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can you say that, Seda?”
    â€œAuron is the king,” she averred, her voice rising so that she was nearly speaking aloud.
    â€œBut do you know him, or know of him?”
    â€œHave you ever even seen him?” added the captain.
    â€œOf course not.” She did not herself understand her own passionate certainty. She only felt, instinctively and unreasonably, that if Auron son of Rabiron were not a good and righteous king, the bright green buds would not be on the ilex nor the green grass growing from the sorrel earth nor the celandine growing so yellow or the wilderness rose so blue. “He is King, I tell you,” she added with just a hint of whimper in her voice, looking at them all with pitiful eyes, daring them to laugh at her again, she, he, a poor shuntali. Seda was not above using her own misfortune to give her leverage on the scrupulous.
    â€œOh, let him alone,” Kyrem said promptly. “Have you no family at all, Seda? Are you orphaned?”
    â€œI think I am a twin,” she said.
    â€œWhat?” He did not understand.
    â€œI sometimes remember a mother and a father and a … someone very like myself. When twins are born, one is cast out.”
    â€œWhat?” Kyrem spoke in astonishment this time. But some of his men were nodding. In Deva also, twins were regarded as unnatural. But rather than abandoning one, parents treated them as one child, and so did the clan and village as well, insisting that they take passage together, marry another set of twins and that on the same day, even die on the same day. Girt about with all these restrictions, twins were regarded as awesome and somehow unlucky.
    â€œThe one who comes second from the womb is cast out,” Seda went on. “That is the bastard. And the mother is lamed for adultery.…” She let her words drift away, recalling the dark, pretty mother who hobbled around a mistily remembered cottage.
    â€œGreat galloping Suth!” Kyrem exclaimed, shocked.
    â€œSo you do not do these things in Deva?” Seda was also capable of a certain dry humor.
    â€œMost assuredly not!” Kyrem started to stand up in his discomfiture, remembered in time the low roof of the hut and sank down again. “Although,” he admitted, “I do remember hearing an old curse, ‘May you be the mother of twins,’ or some such. I thought it was because of the hard labor.” He winced at his own words.
    It is hard on all concerned, Seda thought, not speaking the thought.
    â€œMy lord,” a man said urgently, “send the lad away. He is bringing us ill luck.”
    â€œSilence,” Kyrem snapped. “Seda, how did you live if they cast you out?”
    She shrugged. “They had to keep me until I was three, that is the rule, so that it would not be murder.”
    â€œGreat Suth,” Kyrem said again. “Murder might have been kinder.”
    â€œThey … they never killed the babies outright. In the old days I would have been taken to a mountaintop and left to die.”
    Kyrem sat gazing at her, engrossed, ignoring the mutterings of his men. “So you have a brother somewhere, a twin, whom you have never seen,” he said in wonder.
    Seda shrugged again to hide her confusion. It was a sister. Try as she might, she could not remember the name, but she remembered the infant face, mirror of her own. The years since were all confusion. How had she lived, and how had she become a boy?
    â€œLord,” said another of the soldiers, “we are half naked and shivering in a wilderness; is that not ill enough? Send the lad away, before he brings worse on us.”
    Kyrem turned on the man. “You fool, you sound like a Vashtin!” he said hotly. “They with their stars and their talismans and their charts and rules and their lucky this and unlucky that! Remember you are a Devan, you carry your own magic with you in your very body! You have no need of luck.” He glared at