The word seemed to startle him. ‘Peace? I spoke not of peace. In absence, Korya, there is yearning.’ His strange eyes focused on her. ‘Do you not so yearn?’

She did. She knew the truth of it, as soon as he had spoken of what was inside her. She was the goddess who had tired of her children, who had seen the summers grow ever shorter, tinged with impatience, yet had not known what might arrive in place of the lost age.

‘Sleep this night,’ Haut said, in a tone she had never before heard from him. It was almost… gentle. ‘On the morrow, Korya, the lessons begin in earnest.’ He turned away, ‘My last task awaits us both, and we shall be worthy of it. This I promise.’ He gestured again, and she hurried from the room, her mind awhirl.

The carriage had been drawn up in front of the once-palatial entrance to the House of Delack. A single horse stood forlorn in the harness, head nodding as it chewed on its bit. The journey awaiting it would be arduous, for the carriage was heavy and in years past would have been drawn by a team of four. Beyond it, just visible from where stood Lady Nerys Drukorlat on the steps, the small boy was playing along the edge of the charred ruin of the stables, and she could see that his hands were black with soot, and he’d already stained his knees.

Here, in this failing estate, this was a battle that Nerys had no hope of winning. But childhood was short, and in these troubled times she would do all she could to make it even shorter. The boy needed guidance. He needed to be shaken free of his imaginary fancies. Nobility was born in the rigid stricture of proper attitude, and the sooner her grandson was bound to the necessities of adulthood, the sooner would he find his place as heir to the ancient House; and with proper guidance he would one day return the bloodline to the glory and power it had once possessed.

And she would hear nothing of that dreadful word, that cruel title that hung now over Orfantal like a crow’s mocking wing.

Bastard.

No child could choose. The venal stupidity of his mother, the lowborn pathos of his drunken father — these were not the boy’s crimes, and his innocence was not for others to denigrate. People could be vicious. Eager with hard judgement, eager with contempt.

‘ The wounded will wound.’ So said the poet Gallan, and no truer words were spoken. ‘ The wounded will wound / and every hurt is remembered.’ These lines came from his latest collection, his ominously titled Days of Skinning, which had been published at the beginning of the season and continued to foment outrage and heated condemnations. Of course, the truly cultured among the Houses could look upon unpleasant truths without blinking, and if Gallan in his courage had set blade to the Tiste culture and peeled back the skin, was not all that fury proof that he had seen true?

There was much to despise about one’s own kind, and the banality of fading glory was indeed bitter to bear. One day, there would be a rebirth. And if one saw clearly, and planned well enough in advance, then in the rising of a new age of fervour the bloodline could burst into new life, at the very heart of unimagined power. The opportunity would come, but not in her time. All that she did now was meant to serve the future, and one day they would see that; one day, they would understand her own sacrifices.

Orfantal had found a splintered shaft of wood, from one of the fence rails, and was now waving it over his head, shouting and running. She watched as he clambered atop a low heap of rubble, his expression one of triumph. He jammed one end of the shaft between two chunks of masonry, as if planting a standard, only to suddenly stiffen, as if speared through by some invisible weapon. Back arching, he stared skyward, his expression shocked, filling with imagined agony, and then he staggered down from the mound, stumbling to his knees, one hand clutching his stomach. A moment later he fell over and lay like one dead.

Silly games. And always ones of war and battle, heroic yet ending in tragedy. She’d yet to see the boy pretend to die while facing his imagined enemy. Again and again, it seemed he was enacting betrayal, the knife thrust from behind, the surprise and hurt filling his eyes. The hint of indignation. Boys were foolish at this age. In their ridiculous games they martyred themselves to their own belief in the injustice of the world, the chores that cut into their play time, the lessons that stole the daylight and summer’s endless dreaming, the shout from the kitchen that ended the day.

It all needed expunging. From young Orfantal’s mind. The great wars were over. Victory had won this peace, and young men and young women must now turn to other things — the sword-wielders’ time was past, and all these veterans, wandering through the settlements like abandoned dogs, getting drunk and spinning wild tales of bravery and then weeping over lost comrades — it was a poison to everyone, especially the young, who were so easily seduced by such tales and those crushing, wretched scenes of grief.