Melanie Rawn - Exiles 1 - The Ruins of Ambrai

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Part One
942-967
He remembered the wind.
Skittering in the far reaches of his mind were other memories: warmth, and light, and snug
belonging in some cheerful firelit room where a woman sang. Had these images been useful,
he would have remembered them more clearly. What he knew in this life, he knew because it
helped him survive.
Thus the wind. Sudden and brutal, it shoved him down an embankment into a muddy ditch,
where he lay bruised and stunned while it howled down the gorge like a wounded wild
animal. He tried to move, to get up and run, but was helplessly pinned. When the wind died
as quickly as it had been born, he crawled out of the ditch bleeding.
Years after, he learned that while he sprawled in the mud, flattened by the wind, brigands set
fire to his mother's house. She died along with whoever else had been within— his sisters and
brothers, perhaps. He didn't remember.
More years passed before he learned that no one else had felt the wind.
He went back a long time later, and saw how it might have happened. Maslach Gorge
formed a natural funnel and some freakish shift in pressure could have forced air down it. As
he walked back to where another house was built around the stern chimney and another
woman lived with her children, he wondered why he remembered no root-torn trees, no
leaf-stripped bushes. Surely so amazingly powerful a wind had felled other things besides
him.
Well, a child that age would not have noticed. He could not have said exactly how old he was
when it happened. Four, he guessed—perhaps a little less, certainly no more. Eventually he
chose the Feast of St. Lirance, first day and first full moon of the year, as his Birthingday. The
Lady of the Winds had saved his life.
He didn't remember why he'd wandered so far from the house. Neither did he remember the
winter cold that must have been, or the time he certainly spent stumbling across ice-crusted
grainfields into the forest. He had a clear memory of the cartroad, however, for it, too, had
been of use to him. The rutted track had led him to where people were: people who fed him,
warmed him, kept him alive, and at length sold him as a slave.
Groggy with cold and exposure, he went to the people willingly. One of them picked him up
from the dirt road and i settled him on her hip. She wore a plain silver bracelet set
with blue onyx. If he squinted through his lashes, the pale gold sliver in the stone looked like a
candle flame. He trusted the wearer because he recognized the bracelet: it had been worn by
the singer beside the fire. He snuggled against the woman wearing silver and onyx, and fell
asleep. It was only when he woke the next morning inside an iron cage within a dark wagon
that he began to be afraid.
They fed him, tended his cuts and bruises and frostbitten toes, and kept him in the cage as
they traveled. He was given clean if threadbare clothes, woolen socks too big for his feet, and
a chipped clay jug to relieve himself in. The outside world vanished for him. He knew only
the wooden slats of the rocking wagon, the crates and carpets piled within, and the cold iron
cage.
It had been made for an animal—barely big enough to crouch in, or sit in with knees to chin.
Tufts of fur snarled in the hinges. He plucked them out carefully and rolled them into a ball to
feel the softness. The bronze fur smelled of cat, and for some reason that comforted him. A
shred of silvery claw had been left behind as well, torn on a hinge. He remembered the fur
and the claw because they'd told him something important. No feline, for all its strength and
cunning, could reason even as simply as a four-year-old child. Hinges went with doors. Doors
had latches that made them open. The cage had hinges, so there must be a door with a
latch—and he could open it.
So he did.
The hinges squealed betrayal. The wagon jerked to a stop. He tumbled through the cage door
just as the woman wearing the armlet appeared in a sudden sun-blaze rectangle at the back
of the wagon. She slapped him hard enough to split his lip, stuffed him back into the cage,
and tied his ankles to the iron with thick, prickly twine.
The people never talked to him. To each other, yes, and they even sang sometimes after the
wagon had stopped and it got colder and darker. But they never talked to him. He wondered,
years later, why they'd been so circumspect around so small a child. Surely they couldn't
have feared he would identify them to the authorities. There were no authorities in the
Tillinshir backlands where brigand wagons rolled. He didn't understand about the cage,
either. How far could a little boy run before they caught him?
He was halfway through his life before he knew the reason for the cage was the armlet, and
what it had told the brigands about the woman they'd killed, the woman who had been his
mother.
He never knew how many days he spent in the cage. Forty, perhaps fifty, to judge by the
distance from Maslach Gorge to Scraller's Fief. One day he was dragged out by the scruff to
stand on shaky legs before a tall, skeletal man whose black eyes were the coldest he had ever
seen—but not the coldest he would ever see in his life.
He remembered how Flornat the Slavemaster had looked him over with those eyes like chips
of ice-sheened obsidian, and paid for his new acquisition in real gold. This memory had
nothing to do with survival; it burned with shame in his mind. Even at four years old, he
understood that the man had traded a shiny yellow circle for him, the way he'd once seen
someone—he didn't know who—trade a brass cutpiece for a copper kettle. A price had been
put on him: a cost for a commodity, a statement of his worth, a definition of his value by
someone who saw him only as a live, healthy, usable item for sale.
He told her about it once, about how it had made him feel like a thing instead of a person.
The revelation came after a shouting match caused by the innocent gift of a silver earring.
She hadn't been trying to buy him—but she hadn't understood his revulsion, either. After he
calmed to rationality, he realized it was probably the blue onyx dangling from the silver circle
that had ignited memory and temper. She'd done her best to make it up to him, but how
could a Lady of Blood, born to pride and privilege, understand the unique humiliation of
knowing you had been sold?
His owner was Scraller Pelleris. Scraller was that vanishing rarity, a man in complete charge
of his family's estate. He had inherited by virtue of having outlived every single one of his
relations. Virtue, of course, had nothing to do with it. By the time Scraller acquired a certain
very young copper-haired slave, talk had long since died down about the fortuitous (for
Scraller) deaths of three sisters, four aunts, and five cousins. His mother had drawn her final
breath approximately one minute after Scraller drew his first. It was said she had a
premonition of what her son would become and, as she died, muttered, "I choose to join the
Wraiths." Presumably this was preferable to staying around to watch her lastborn's career.
Before Scraller was twenty, she had welcomed all her relatives into the Wraithenwood,
probably with an I told you so.
Pelleris Fief became known by Scraller's nickname. In the local parlance of The Waste, a
"scrall" was the clever and invariably criminal act of making something out of nothing.
Despite its connotation, Scraller used it with pride. Many people—including his own late,
unlamented family—had called him worse.
Scraller's Fief was a massive stone warren built atop a substantial pile of rock in The Waste. A
climb of three hundred and eighty-six steps—one for each day of the year— past two
barbicans bristling with guards led through iron gates to a courtyard scarcely wide enough to
circle a wagon in. The main tower was a gigantic construction of gray granite roofed in blue
tile. From the courtyard, the effect was that of a face topped by a thatch of blue hair. A broad
balcony and overhanging stone canopy, both studded with iron spikes, formed toothy
half-open jaws. Above were two tall windows like great pale eyes reflecting the sun. The nose
was the banner dangling between the windows, crimson edged in brown and lacking a
device. The First Tier Pelleris family had neither money nor influence to purchase their way
into Blood status. They owned much of The Waste, but as the name implied, that wasn't
saying much. Scraller's ambition was to swell his coffers and create a court worthy of notice
by First Councillor Avira Anniyas, so he could ride through his gates into his courtyard and
behold his castle grinning down at him with a golden galazhi galloping across its crimson
nose like a wart on the nose of a drunkard.
When Scraller was twenty-eight, the death of the last notable opponent of the First
Councillor's power gave him the opportunity he needed. In exchange for a percentage off the
top, Scraller was given complete control over all economic activities in The Waste. Again, this
wasn't saying much. But Scraller hadn't earned his nickname in vain. He undertook a
massive drainage project—never mind that the noxious siphoning of The Waste Water
polluted the sea into which it spilled for five years afterward. Dried salts scraped off sunbaked
land revealed soil perfect for concrete—never mind that half of it was adulterated with those
same salts, and tended to crumble after ten years. Scraller made a luscious profit, even after
Avira Anniyas took her share.
So it was that Scraller was elevated to the status of Blood. Golden galazhi minced not only
across the courtyard banner but on every door, carpet, chair, fireplace hood, pillow slip, and
napkin in the castle. (The launderers said that its execution in gold embroidery on Scraller's
crimson underdrawers was especially fine.) The First Councillor was generous to those who
served her well. Besides, The Waste was so far from Ryka Court that she didn't much care
what happened there so long as her percentage kept rolling in, the concrete for her own
building projects was top grade, and the rebellious Mage Guardians found no succor at the
Fief.
In the Council Year 942, Scraller's latest acquisition had no knowledge of economic or
political matters. He knew that he had been safe, and now was not; that he'd been sold, and
did not like it. And when Scraller's mark—the inevitable galazhi—was painfully etched in
yellow ink on his right shoulder, he knew it was all real. The warm hearth and the woman's
soft singing were gone forever.
Eventually he was found to be quick of mind, so he was given the rudiments of an
education—just enough to make him a more useful servant to his master. He was taught to
read and write, and showed an aptitude for mathematics. But it was several years before his
real value became apparent.
He was a musician born. To him, notes on a page were like numbers in a column that added
up to a sum—or a song.
Cool, precise, with only one right answer, music and mathematics were the same to him.
It took a Bard silenced forever and a Lady of ancient Blood to teach him that they weren't the
same at all.
Scraller had no need of another steward to count his wealth, his slaves, or his crimes. What he
did require, for the elevation of his court to elegance, was a truly gifted musician. And this
was what became of the boy spared from death by the wind.
He retained precisely one possession from the time before the wind and the brigands: his
name. Though he was given a new one, he stubbornly clung to the only thing he owned. So,
after a few weeks of slaps when he did not answer to the new name, they shrugged and gave
in. He was only a little boy, after all. He couldn't be expected to learn as swiftly as an older
child. And what did it matter what he was called, as long as he caused no trouble?
It was the first of Collan's victories, and for many years was his last.
Chapter 2
His first summer at Scraller's Fief, Collan was judged deft enough with his big, long-fingered
hands to leave Cradle Quarters and start justifying the gold the Slavemaster had paid for
him. At first he was assigned to the kitchens. Simple tasks: shelling nuts, washing vegetables,
plucking fowl. Scraller's household numbered well over three thousand, and feeding so many
was a lot of work. Col also spent many hours on the hearth treadmills, walking or running as
the cooks demanded to turn spits over the fire. He remembered little of that time except
exhaustion and heat. But never in his adult life would he enter a kitchen in castle or cottage
without feeling slightly nauseated.
Although he couldn't have spent more than a few hours each day at this exhausting task, it
seemed his life consisted solely of treadmill and pallet for years. The work toughened him at
an early age—which was part of the process. Toughening the body while breaking the spirit
was the rule.
They underestimated Collan badly.
One morning—he must have been about six—he was liberated forever from the kitchen. For
reasons he neither knew nor cared about, the galazhi had fawned early that year. He and
many others were sent to the high pastures to help the herders. It was new spring and
incredibly cold, the crusty snow patched with blood like a gory quilt. He learned swiftly that
by reaching into a doe's body, first to tug the fawn out and then for the afterbirth, he could
keep his hands warm. Twins were best; he could plunge his fingers thrice into hot slick blood
and mucus, and keep from freezing just that much longer. He gave thanks whenever the
Chief Herdsman announced that a doe he tended bore twins.
The rest of him didn't fare as well. His socks were more holes than knitting; nothing but his
thick hair protected his head from cold, acidic rain. By the third day his nose was streaming,
his hair was falling out in clumps, his scalp was burned, and he reeled with fever. He was
returned to the Fief and banished to the infirmary. When the fever broke he pretended a slow
recovery. This deception led to his being taught to read and write.
It happened because Flornat the Slavemaster had whipped Taguare the Bookmaster to within
a sliver of his life, for what offense Collan never learned. Taguare occupied the other sickbed
before the hearth, and as they recuperated together, the Bookmaster discovered a mind worth
training.
Not that Col knew anything. But to distract himself from his pain, Taguare told his own
favorite stories, and found an appreciative, perceptive audience. He encouraged questions,
trying to get a feel for Col's wits. They were promising. Taguare asked for and received
permission to add him to the small class of slave children deemed teachable. Now the boy
spent his mornings running errands for various functionaries, his afternoons in the animal
pens, and the time between dinner and bed in a tiny schoolroom with four other boys and six
girls under Taguare's tutelage. All were older than he, and far ahead of him in learning. But
Collan rewarded the Bookmaster's instincts. A talent for words and numbers was revealed.
And he was always hungry for more.
He learned reading, writing, and ciphering; basic geography (limited to The Waste, which no
slave of Scraller's ever left); what botany was applicable to a notoriously barren land; more
than he ever wanted to know about galazhi; and multitudes of tales about Wraithenbeasts.
These included no practical advice for escape—no one lived past a Sighting— and were
intended solely as a warning; the threat of Wraithenbeasts kept slaves pent better than
guarded walls.
There were two other subjects to the curriculum: religion and music. Had this been brought to
Scraller's notice, he would have pronounced both a total waste of time for slaves. But Taguare
taught his pupils the Saintly Calendar because he was a sincerely religious man, and he
taught them to sing because he loved music. Collan was an indifferent student of religion
(except for selecting his Birthingday in tribute to the only Saint who'd ever helped him; the
others seemed pretty useless), but he soaked up music like a garden drinks clean spring rain.
When his gift became evident, his morning duties were halved so he could be taught by
Carlon the Lutenist—an average talent, but a kindly man. This worthy begged Flornat to add
study with him to Col's day, and after a demonstration of the boy's raw talent, the
Slavemaster heeded his request. Scraller was informed, and approved the plan. He kept
Bookmaster and Lutenist as proof of the elegance of his court. He was, of course, both
illiterate and tone-deaf.
Collan's life settled into a different routine. He still worked ten hours of the day's fifteen, but at
least he was liberated from the kitchen. Rising by torchlight at Fourth, he ate in the quarters,
then washed and presented himself for three hours of delivering messages among Scraller's
stewards, who had not deigned to address each other in person anytime during the last fifteen
years. Their universal ill-humor was expressed in various ways on Collan's person until
Taguare reminded them that the boy—particularly his hands—was Scraller's property. They
didn't hit him after that, though they often looked as if they'd like to.
From Half-Seventh to Ninth, he had music lessons with Carlon. Half an hour for another
meal and a brief rest— Scraller was solicitous of his property—and a long afternoon of
tending animals was followed by dinner at Twelfth and study with Taguare. Then, at
Fourteenth, he would curl into a blanket and sleep like the dead until the bell clamored its
demand five hours later. He never dreamed.
It bothered him to come to his lessons with the Bookmaster stinking of the sty. Only Scraller's
personal servants were allowed to bathe more than once a week; in The Waste, water was
rationed at the best of times. Along with an aversion to kitchens, Collan took with him from
Scraller's a lifelong hatred of being dirty. And he could never bear to eat pork—not because
he'd conceived any fondness for pigs, but because he could never forget their stench.
As his time with Carlon the Lutenist came in the morning, his hands and clothes were always
clean for his music lessons—his escape into the cool, pure world of notes that summed into
songs. He learned ballads and rounds, hymns and chanteys and lays, and as the strings
obeyed the growing mastery of his fingers the words made strange and delightful pictures in
his mind. Though he was unsure what love and desire and other odd words meant, any sound
that accompanied music must by mere association tell of wondrous things.
Taguare didn't reveal, and Carlon never mentioned, what awaited him if Scraller found his
performance pleasing—or, more to the point, if Scraller's guests found him so. His voice was
clear and fine. To keep it intact, at the first sign of maturity Collan would be castrated.
Taguare said nothing because of his guilt; if he hadn't discovered the boy's quickness of mind,
the gift for music would have gone unnoticed as well. But Collan's only real joy came from
the very thing that would unman him. One day, before it was too late, Taguare promised
himself he would warn the boy to "lose" his voice.
Carlon said nothing because it was to him a perfectly natural state. What was the loss,
compared to privileged position? He himself had never minded.
In Collan's ninth year—more or less—he first sang before Scraller's Court. For the occasion he
was washed by bath attendants for the first time in his life. The scrubbing left his dark skin an
angry red, but not a single flea or louse survived. He was then dressed in a motley of cast-off
clothing. The plain brown shirt, from a page recently promoted to footman's crimson,
billowed around Collan's skinny chest and arms. The shortness of the same page's brown
trousers had been disguised by sewing a row of slightly snagged crimson silk ribbon at the
hems, thus decently covering his ankles. (In fact, Scraller liked the effect so much he ordered
the same addition to the livery of all his pages. It was the first time Collan set a fashion, but
not the last.)
The longvest, hemmed to proper knee-length, belonged to Carlon, unworn since his girth had
expanded beyond the seemly closure of the buttons. A gaudy creation of turquoise
flame-stitching on thick yellow tapestry silk, the padded shoulders extended a full five inches
beyond the boy's arms. Stiff, heavy, and so big on him that one glance in a mirror told him
he looked ridiculous, the longvest's effect on his appearance irked him mightily—so much so
that he forgot to be nervous about his performance.
At least the slippers fit. They were soft new doeskin, and Taguare's gift, made by his friend,
the cobbler. "You're like a Senison puppy," the Bookmaster told Collan, smiling. "You'll grow
into those hands and feet of yours, Col—and top me by at least a head when you're finished!"
The slippers were the latest absurdity in style, with elongated, pointed toes. But they were
new, and his, and so comfortable that he didn't mind too much that they made his feet look
even bigger than they were.
He would remember the slippers and the longvest for reasons having nothing to do with
survival. Cobblers and tailors would moan in later years when they saw Col coming, for his
insistence on perfect fit took hours. After he began his infamous and highly lucrative career,
he would never again wear any garment that had belonged to another man. His clothing
from head to foot was his and his alone. And he never wore a coif if he could possibly avoid it.
They had virulent arguments about that, he and she. It completely escaped him how a
woman who could exert every particle of her formidable powers to the overthrow of the
existing government—and the social order that nurtured it— could be so utterly dedicated to
the preservation of some of its customs. "Bred in the bone," the old man told him once, with a
mild shrug. "You must remember Who She is, my lad."
The hated coif was a woven hood that fit tightly to the skull and fastened at the throat with
buttons or, in the case of Bloods and the First and Second Tiers, sigil pins. Modesty dictated
that every male's head be hidden from brow to nape. Not a single hair could show. Saints
knew how many ladies would be scandalized—not to mention Scraller, who according to
rumor was balding—if even a slave-child appeared with his head uncovered.
So when they dressed him before his first appearance at court, he submitted to a garish
crimson coif. After strict inspection, Flornat the Slavemaster pronounced him fit to be seen by
polite company. Collan was taken to a dark hallway off the banquet room to await summons.
Carlon had lent his own second-best lute for the occasion. Col clutched it by the neck as if
strangling a snake. He was sweating in the heavy longvest and his scalp itched even though
he knew there wasn't a live bug on him anywhere. This alone was an odd enough sensation to
start his nerves twanging. But worse was the coif: a bad fit around his abundance of curling
coppery hair, the throat strap made it difficult to breathe.
So he took the fool thing off.
No one came to fetch him; a door simply opened and a hand waved him into the banquet
hall. He'd never been inside it in his life—indeed, never been in any of the public rooms, only
the kitchen and work chambers and the warren of halls. Collan was as startled by the place as
the people within were by him.
Not a hall; a cavern, cut into living rock and festooned with the banners of Scraller's
guests—and dozens of inevitable galazhi. Long tables formed a hollow square around a
blazing bonfire. Dogs and cats slunk and scrabbled underfoot, their yowls underscoring the
babble of three hundred diners. All the ladies wore bright gowns and elaborate headpieces,
some so fantastically antennaed as to imperil their neighbors' eyesight. All the men were
formally robed and coifed, though some dared to leave their top shirt buttons undone to hint
at a furred chest.
Scraller himself was one of these. His crimson coif was embroidered with his cherished sigil
and decorated with jewels, and his robes were properly concealing as befitted a modest male,
but his shirt was open to the breastbone. The wiry black hair thus revealed had bits of dinner
clinging to it.
Collan strode forward and made his bows to the ladies and then to Scraller, as instructed. He
ran a nervous hand through his hair as he straightened up. This unconscious emphasis on his
uncovered state did not amuse Scraller. He drew breath to condemn the boy—then noted
that all but the stuffiest of his female guests had begun to smile.
He scrutinized his possession. A handsome child, no doubt of it: manly, despite his scant
years; well-formed, for all his scrawniness. The ladies were imagining him fifteen inches of
height, ten years of age, and eighty pounds of solid muscle into the future. And Scraller saw
not just their admiration but his own profit gleaming in their gazes.
"Sing, boy," he commanded, and eased his spindly form back in a chair with galazhi-horn
finials.
Anyone less proud—or more perceptive—would have sought to please his audience. Collan
never made music except to please himself. Carlon deplored this fault in presentation ("Sing
to me, not the empty air! Look in my eyes!"), but had to admit that the boy's aloofness was
intriguing. Collan never sang for anyone; he merely allowed others to listen, not much caring
if they did or not. In his whole life he found only two people he truly wanted to sing for—and
when he did, the music was such to win and break hearts.
But because those two persons did not yet exist in his life—indeed, one of them was not yet
born—Col played and sang for his own satisfaction. His very indifference to audience
reaction made him a triumph that night and at every banquet thereafter for the next four
years. Word spread that Scraller possessed a slave with a voice and fingers inspired by St.
Velenne herself. Offers were made, all of which Scraller turned down. Col was excused from
running errands, tending animals, and any work that might damage his hands or expose his
voice to dangerous weather. His sole daily occupations were music practice with Carlon,
lessons with Taguare, and acting as Scraller's personal page.
Oddly, he missed the animals, even though it was nice not to stink anymore. Pigs and
galazhi and horses demanded nothing of him but friendly care. He definitely did not miss
scurrying around the maze of the fief at the whim of ill-tempered stewards.
He purely loathed the hours he spent with Scraller.
There was no physical abuse. He was much too precious a commodity. Scraller's taste didn't
run to boys, anyway. But his very praise and attention, growing more lavish as Col's worth
grew, became emotional abuse. When it was found that the boy spoke as pleasingly as he
sang, the abuse became intellectual as well. In those four years, he read aloud more
excruciatingly bad poetry, more blazingly false history, and more disgustingly turgid
pornography than anyone should have to endure in four lifetimes.
Collan knew the poems were dreadful because Minstrel's instinct told him so. He knew the
history was untrue because Taguare had let him read secret copies of treatises from the time
before the First Councillor. (Besides, one of Scraller's own books had Avira Anniyas winning
the Battle of Domburron and killing Warrior Mage Lirsa Bekke with her own hands, and
everyone knew the two events had occurred on the same day a thousand miles apart.)
The pornography simply nauseated him. Scraller, however, found it vastly romantic. He
would slump back in his chair, tears of enjoyment trickling fat and slow down his cheeks as
the Humble Whomever yielded his tense and trembling virginity to the erotic mastery of the
Blooded Lady Thus-and-so, who then proceeded to fuck him blind. Such forthright terms
were never used, however; Scraller preferred his titillations couched in coy and cloying
euphemisms. He savored descriptive metaphor: "burning monolith of manhood" and "fierce
craving cavern of womanly desire" brought gusting sighs of sensuous delight. He adored
scenes of bondage, but only if silken cords were specified. The word "rape" made him scowl
horribly—even if it was obvious that rape was precisely what the story was about. By the fifth
night of reading this offal, Col knew that if he vocalized the Humble Whomever's
impassioned grunts and the Blooded Lady Thus-and-so's litany of
You'll-love-what-I'm-going-to-do-to-you-you-handsome-peasant-brute one more time, he'd
vomit.
But he learned how to keep saying the words with the feeling Scraller deemed appropriate,
while his mind disconnected and roamed elsewhere.
Scraller's evening entertainment might have given him a warped view of sex. That it did not
was due to his own good sense and his observations in Quarters. Slaves were forbidden
marriage, but they could bedshare with whomever they pleased. Collan learned that such
activities sometimes occasioned soft laughter, sometimes muffled weeping, and occasionally
bruises. But the persons he liked and respected, whichever sex they bedded, were always
attended to their blankets by laughter. Nobody in Scraller's books ever laughed, except in
virile triumph or cruel mockery—or perhaps it was cruel triumph and virile mockery, he'd
stopped paying attention long since.
Truly told, he came to feel rather sorry for Scraller. Forbidden by a sense of his own exalted
worth from besmirching himself with slave women, adamantly refusing to marry and thus
put his wealth into a woman's hands, he had two choices: his female guests, if they felt so
inclined, and his books.
It was years before Col actually tagged those books with the term pornography, and others
would have blinked in surprise at what he considered obscene—mild indeed by some
standards. But Col never reversed his opinion of Scraller's bedtime stories, for later experience
taught him that bedding was obscene unless he lay down with a woman's glad laughter as
well as the woman herself.
Love was something he wouldn't understand until he was past thirty years old, and the irony
of it was that he was the Humble Whomever, and she was the Blooded Lady Thus-and-So.
But oh, how they laughed…
Once she stopped wanting to murder him.
摘要:

PartOne942-967Herememberedthewind.Skitteringinthefarreachesofhismindwereothermemories:warmth,andlight,andsnugbelonginginsomecheerfulfirelitroomwhereawomansang.Hadtheseimagesbeenuseful,hewouldhaverememberedthemmoreclearly.Whatheknewinthislife,heknewbecauseithelpedhimsurvive.Thusthewind.Suddenandbruta...

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