“No!” The word exploded from his lips. He took a slow breath, bracing his hands on his knees. “No,” he repeated more gently. “Do you think I don’t know, Lady? An ordinary cuckold’s life, with all the small shames and painful sympathies attendant upon it. Believe me, I know what I abandoned”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Cerelinde looked at his braced hands, then raised her gaze to his face. “Is that why you killed her?”

“No.” Tanaros lifted his hands, examining them in the dim lamplight. “I was angry.” He met her gaze. “I held her hand through the birth. I wept tears at her pain. It was only afterward, when I saw the babe. I saw his red hair, and I remembered. How she and Roscus had smiled at one another. How they had fallen silent when I entered a room. A thousand such incidents, meaningful only now. I asked her, and she denied it. Lied. She lied to me. It was not until my hands were at her throat that she confessed. By then, my anger had gone too far.” He paused. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Neither portion, I fear.”

“It is said the Ellylon cannot lie,” he mused. “Is it so?”

“We are Haomane’s Children,” Cerelinde said, perplexed. “The Lord-of-Thought Shaped us. To think is to speak; to speak is to be. How can we speak a thing that is not true? We might as well unmake ourselves. It is not a thing I can fathom.”

“Ah, well.” Tanaros gave her a twisted smile. “We are Arahila’s Children, and the truth of the heart does not always accord with that of the head. Be mindful of it, Lady, since you propose to wed one of us. If I am wrong, and we lose this coming war, it may matter.”

“Aracus would not lie,” she said certainly.

“Perhaps,” he said, echoing her words. “Perhaps not.”

Silence fell over the room like a shroud.

“Tanaros Kingslayer,” Cerelinde said aloud. “Do you lay that death, too, at anger’s doorstep? For it seems to me you must have loved him, once, for him to have wounded you so deeply.”

For a long time, he was silent. “Yes,” he said at length. “Anger, and love. It is the one that begat the other’s strength, Cerelinde. He was my liege-lord; and for many years, like unto a brother to me.” His mouth quirked into another bitter smile. “Do the Ellylon understand betrayal?”

“Yes.” She did not tell him what was in her mind; that the Ellylon had known betrayal at the hands of Men. So it had been, since before the world was Sundered. From the dawning of the Second Age of Urulat, Arahila’s Children had coveted the Gifts of Haomane’s. And they had made war upon the Ellylon, believing in their folly that a Shaper’s Gift could be wrested away by force. “We do.”