Of course she would say this. Even if she hadn’t been Kellhus’s adoptive daughter, she would have said precisely the same thing. They so wanted it to be simple, believers. “It is what is!” they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. “It says what it says,” spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves “open.”

This was the iron habit of Men. This was what shackled them to the Aspect-Emperor.

He shook his head in slow deliberation. “The most important question you can ask any man, child, is the question of his origin. Only by knowing what a man has been can you hope to say what he will be.” He paused, brought up short by an old habit of hesitation. How easy it was to hide in his old pedantic ruts, to recite rather than talk. But no matter how woolly, his abstractions always became snarled in the very needling particularities he so unwittingly tried to avoid. He had always been a man who wanted to digress, only to find himself bleeding on the nub.

“But everyone knows the answer to that question,” she said with same care as before, “Kellhus is the Son of Heaven.” What else could he be? her over-bright eyes asked.

“Yet he is flesh and blood, born of a father’s seed and a mother’s womb. He was reared. He was taught. He was sent out into the world …” He raised his eyebrows as though speaking something crucial but universally overlooked. “So tell me, where did all this happen? Where?”

For the first time, it seemed, he glimpsed real doubt gnawing her gaze. “They say he was a prince,” she began, “that he comes from Atrith—”

“He does not come from Atrithau,” Achamian snapped. “I know this on a dead man’s authority.”

The Scylvendi. Cnaiür urs Skiötha. As always, the man’s words came back to him: “With every heartbeat they war against circumstance, with every breath they conquer! They walk among us as we walk among dogs, and we yowl when they throw out scraps, we whine and whimper when they raise their hand … They make us love!”

They. The Dûnyain. The Tribe of the Aspect-Emperor.

“But what about his bloodline?” Mimara asked. “Are you saying his name is false as well?”

“No … He is an Anasûrimbor, I grant you that—the coincidences would be stacked too high were it otherwise. That is our only clue.”

“How so?”

“Because it means the question of his birthplace is the question of where the Line of Anasûrimbor could have survived.”

She seemed to consider this. “But if not Atrithau, then where? The North is more than ruined, more than wilderness—or so my tutors always say. How could anyone survive with … them?”