Nomi loved the way Serians told stories. She'd never heard anything quite like it; they combined personal tales with Mancoserian history, sometimes so seamlessly that she could not tell whether they were talking about themselves or their entire race. Their stories were always quite short, but they packed in enough to occupy her dreams and thoughts for days.

Nomi leaned sideways. “You should be writing this down,” she whispered to Ramus, but he acknowledged her with a blank smile and glittering eyes. He seemed to be enjoying the wine.

“I'm thirty-seven,” Konrad said, “and I went on my first voyage when I was twenty-two. Two years before that, I had killed my seethe-gator and risen to adulthood, and I left Mancoseria with my ’gator carving, my weapons and the clothes I walked in. My parents told me that Noreela was a safer place to be, and that I would find work in Marrakash at the Guild. My travels from my homeland to Long Marrakash . . . that's a telling for another night. A night when, perhaps, you'll want to hear about slave thieves and the wildcat herds in Cantrassa's less accessible parts.

“Raiders are something Mancoseria is used to. They've been invading our western shores almost as long as the seethe-gatorshave been crawling onto the beaches in the east, but fighting them has never been a rite of passage. It's a necessity for our survival. No significant battles for over a hundred years, though even now there are occasional attacks from raiders hanging on to their past. But in the Founding Days of Mancoseria there was a constant trail of children traveling to the west, and adults coming back. Fighting knocks the childhood out of you—a youngster will be interested in combing beaches for strange creatures, shells and driftwood from which he can build elaborate stories. A Mancoserian adult back then would look at a beach and try to see where a raider may be hiding; behind that sandbank, beneath that convenient drift of seaweed, ready to leap from a beached boat? There's something devastating in the idea that a beach, home to waves and birds and patterns in the sand, is something other than beautiful. But back then, the raiders cut all the beauty away. And they sliced beauty from Mancoserian women's faces with their knives.