He walked away then, and still she could not look at him. Fear Sengar, you fool. A fool, like any other man, like every other man. What is it with your gestures? Your eagerness to sacrifice? Why do you all give yourselves to us? We are not pure vessels. We are not innocent. We will not handle your soul like a precious, fragile jewel. No, you fool, we’ll abuse it as if it was our own, or, indeed, of lesser value than that-if that is possible.
The crunch of stones, and suddenly Udinaas was crouching before her. In his cupped hands, a minnow. Writhing trapped in a tiny, diminishing pool of water.
‘Plan on splitting it six ways, Udinaas?’
‘It’s not that, Acquitor. Look at it. Closely now. Do you see? It has no eyes. It is blind.’
‘And is that significant?’ But it was, she realized. She frowned up at him, saw the sharp glitter in his gaze. ‘We are not seeing what is truly here, are we?’
‘Darkness,’ he said. ‘The cave. The womb.’
‘But… how?’ She looked round. The landscape of broken rock, the pallid lichen and mosses and the very dead trees. The sky.
‘Gift, or curse,’ Udinaas said, straightening. ‘She took a husband, didn’t she?’
She watched him walking back to the stream, watched him tenderly returning the blind minnow to the rushing water. A gesture Seren would not have expected from him. She? Who took a husband?
‘Gift or curse,’ said Udinaas as he approached her once again. ‘The debate rages on.’
‘Mother Dark… and Father Light.’
He grinned his usual cold grin. At last, Seren Pedac stirs from her pit. I’ve been wondering about those three brothers.’
Three brothers?
He went on as if she knew of whom he was speaking.
‘Spawn of Mother Dark, yes, but then, there were plenty of those, weren’t there? Was there something that set those three apart? Andarist, Anomander, Silchas. What did Clip tell us? Oh, right, nothing. But we saw the tapestries, didn’t we? Andarist, like midnight itself. Anomander, with hair of blazing white. And here, Silchas, our walking bloodless abomination, whiter than any corpse but just as friendly. So what caused the great rift between sons and mother? Maybe it wasn’t her spreading her legs to Light like a stepfather none of them wanted. Maybe that’s all a lie, one of those sweetly convenient ones. Maybe, Seren Pedac, it was finding out who their father was.’