The town was quiet now, but it was the peace of exhaustion-more like a coma than the sleep of healing, and who could tell whether Sanctuary, or any of its people, would awaken to life again?
Lalo shivered and squinted at the sky. Even if it was useless, he ought to get up to the palace before the morning light was gone. As part of a sequence of political and religious negotiations which Lalo did not even try to understand,
Molin Torchholder had commissioned him to paint an allegorical mural of the
Wedding of the Storm God and Mother Bey. The work was as lifeless as everything else he did these days, but he was getting paid for it. And he did not know what else he could do.
“She was going to be pretty…” said Illyra in an oddly conversational tone. “My
Lillis had golden hair like her father’s, do you remember? I used to comb it and wonder how anything that pretty could have been born from me….”
“Yes,” answered Gilla quietly. “I know.” She had only seen Illyra’s daughter a few times, but that did not matter now. “Ganner was the fairest of my children…” Her throat closed.
“How can you understand?” exclaimed the half-S’danzo suddenly. “You still have children! But my daughter is dead and they have taken my little boy away! There is nothing left for me.”
“Your child was young,” said Gilla heavily. “You do not know what she would have been. But all the labor of raising my boy to manhood is wasted. He will never give me grandchildren now. I have buried one infant and lost one from the womb; the boy that was born after Ganner died of a fever when he was six years old. I know the pain of losing them at all ages, Illyra, and I tell you truly that whatever age your child is taken from you is the worst. But I will bear no more.