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isn’t sure he cares. People are people, and others believe what they want to. Still, he watches the magistra and listens.

XI
    “What is the social basis for the Legend?”
    The social basis for the Legend? What does the Legend have to do with understanding anything? Dorrin looks around the small room. The Academy of Useless Knowledge and Unnecessary Violence indeed—but it is better than the alternative of immediate exile.
    Kadara twirls a short strand of red hair around the index finger of her right hand, her forehead faintly creased. Brede shifts his weight on the battered leather cushion that serves as his seat. Arcol swallows and glances toward the half-open window and the morning fog outside.
    “Come now, Mergan.” Lortren’s low voice carries an edge. “What is the Legend?”
    “Well…it says that the women Angels fled and came to the Roof of the World. They founded Westwind and the Guard and the western kingdoms…” The pudgy girl looks at the polished graystone floor tiles.
    The magistra clears her throat. “You come from Recluce, not from Hamor or Nordla. You should certainly know the Legend. We’ll try…Dorrin, what was unique about the Angels who fled to earth—to our world, if you will?”
    Dorrin licks his lips. “Unique? Well…they fled from Heaven, rather than fight a meaningless war with the Demons of Light.”
    “That’s spelled out in the Legend. But…” She draws out the word. “What was supposedly unique about those particular fallen Angels?”
    Kadara lifts a hand.
    “Yes, Kadara.”
    “Weren’t they all women?”
    “That is indeed what the Legend says. Why is that patently incorrect?”
    “Incorrect?” stumbles the normally silent Arcol.
    “Ah, yes…incorrect. Why?” repeats Lortren.
    As the silence draws out, Dorrin answers. “Because they had children, I suppose, but…”
    “You were going to say something else, Dorrin?”
    “No, magistra.”
    “You were thinking something else.”
    “Yes,” he admits, wishing he had not.
    “And?”
    Dorrin sighs. “According to the Legend, the Angels had weapons that could shatter suns and whole worlds. Why couldn’t they have had machines that allowed women to have children without men?”
    “Perhaps they did have such machines in Heaven, Dorrin…but…if they had such machines, where are they? Even more important, how did these powerful Angels, who had the supposed ability to shatter worlds, end up in a simple stone hold on a mountaintop with no weapons beyond the shortsword?”
    “They renounced machines as the mark of chaos,” asserts Arcol, the round face and pug nose somehow incongruous with the dogged belief in the Legend.
    “Ah, yes, the answer of the true believer.”
    Arcol flushes, but his chin squares. “Destruction is the mark of chaos, and the Angels fled to avoid becoming the tools of chaos.”
    “Shall we consider that?” asks Lortren.
    Why bother? Even Dorrin knows that machines do not last forever, and that anything built long centuries ago would have broken or been reused for the metals or made into simpler artifacts—or even lost under the snows and ice of the Roof of the World.
    “What’s the point of it all, magistra?” The voice is Brede’s, the deep mellow tones more appropriate to a graybeard than to a fresh-faced and muscular youth with hazel eyes. “I mean, some women wrote down that they escaped from a bunch of crazy men. They built a kingdom on a mountain top. They used their blades to chop up anyone who got in their way and claimed that the reason was that men were all weak and silly.”
    “Blasphemer…” mutters Arcol.
    Kadara’s mouth quirks as if she suppresses a grin.
    Lortren does in fact grin, but the expression is more the look on the face of a hill cat who has discovered a meal than a look of amusement. “Brede, you raise an interesting question. Do, by chance, you happen to know the only country in Candar that had the same government and the same power from its