The slippery mass of a child dropped into White Feather’s waiting hands.

She groaned, or perhaps it was the earth grinding at a register almost too low to be perceived.

‘Another one!” cried Green Skirt in shock.

“Twice blessed! Twice cursed!” sang out White Feather, shoving the first infant into the waiting hands of Skull Earrings so she could catch the impatient second, now crowning.

Feather Cloak pushed as the world was born again, as the White Road flared into existence, a ribbon so bright that it shone, as Earth exploded beyond the borders of the Ashioi land. Firestorms raged and gales seared the land. Yet all this transpired at such a remote distance from the heart of the maelstrom that her awareness of the cosmos, too, faded, and she was after all weary. So weary.

“Two girls!” said Skull Earrings, cradling the first tenderly in his arms. “The gods have favored us!”

She slid down the long road of exhaustion and fell into sleep.

North of the land lies devastation so complete that the land steams. Has their return created such a wasteland that smoke and ruin are all she sees?

No. Beyond the scar lies land touched by fire, by wind, by raging seas, by great shifts in the earth itself, by tumult, but it is not dead.

She sees now what caused the land just beyond the White Road to be engulfed by molten rock. The Bright One walks in the wasteland. She created it with the power that resides within her, the curse she received from her mother’s kin. She is naked and carries nothing except a bow layered with the magical essence of griffin bone. So bright it shines… .

She moaned and came awake, squinting against a light she did not recognize.

“Ah" She shielded her eyes. “What is it?”

“He-Who-Burns!” cried Green Skirt. “That is the sun. See how his light shines!” She pointed at the roof of the cavern, where a yellow glare illuminated the spray of plant roots dangling from crumbling ridges of soil.

Skull Earrings stepped forward with White Feather beside him. “Here are your daughters,” he said, displaying the dark babies.

White Feather nodded. “So small. So perfect!”

Weeping, she kissed them. “They will never know exile. We have come home.”

PART ONE

THE TIDES OF

DESTRUCTION

I

A VISION OF

THE END

1

WHEN the earth began to shake, his jailers abandoned him within the ruins of the old monastery, beside the roofless church and its stone tower. From his prison, in his cage in the back of the cart, he watched in a confused stupor as both horses and oxen bolted, spooked by the unnatural weather.

Along the shoreline of Osna Sound, the water receded far out past the line of the ebb tide, exposing seabed and a line of sharp rocks below the curve of the Dragonback Ridge. Above, the sky was a sheet of lightning that veiled the stars, but that light in the heavens was an uncanny thing because no thunder answered it. A stillness, more like an indrawn breath, settled over the country, and it hung there, waiting.