Shir fought us with the idealism of youth. How could we accept ducal rule, after so long fighting against them? How could her own father accept the title of Duke Lachta—a title stained with the blood and pus of the city’s suffering?

I tried to explain that we’d compromised.

Compromised, Shir told me, was another word for betrayed.

She was fifteen and I was thirty-six, but those twenty-one years between us might have been the distance to the moon. She would not bend. Her cousin Hu (brave young Tain Hu, who would one day meet and strike down the Pretender-King Kubarycz in single combat) was only five years old. Frustrated with the adults, Shir carried Hu on horseback through the forest, and spoke to her of injustice, and showed her how to kill trapped animals without hesitation. Later I would discover that Hu remembered everything.

Hu remembered what Shir had said:

You must understand, no matter what anyone tells you, that you are free. In this moment you may do whatever you choose. No one can stop you. They can choose how to react to your choice, but they cannot stop the choice itself. This is freedom, understand? A knife in your hand. And you may do with it as you please.

When people teach you what you might and might not do—they are bridling you. They are taking your freedom away. Yes, the world has laws, which are consequences for your actions. But remember that there is nothing you cannot choose to do. Only consequences you fear to face.

If anyone ever tells you that they have no choice but to compromise, remember this. They are afraid.

Shir developed an interest in an anonymous correspondent. The more she wrote to him, the less she spoke to us. He signed his missives Itinerant. I would say we tried our very best to reach her, but I would damn myself if I did, for Olake and I didn’t even know who we’d become, let alone the girl. I was preoccupied by the lies I had begun to tell my twin: lies of omission, lies about my plans, because whatever I told him he would tell his wife, the daughter of Duke Vultjag, the aristocrat in our midst.

And then one day Shir was gone. She left a letter tucked in my comb.

I have gone to seek out the nature of justice. Somewhere in this world there must be a good true way to live.

I knew very little about what she did after that. But I do know what turned her. I know where she began her descent toward the killing woman in the marsh.

*   *   *