Summu had been of the highest blood of our kind, so her eldest boy and girl, as was the tradition then and now, were married to each other to keep the line pure and strong. But these two, Ayann and Yasudra, passed the Fireflower along to their own children, and the gift it bestowed was that when Ayann and Yasudra were dead and their children ruled the People, their children had the parents’ essence in them—not just their spirit or their blood, but their living essence and all their memories. The children then birthed children of their own, Ayann and Yasudra’s grandchildren, and one day those two married and received the wisdom and thoughts of both their parents and grandparents. So it has gone ever since, the king and queen of our people each passing down all that he or she is to the next born. We are a living Deep Library, and so we have what we need to guard our children through the pain of the Long Defeat. The king nodded slowly. You do not know what that means, do you, manchild? We call it the Long Defeat because we Qar are too few ever to contest our once-cousins the mortal men for ownership of this world, so we know it is our fate to diminish and eventually be supplanted by your folk—although, again, I speak too simply of complicated things.
But here is where we come to the hard truths.
The Fireflower runs forever in Yassamez because she has not shared it. She has never taken one of her own blood for a lover, so she has not diminished the gift. Some say it is because she is selfish. Others call it the opposite, a sacrifice—they say she has accepted a painfully long life so that she may watch over the generations of her brother and sister’s bloodline. But whatever the truth, Yasammez is what she is.
Those of us who received the Fireflower from our parents, and must pass it along in turn to our own offspring, have a more complicated path to walk. For one thing, each passing of the Fireflower, each passing of the memories of all the previous generations to the next, takes great strength. We cannot find such strength in ourselves alone—the cost is too great. There is only one place we can go to gain it. To Crooked himself—or rather, to the last trace of him remaining in this world.
This ultimate trace of the god stands beneath the castle your people call Southmarch, but which was once a doorway into the home of the Earthlord Kernios. It is the last true vestige of the terrible old days when all the gods walked the earth.
Most of your folk do not even know of it, but some who live in the depths beneath the castle do. They call it the Shining Man.
“I haven’t… I do not know it, Lord.”
But the drows of your family’s castle do. They have worshipped and protected it for years without every knowing what it truly was.
“Drows? ”
He waved his hand. You call them “Funderlings,” I think. It matters not, because now we are at the crux of things.
For years the place you call Southmarch was occupied by men—warlords and petty nobles ruled it at the behest of other kings, and although we of the People’s ruling family could not come there openly, we knew other ways to reach the Shining Man and gain the strength we needed to keep the Firef lower alive in our blood. My sister Saqri and I made the pilgrimage in the days of the empire in Syan. Our grandparents had been there when Hierosol ruled mankind. But then came the plague years and the humans drove us out of all their lands—lands which had been ours once, but in which we were now interlopers, objects of fear and hatred—and the most painful loss of all was the place you call Southmarch, where Crooked waited in the depths for us. We fought to keep our way to him open but were defeated, in large part by your ancestor Anglin, and forced to fall back to our lands in the north, where humans seldom walked.
Thus, when Saqri and I began to sicken with age, we could not pass the Fireflower to our son and daughter. A century went by and our plight became desperate. Yassamez, the elder sister of our entire line, counseled that we should make war on mankind to win back the castle, but I feared that we would lose such a contest and things would only be worse. My wife sided with our ancestress. For a long time our family was locked in dispute, until all of Qul-na-Qar was riven by it. At last, hiding their thoughts from their mother and from me, my son Janniya and his sister Sanasu set out themselves for Southmarch with only a small troop of household guards and retainers.
They were captured, though, and brought before Kellick, Anglin’s heir, the ruler of the March Kingdom. Your ancestor Kellick saw Sanasu, my beautiful Sanasu… Here Ynnir stopped, and although his face did not change, the cessation of his quiet, calm thoughts in Barrick’s head was as shocking as if the king had burst into tears.… And he wanted her for his own, he continued at last. A mortal man coveted the one who would have become immortal queen of her entire people! And he took her, as a wolf takes a graceful deer, little caring what beauty is destroyed as long as his appetites are slaked…
This time the pause was more deliberate. Barrick, in a sort of helpless dream, watched the king’s pale face harden into something even stonier than before.
He took her. Janniya, her brother, her intended—my son!—fought for her, but Kellick Eddon had many men. Janniya was… killed. Sanasu was taken. The Fireflower could not be passed to the son and daughter. The end of the people was at hand.
Queen Sanasu… ! Barrick thought of her picture in the portrait hall, a face he knew well, strange, haunted eyes, fiery hair, and pale skin. But she… was married to the king of Southmarch! Could she truly have been one of the Qar?
In the wake of that terrible day, the king resumed, Yassamez and others of course brought war to the humans, and for a while even recaptured the place where Crooked had destroyed the last of the gods, but Kellick took my daughter Sanasu and retreated farther into the domains of men until he could find enough allies to fight back. While we owned the castle again, Saqri and I did what we could to strengthen our inner flames, but we knew that without heirs we only delayed the inevitable. Eventually the humans overwhelmed us and forced us back out again, slaughtering so many of our folk that we gave a great deal of our remaining strength to creating the Mantle, a cloak of twilight that would discourage men from following us into our lands. And so we have lived these last years.
Now the queen and I are both dying. I have loaned her what strength I could while we waited to see how this… he lifted up the mirror… gamble called the Pact of the Glass played out. But it is not enough. She will not wake again. Unless I give her what little I have left of myself. Unless I give her my life.
Barrick sat, shocked. “You would have to give your life for her? But that wouldn’t help anything.”
In any other situation that would be true, but the ways of the Fireflower are complicated and subtle. There might yet be a way to stave off the inevitable end of our line—at least for a little while longer. Perhaps that is what Yasammez thought when she sent you to me. I would like to think she had some intention other than to mock me.
“I… I don’t understand, my lord.”
Of course not—how could you? Your people have hidden the truth of what happened. But still, at times in your young life you must have wondered, perhaps sensed that something was… wrong…