Whether it was a blessing or a curse is, even now, the subject of considerable debate.
If I’d had the courage to step forward into the dark alley that day and hear the words that the handsome, scar-bearing stranger whispered into my mother’s ear, perhaps one of us—or all of us—might have died a great deal sooner.
Or, if I’d come just a few minutes earlier, if I’d taken my mother’s hand and convinced her to follow me out of town and down the forest path to our little home on the marsh, perhaps her secrets, and the secrets she kept on my behalf, might have stayed buried forever in the Emarion soil, and so many lives might never have had to take their place.
Only one thing is certain: my mother’s disappearance on that hot, cursed afternoon set off a chain of reactions so unexpected, so far-reaching, that even the gods themselves could not predict the consequences that would later come to pass.
And so it’s there that my story begins.
