Eleven years before the founding of the first kingdom

"But Madra, I'm hungry!"

"You're always hungry. Go outside while I cook this chicken that the good man Ventra brought us."

"But I'm hungry now!"

"Listen to your madra." The well-dressed Ventra gave Andral a stiff smile that only half covered a complex sneer of disgust, disdain and irritation. Ventra seemed to be good at sneering. "And leave us adults alone to do adult things."

Andral looked at his mother's worn expression. She stood in the doorway of their cramped one-room apartment wearing a stained and tattered dress. Most men came to visit his mother quietly in the night when he would have to pretend to be asleep or be kicked outside. Ventra, in his fancy new clothes, had come in the morning while most men were going about their business. Andral looked back at Ventra trying to puzzle out why he was there. "Are you going to be my new adra?"

Ventra's indulgent smile disappeared faster than the cuff to Andral's head could land. "Obey your elders," Ventra snapped as Andral hit the floor. "And don't talk back."

Andral looked up tearfully at his mother, his face stinging, but saw only a weary accusation in her expression as if it were no more than he had deserved. He got up, sniffing, and went outside.

"An-dral. An-dral. An-dral."

Andral looked around the ground outside their building. Half a dozen shiny, dark, green-black beetles crawled towards him from the shadows of the surrounding trash and weeds. The insect chirping seemed to call out to him, which amused him. He scooped up as many as he could hold in his hands and went looking for a long sharp twig.

"Save us! Save us! Save us!"

Andral found a skinny twig and impaled his beetles on it. Fortunately the baker next door had already fired up his ovens and, though he preferred an open flame, Andral laid his squirming stick on the hot bricks of baked clay and waited for the beetles to swell and burst their glittering shells. When they had finished cooking, Andral gently pulled one steaming insect from the stick, pulled off its head, pinched off its legs, removed the wing casings and carefully ran a thumbnail along the crack of its split exoskeleton. Pulling out the tiny white meat, he popped it into his mouth. He thought it tasted a bit like prawn and a bit like something else he didn't know but thought of as the flavor green.

"Ai! Bug eater. What's the matter? Does your daddy not feed you?"

Andral faced five local boys. Most of their fathers worked at the nearby docks or as laborers and so had no trade to teach them. This left the boys free to run around the streets of Mari during the day looking for easy entertainment.

"Oh! I forget. You don't know who your father is. He could be anyone. He could be everyone!" The leader laughed. He was a wide heavy-set boy with a nose that seemed to be a low hanging extension of a ponderous brow shadowing two small inset eyes. His upper lip was perpetually curled upward in the middle as if it had given up trying to cover his large buck teeth. "Maybe that's why you look so funny. Your mother took the seed from every man of the city and made it into one really ugly boy!"

Andral was nearly of a size with the five bullies, but his six years of experience had not prepared him to deal with their kind of cruelty. He lowered his own heavy brow threateningly and warned them away with a look, like a dog guarding a bone. He hurriedly plucked and peeled another beetle.

"Ai! Give that here, you glutton." Their leader snatched Andral's stick away and held it out of reach. "Did you not think someone else might like a bite?"

With an outraged roar, Andral lowered his head and charged the bully, striking him in the midriff.

The leader staggered back, with a grunt of surprise and pain. He pushed Andral back, dropped the stick and punched him in the face.

The blow snapped Andral's head around and the world went blurry and gray. Then the ground swung up and slammed into the other side of his head. The blow had been so swift that he had barely felt it. But as he lay stunned on the ground, the pain caught up to him. He felt the pressure of the bully's knuckles on his cheek and jaw as if the boy were leaning over him, pressing his fist into Andral's face and not standing back laughing and pointing. Tears came to his eyes and he whimpered for his madra, which only brought more laughter. He spread his arms out in the dust, his heart yearning for her comfort, and imagined holding her.

Warmth and strength flowed into him from the ground. His head cleared and a rock seemed to push itself into his outstretched hand. He rose, rage filling him, and ran at the bullies' leader. The boy turned toward him as he swung. The rock slammed into the side of his head with a loud crack. The buck-toothed boy dropped and lay bleeding from his nose and ears.

The other boys staggered backwards and gaped at Andral. Andral shook his rock and roared at them. They looked down at their friend lying motionlessly on the ground and, with urgent mutterings and wary glances at Andral, picked him up and carried him off.

Andral sent more wordless shouts after them. Then he noticed a shabby man watching him. He ceased his shouting and lowered his arm, sending the smirking man a warning frown as the stranger approached.

"You have quite the fighting spirit." The man paused a few feet away and smiled down at him with a vaguely ironic expression. "I would expect no less from the son of an oracle."

Andral glared up at him. He didn't understand what the man was saying, but he didn't care either. He just wanted the man to go away.

"Are you Apaidia's boy? Can you show me where you live?"

Andral gripped his rock and shrugged noncommittally.

"My name is Pronos. I knew your father."

<====|==|====>

Mari was a large city with a constant stream of traders arriving and leaving. It was an easy city in which to get lost, yet an unmarried foreign woman from the east with a child, if she stayed more than a few months, would surely be noticed by somebody—or so Pronos had hoped. Having heard rumors of such a woman living down by the docks, Pronos thought he had found her until he discovered several such women in the area. It wasn't until he saw a child wearing clothes cut in the style of the children of Nur that he knew he had tracked her down at last.

When Pronos first saw Andral being bullied, he thought the two boys were brothers. They were both wide, stocky boys with ponderously low brows shading small eyes. Unlike the bully's eyes, however, Andral's were not each of the same size or on the same level. Andral's skin, too, was of a strange shade—a dusky gray like old stone—while everyone else's was of a darkly tanned reddish brown. But most disturbing of all, Andral's features were all very slightly askew as if his maker had started to slide his face onto his head and stopped before everything was completely lined up.

At the mention of his father, Andral's stubborn scowl changed to a puzzled frown. With an almost imperceptible nod, he started to lead the way to his home.

"One moment!" Pronos hurried back to the corner from where he had been watching the boys and retrieved his weapon. It was a short heavy spear with bronze points like long knives at each end.

After a long curious glance at the weapon, Andral led Pronos to the back side of a shop where a rickety flight of stairs led up to a wooden balcony. The narrow balcony fronted a series of small room, many of which didn't even have doors.

Pronos put a cautious foot on a groaning step. He thought it strange that the buildings of Mari were mostly constructed of wooden timbers, unlike the thick stone and mud brick buildings of distant Nur. It leant an air of impermanence and precariousness to the whole city.

Andral stopped outside a doorway in which only a heavy piece of sun-bleached cloth hung. "Madra!"

Pronos heard a frantic rustle and angry whispering.

After a moment, a bear-shouldered Apaidia stuck her head out around the cloth and snapped at Andral, "What is it?"

Pronos stepped up next to the boy and planted his spear on the splintered wood of the balcony. "Good morning, Apaidia. Have a moment for an old friend?"

Apaidia had always been a plain-faced young lady whose best features lay elsewhere. The hard years had thinned her face and exposed cheekbones that gave it a character her earlier life of ease had obscured. She looked at him and looked at his spear and her eyes widened with recognition. "You! I know you. What was your name?"

"Pronos. I was a childhood friend of Amantis when he lived among the northern tribes."

"Yes!" A complex mix of hope and despair crossed her face. "One moment." She disappeared back inside followed by more urgent whispering and the rustle of cloth.

Pronos guessed she had expected Amantis to follow her when she had fled Nur ahead of the invasion. He wondered at what point during the six following years her hope had died. Had it been after the first year in Kudru Springs when Amantis had failed to emerge from the death and chaos she had left behind? Had she simply smothered what hope remained and got on with her life, or had she banked its dying embers in the ashes of her dreams and come south to Mari, hoping he had simply missed her and that she would find him there?

Andral turned his twisted scowl from the curtained doorway to Pronos. He clearly didn't understand what was going on but he knew he didn't like it. His expression only softened when he looked at Pronos' spear.

Pronos shifted it to the hand nearest the boy. Andral put out a hesitant finger and touched the smooth wood of the shaft. He ran it down to the bronze point and gingerly touched the sharp edge. Pronos didn't think to warn the boy that he might cut himself. To his credit, Andral didn't cry when a drop of blood welled up on his finger tip. Teach him an important lesson on spears, Pronos thought.

A hand pushed back the cloth and a young man—younger than Apaidia—in a fine white linen tunic stepped out wearing gold bands on his wrists and a gold torc around his neck.

Pronos had had no idea what wealth was until he had moved to a city. Among the tribes of the Pelahin, wealth was measured in the size of one's herd. In the cities he had found men so wealthy that their sons spent their nights feasting and drinking and their days sleeping, never having to work a moment of their lives.

He must be one of those, Pronos thought, as the fellow brushed past him, muttering a vague apology, eyes down as if he could make himself invisible by avoiding recognition in another's gaze. He's grown bored with the beautiful and easy, Pronos thought, and seeks excitement among the dirty and forbidden. "Good morning to you."

The fellow paused, casting a worried glance back, was that the fear of recognition in his eyes?

Pronos smiled. True wealth did not lie in possessions. Amantis had taught him that. True wealth lay in the power one had over others. Pronos leaned on his spear, smiling as the young man muttered something and slunk away.

Apaidia cast an anxious glance at them from the doorway and gestured Pronos and Andral inside.

<====|==|====>

"They buried him in Straton's field where his spears used to train," Pronos said. "And they buried his soreav—at least those who fell in the fighting—with him."

Loss and dismay rippled across Apaidia's face, surprising Pronos. He had always thought of her as the pragmatic type, willing to use and be used by the men who could give her what she wanted. The realization that she cared for Amantis was unexpected. "How?" She gasped. "How did it happen?"

"They say that Karux himself impaled Amantis on his spear and hurled him from the top of Amantis' mountain of stones. I heard his body landed a block away in the market square."

Apaidia closed her eyes, her face clenched in pain. He thought she might begin to wail as city women often did at the death of a loved one, but she seemed to swallow her pain. Pronos glanced at Andral who glowered up at him beneath the overhang of his brow, his eyes hard like glittering chips of mica.

"Are you talking of my Adra?"

"Yes," Apaidia said.

"No," Pronos said at the same time. He paused before their scowls. "If Karux had not killed him, Amantis would have been your Adra, but you were sired by another."

"His sire wasn't that guard I caught...his madra...with, was it?" Apaidia asked. 

Pronos chuckled. "No. But when Amantis found his wife—who had always refused him—had lain with another, he dragged her down to the cellar and, somehow, gave her over to one of the n'phesh—one of the spirits of the land.

"Are you saying Andral's true father—that he's not entirely..."

"Human? No. His brother is, but Andral was sired by the n'phesh."

Andral gave Pronos a questioning look. "I have a brother?"

"A half-brother, yes."

"Where is he?"

"Your real madra gave him to be raised by the man who killed your adra. She also made him promise to kill you."