Come in a pole boat, bring a handful of hyacinths

Come across the stream, bring a comb of honey

Come on a carry-chair, bring milk and curd

Come on walking feet, bring a basket of bilberries

Now listen to me and hold them tight

Keep them here for baby’s delight

As Jesa sang and rocked the cradle, she wondered if she would ever hold a baby of her own. She had not been much more than a child herself when she first came to Nabban, purchased as a companion and servant for the duchess when they were both young girls. Canthia had been fond of her, so when she grew up and began to have children of her own, first her son Blasis and now the new baby, the duchess had kept Jesa on as nurse for the children. Jesa missed her home sometimes, of course, and would never entirely get used to going days at a time without feeling soil or water beneath her feet. But when Jesa thought of her own mother and all that woman’s backbreaking work, gathering and pounding roots all day long, mending nets, and tending children as well, or when she considered the many other Wran-folk she saw here in Nabban whose daily work seemed so hard and dangerous, she thought that even with no child of her own, she must still be one of the luckiest people in the world.

Jesa had just begun a new cradle song when someone knocked at the door. One of the duchess’ ladies-in-waiting rose to open it. It was the duke himself, and when Saluceris made it clear he wanted to talk to his wife in private, the highborn ladies gathered themselves up and went out, chatting happily about visiting the Sancellan’s courtyard garden as though they would have been headed there even had the duchess’s husband not arrived.

Duke Saluceris glanced briefly at Jesa where she crouched beside the cradle, but his gaze slid from her face as though she were made of polished stone. That was one of the strangest things about the drylanders, Jesa had always thought: if they were not speaking to a servant face to face, they pretended that servant did not exist, as if their maids and nurses were only furniture.

As the duke approached, Duchess Canthia smiled and lifted her cheek. Saluceris bent and gave his wife a kiss. “I’m sorry to send your companions away,” he told her, “but Tersian Vullis is pressing me for an answer and I can’t delay it much longer.”

“An answer to what?”

“The betrothal. Surely you remember! I’ve been patient because of your condition, but Vullis has been waiting a long time.”

Canthia frowned very slightly, and Jesa thought it was like a cloud crossing the sun, bringing a moment of shadow to a beautiful day. “You say the betrothal, my husband, but surely I remember you speaking of a betrothal, or at least a suggestion of one by the margrave. Yes, that’s right, I remember you said Vullis wished to wed his daughter to our Blasis. And I also remember saying that we would speak of it after the baby came.” She smiled. “And surely before we speak of it any more, you should go and look at your beautiful daughter, who is sleeping like the angelic gift that she is.”

The duke sighed. “Don’t be difficult. Of course I want to see my daughter.”

Jesa stopped rocking as Saluceris approached the cradle. Since he still did not look at her, only at tiny Serasina in her blanket, Jesa could examine the duke. She seldom saw him from so close, despite her long connection with Duchess Canthia, and it always surprised her to see how very ordinary he was, this man with pale, fishbelly skin and a neat, sandy beard. He was tall and handsome enough in the bony-faced, drylander way, but he was in no way surprising. How could it be that after the High King and High Queen, those far away people who Jesa knew only from stories—mythic figures like They Who Watch And Shape—Duke Saluceris was perhaps the most important person in all the world?

The thought dizzied her a bit, as it often did, and with him standing so close she was terrified at the thought she might suddenly tip and fall out of her squat.

Only now that she was a woman herself had Jesa begun to understand how the drylander world worked, and what a small, disregarded part of things her birthplace, the Wran, truly was. The realization had come to her just a few years before, when she learned that her mistress (who was also in many ways her closest friend from childhood on) was going to marry not just another lord, but the Duke of Nabban himself, master of the biggest, most populous nation in all of the world. The thought had been so frightening that for many sleepless nights Jesa had thought about running away back to the swamp, back to her familiar lagoon. A girl like her had no business in the houses of such people. She could barely read, and what little she knew she had taught herself from watching Canthia and her tutors, but always from a distance.

One night, shortly before the marriage, she had huddled all night at the foot of Canthia’s bed, miserable at the idea of going to live in the Sancellan Mahistrevis, the great palace at the top of one of Nabban’s highest hills, where hundreds of servants already lived, each one fiercely envious of her position, no doubt. Here in this strange country, Jesa knew, even monarchs had been killed; the other servants would probably do away with her in her bed the first night. They would beat the young Wrannawoman and throw her off the Sancellan’s wall, and she would plummet all the way down to lie broken in the market at St. Galdin’s Square.

Don’t be a fool, Jesa, she had told herself over and over again throughout that long night. Jesa Green Honeybird, the elders named you. Green Honeybird didn’t run home to her nest when Tree Python chased her, she turned around and blinded him with her beak! Don’t shame your namesake by acting like a coward.

And as if her spirit bird had come to her then, in that dark night and in such a daunting, foreign place, Jesa had felt something whisper past her face and weave itself into a crown of air around her head. Then it was gone. But after that moment she had not been as frightened, and when she entered the Sancellan Mahistrevis for the first time a fortnight later, following her mistress, she had been astonished and gratified to find she had lost her fear. From Red Pig Lagoon to this strange place—what a journey she was on!

After he had stroked his infant daughter’s face with a careful forefinger, Duke Saluceris abandoned the cradle, and within a few moments had begun pacing back and forth in front of the large window that looked out over the harbor.

“It’s really very difficult to see anything but you just now, my lord,” said the duchess, “and you won’t stay in one place long enough for me to look at you properly, either. It’s not very restful.”

“I said, don’t be difficult, Canthia. I need Vullis, little as I like to admit it. The Dominiate is meeting next month and Dallo Ingadaris is introducing some damnable notion of a tariff on wool for no other reason than to push me into a fight with the High Throne. But if I have Vullis, he will pull all our northern and western lords to my side.”

The duchess smiled sadly. “My poor husband. You work so hard! Surely you do not have to convince people to listen to you—you are the duke! The king and queen themselves chose you.”

“My brother hates me for it. And those cursed Ingadarines are going to do everything they can to use him as a weapon against me.”

Little Serasina woke up then and began to fuss, and soon Jesa lost track of what the duchess and her husband were talking about. She had heard so much of this sort of thing that at first she had been frightened all the time—Thrithings-men were raiding! Nabban’s houses were at war with each other!—but now she knew that the world was bigger than she had understood, that things which seemed close when her mistress and others spoke of them were actually far away and unlikely ever to trouble the duke directly, let alone harm Jesa herself.