"I grew up watching the Malyas come, and the Chonyas, and a hundred mongrel raiders. When I was twelve, Ibarak's killers cut my father down, so Ibarak could add my mother to his harem."
He heard Kyla's low gasp of horror, and the shock that was in the sound stabbed him with a feeling that held both pain and, somehow, a fierce, vindictive pleasure.
He said harshly: "It was his mistake. She slit his throat, and then her own."
"Oh, no—!"
"Yes!" He swung round, and looked squarely into the slim, lovely Shamon's eyes. "I swore an oath that day, my priestess—because that day I saw that nothing mattered save the power to take and hold. Love, honor, duty—what did they count? What had they done for my father, my mother, a million others like them? So I swore I'd live to see the time when no living creature in all the universe would dare to strike a blow against me. I swore I'd have the might to smash them, one and all!"
There was silence, then, for a vibrant moment, broken only by the scraping of the hwalon's claws as they moved over rock and slides of gravel.
At last Kyla said, "What can I say, Haral?" And now pain was in her voice, too.
Wordless, tight-drawn, Haral nodded and turned away.
But then the girl spoke again: "I have long been Xaymar's priestess, blue one, and a priestess learns many things. Namboina himself it was who taught me to read men's hearts from the words they speak and the things they do, no matter how confused and torn they themselves might be."