The armies of western Eosia returned home from Lamorkand to immerse themselves in unrewarding toil in stubborn fields where only thistles grew in abundance. Civil war erupted in Lamorkand, but there was nothing unusual about that; there was a serf rebellion in Pelosia, and the number of beggars near the churches and at the gates of the cities of the west increased dramatically.

Sephrenia received the news of Ehlana’s pregnancy with astonishment. The undeniable fact of that pregnancy seemed to baffle her, and that bafflement made her short-tempered, even waspish. In the usual course of time Ehlana gave birth to her first child, a daughter whom she and Sparhawk named Danae. Sephrenia gave the infant an extended examination, and it seemed somehow to Sparhawk that his tutor was almost offended by the fact that Princess Danae was totally normal and disgustingly healthy.

Mirtai calmly rearranged the queen’s schedule to add the task of nursing to Ehlana’s other royal duties. It should be noted in passing perhaps that Ehlana’s ladies-in-waiting all jealously hated Mirtai, even though the giantess had never physically assaulted nor even spoken sharply to a single one of them.

The Church soon lost sight of her grand design in the east, turning instead to the south to seize an opportunity which presented itself there. Martel’s enlistment of the most fervent Eshandists and his subsequent defeat at Chyrellos had decimated the ranks of that sect, leaving Rendor ripe for reassimilation into the congregation of the faithful. Although Dolmant sent his priests into Rendor in a spirit of love and reconciliation, that spirit lasted in most of his missionaries for only so long as the dome of the Basilica remained in view. The missions to Rendor were vengeful and punitive, and the Rendors responded in a fairly predictable fashion. After a number of the more strident and abrasive missionaries had been murdered, larger and larger detachments of Church Knights were sent into that southern kingdom to protect the unwelcome clergy and their meagre congregations of converts. Eshandist sentiments began to re-emerge, and there were once again rumours of caches of weapons out in the desert.

Civilized man believes that his cities are the crown of his culture and seems incapable of grasping the fact that the foundation of any kingdom is the land upon which it rests. When a nation’s agriculture falters, its economy begins to collapse, and governments starved for revenue inevitably fall back on the most regressive of all forms of taxation, heaping additional burdens on an already suffering peasantry. Sparhawk and the Earl of Lenda had long and increasingly bitter arguments on that very issue, and they quite frequently stopped speaking to each other entirely.