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not be feared as his true mother was.”
    My attention drifted away from the physical concerns of the moment, reveling as a good storyteller does in the details, in the pleasure of a captive audience. And they were captive. As I spoke the dread goddess’ name I heard not even a breath escape my listeners.
    “As their mother’s death had given the elder brothers cause to hate Salarahan, so their father’s drove their hands at last. Shran would not divide his kingdom, but neither could he will it to one of his sons without first having proof of their love for him. Though it is rarely fair to lay the same task before one’s children, whose strengths often flourish in the shadow of another’s weakness, Shran asked them each to bring him a likeness of their mother. Whoever gave him the finest would be king after him.
    “While his brothers raced to do as their father asked, Salarahan hesitated. He had always suspected that his mother was not the same as his brothers. They shared every feature with their father, but there were many things, little things, that caused Salarahan to doubt. These were troubles he did not wish to lay at the feet of a dying man, however. He was determined to please his father not to have the kingdom for his own, but to ease the passing of a beloved parent.”
    With a polite sweep of my eyes I could look from Morainn to Gannet, wondering if they thought of their mother and father as I did now, as I always did at this part of the story. My father, a diplomat with little to resolve in exile but the careless jealousies of his daughters, would never meet with theirs.
    But how much did they know their own father? Morainn had been sent into the desert to lead a bloody campaign, and Gannet could not even claim her openly as his sibling. His dark expression I took to mean he knew his father as I did, in rumor and whisper.
    I felt sorry for him, and was quick to bury those feelings in the sorrow of the tale.
    “The brothers met again the next morning in Shran’s bed chamber. His middle sons each presented a crude portrait, sketched from the relief that hung in their mother’s untouched bed chamber. They fell to fighting over whose idea it had been first, not looking at their father. Shran only shook his head before inviting his eldest son to step forward. Behind him came a young woman clad in one of Jemae’s shifts, her hair dressed in a fashion that had gone out of style many years ago. Shran’s eldest son opened his arms greedily to her, and if he understood the horror of what he did, he did not show it. Shran looked from his eldest son to his youngest with tears in his eyes.
    “Salarahan had fashioned a bust from the soft clay of the river where he had been told Jemae liked to go most often to wash her feet with her maids. The features of the sculpture were modest, a fair likeness ornamented with flowers taken but moments before from the terrace gardens. Salarahan’s work was not to be rewarded, though, for even in the moment that Shran raised his hands to embrace his youngest son, Salarahan’s true mother exerted her influence over the family one last and devastating time.”
    The fire had wasted without anyone to attend to it, though it didn’t seem that anyone attended much to my story, either. Their eyes were looking everywhere else, and I noted that Morainn was shredding the hem of a fine shawl in her hands. I couldn’t hear or feel what they were thinking. Gannet had stepped nearer to me, revealing in a glance that he was somehow responsible for whatever shielded me now. If he spared me from knowing their true feelings or barred them from me I didn’t know.
    Perhaps this story was not so harmless.
    “Theba didn’t need to appear herself to stir in them the jealousy she felt at Salarahan’s work. It didn’t matter to the dread goddess that she had abandoned the child. She expected his allegiance all the same. The brothers’ rage was her rage, and they tackled him, shattering the bust.