if a piece of dried meat had gotten stuck between. “What would you have said to Lady Junica?”
“Hmm?”
“When you said that only killing the Destroyer mattered, and she replied that if we destroyed Koth to stop him, no different would we be. It seemed you would say something, and then did not.”
“Ah.” With a sigh, Ardyl let the claw fall against her neck and gestured to the wineskin near Lizzan’s leg, which she’d filled that morning with the ale from the bandits’ barrels before leaving the remainder behind. As Lizzan passed it over, Ardyl sat up and said, “I would have told her that if she ever had to trade between the lives of her family and the home that she lived in, she would choose the family. But then I recalled what you said last eve. All of her family was lost to the fever?”
Gravely, Lizzan nodded.
“Then I can have nothing to tell her that she does not already know.”
“That is not what it seemed.”
“But it is true, I think.” She gazed across the busy clearing, to where the councilor sat with Tyzen and Preter and Seri. “What age would her children have been now?”
A pang struck Lizzan’s heart. “She had a daughter near Seri’s age. And a son the same age as Aerax.”
Nodding as if that confirmed something she had suspected, Ardyl said, “I was a babe when the Destroyer’s armies came to the Burning Plains. My entire clan was slaughtered, except for me, because I was hidden away in a granary. All that I have of them are these.” She touched the silver piercings on her face, then showed Lizzan the silver ring around her thumb. “Each of them wore a ring marked with their name and their parents’ names—but the Destroyer’s men piled their bodies and all of their belongings into a giant pyre, and all their names were melted away. But a babe does not wear a ring. So I know not who my parents were. I know not if I had sisters and brothers, or what my true name is. I have been told stories about my clan by people who knew them, but I have no memory of them at all, no knowledge of the stories they told of each other and that an outsider could not know, and no connection to the territory where they lived. I know not even the place where I was born. Do you?”
Chest tight, Lizzan nodded. “In the back of a cart on the road outside Lightgale, because my mother believed I would not come for a few more days, so she traveled to Fairwind to hear a dispute.”
“Have you ever passed that spot without thinking of that story, even though you cannot remember it yourself?”
Lizzan shook her head.
“Just as it must be for her,” Ardyl said, looking to Lady Junica again. “I envy that she has so much more than a few bits of silver to remind her of what was lost. There must be so many places on that island that hold the memory of those she loved, it surprises me not at all how fiercely she protects them. But she is clearly a woman of sense, and knows those memories are truly held here”—she tapped the side of her head—“instead of in those places. And then there is her admiration of Varrin.”
With a sudden laugh, Lizzan asked, “Which version? For never have I heard the one where he is a monster before.”
“And I am inclined to believe it, merely because it came from Tyzen’s mother.”
“Truly?”
A strange expression moved over Ardyl’s face. “You need never ask that of a Parsathean.”
As well she knew. Lizzan repeated dryly, “Truly?”
“Ah. You assumed it was a jest?”
Surely it must be. “Was it?”
Ardyl shook her head. “A warrior-queen of Syssia would not spread idle lies, so she must have had good reason to believe what she saw. But what I believe of Varrin matters not at all. I only mention it because Lady Junica so clearly admires him—and when he sacrificed himself, it wasn’t to save the island, but to save the people on it. That is the god she has faith in and would hear no slander against. So I would wager that if she faced the decision, she would choose to save lives rather than to save the island. Just as I would kill anyone who tried to take these piercings from me. But if I had to decide between saving Kelir or Seri and these piercings, I