bondsisters, never once did I seek her physically, nor did such a union ever occur. Take this on faith, if you will: in these pages I tell you so much that is discreditable to me, making no attempt to conceal that which is shameful, that if I had violated Halum’s bond I would tell you that as well. So you must believe that it was not a deed I did. You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.
Nevertheless I held myself guilty through the waning of the night and into this morning, and only as I purge myself now by putting the incident on paper does the darkness lift from my spirit. I think what has really troubled me these past few hours is not so much my sordid little sexual fantasy, for which even my enemies would probably forgive me, as it is my belief that I am responsible for Halum’s death, for which I am unable to forgive myself.
TEN
AFTER MY BROTHER STIRRON became septarch in Salla, I went, as you know, to the province of Glin. I will not say that I fled to Glin, for no one openly compelled me to leave my native land; but call my departure a deed of tact. I left in order to spare Stirron the eventual embarrassment of putting me to death, which would have weighed badly upon his soul. One province cannot hold safely the two sons of a late septarch.
Glin was my choice because it is customary for exiles from Salla to go to Glin, and also because my mother’s family held wealth and power there. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I might gain some advantage from that connection.
I was about three moontimes short of the age of thirteen when I took my leave of Salla. Among us that is the threshold of manhood; I had reached almost my present height, though I was much more slender and far less strong than I would soon become, and my beard had only lately begun to grow full. I knew something of history and government, something of the arts of warfare, something of the skills of hunting, and I had had some training in the practice of the law. Already I had bedded at least a dozen girls, and three times I had known, briefly, the tempests of unhappy love. I had kept the Covenant all my life; my soul was clean and I was at peace with our gods and with my forefathers. In my own eyes at that time I must have seemed hearty, adventurous, capable, honorable, and resilient, with all the world spread before me like a shining highway, and the future mine for the shaping. The perspective of thirty years tells me that that young man who left Salla then was also naive, gullible, romantic, over-earnest, and conventional and clumsy of mind: quite an ordinary youth, in fact, who might have been skinning seapups in some fishing village had he not had the great good fortune to be born a prince.
The season of my going was early autumn, after a springtime when all Salla had mourned my father and a summer when all Salla had hailed my brother. The harvest had been poor—nothing odd in Salla, where the fields yield pebbles and stones more graciously than they do crops—and Salla City was choked with bankrupt husbandmen, hoping to catch some largess from the new septarch. A dull hot haze hung over the capital day after day, and above it lay the first of autumn’s heavy clouds, floating in on schedule from the eastern sea. The streets were dusty; the trees had begun to drop their leaves early, even the majestic firethorns outside the septarch’s palace; the dung of the farmers’ beasts clogged the gutters. These were poor omens for Salla at the beginning of a septarch’s reign, and to me it seemed like a wise season for getting out. Even this early Stirron’s temper was fraying and unlucky councilors of state were going off to dungeons. I was still cherished at court, coddled and complimented, plied with fur cloaks and promises of baronies in the mountains, but for how long, how long? Just now Stirron was troubled with guilt that he had inherited the throne and I had nothing, and so he treated me softly, but let the dry summer give way to a bitter winter of famine and the scales might shift; envying me my freedom from responsibility, he might