I began to feel as if I would strangle. My brain was alive with pictures and half-formed words, and my hands shook, but not from weakness.

“If I am to swallow this, then give me the bitch’s name, this wild cat who sloughed me, and left me behind like excrement.”

“She gave no name to me,” Kotta said, “but something of her past I heard two nights before she bore you. Her living had been a rare jumble, not as a woman lives among the tribes; a maze of death and battles and men she had companioned—she had lived several lives in one, it seemed to Kotta, as the snake wears and sheds several skins. And in the cities of the mask-faces she had been worshiped as a goddess. The man that got you on her was a king.”

“So she would say, no doubt,” I answered sharply. “Goddess bedded with king. Yet she was not a gold-mask—the lynx is silver. More probably she was some captain’s doxy and he cast her off.”

“No. She was no man’s doxy. For all she walked bowed among the tents, for all the woman’s burden in her womb, she was unlike any women you have seen. Think of the Eshkir you have put by your hearth. She has surprised you. But your mother was to her as the moon to the star. And your father was not a red chieftain but a black-haired lord, master of cities. You have your darkness from him.”

“This is very fine,” I said. “Why spill the beer now?”

“The one whom it served to keep silent has died. Though, indeed, Tathra knew her changeling almost from the beginning. Do you not recall how she altered to you when you took the lynx-mask from Ettook’s spoil chest? The mask your city wife wears, which was her mask who was your mother.”

I put my hand to my face to wipe the cold sweat from it.

Kotta said, “That summer we were late traveling, near two months late to reach the Snake’s Road, for there was great fighting over the mountains, the beginning of the wars that toppled the cities down, and now and then the braves would go looting ruins. Presently Seel learned of a fallen tower, the tower of an Eshkiri fort to the west, where it was said a king had died with his treasure around him. The warriors rode there, but came back with only one thing, the white-haired woman, your mother. They said she was a witch, or had claimed to be, but they did not believe it in truth, nor did she prove cunning in that way. Ettook let Tathra have her as her slave, and so she journeyed with us till that dawn she ran away, into the wild lands. I think no one ever saw her face but Kotta, and Kotta is blind.”

“This king, then,” I said, “do you have a name for him?”

“Yes. She named him. She was wife to him, yet she had slain him, for he was cold and cruel, and she thought him a sorcerer.”