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loved and listened to as a child. Mother searched in Malino’s old library for the books and she would burst into my room with a happy cry, with dust and cobwebs in her hair, brandishing a book whose leather binding had split and was hanging down in strips.
    “Look at this, you loved this one!”
    At such times she reminded me so much of Siski that I was almost startled. She leaned in the doorway, laughing, wiping the book on her skirt. Once my father shouted from the foot of the steps, “ Firheia! ” And as she called back a promise of silence, her eyes twinkled just like Siski’s.
    She crossed the carpet noiselessly in her slippers and sat in the chair beside my bed. “Look, you remember this one, don’t you?”
    The book had fallen open at a picture of the boy Istiwin watching the Queen of the Bears emerge from the hill. His round eyes, his hands thrown up in horror. At his feet crouched the ragged, long-eared hare we had named Atsi as children.
    “You don’ t feel well, ” Mother said. Her hand was cool against my cheek, her face reflected in the bowl of the lamp.
    “No, I’ m fine, ” I said. She smoothed her skirt out on the chair, the same brown velvet skirt she had worn seven years before. Now the golden pattern in it was faded and the swirling leaves could only be seen in the lamplight on her knee.
    “What’s happened to the forests?” I said.
    She frowned and turned the pages, biting her lip. Then she said: “Let’s not talk about that now.”
    “I know he’s sold them,” I said. “To Uncle Fenya.”
    She turned another page. “Please not now, the doctor says you must rest.”
    I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her, her wide sad eyes and the delicate skin around them where blue shadows lay. She tried to smile. She did not look like Siski anymore but only like herself. She turned back to the book and tried to find her place. And I thought of her through all those years at the table in her sitting room, her neat accounts, everything slipping away from her like sand. I thought that she must have put her head down sometimes in despair and rested her forehead on the glass of her writing table, and as she had done so I had moved through snow on horseback, killing, killing, watching men die for the glory of Olondria. It seemed right to me that the house was in decay, the avla shut up. I remembered earlier times, and what we had called “the unrest”: how we rode across the bridge on the Oun and heard an insolent song in the meadow: “ Down goes the house! Fire, fire, fire! ” I don ’t think we knew they meant our house. The song was in Kestenyi and we were Kestenyi, Dasya and Siski and I. But to be Kestenyi, I thought, no longer hearing my mother’s voice, it can’t mean the blood you’re given, it must mean how you give your blood away.
    Give it away. But not to Uncle Fenya, who acted for Aunt Mardith , obeying her orders, pouring our precious forests into her coffers. I wanted to shout: Don’t you see how we’re changing masters? The Laths have ruled Kestenya with swords and the Nains will rule it with gold . But I couldn’t say it. Not when Ashenlo had been my mother’s life. Not when this was her work: finding a way to pay the herdboys, to have the carriage repaired, to scrounge up decent clothes for Siski and me as our father sold everything to pay for the bolma he ordered from the south. As he sat like a king in his glassed-in porch. He was the true son of a traitor, the heir of my grandfather who had signed the Treaty of Tevlas. Thinking of it, rage filled me and I ached to crawl out of bed, to hurl myself down the stairs and accuse him to his face. You. You. You have supported my grandfather’s act of treason, that disgusting treaty that crushed Kestenya’s chance at independence. And now you’re selling Ashenlo to the Nains so that you can stuff yourself with bolma. I twisted in the bed and my mother touched my brow.
    “You’re warm,” she said. Her hand was as