“Not their authority, no, not really.”

“What then?”

“Their truth. Their wisdom. It came to me as I lay in the swamp. They entered me. I felt it, father. I thought I was dying, and they came to me. You know that I had no belief before that. But I do now.”

“I see,” Hresh said vaguely. But he didn’t see at all. The more she told him, the less he seemed to understand. Even as he had begun to feel the pull of the Nest — which was partly her doing — she appeared to be turning away from it. “So there’s no likelihood that you’ll try to return to the Nest, now that you have your strength back?”

“None, father. Not any more.”

“Speak only the truth to me, girl.”

“It is the truth. You know that I would have gone with Kundalimon. But now everything is changed. I’ve begun to doubt everything I once believed, and to believe everything I once doubted. The world’s become a mystery to me. I need to stay right here and sort things out before I do anything.”

“Can I believe you, I wonder?”

“I swear it! I swear by any god there is. I swear it by the Queen, father.”

She reached her hand toward his. He took it and held it as though it were a precious object.

Then he said, “What a puzzle you are, Nialli! Almost as great a puzzle as the hjjks themselves!” He smiled tenderly. “You’ll always be a puzzle to me, I suppose. But at least I think I’m beginning to understand the hjjks.”

“Are you, father?”

“Look at this,” he said. “A newly discovered text, very ancient.”

Carefully he drew a vellum scroll from the larger of his two caskets of chronicles, and undid its fastening. He laid it on the table before her.

Nialli Apuilana leaned forward to peer at it. “Where was it found?”

“In my collection of chronicles. It was there all along, actually. But it was in Beng, a very ancient form of Beng almost impossible to understand. So I didn’t pay much attention to it. Puit Kjai suggested finally that I ought to look at it, when I told him I was doing research in hjjk history. He was the keeper of the Beng chronicles, you know, before they were turned over to me. He helped me learn how to read it.”

She put her hands to the manuscript. “May I?”

“It won’t do you any good. But go ahead.”

He watched her as she bent over the text. The writing was unintelligible to her, of course. These ancient Beng hieroglyphics were nothing like the characters in use nowadays, and wouldn’t tune themselves easily to a modern mind. But Nialli Apuilana seemed determined to master them. How very much like me she is in some ways, Hresh thought. And how different in so many others.

She murmured under her breath, pressed her fingertips harder, struggled to bring sense out of the page. When it seemed to him that she had wrestled with it long enough he reached for the manuscript to decipher it for her, but she shook him away and continued to work at it.

He looked at her and his heart overflowed with warmth. He had so many times given her up for lost; and yet here she was, quietly sitting with him in his study, as she had so often done when she was a child.

Her strength and determination as she toiled over the ancient manuscript delighted him. Seeing her like this, he could see Taniane reborn in her, and it took him back to the days when he was young, when he and Taniane had roamed Vengiboneeza together in search of the secrets of the Great World.

But Nialli was something more than a mere duplicate of her mother. He could see the Hresh in her too. She was volatile and impulsive, a spooky willful child, as he had been. Before her capture by the hjjks she had been outgoing and exuberant, but also — as he had been — lonely, alienated, inquisitive, odd. How he loved her! How deeply he felt for her!

She looked up from the scroll. “It’s like the language they speak in dreams. Nothing will hold still long enough for me to find its meaning.”

“So I felt also. But not any longer.”

She gave him the manuscript. He put his fingers to it and the strange archaic phrases rose to his mind.

“It’s a document of the very early years of the Long Winter,” he said. “When all the tribes of the People were newly cocooned. There were some warriors of the Bengs who wouldn’t believe that they had to spend all their lives in hiding, and one of them made a Going Forth to see if the outer world could be reclaimed. You must realize that this was thousands of years before our own three premature departures from the cocoon, what we call the Cold Awakening, the Wrongful Glow, and the Unhappy Dawn. Most of the text is missing, but what we have is this—

“And then I stood in the land of ice and a terrible death of the heart came upon me, for I knew that I would not live.

“Then did I turn, and seek again the place of my people. But the mouth of the cave I could not find. And the hjjken-folk came upon me and seized me where I stood, laying their hands upon me and carrying me away, but I was free of fear, for I was a dead man already, and who can die the death more than once? There were twenty of them and very frightsome of aspect, and they did lay their hands on me and take me to the warm dark place where they lived, which was like unto the cocoon, but greatly larger, in the ground extending farther than I could see, with many avenues and side-passages going in every way.

“And there was in this place the Great Hjjken, a monster of huge and most formidable size, the sight of which made the blood run backward in my vessels. But she touched the soul of my soul with the second sight of her, and she said unto me, Behold, I give you peace and love, and I was not afraid. For the touch of her soul on my soul was like being taken into the arms of a great Mother, and I did marvel greatly that so huge and frightsome a beast could be so comforting. And also she said, You are come to me too soon, for my time is not yet. But when the world wakens into warmth will I embrace you all.

“Which was all she said, and never did I speak with her again. But I did stay among the hjjken twenty days and twenty nights, the count of which I did keep most carefully, and lesser hjjken did ask of me with the voices of their inner minds a great many questions concerning my People and how we live and what we believe, and also they did tell me something of what it is that they believe, though that is all hazy in my mind, and was even as they told it me. And I did eat of their food, which is a dreadful mash that they do chew and spit forth for their companions to eat after them, and which gave me sore revulsion at first, though later hunger overcame me and I did eat of it and find it less hateful than might be thought. Then when they ceased to question me did they say to me, We will take you to your nation now, and let me forth into the bitter cold and deadly snows, and did conduct me thenceforward—”

Hresh laid the scroll down.

“That’s where it ends?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“It breaks off there. But what there is of it is clear enough.”

“And what does it tell you, father?”

“It explains, I think, the taking of captives by the hjjks. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Evidently it’s so they can study us. But they care for the captives and eventually they let them go, some of them, at least, as they did with that poor foolish Beng warrior who they found wandering around on the icefields.”

“So this is what has led you to cease thinking of them as monsters.”

“I never believed they were monsters,” said Hresh. “Enemies, yes, ruthless and dangerous enemies. Remember, I was there when they attacked Yissou. But perhaps they aren’t even that. After all this time we don’t really know what they are. We’ve never even begun to understand them. We hate them simply because they’re unknown.”

“And they probably always will be.”

“I thought you said you understood them.”