“You Akarans dwell on past failures too much. I’m beginning to think that’s what made your line so tyrannical: guilt, and hiding it.”

“Yes,” Dariel said, no indication in his voice that he took offense. Mór imagined him grinning as he propped a leg up on a stool. “But enough of me talking. You give me something now. You said you would.”

This was met with a moment of silence, then Skylene cleared her throat. Mór imagined the tight face she was making, the way she would dip her head and sweep her left hand from her forehead up lightly across her plumage. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Everything.”

“That’s a bit too much to tell at one sitting.”

“Tell me about the Auldek, then.”

And she did. Mór pressed her ear even closer to the gap, for Skylene began speaking softly. Good, she thought. Yes, do give the Akaran truth. Let it be a punishment to that weak side of him that embraces guilt.

Skylene spoke with her usual conciseness, laying out the details in a dispassionate manner that Mór herself could not have pulled off. It was hard to know truth from myth, but some among the divine children had been entrusted with keeping the Auldek’s oral history. They passed on what they had learned to the People. The clans of Ushen Brae had once been much more numerous. Theirs had been a warrior culture, rooted for millennia in intertribal strife, a culture in which men lived to die in battle, risking everything to earn a place in the warrior halls of the afterworld. They worshipped a god of war, Bahine, and a pantheon of lesser animal deities, warriors all.

“If they had stayed such,” Skylene said, “there would never have been a quota trade.”

But things did not stay that way. Though the tribes were rich in fertile land and resources, the constant warring made for feast or famine, triumph or destruction. They might have been strong with swords and axes; when the Lothan Aklun arrived, they thought them hounds fighting over scraps.

“Arrived?” Dariel interrupted. “From where?”

Skylene admitted that she did not know. But they came and, soon after, the league did as well. “It was so long ago that the truth is hard to know for certain, but some believe that the Lothan Aklun and the league were in partnership right from the start, as if the Lothan Aklun discovered Ushen Brae, saw the potential for trade, and called on the league to sail the seas for them.