‘RESTITUTION,’ SAID VATHA URUSANDER, ‘SEEMS SUCH A simple concept. A past wrong made right, even should generations span the injustice. Even if questions of personal culpability no longer obtain, there are the spoils of the crime to consider.’

Renarr slid her gaze from her adoptive father where he stood by the window, over to young Sheltatha Lore, who had a way of making adolescence itself a triumph. Long limbs draped upon the divan, her slim torso slightly curled in feline grace – as if she but awaited the sculptor and the chisel, the unblinking eye finding its myriad obsessions. ‘Art,’ Gallan once said, ‘is the sweet language of obsession.’ Renarr thought that she’d begun to comprehend the poet’s assertion, as she idly gave herself the artist’s eye when looking upon her not-so-innocent charge.

In the meantime, Urusander continued. ‘A concept may seem simple, until its careful consideration unveils unending complications. How does one measure such spoils when cause and effect settle one upon the other in endless repetition, like sediments in stone? Raise up that first cause like a spire – the years after will see it weathered to a stub, its solidity reduced to grains, its height levelled amidst the heaps of its own detritus. Even then, how does one assign a value to all that was gained, over all that was potentially lost? Is innocence worth more than knowing? Is freedom worth more than seeming necessity? What of privilege and greed? And power and force? Are they a match in coin, or weight of gold, to destitution and loss? Helplessness and impotence?’

Plucking at some thread or lint, Sheltatha Lore sighed. ‘Dear me, milord, surely you comprehend that restitution holds a thousand meanings, ten thousand – numbers unending, in fact.’ One supple arm reached out and down to collect up the goblet of wine, which she brought to her lips. A careless mouthful, and then, ‘What about the victim indifferent to gold? Contemptuous of coin? Or the one whose beliefs reject vengeance? What of the Denier in the forest who can only weep for the loss of trees and the deaths of loved ones? How many wagons filled with loot will satisfy him or her? How many newly planted trees, or rebuilt huts? How many monuments to honour their dead? Restitution,’ she said, after another mouthful of wine, ‘may live in the present, promising a just future, but it dwells in the sordid past. The word itself ignores the lesson of its necessity, and so will breed its own generations. But at the last, milord, the only restitution won in the final bargain will be that of the wild’s return, to all that civilization destroyed and enslaved. Restitution is not found in the words of compensation, guilt, and wretched bargaining. It is found in the silence of healing, and that silence only comes when the criminals and their ilk, their very civilization, are gone.’