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“So that’s the Inverted Keep, isn’t it?” Remy asked.

Lucan nodded. “That’s what the story says.”

“How did it get inverted? What happened to the builder?”

“Those are other stories,” Lucan said. “I’m tired of telling stories. Let’s ride, and let’s look out for what the crows get up to along this road.”

“Sounds like the crows are the least of our problems,” Kithri said.

“Some of them are shadowravens,” Lucan said.

Kithri nodded. “See?”

“But there are no sorrowsworn around because no great battle has ever been fought on the Crow Road. No general has ever kept an army together along its path.”

“Why would a general have wanted to come this way?” Biri-Daar wondered. “Between here and Karga Kul there is nothing.”

Lucan took a drink to wet his throat after the story. When he was done he said, “Who other than generals knows why generals do anything?”

Keverel leaned over toward Remy. “This, you see, is why none of us became soldiers.”

For the rest of the day they rode. Remy turned over in his mind the idea that Biri-Daar was a descendant of the Knights of Kul. How was it possible to know things like that? Iban Ja was a name in a story. Even the archivists of Arkhosia were unsure when he had lived, which meant they were unsure when the bridge had fallen.

What history might lie behind Keverel, or Kithri?

What, Remy wondered, might lie behind me?

He knew little about his own family. His mother Melendra had died five years before, when he was fourteen and by the laws of Avankil a man. Since then he had slept at the docks, usually on ships that had been abandoned or whose captains had died onshore. It took the Avankil authorities quite a while to track down and auction off those ships. In the meantime they served very well as a protected place to sleep for the urchin youth of the city. Remy had avoided the gangs by spending just enough time at the keep for the gang leaders not to trust him, but also to decide not to kill him … which he could have made difficult because a year after his mother died was when he had bought his first sword.

Of his father he knew nothing but stories. His mother had told him that his father was a sailor on one of the fast ships that escorted valuable cargoes on the cross-Gulf run between Furia and Saak-Opole. This route often ran afoul of pirates at the Kraken’s Gate, part of the archipelago at the mouth of the Dragondown Gulf. To hear Remy’s mother tell it, his father had fought through the pirates a dozen times and more, and had seen things in the waters beyond the Kraken’s Gate that he lacked the words to describe. Physically, she said, Remy resembled his father more and more as he grew older. He wondered what she would say now that he was grown. He wondered whether his father was alive, squinting into this same sunset from the deck of a ship in the Gulf—or dead, his bones long since sunk into the seabottom muck far away from the light, deeper than even the sahuagin will venture …

“Remy.”

He looked up into the concerned face of Lucan. “You were far away for a minute there,” Lucan said.

“History,” Remy said. “I was thinking about history.”

Lucan whistled. In the trees, crows ruffled their feathers at the sound. “They will talk to me a little because I know some of their language,” he said. “Crows don’t like it when you assume that they will learn your speech and you don’t have to learn theirs.”

“Is that right,” Remy said. He wasn’t sure whether Lucan was joking or not.

Lucan raised his arm and whistled a complicated pattern. Out of the setting sun fell a crow. It landed on his forearm and cocked its head at him. “See?” he said to Remy.

“I see you can call it,” Remy said. “I haven’t seen that it can talk.”

“Awk,” the crow said. “Talk.”

Lucan clucked at it. “Slow, slow. No need to rush.” He looked up at Remy. “It has been a very long time since they received their gift. Most of them never use it and it comes back slowly when they try.”

“Time,” the crow said.

With a wink at Remy, Lucan said, “Time, right. Plenty of time.”

“No time,” the crow said.