I found myself standing again. “Are you suggesting I’m ‘mistaken’ about the single most traumatic experience of my entire life?”

“Janel, it was traumatic! It’s not unreasonable to think the horror of what you experienced distorted your memory.”

“The high general was there. Emperor Sandus was there. Do you think Sandus forgot to order a demon to leave a possessed child?”

“Damn it, Janel, I’ve worn the things. I’m telling you that’s not how this works!”

I paused, whatever defense I’d planned on shouting back at him dying on my lips. Instead, in a normal tone, I asked, “How has a Manol vané ever worn a human crown—never mind the Crown and Scepter of Quur?”

He froze.

“Teraeth…,” I started again. “How has a Manol vané—?”

“I heard you the first time.” He inhaled deeply. “Fuck.”

“Then answer the question, please.”

He didn’t, not for a long time. Then he walked away from me and sat down on a rock overlooking the cliff. The Afterlife’s broken, twisted trees spread out ahead. In the distance, yellow mist floated fingers over a lake’s surface, more creepy than romantic.

I walked toward him.

“The cycle,” he said, “is that we die and we’re reborn and we’re not supposed to know what happened to us from one life to the next. Except I remember perfectly. And in my last life, I ended up as emperor of Quur.”

“Which one?”

He grimaced. “Janel, that’s not important—”

“Which one?”

“Atrin Kandor.”

I stared at him in shock. “What?”

He rolled his eyes. “I was Atrin Kandor. You remember, the man who—”

“I know who Atrin Kandor is! Everyone knows who Atrin Kandor is! Most of Quur wouldn’t exist without Atrin Kandor. The man who built Atrine in a single night and slew the god-king Khorsal and kicked the Kirpis vané out of their homeland. That was you?”

“You forgot the part where I ordered a goodly chunk of the Quuros army to their deaths, trying to invade the Manol.”

“Did you … lose a bet with your mother Thaena? Because the idea that Atrin Kandor would be reincarnated as—as you—is the punch line to a joke. You were the single greatest threat to the vané to ever walk the earth, and she reincarnates you as a vané?”

“She does love her poetic justice.” He raised a finger. “But for the record, I’ve been saddled with sins I never committed. For example, I did not wipe out the dreth. They’re still around. Just underground. Literally.”

“I see,” I said. I did too, since as Janel “Danorak” I knew all about the power of distorted myth. “Are there any other confessions you feel like making while we linger here?”

He didn’t answer. Teraeth sat there, drumming his fingers against the rock.

“Teraeth—”

“When I was Atrin Kandor, you were my wife.”