Could all the childhood stories be true, then? Were the Skimmers a different race entirely, like the Rooftoppers surely must be?

“What do your people say?” Utta asked him suddenly, then realized she was speaking thoughts aloud that he couldn’t possibly understand. “About where they came from, I mean?”

He looked up at her, wrinkling the skin of his brow in distrust. “Why do you ask?”

“I am curious, I suppose. I grew up in the Vuttish Isles, and none of your folk still live there, although there are stories that they did…”

“Stories?” he said bitterly. “I’ll trow there were.”

“What do you mean?”

“That were all ours once, your Vuttland.”

“It was?”

He snorted. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t our kings rule there, with the Great Moot? Didn’t the Golden Shoal come to rest there, at the rock of Egye-Var?”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Then why did they leave?”

“Should ask T’chayan Redhand, shouldn’t you?”

“Who is that?”

His eyes widened. He was not pretending—he was truly astonished. “Don’t know T’chayan the Killer? The man who murdered most all my kind in the islands, women and spawn, too, drove our people out of our home and hunted us wherever we went with his dogs and his arrows?”

She blinked, surprised. “Do you mean King Tane the White?” Utta was better read than most of her fellow Vuttlanders, especially because she had gone away, first to the women’s remove at Connord, then to the Eastmarch convent to complete her Zorian novitiate. In fact, she knew more of history than most men, but what the Skimmer youth said was new to her. “Tane is not so well known to us now. I may have heard his name once or twice when I was a girl. When Connord conquered the isles and converted the Vuttish Isles to the Trigonate faith, much of our old history was lost.”

“Your people do not remember T’chayan Redhand?” The Skimmer youth shook his head in stunned horror. “Sure, you’re lying to tease me, then. Your people don’t repent his bloody deeds, or at least celebrate them?”

“What are the two of you going on about?” demanded Merolanna, poking her head out from the hood she had made of the sealskin.

Sister Utta shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she told Rafe. “Truly, I am. My people have forgotten, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we should have.”

He shut his mouth with an almost audible snap and refused to talk anymore, or even look at Utta, as though she herself had just returned from the long task of eradicating all memory of the wrongs done to his forebears.

The day was cold and cloudy, with intermittent rain. The fog that lingered in the mainland city seemed weirdly heavy to Utta, like clouds that lay on the ocean instead of hanging in the sky. She could make out a few landmarks jutting through the murk, the market flagpoles and all the temple spires, but the mists made them seem something else, perhaps the skeletal ribs of ancient monsters.