“Your husband?”

“Yes. Just so.” The woman smiled. One of her teeth was covered in gold. “And you are our honored guest. Sleep now.”

“But why…?” She wanted to ask why this house in such a strange place, why the bath, why all these beautiful dark-skinned women in the middle of Marrinswalk, but all that came out was that word again. “Why?”

“Because the Lord Shaso brought you here,” the woman said. “He is a great man, cousin of our old king. He honors our house.”

They didn’t even know who she was. Shaso was the royalty here.

Briony slept then, floundering through confusing dreams of warm rivers and icy cold rain.

5

At Liberty

But the first son of Zo and Sva, who they named Rud, the golden arrow of the daytime sky, was killed in the fight against the demons of Old Night.

Their younger son Sveros, lord of twilight, seized Rud’s widow Madi Oneyna for his own, and swore that he would be a father to Rud’s son Yirrud, but in truth he sent a cloud to breathe upon Yirrud where Onyena had hidden him in the mountain fastness and the child sickened and died.

Instead of giving Oneyna a new child to replace the one he had taken, Sveros also took her twin, Surazem, who we call Moist Mother Earth, and fathered three children upon her, who were the great brothers, Perin, Erivor, and Kernios.

—from The Beginnings of Things
The Book of the Trigon

FREEDOM WAS BOTH frightening and exhilarating. It was wonderful to be able to walk the streets on her own, with nothing between her and life but a hooded robe—she had not known such liberty since she was a young child, when she had known nothing else and had not appreciated what a sublime gift it truly was.

In fact, it was a bit confounding to have so many choices. Just now, Qinnitan couldn’t decide whether to return to the main road winding through Onir Soteros, the neighborhood just behind the Harbor of Kalkas which she had called home for almost a month, or to continue following the winding streets farther into the great city, expanding her area of conquest as she had almost every day.

What a place in which to have gained her freedom! Hierosol was a huge city, perhaps not quite as large as Xis, the place she had escaped, but not a great deal smaller, either—a massive rumpled blanket of hills and valleys sitting athwart several bays, commanding both the Kulloan Strait and the Osteian Sea, nearly every inch covered with the constructions of several different centuries. Ancient Xis sat on a high plain as flat as a marble floor, and from any of its high places you could see all the way to both the northern sea and the southern desert. Here in Hierosol she had not yet managed to climb high enough to see anything but other hills, Citadel Hill the tallest of them all, looming above the others like a noble head gazing out across the straits, the rest of the city trailing down the slopes behind it like a cape.