I hoarded shells and bird’s eggs. When the brille swarmed, I waded in, knee-deep, to haul the nets. I swung a sling and pulled girls’ hair; fought with other boys and listened to the stories of old men. On the cliff above the village I had a secret camp: a fortress great as the Lord Protector’s keep, from which I and Tellurin and Coram and all the rest defended Whitefish village against the Kho’rabi. Sometimes I was a Kho’rabi knight and with my bark-peeled blade wrought slaughter on my friends, though I always liked it better when I had the part of a Dhar warrior-a commur, or a jennym, even a pyke-for then I felt, with all the intensity of childhood’s fierce emotions, that I fought for Kellambek, to hold off those invaders the Sentinels could not prevent from crossing the waters of the Fend, Those were carefree days when, in the ignorance of childhood, I knew only that the dawn be sunny and I should go to play again.

What did I know then of the Comings?

Little enough: to me, the Kho’rabi knights, the kingdom of Ahn-feshang, they were legends. When I was very young-too young to laugh at the threat-my mother used to tell me that should I disobey her, a Kho’rabi knight should come and take my head. I spent some small time cowering beneath my blanket at that, but as I grew older, sneered. Kho’rabi knights-what were they to me? Creatures of legend, of no more account than the fabled dragons of the Forgotten Country, who had gone away before even my grandfather was born.

But then I saw the Sky Lords.

It was the end of summer, when the winds off the Fend shift and blow westward. The sky was a cloudless cobalt blue, hot and hard, the sun a sullen eye that challenged observation. The sea was still, unrippled. I was on the sand, passing my father the tools he needed to sew gashes in his nets. Battus and Thorus worked with him on the skein: they had decided to forgo the evening tide and spend the dusktime in repairing.