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desert, closer every day to Morainn’s kingdom, to Ambar. Even riding hard I imagined it would take twelve days to reach home, maybe more, and I did not like to dwell on the distance, increasing with every hour.
    At night it was easier to imagine myself somewhere more familiar, and the quiet gatherings by fireside were not unlike those I remembered in the caverns deep in the desert. My presence was compulsory, but I tried to ignore that fact. We stopped only for a few hours, to wash and eat and rest, but it was enough.
    As it was during the day, when I wasn’t confined to my chamber I was with Morainn. Why she kept me close I didn’t know, not when there were armed guard enough to ensure I wasn’t going anywhere. She had two maidservants, Imke and Triss, who didn’t seem to do much but complain of the sand in her clothes and her food, the flies as plump as her littlest finger alighting on everything. But they were a distraction, and she couldn’t have enough of those. I wanted deeply to dislike Morainn, but she was not unkind. She wasn’t even terribly spoiled, though I wasn’t surprised to learn after our first encounter that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take no for an answer.
    “You Aleynians are very fond of your stories,” she observed one evening. I didn’t like the sound of our name on her lips, though I supposed my people weren’t Aleynians, not anymore. “Tell me one.”
    My desire to comfort myself in the telling of a tale warred with not wanting to share with her, with her servants, the guards, and Gannet. Especially Gannet, who I knew already couldn’t appreciate them.
    “I don’t think I know any that would be to your liking.”
    “I think you might be surprised by what I like.”
    “Let me entertain you, Dresha ,” Imke began when still I hesitated, shooting me a hard look for all her soft address of her mistress. She was the more martial of Morainn’s servants, and I didn’t need to see the wicked little knife hanging from her belt to know it. “I can do better than Aleynian poison.”
    “There is no harm in her stories,” Gannet interrupted, looking down on Imke and away, into the darkness. He surprised me. His were the only pair of eyes that weren’t on me now, a strange mix of curiosity and trepidation plain on the faces of those who thought their expressions guarded by shadow. If they wanted a story I would give them one.
    “Even the cruelest story is a balm, not a poison,” I said, holding Imke’s gaze until she looked away. “But I will let you be the judge, for this is the cruelest story that I know.
    “Shran had four sons. They were united only in their hatred of their youngest brother, Salarahan, who was small for his age and tricksome. When he wanted to hide no amount of shouting could draw him out again. The elder brothers were lashed by their tutors for letting Salarahan come to harm through their neglect, and only when the whistle of the beating with whip or switch or palm had stopped would the littlest brother appear, whole and safe and looking quite perplexed about what had passed in his absence.
    “The brothers hated him, though, not because they were beaten but because they had no mother to coddle them after their beating. It was Salarahan’s doing that their mother was dead, for Jemae had given her life for his. This, above all of his crimes, they could not forgive.
    “What the brothers did not know was that their mother’s had not been the first womb to shelter Salarahan. The goddess Theba had lain with Shran in the guise of his wife because she had desired him, but so great had her shame been to carry the child of a mortal that Theba came to Jemae at the time of her blood and thrust into her the bundle of life that was Salarahan. Because Theba was a fearsome goddess and the fiercest, and because these were times where the rule and forecast of the world was not questioned, Jemae accepted what she had been told and said nothing so that her youngest son would