And I wondered if this was how Tain Shir lived her life. As a god who walked unshackled among the mortals in their chains.

*   *   *

FROM the very first instant my brother knew Tain Ko, the sister of the Duke of Vultjag, he hated her fucking guts. Olake hated her from the long braided fall of her hair to the proud angle of the Vultjag nose to her hickory-brown throat and high-bound noble tits and her unfashionably athletic legs and her presumably arrogant and demanding and oh-so-aristocratic cunt (perhaps she dissolved commoner cocks with acid). Especially, Olake hated Ko’s distaste for his city: Olake loved Lachta, his slushy muddy flea-bitten home, even back then before the Masquerade rebuilt the sewers. I myself lost that sentiment when I contracted a rot from the laundry-water. We drew a grease circle around the infection, and watched it grow, with frightening and almost visible speed, across that circle, across my thigh.

So Olake stood behind me with the ends of a belt in his fists. I could feel, through the leather, how his grip tightened with every shriek I chewed into that belt. And I cut that divot of flesh right out of my leg.

Good Himu did my brother hate Tain Ko. I said he hated her from the first instant he knew her, which was a street brawl between Ko’s retinue and my brother’s antiroyalists, and their hatred escalated from there. In no time at all they were hating each other on the floor of our apartment while I tried to sleep, hating each other in the back of the wagon while I tried to drive the horses, in stockrooms and meadows and anywhere else they could find. I believe they only came to like each other out of some animal release of passions: by sheer weight of fucking, their bodies seduced their minds along.

The child was unplanned. In those days under Duke Lachta contraceptives were contraband: I believe Tain Ko, unfamiliar with the city and its dubious markets after a life with the pharmacist-women of the north, bought a batch of fake silphium. She decided to keep the child, partly to deter suitors who wanted her for a political marriage. But she dared not reveal the father: Olake was a known antiroyalist, and Duke Lachta hated both Duke Vultjag and Olake. Vultjag’s sister bearing Olake’s child would drive Lachta to matricide.

The birth came earlier than planned. In those days I was still a laundry girl covered in bedbug bites and soap burns, and our flight from the city was a terrifying wonder: there were places in the world that hardly stank at all! I think something was born of me, too, a love of Aurdwynn entire, a love which I still carry and hope I always will.

I midwifed Ko while Olake paced under the pine boughs.