Moth and Spark by Anne Leonard

work to do, and he trusted her to ensure he wasn’t being cheated. The young men she had met here would have only scorn or, worse, pity, for her for doing such things, and therefore she would not marry any of them. She was not averse to men or marriage, but she was averse to idleness and indulgence.
    Her father had not wanted her to come to Caithenor. Partly it was because he thought it was too frivolous, but his greater fear was that this might be the summer the Sarians moved west. He knew what it meant ifthey did. He had been to Sarium twice, once before Tam was born, and the second time eight years ago, when Tyrekh was building his army and looking hungrily westward. Sarium was a harsh land of arid steppes and icy mountains, which were rich in iron and tin and other metals, silver and traces of gold. There were also fields of coal, in which the Sarians delved pits and widened them until the land for miles was nothing but craters and dust. They were clever with machines, with forges, with mixes of salts and metals, with distillations of drugs from many different plants. The coal and the metals and the other things the Sarians had, fine goat wool and medicinal plants, beautiful rugs, they traded in the powerful kingdoms to the east for goods they needed. In the steep and narrow but very long river valleys—slashes in the land, her father said—they grew grain and raised goats and small cattle and built their cities. Her father had learned a great deal there, which was why he had made the dangerous journey twice.
    But Tyrekh thought there was no reason to trade for what he could take, so he came west across the Black Peaks instead, and took. And took and took. Tam’s father had told her some of the things the Sarians did to their own people, horrible things that she did not want to think about. He had told her three years ago, when they thought Tyrekh might come to Argondy and Caithen, because she had asked him. She hated what she heard but could not tell him to stop. The Sarians made use of the land to punish, and they made use of their metals and machines and chemistries to frighten and control. To kill.
    It had been peaceful in Caithen, but her father was not reassured. He thought Tyrekh had already waited too long. Occasionally men he knew from Illyria or Liddea, ground down with fear and suffering, came to their home. They told grim stories of slavery and death. Tam’s father listened, and waited, and thought she should stay at home in her shabby and insignificant city.
    She and her mother persuaded him that all of Argondy and half of Caithen lay between the Sarians and Caithenor. Her brother was in Dele as he was every summer, making bargains with traders from across the Empire, shipmasters, and bankers. If war came he was in much more danger than she was. Hyrne grudgingly gave in, yielding his daughter to the fripperies of court.
    The candle flickered and went out in a sudden strong draft. Tamstayed where she was, letting the darkness fold itself around her. It made her aware of the age of the palace, built a thousand years ago and added on to piece by piece as the world changed and different things were needed. Without light the room was stripped of all its modern touches and had only the walls it had had when it was built centuries ago. Who knew how many other people had sat here and looked out on rainy nights?
    Age itself did not impress Tam; her own city of Dalrinia was dotted with buildings that were hundreds of years old, and some of the roads were even older. Caithenor too, she was told, had its share of ruins and overgrown lich-fields. Civilizations had risen and fallen for millennia. Remnants of walls and foundations were scattered across the landscape, buried, built upon. She had been to the City of Silence in the west, where no grass grew and the only things that moved were the tiny dust-devils in the streets, and every stone house was full of stone people. There was no record, no memory, of what had