The Wound is healed

by the sword that deals it;

the heart is knit

by the pain that breaks it;

the life is made whole

by the death that starts it;

the death is made whole

by the life that ends it.  

(Hamartics, 186)

Four lands hemmed in by mountain and waste and the Sea—those were the Middle Kingdoms: and the greatest of them, Arlen and Darthen, were in peril of destruction. For seven years Arlen’s throne had been empty of the royalty needed to keep the land fertile and the people at peace. And Darthen suffered as a result of Arlen’s lack, for the Two Lands were bound together by oaths of friendship and by joint maintenance of the royal sorceries that kept their lands safe from the ever-present menace of the Shadow.

In those days there appeared a man with the blue Fire—not just the spark of Flame that every man and woman possesses, but enough to channel and use to change the world around him. His lover was the child of Arlen’s last king, heir to his usurped throne. In the Firebearer’s relationship to Freelorn, King Ferrant’s son, many later saw the Goddess’s hand. She had been working quietly, so as not to alarm Her old adversary the Shadow.

Her hand seemed visible elsewhere too. Freelorn had taken companions with him into his exile. They lived as outlaws and bandits, stealing what they needed when they had to—though none of their hearts were in it. One of them in particular would certainly have been elsewhere, if she had had a choice. Swordswoman and sorceress, trained in the Silent Precincts and in every other place in the Kingdoms that dealt in the use and mastery of the blue Fire that some women bear, Segnbora d’Welcaen tai-Enraesi was a spectacular and expensive failure. She had the Fire in prodigious quantity, and couldn’t focus it. On her way home from one more school that couldn’t do anything for her, chance threw her together with Freelorn’s people one night. Bitterly frustrated with what seemed a wasted life, desperately needing something useful to do, Segnbora swore fealty that night to the rightful heir of the Arlene throne, and fled with him and his people into the eastern Waste where Freelorn’s loved, Herewiss, awaited him.

The children of House tai-Enraesi traditionally had a talent for getting themselves into dangerous situations. There in the Waste, in an ancient pile built by no human hand—a fortress rising gray and bizarre out of the empty land, skewed and blind-walled and ominous—she started wondering whether even the tai-Enraesi luck would do her any good. There were stories about this place, about soul-eating monsters that guarded innumerable doors into Otherwheres.  Even  the mildest of the stories were gruesome.  Fear gripped her, but her oath gripped her harder. She stayed with Freelorn and his people.

And there in the Hold, fulfilling her fears, the stories she had heard came true—even the one of how nothing good would come out of this terrible place until (ridiculous improbability) a male should focus his Fire.

On the night Herewiss declared his intention to use his newly gained Fire to replace Freelorn on his throne, Segnbora lay in the darkness and considered the old rede that spoke of her family’s luck. That luck would run out some day, when the last of her line died by his or her own hand, in a time of ice and darkness. But that hardly had anything to do with her. She wasn’t the last of the tai-Enraesi, and anyway her luck was holding splendidly. She would be riding out of here with three good friends, a sometime lover, a prince about to retake his throne, a fire elemental, and the first man in a thousand years to focus his Fire. So maybe, maybe just this once, everything was going to turn out all right ....