Cover

Dedication

For all who seek redemption.

BOOK I

NIGHTMARE

CHAPTER ONE

A chorus of tree frogs trilled in the damp, velvet darkness, wide awake and relentless as they spoke their authority over the nocturnal world. The village of Makendha slowly marked the hours to midnight with a quieting of laughter and argument, a dimming and darkening, and a staccato punctuation of ending sounds—the shutting of doors, the dropping of shoes, and the weighty hush of a house empty of talk but filled with dreaming.

One house kept vigil with a single glowing window. Behind the curtains of pale ivory gauze, gilded by the light of an oil lamp, an age-old scene was unfolding: a mother of the village sitting at the kitchen table, interrogating her adult son about his life, his loves, and his future. Because the mother was Paama, a woman known for quiet strength and infinite patience, the conversation was calm and loving rather than sharp and resentful. Because the son was Yao, also known as Chance, one of the undying who had become human more by accident than design, questions that involved love and the future were difficult to answer. Such is the lot of mortals who birth myth and legend in the midst of the mundane.

“At last you come to visit your old mother.” Strong, patient, but not at all above a little emotional manipulation.

Chance, occasionally called Yao, smiled fondly. “I have been busy. You know that, Maa.”

“Your trickster brother is the wanderer, not you. Why so vague about what you are doing? Who is she, this woman that you are working for?”

“I don’t keep secrets from you, Maa; you know that. But sometimes things are simply incomplete.”

She studied him in the lamplight. “I will try to understand. I know you have always been unique.”

“Unique? You had two of us,” Chance reminded her teasingly. “Two undying ones turned human for the privilege of being your sons.”

Paama shook her head. “Silly boy. I would have to be very old and dotish to forget what your brother is, but you . . . you are something beyond even him.”

A mother always knows her child. Chance did not dwell on those times when he had been a capricious otherworldly creature rather than a dutiful human son. And yet . . . there were days when he remembered as vividly as nightmare the moment when Patience, his elder and superior and as much a mother as an undying one could be, took him and unraveled his essence, all but unmaking him to make him human. Growing up Paama’s son had been a long, slow awakening from near oblivion to deep self-knowledge. With Paama as his mother and the Trickster as his brother, mortal life was not hard—it was even sweet. And yet it felt like it wasn’t enough.

Sometimes things are incomplete.

The beginning of one person’s tale may be for another a middle . . . or an end.