Seeking the right mother.
So the witches remained. Yan Tovis had believed the coven obliterated, crushed into extinction-the Letherii well knew that resistance to tyranny was nurtured in schools of faith, espoused by old, bitter priests and priestesses, by elders who would work through the foolish young use them like weapons, flung away when broken, melodramatically mourned when destroyed. Priests and priestesses whose version of faith justified the abuse of their own followers.
The birth of a priesthood, Yan Tovis now understood, forced a hierarchy upon piety, as if the rules of servitude were malleable, where such a scheme-shrouded in mysterious knowledge and learning-conveyed upon the life of a priest or priestess greater value and virtue than those of the ignorant common folk.
In.her years of Letherii education, Yan Tovis had seen how the arrival of shouldermen-of warlocks and witches-was in truth a devolution among the Shake, a devolution from truly knowing the god that was the shore. Artifice and secular ambition, withholding sacred knowledge from those never to be initiated-these were not the shore’s will. No, only what the warlocks and witches wanted.
Taloned hands and feet have proved iconic indeed.
But power came with demonic blood. And so long as every child born with such power and allowed to survive was initiated into the coven, then that power remained exclusive.
The Letherii in their conquest of the Shake had conducted a pogrom against the coven.
And had failed.
With all her being, Yan Tovis wished they had succeeded.
The Shake were gone as a people. Even the. soldiers of her company-each one carefully selected over the years on the basis of Shake remnants in their blood-were in truth more Letherii than Shake. She had done little, after all, to awaken their heritage.
Yet I chose them, did I not? I wanted their loyalty, beyond that of a Letherii soldier for his or her Atri-Preda.
Admit it, Twilight. You are a queen now, and these soldiers-these Shake-know it. And it is what you sought in the depths of your own ambition. And now, it seemed, she would have to face the truth of that ambition, the stirring of her noble blood-seeking its proper pre-eminence, its right.
What has brought my half-brother to the shore? Did he ride as a Shake, or a Letherii Master at Arms for a Dresh-Preda? But she found she could not believe her own question. She knew the answer, quivering like a knife in her soul. The shore is blind…
They rode on in the dark.
We were never as the Nerek, the Tarthenal and the others. We could raise no army against the invaders. Our belief in the shore held no vast power, for it is a belief in the mutable, in transformation. A god with no face but every face. Our temple is the strand where the eternal war between land and sea is waged, a temple that rises only to crumble yet again. Temple of sound, of smell, taste and tears upon every fingertip.