They had found her daughter, her only child sired by a man instead of a god. And if the manner of her discovery had not broken Esmenet’s heart, then the hatred she saw in Mimara’s eyes upon their reunion most certainly had … Mimara, sweet Mimara, who as a child would only hold her mother’s thumb when they walked hand in hand, who would cry inexplicably at the sight of solitary birds, or squeal at the glimpse of rats flitting from crack to crevice. She had come back to her mother broken, another bruised and battered peach, and quite as mad as any of Esmenet’s other more divine daughters and sons.

As it turned out, Mimara also possessed the Cift of the Few. But where Kellhus had turned a deaf ear to Esmenet with Serwa, this time he left the matter in her selfish hands. She would not lose another daughter to the witches, even if it destroyed any chance of mending the tattered history between them. She would not sell Mimara a second time—no matter how vicious the young woman’s rantings. Even the Schoolmen Esmenet consulted had told her that Mimara was too old to master the painstaking meanings sorcery required. But as so often happens in family quarrels, the grounds were entirely incidental to the conflict. Mimara simply needed to punish her, and she in turn had needed to be punished—or so Esmenet had assumed.

The twins arrived during this time, and with them one final spearthrow at Fate.

There had been much cause for despair in the beginning. Though as perfect in form as their eldest brother, Kayûtas, they could not be separated without lunatic squalls of anguish. And when they were left together, all they ever did was stare into each other’s eyes—watch after watch, day after day, month after month. The physician-priests had warned her of the risks of bearing children at her age, so she had prepared herself for … oddities, she supposed, peculiarities over and above what she had already experienced. But this was so strange as to be almost poetic: two children with what seemed a single soul.

It was Kellhus who purchased the slave who would save them—and her. His name was Hagitatas, famed among the Conriyan caste-nobility as a healer of troubled souls. Somehow, through tenderness, wisdom, and incalculable patience, he managed to pry her two little darlings apart, to give them the interval they required to draw their own breath, and so raise the frame of individual identities. Such was her relief that even the subsequent discovery of Samarmas’s idiocy seemed cause for celebration.

These sons loved—there could be no question that they loved!