The revelation of adultery was significant in its own right—and it stung the old Wizard for reasons he dare not ponder. But the possibility that Seswatha might be Nau-Cayûti’s father? Not all facts are equal. Some hang like leaves from the branching of more substantial truths. Others stand like trunks, shouldering the beliefs of entire nations. And a few—a desperate few—are seeds.

He was running through all the details that might allow him to date the dream—which Knight-Chieftains still had favour at the High-King’s table, which rings Seswatha wore, the fertility tattoos on the Queen’s inner thighs—when one of the children’s voices piped through the drone of his failing concentration. “Yeah, but from how faaaaaar?” A girl’s warbling, squeezed into a reed by the distance. Little Silhanna, he realized.

A woman replied, something tender and inaudible.

It was the accent more than the voice that sent him stumbling to the open window. He found himself blinking, gripping the cracked and pitted sill against the sudden vertigo. It was Sheyic, the common tongue of the New Empire, but lilting with southern nuances. Nansur? Ainoni?

He glanced out to the horizon, across what had once been the Galeoth province of Hûnoreal. The skies were iron grey with the chill-spring promise of summer blue. Climbing and falling canopies jostled across the near distance, a patchwork of tender greens so new that swales of ground could be seen through them. The morning sunlight was still barred from the ravines, so the landscape possessed an oceanic quality; the sunbathed summits and ridge lines resembled yellow islands in a shadowy sea. Even though he couldn’t make out the white-backed tributaries of the Rohil, he could see their winding stamp on the disposition of the distant hills, like cables laid across love-tossed sheets.

Strange, the way distances grew in the chill.

The ground immediately below fell away in a series of stubbed terraces, so that looking directly down made it feel as though he were being tugged out the window. There were the outbuildings, little more than lean-tos actually, staking out their humble circle of habitation, and the nearer trees, elms and oaks, winding to heights that would have been eye level had the ground been even. And there were the bare stretches, whose bald stone carried premonitions of smashing melons and broken skulls. He could see nothing of the children, though he did spy a mule staring with daft concentration at nothing in particular.

The voices continued to chirp and gaggle somewhere to the left, on a blade of level earth that formed the foundation for several hoary old maples.

“Momma! Momma!” he heard young Yorsi cry. Then he spied him through the weave of branches, barrelling up the slope. His mother, Tisthanna, strolled down toward him, wiping her hands on her apron and quite—Achamian was relieved to note—unconcerned. “Look!” Yorsi cried, waving something small and golden.