As they travelled across Bareth Solitude, each night she took to her bed the young man, bastard son of Draconus, and told herself that it was because the Lord had asked it of her. But it was getting more and more difficult to meet her brother’s eye. Arathan was pouring his seed into her, twice, three times a night, and she did nothing to prevent what might come of that; just as she had done nothing the night that she slept with Grizzin Farl, but at least then she’d had the excuse of being rather drunk. Something wayward had taken hold of her, a rushing towards fate, eager to sink into dire consequences.

She had no fear of her own future, and to be mired in circumstances of one’s own making offered its own delusion of control. But she was claiming that which belonged to others – the years ahead of them, the lives they would be made to lead. Mothers who lost could become obsessed with protectiveness and that might well find Feren, and for that her child would suffer through life. Arathan could sire a bastard and so show his father a mirrored reflection, and the eyes in their self-regard would be cold and unforgiving. Her brother, disarmed anew, might flee from an uncle’s love, stung by the pain of a loss still too sharp to bear.

Arathan was the same age her son would now be, a young man spread-eagled beneath the world, as all young men were. He was not her son, but he could give her a son. Indeed, she was certain that he would. Her brother had seen something of this strange, macabre compact in her mind, this blending of fates, one empty, the other fast filling. She was convinced of that.

It was one thing to use for pleasure. It was another thing entire to just use. She taught Arathan the ways of lovemaking, whispering of grateful women in the future. But who were these women, who would give thanks to Feren for all that she’d given the man in their bed? Where would he find these women, this frail bastard son, soon to be abandoned among the Azathanai? Not a question with which she need concern herself, of course; and she reminded herself of this often, to little avail. He would be what she made him, and in turn he would make in her what he could never be: a son. And afterwards, in the dark and the heat, she would stroke his hair, and make his hands into fists – soft tips and absent nails – which she then closed her own hands around – and in fleeting ecstasy, sick with guilt, she imagined the boy’s fists to be smaller than they were, as if by the strength of her grip she could crush them down to proper proportions.