Kelmomas stared at his toes instead of replying.

She dismissed her body-slaves with a vague flutter of her fingers, turned to look at him directly. Birdsong floated on the cool morning drafts.

“Sweetling … Where’s Porsi?”

She winced at the question, which she had asked out of habit. Porsi had been scourged and turned out for her negligence. When Kelmomas failed to respond, Esmenet found herself looking back into the mirror, pretending to be preoccupied with the twists of muslin about her waist. Her hands automatically hitched and smoothed, hitched and smoothed.

“I c-can be Sammy …”

She heard these words more with her breast it seemed than her ears. A flush of cold about the heart. Even still, she continued to face the mirror.

“What do you mean? Kel, what are saying?”

Our children are so familiar to us that we often forget them, which is why the details of their existence sometimes strike us with discomfiting force. Either because she watched him through the mirror or in spite of it, Esmenet suddenly saw her son as a little stranger, the child of some unknown womb. For a moment, he seemed too beautiful to be …

Believed.

“If you don’t …” Kelmomas began in a pinched voice. He was twisting the fabric of his tunic against his right hip, causing the hem to ride up his thighs.

At last she turned, sighing as if irritated and feeling instantly ashamed for it. “Sweetling. If I don’t what?”

His little shoulders jerked in a soundless gasp. He stared down with the fierce concentration that only injured boys seemed able to summon—as though seeing could choke what was seen.

“If you don’t w-want me … If you don’t want … Kelmomas, I can be Sam-Sammi.”

Heartbreak crashed over her, numbed her to the extremities. In a rush she saw the full compass of her selfishness. Had she even truly mourned for Samarmas, an anguished part of her wondered, or had she simply made him evidence of her own hardship? For whom had she grieved?

She tried to speak, but there was no voice in the sound she made.

Kelmomas warred with his trembling lips. “I l-look … look j-just like …” He fell to his rump, then slumped into a silken bundle onto the floor. He did not sob, nor did he wail; he keened, a noise every bit as small as his frame and yet animal in its intensity, its honesty.

Abandoning her reflection, Esmenet pressed through cool fabric to kneel over him. Now that she could see her crime, it seemed she had known all along. Trapped in circles of self-pity, pinned by the weight of endless duty and obligation, she had never paused to consider what Kelmomas suffered. As devastated and desolate as she had been the past days, she possessed the same vein of flint that tempered the heart of all mothers, the same hereditary knowledge. Children died. They died all the time, such was the cruelty of the world.