Ah, you see their contempt, then. Is this how it is, now? Righteous fury lost on the horizon, amidst white winds. And here before me, Vatha Urusander, the greying wolf with its fangs pulled. ‘Sir, what you might call marriage, they name machination. In a joining of hands, as you might see it, they grasp for leverage. Not a union of love, then. Nor one of respectful regard, you with her, her with you. Rather, they set you both upon the same anvil, and from two blades they would hammer and twist the pair of you into one single weapon.’

‘For them to wield?’

She almost stepped back at the sudden fire in his eyes, a flame of light unnatural in its fierceness. The fangs remain, but still I sense his… helplessness. Was this the mark of Syntara’s blessing? Skin of white and the blinding fires of Liosan… all pointless? Did she curse as well as bless? What reach this newfound power of hers, and was that what Sharenas saw in Hunn Raal? ‘It is my thought, sir, that they would take hold of such a weapon, even knowing the threat of uncertain edges, a sliding grip, an unexpected unbalancing, and swing hard, unmindful of innocent victims.’

‘As you say,’ he said sharply, ‘an uncertain weapon, no matter what they might desire, or expect. To think that we are seen this way, a Legion commander and a goddess. As mere tools for their ambitions. I will speak to her!’

He meant Mother Dark, she presumed. ‘They must line the steps of that path first, and so they urge you to remain here. Sir, was it truly your desire to… do nothing?’

‘And yield trust to any messenger? Were you, captain, not enough?’

‘Day by day, sir, my reiteration of your avowed loyalty, in the name of peace, rang more and ever more hollow.’ Pray that stings you, Urusander. Words scud like clouds over the blood-soaked landscape. High and noble they might be, but their shadows prove weak.

He squinted southward for a time, and then seemed to deflate. ‘I am filled with promises,’ he said. ‘None worth the weight of the breath that utters them.’

The wealth of light, it seemed, invited extremity. There would indeed be little balance left to this newly forged weapon. In sudden clarity, she saw the marriage, this union that would bring peace upon the realm. A bloody peace. Light and Dark will war, one against the other. I see the spitting out of children, a family brood both venal and vicious. A marriage of two bedrooms, two keeps, two worlds. ‘Commander Toras Redone’s grief, sir, is for the soldiers of the Hust Legion, almost all of whom are now dead.’