Read Last First Snow for Free Online Page B

recognized that expression even had the child not left the game and run toward them across the courtyard, shouting, “Dad!”
    Temoc grabbed the boy, lifted him in a hug, swung him around so the force of their revolution made his feet describe a circle. The priestly mask was gone. Grinning, he set the boy down, and presented him to Elayne. “This is Caleb, my son. Caleb, meet Elayne Kevarian.”
    Elayne accepted the boy’s hand. His grip was strong.
    She was still reeling when the screen door opened and a woman emerged: tall, tan, short-haired, with the elegant self-possession of minor royalty and tenured academics. She smiled, too, but there was tension in that smile. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said to Temoc.
    Temoc moved to her, river-swift and inevitable, held her, kissed her. Her hands seemed sculpted to his shoulders, and their parting was the parting of tectonic plates. Elayne felt guilty for having seen it, for being the pretext on which Temoc drew back and turned and introduced her to, “My wife, Mina.”
    *   *   *
    Lunch was leftovers—heavily spiced and roasted pork in a sauce touched with chocolate, and oranges for dessert. They ate outside, the dining room table being occupied at the moment by Mina’s research, which topic gave Elayne, drowning in domesticity, a spar to clutch. “What do you study?”
    â€œMigratory desert cultures. Mythography and foundational theology for the most part.”
    â€œExciting field?”
    â€œThese days. We’re just coming out from under the shadow of Abervas and Klemt, last century—the family-tree model of religious structure.” She ate with her fork, sawing meat to pieces with its side, then spearing, and she leaned against the table when she spoke. “Very Gerhardtian—this sense that cultures grow more complex over time, and by studying modern ‘primitive’ cultures we can approximate the beliefs of previous generations.”
    â€œThat isn’t true?”
    â€œNo more than it’s true monkeys evolve into men—in fact both came from something else. Cultural development and transformation happens everywhere, all the time—it’s a disservice to modern nomads to see them as throwbacks who never made the jump to settled life. Klemt’s students missed, well, basically everything pertinent about the subject. Turns out many of the cultures Klemt identified as ‘primitive pretextual’ were recovering from post-Contact plague; we got off easy, our gods were strong enough to keep us going until our immune systems caught up with Old World bugs, but Contact wasn’t so easy for everyone. Klemt was such a dominant force in the field that people spent a solid century ignoring what their own eyes told them in favor of his theories. Nomadic peoples aren’t any more timeless than urbanites—their history just works differently. I spend most of my time in the field, trying to trace it. That’s how I met Temoc.”
    â€œWe visited the same tribe at the same time,” Temoc said, “while I was wandering. We did not have much in common.”
    â€œI thought he was a self-righteous prig. But adversity makes the heart grow fonder.”
    â€œWe stopped a renegade Scorpionkind clutch from infesting the desert with unbound demons.”
    â€œThat was the start, anyway.” Mina grabbed Temoc’s wrist, and squeezed.
    â€œHow did you meet Dad?” the boy asked Elayne. He had obviously heard these stories before, and run out of patience for them.
    Temoc coughed into his hand.
    â€œWe didn’t like each other at first, either,” Elayne said. “Your father seems to have that effect on people.”
    â€œYou did save my life,” Temoc demurred.
    â€œWe met during Liberation. He worked with the old gods, and I was an attach é to the Liberating Forces.”
    â€œYou fought for the King in