By god, I haven’t been this angry since…since my family spilt. We all make errors, there’s no need to keep castigating myself about that. Yes, the little mistakes made by princes are devastating on account of our power.

Who has she been talking to, to turn out so badly? It must be the effect of Hacilith and that rotten brood of Ata’s. Cyan always seemed all right before, but now delinquency hangs around her like a cloud of perfume. I used to love her innocence. She might have been an accident, but she woke me up. A year feels like a year now, rather than ten minutes. I’m alive again-or becoming so-I’m experiencing more now in a year with her than I did in a century before. She invigorated me…more, far more, than even Swallow could. Damn it, I even wished I could be like her.

Do I have to give up my own daughter like I’ve given up everyone else? No, wait. Take a breath. Step back from this-you know you can, there’s been worse-and think. In a way she has played into my hands. I have a…a legitimate way of dealing with her. She isn’t familiar with the procedures of Challenges. I did the right thing; I’m free of her for the time being and I can talk to her later, at my convenience…I am sure she will be very repentant.

The way she has turned out is not my fault. Events swept me along too quickly to make time for her…I regret not having the pressure of time that mortals do. Promises are made; time passes and sometimes they are not properly kept. Reality intrudes on the best of intentions: doesn’t every arrow that flies feel the pull of the earth? But, damn it, I have my duty; I can’t neglect it. I knew she was growing quickly, but millions of things demanded my attention…Swallow should have been more dutiful herself.

But no. When an archer misses the mark, he should turn and look for the fault within himself. A failure to hit the target is never the fault of the target.

The world is becoming too crass. Oh, that old refrain: everywhere is similar, and becoming more so. In the time that reared me the Grand Tour only took us around Awia, and it startled and inspired us. Now the Tour takes our sons and daughters thousands of kilometres and shows them four lands in the space of a year, and they return unimpressed.

I am fighting to protect the very ideals that Cyan is trying to change, and…oh, what is the bloody point? I’m sure in the past I never had to justify my every move. There is an informality, these days, that causes uncertainty; nobody knows how to behave any more. It was easier when there were proper codes of behaviour…I am too old and inflexible to bear this blow. Old armour splits; only soft jackets withstand sword blows.

Don’t talk rubbish.

The world is changing, though. Changing radically, in ways I don’t care to understand. And what will I be left with? A sense of nostalgia, for the rest of my life in long centuries to come. A terrible sense that I have missed the only thing worthwhile. Be steady, keep calm. Where are the nerves of steel I have when Insects are charging at me and I have to wait for my range?

I walked more slowly because a recent, mostly healed, rapier wound in my back was starting to catch. I passed into a deep shadow and looked about me, perturbed. I had come as far as the outer road. I must have paced across the square and three streets completely oblivious.

The tower of the gatehouse overshadowed the barrack blocks on my either side. Soldiers smoking outside on their steps were staring at me in surprise, curious at the sight of Lightning striding down the street in his shirt sleeves.

I passed them, then I stopped dead. The banner of Morenzia was flying above the barrack doorway. A red clenched fist. The red fist: the marriage rite. The Hacilith fyrd must have assembled, one part of my mind observed, but with the sight of the flag my other thoughts winged far away, to Savory. My Savory. Cyan was wrong to taunt me about her. If she knew what happened she wouldn’t dare to mention Savory at all.

The wind gusted and the flag flapped, pulling its cord through its eye hole. It released me from my trance and I looked down, aware I was touching the scar across my right palm, rubbing it with my left thumb and forefinger. I turned and walked slowly back to my room. The civilised parts of Morenzia don’t conduct the blood-red hand ceremony any more, only the people of Cathee still do, but the country has kept it as their device. I am so used to seeing it, it hardly registers, but occasionally when I am pensive I look a little deeper and the realisation of what it means takes me back to Savory. And again I am in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall.

I was in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall. The hut walls were wattle hurdles woven around living trees; I sat on the floor and looked up to the beams of the round roof, constructed in spirals like a spider’s web. Through the smoke hole at the apex I watched folds in the clouds push against one another. The dusk sky was different shades of old gold like the mixture in a bottle of illuminator’s ink.

After dark she will call me, if she hasn’t had second thoughts, celebrating in the village all day with her friends and family. I heard their laughter as they dressed her up and drank to her, and asked her over and over, as is their custom, if she’s sure, if she’s really sure. Soon I will know if they have managed to sway her conviction; if I stay here well into the night and she fails to call me, then without a word I will go to the trader I had employed as a guide and leave the dense forest.

Outside was nothing but pine trees behind pine trees all the way up and over the fir-covered ridges of the vast mountain forest of Cathee. Cathee could not be more different from my hunting woods I loved so well; it was dark; it was trackless; it was wild. For hundreds of kilometres from Vertigo town to the Drag Road, from the clay paddy fields of Litanee to the cliffs of the cape there were only trees. Even at the edges where conifers segued into broadleaf forest it lost none of its impenetrability.

I had fasted in the marriage hut for twenty-four hours, alone, and I was expected to use that time to think about Savory and whether I wanted to marry her. I did with all my heart; Savory, when she called me, would never find the hut door swinging wide and her groom long gone.

Love filled me and uplifted me. I was intoxicated; I floated; I was full of love. After so long I was about to be married! Completed-as I had never felt complete before. I had always felt as if something was missing. I had always felt unfinished, but two people living together as one is to be complete. Savory did not have wings, so we would not be able to tangle our pinions together and I would not be able to bury my face in the warm, feather-scent in their pits, or stroke my fingers along their serried rows. They couple in a vulgar way, do humans, face to face rather than belly to back, but then my cousin Martyn and I used to throw ourselves on each other that way, when she had the key to the belvedere, or with excitement after the day’s hunt. The smell of deer blood, oiled armour, dry leaves, the perspiration of our eager flesh…It would be strange at first to have a woman without wings, but then it would be strange, so strange, to have a companion at all.

The beauty of it-waiting outside in a far place, for my love to call me, while sunset dyed the sky strange colours and the light drained out of the forest. I wanted to tell her all my history-the past to be discussed in the future-we would have so much time!

I glanced up as the first wolf howls carried on the breeze. The Cathee grey wolves were dumb lanky beasts with dirty pelts and eyes glazed by starvation. They scavenged in large packs and scratched ancient things out of the villages’ middens. The few villages sheltered from them behind circular palisades, but I had my new crossbow and I was not afraid. The worst they could do was give me fleas.