Over time, it became apparent that no matter who ruled the country of Gundarland, the Godmother ruled the city of Dun Hythe.

The mountains she’d viewed in childhood as nurturing have now taken on a menacing quality. Their stippled surfaces – the dark of trees rising from a background of white – give the impression of something more mythic than geological. Leviathans hibernating in the open, ready to stir at any moment and swallow her whole.

He tips his cap forward over his face and inhales deeply of the moist air. It seems to Harlan that he can smell the whole of these mountains’ lives in that single breath. The gentle notes of wild herbs and grasses, of seedlings introducing themselves to the world. Also the thick and bittersweet must of leaf litter, felled trees, and decaying animals returning to the soil.

Harlan chuckles to himself and shakes his head, as though enjoying a joke only he has heard. ‘Now I guess it’s only fair to warn you,’ he says. ‘This is not going to go the way you want it to.

Kings and dukes tended to appoint wizards as their principal advisors, a practice that often proved catastrophically wrong.

In the years that followed, Tsula would find that she could not recall that walk to the edge or the thrust of her legs into the air. Her clearest memory more than twenty years later is of the long, breathless wait as she fell, seemingly forever, and the water swallowing her at last. When she burst from its surface, unhurt, her mind noisy and electric, she grabbed for Jamie and kissed him hard.

Toward the back of the small property, Twentymile Creek flows through a ravine two to three feet deep and three times as wide. The waters of the creek, high and vigorous from recent rains, purl noisily around stones bearded with green moss and swatched with lichen. There she finds the body, stretched across the frothing stream.

Finally, the sound fades and doesn’t return. Tsula sits alone in the quiet and the dark, shivering with such force that she fears her teeth might crack.

Religion played a part in many people’s lives and the largest sect was Snotism. Snotists worshiped Gundar, the god who created the universe with a might sneeze after snorting His favorite recreational drug. Spittle flew through empty space and solidified into suns, planets and comets.

The current needs of survival leave little time for luxuries like sentimentality. It is, he figures, a kind of mercy. No time to dwell on what was lost when there is more yet to protect.