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of it all. He had hoped the confusion in his thoughts would ease when the king’s funeral ended, but instead the silence that followed had seemed to make it worse.
    The queen of the fairies was walking with him—or rather Saqri walked a little ahead, dressed all in billowing white so that she seemed hardly more substantial than sea foam herself. Ynnir’s widow had not spoken a word to him since she had summoned him with a single imperious gesture to follow her, then led him out of the halls of Qul-na-Qar and down a winding path to the restless, dark ocean.
    They were alone, Barrick and Saqri, or as alone as they could be: three armored, manlike figures stood at the foot of the path watching every step their queen took. These were Ice Ettins, Barrick could not help knowing, part of a clan called The Whitewound , from Bluedeeps in the north. He knew their names, too, or at least the gestures they made for their names—despite all their potential for violence, the Ice Ettins were a quiet and secretive race. He knew that their dully shining armor was nothing a smith had forged, but a part of their skins, as nerveless as nails or hair; he also knew that though none stood much taller than a mortal man, each Ice Ettin with his heavy bones and horny plates would weigh at least as much as three large men. These creatures were bound to the Fireflower by their clan oath, and each had earned a place in the queen’s guard through victory in one of the murderous ceremonial games that The Whitewound always conducted in icy darkness.
    Barrick knew all this as well as he knew his own name and the names of those who had raised him through childhood—but in a completely different way: all this new knowledge, countless histories and namings and connections and even more subtle things that could not be named but simply were, all these delicate understandings shouted and muttered in his head—shouted, but without noise. Barrick could not look at anything, even his own hand, without a thousand intricately foreign Qar ideas battering his thoughts like a sudden hailstorm—bits of poetry, scholarly associations, and countless far more meaningless and mundane memories. But these storms of knowledge were as the balmiest spring weather compared to the swelling of imagination and memory that crashed over him when he looked at anything significant—the towers of Qul-na-Qar or the distant peak of M’aarenol, or, worst of all, at Queen Saqri herself.
    ... When she first as a child stood in snow, laughing . . .
    ... The night her mother died and she took the Fireflower, and her sense of what should be would not let her weep . . .
    ... Her eye, knowing . . .
    ... Her lips, warm and forgiving after that terrible fight . . .
    The associations went on and on, unstoppable, and Barrick Eddon was terrified by how little he could do beyond holding onto those parts of himself he could still recognize.
    I was a fool to agree to this , he thought. It is like the story of the greedy merchant—I will get everything I wanted, but it will fill me until I swell like a toad and then burst like a bubble.
    Saqri suddenly stopped and turned toward him—a graceful transition from motion to absolute stillness. She used words to speak out loud but he heard them in his thoughts as well, where the meanings were subtly different. “I have thought all the day and I still do not know whether to embrace you or destroy you, manchild,” Saqri told him. “I cannot understand what my beloved great-aunt thought she was doing.” A tiny shift of the mouth betokened a scowl. “I stopped wondering at my late husband’s actions long ago.”
    Her thoughts came with a sting even sharper than the wind off the booming black sea. “It isn’t ...” He fought to keep his concentration through the flurry of foreign recollections and impulses. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What she wanted. She sent me and . . . and then your husband gave me the Fireflower.”
    She looked at him with an