Thankfully, by cutting between Mounts Eyon and Ingril, the Lamon Pass saved them a climb to the frozen peaks, along with several days’ travel and even more freezing temperatures. The Pass did, however, emerge high enough on the eastern side for a good chunk of Quaver to lay spread out before them.

They sat atop their horses, taking it all in. Llew had never seen anything like it. Beside her, Jonas seemed relaxed. Hisham, too, seemed eager to return home. Aris remained stoic. Karlani’s eyes were bright, lit-up at the sight of her ancestral home. It certainly wasn’t Llew’s. There was beauty there, no doubt, in the wide plains of sweeping grasses carved by serpentine rivers and pockets of forest. Dotted here and there were human settlements, surrounded by cleared farmland, much the same as Aghacia. Inland of the mountain range was a smear of grey. There might have been a hint of buildings, but it was hard to tell for certain. They were smothered in a low-hanging cloud, nearly black. No, it wasn’t a cloud, but smoke. City smog. She’d struck it once before, in Duffirk, Turhmos.

‘That’s Taither,’ Jonas said. ‘Don’t look like much from here, but once you get amongst it, well, it has a way of drawin’ you in.’ Llew’s doubts must have been written all over her face because he continued, ‘It looks worse’n it is from here. Marassan’s right beside it. It’s bigger and dirtier than Taither. Just hard to tell apart from here, is all. But I want you to look that way.’ He extended an arm, drawing her attention to the northeast. ‘You can’t see it, cause it’s just hidin’ over the horizon, but Aldia’s out there. My real home.’

Expectant eyes rested on her as she peered into the distance. There were a couple of what must have been cities visible, and then green and more green and more green, from shades near yellow to blue, as far as she could see. So far inland, it’d take a week or two to reach the opposite coast, if not more. In fact, most, if not all, of Quaver was land locked. Huge and land locked. Nothing like Aghacia. Nothing like what she was used to.

She turned to him, his face lit with hopeful expectation, and she smiled. She couldn’t tell him the land stretched out before them was beautiful, because it didn’t match her idea of beauty, but she could give him a smile. If there was beauty there, he would show it to her, and she was ready to discover it.

They spent a day riding down the eastern slope. Taither, Quaver’s military capital, was still some ten days away.

They entered a small town at the heart of a wider farming community. The main street was home to a general store, inn, and even a hotel of sorts. Mud streets reminded Llew of Cheer in spring.

The few locals stopped to watch the soldiers and riders meander through the center of their town. A couple of jaws dropped as eyes followed Jonas in particular. Then the murmur began and grew, spreading and bringing more onlookers.

Just before they could leave the town behind them, a woman came running from her home, her skirts flying around her. Her fist clutched a bodice – not hers – dragging a weeping girl of perhaps fifteen behind her.

‘Jonas!’ the woman called after him. Jonas rode stiff-backed, refusing to turn or acknowledge the woman. ‘Jonas! Please, stop by for dinner,’ the woman begged. The girl wailed and strained against her mother’s iron grip. The woman clouted the girl across the cheek and shoved her forward.

‘My daughter will bear Kara. Please!’

Llew just about jumped from Amico’s back with a vague plan of saving the girl more humiliation. But what protection could she, an Aenuk in Quaver, offer this girl? None of her travel companions were reacting. Was this normal?

One of the male soldiers walking near Jonas said, ‘Oh, look, Jonas. A date,’ and was rewarded with a round of laughter from those around him. Even some of the female soldiers smirked along with them.

Jonas remained as stoic as he had for the woman herself.

‘I’m Karan.’ One of the soldiers turned, a leer darkening his features, bringing Llew a familiar nausea.

‘I shan’t waste her virginity on a maybe,’ the mother snarled. ‘She must bear Kara!’

The soldier made a derisive sound and returned to his position with a sideways glance at Jonas.

They rode on, the woman’s pleas growing more insistent until her voice grew hoarse, then faded as they left the town behind them.

‘How can she pawn off her daughter like that?’ Llew asked. ‘She was crying!’

Jonas shook his head, clearly not in the mood to discuss it.

‘Quaver will look after her daughter if she mothers a Karan child,’ Hisham piped up from behind. ‘At least until the child grows.’ A hint of hollowness in his tone. ‘Town this small, might be hard to marry her off. Better to let the state take her. Jonas is about the only guarantee of that.’ Whatever she thought she’d heard was gone again.

‘I don’t understand how parents could do that,’ said Llew.

‘It’s tough making a living out here,’ said Hisham. ‘They probably see a future where they have to marry her off to the first local lad takes an interest in her, or they support her into spinsterhood. Seeing her taken care of, with a child whose future would already be decided, well, it don’t seem much of a choice.’ Again, there was something else in his voice. A sadness? An ache?

Llew looked at Hisham, but he gave nothing away, unless you counted the way he looked off into the distance, like he was avoiding eye contact. Like he was thinking about his own ma. Was that who he was? The child of a surrendered woman?

He fidgeted, like he wanted to look ahead, but sensed Llew’s attention and was avoiding engaging with her. Was he thinking of his mother now? How often had he spared a thought for her?

Llew slumped in her saddle, a sense of defeat settling in her gut. It seemed wrong, but she now felt as much sympathy for the mother as she had for the girl herself. She could never imagine having to make such a choice if her own child was a daughter. She looked ahead to where Jonas rode stiffly, relieved that such a choice would never be hers.

No. But if her child was Aenuk, not Karan, what choices might she face? Could Quaver accept an Aenuk fathered by their Syakaran hero? Llew doubted it.

‘Don’t worry. It ain’t just Jonas they latch on to.’ Hisham said, apparently seeing Llew’s glance. His voice was a little thick, and Llew was almost certain she was right about his origins. What had become of his ma since he’d grown and joined Quaver’s army? ‘Even Karan soldiers got a chance of giving her a Karan child, and new troops are passing through all the time.’

‘She didn’t seem to like the odds, did she?’

Hisham gave a wry shrug. He looked weary, like simply the thought of his own ma was a drain on his energy.

‘What if she doesn’t have a Karan child?’ Llew kept her tone gentle, mindful of Hisham’s emotional state. But, when her question was initially met with silence, she twisted in her saddle to face him.

He shrugged.

‘What does—’ She mimicked him. ‘—that mean? They won’t look after her, will they?’

Hisham shook his head with some reluctance, but none of the haunted look he’d had. His ma must have been taken care of while Hisham still lived with her, and if she’d already successfully raised one Karan, it wasn’t a stretch to think she might have gone on to have more. But what if she hadn’t?

‘And I bet ruined women are seen as kindly as anywhere else.’ Not at all, in other words. Llew had hoped the world beyond Cheer was better. It seemed not.

Hisham had the decency to look ashamed on behalf of his countrymen.

‘And Jonas is the only way to guarantee a Karan in the least,’ Llew muttered, turning back in her saddle.

Jonas remained silent, riding on, looking at no one.

‘Why would her parents need to look after her? Can’t she go out on her own when she’s grown?’

‘She’s a woman,’ said Hisham, as if that explained everything.

Llew twisted in her saddle and let her mouth fall open. She had no words.

‘But . . .’ She gestured at the female soldiers surrounding them.

‘They’re Karan,’ said Hisham.

Again, it seemed he required no further explanation. Llew turned back in her saddle and huffed out her frustration.

‘Don’t judge the way we do things.’ Aris turned in his saddle. ‘Our women volunteer.’

Llew didn’t think the girl had looked much like she was volunteering.

With the town well behind, and winter sun not high enough to cause heat stress, they urged their horses on at a ground-eating lope.

‘I never bedded girls that young,’ Jonas said when they finally did stop for a light lunch. ‘And none that cried.’

‘How many?’

He looked disgusted that she would ask at first, then as if he was counting. Then he asked, ‘You really want to know?’

No, she didn’t. ‘Past is past,’ she said.

‘And the future is you.’

Llew nearly choked on her bread.

‘What do you do? Rehearse these lines in your sleep?’

‘If I planned ’em, I’d come up with better ones.’ He winked.

‘That one was rather good.’

‘Yeah?’

Llew nodded and smiled.

Cadyn walked past, blowing a lungful of smoke and eying them sideways.

Taither.

Jonas’s most recent memories of the place were of his home in flames, Kierra’s body still inside. Then Aris had handed him the knife he’d given to Braph years earlier. The family blade. A tool for killing Aenuks. And he had killed. So many. He’d been one man, sneaking up on them, not on a battlefield, but in their camp, where they slept. He had done what he had loathed the Aenuks who’d killed his parents for. For taking the fight across the battle line.

This was not the part of Quaver he particularly wanted to bring Llew to. If he was honest, it wasn’t a part he much wanted to return to, either. But he was born Syakaran, born a soldier. He owed Quaver his life for a few years yet, if not its entirety.

The approach to Taither saw increasingly frequent and more densely populated small towns along the road, until it was hard to tell one town that had been swallowed up and become a part of Taither itself from the next. The kids running around were soldiers’ children. The ladies hanging washing or buying supplies were either soldiers’ wives, or wives of the state, raising their Karan young. All paused in whatever they were doing to watch the troop go by.

Again, came the excited exclamations that Jonas had returned.

The closer they got to Taither, the more these cries and calls came from women, desperate to be guaranteed a Karan child that would see them looked after for a few more years.

Little over a year earlier, he would have soaked up the praise and excitement. Quaver’s hero, yes, he was. But he didn’t feel like much of one anymore. Not after what he’d done in Turhmos. He’d returned home triumphant enough, if humbled for the diplomatic damage he’d caused, but now he knew that Aenuks weren’t the evil monsters he’d been brought up to believe. They were people, like him, like Llew; forced into doing what they might not want to do for some Greater Good. Or evil. Or simply a misunderstanding.