands.”

She looked at him as if he was an idiot. “And this stopped Vanyel? This stopped Lavan Firestorm?”

The Lord Marshal wasn’t about to back down. “That was in another situation entirely,” he retorted. “And if you’re referring to the ‘Demonsbane’ legend, Vanyel was on Hardorn land, not Karsite.”

Alberich cleared his throat. “Ah—Herald Laika—a question. Suppose I must, that you have these children been among. Think you, they can be anything but Tedrel?”