I don't know how long I was in the water that morning. I remember the strength of the icy current, and the gray light. I remember being grazed by something huge and cold, probably a submerged trunk, but to this day, a childish doubt still lingers in me. I didn't have the strength to be afraid. Gradually, I got stuck in a dreamlike state, between the numbing grip of the cold and the slow but repeated rhythm of my fathoms, and even the terrifying stories of the old fishermen quickly left my mind. The fog surrounded me, I was alone, lost in the uncertain flow of white limbo. Dawn was coming, but the light, instead of lifting the veil, only thickened it. My small reserve of energy soon ran out. I drifted more than I swam. The cold and tiredness anaesthetized, nourished a growing and dangerous indifference. Thoughts of loyalty to Brindy and resentful anger towards Sesh were gone. There was nothing but the liquid abyss, a cold and bottomless chasm at the edge of which I stood in precarious balance, somewhere between the throbbing heat of my own flesh and the pressing call of the pit. It was an unequal fight, I knew I would lose it, and I didn't care.

The rough contact of the clay bank made me come back to my senses. Wading in the muddy water, I somehow managed to pull myself up onto dry land, my insensitive hands scratched by the handles of rushes that I grabbed. Breathless and dripping, my body shaking so much that I thought my limbs would fall off, I staggered towards the woods that bordered the river. In spite of the convulsive shaking and exhaustion, I vaguely understood that I would get lost if I strayed too far from the path that linked the sawmill to the Brown wharf, which I did not want to follow directly for fear of meeting ill-intentioned passers-by. I wandered like a drunkard between the trees, clinging to reality by a thin thread, my clothes soaked, of an impossible heaviness. The pale sun was still struggling with the night. The dead leaves and branches cracked under my feet. I kept telling myself that I shouldn't fall asleep, because I knew that if I did, I wouldn't wake up.

Then I only dispose of fragments of memory about what happened. The lanterns on the Brown wharf. A few surprised faces at the entrance of the small town. The fishermen who went away from me, invoking the Lady of the waters, and the round mouths, the pale eyes that answered my stuttering. Then the metallic footsteps of the guard, and the gray face of old Nep bent over me. My teeth chattering, as I tried to tell the story of my ordeal, all the effort that these moments of coherence cost me. The hard, scowling look of the guards, the incredibly bushy eyebrows of Nep. The unbearable heat of the fire near which I was placed, whose flames seemed to tear me shreds of skin. People were fidgeting around me, whispering resolute and dangerous words. The clattering of weapons being prepared, then the silence, the crackling of embers, and the gentle vibration of fatigue, while with delight I finally allowed myself to give in. A long dreamless sleep.

I have the true sequence of events from the two separate accounts that Sesh and Nep gave me afterwards. My disappearance, together with that of Brindy, had completed the mobilization of the guard in search of the lost children. Indeed, the state in which the despair of Brindy had left Sesh's shack on the fateful night of our departure for the Stream had led him to believe that it was in his house that I had been abducted, and, infanticide pariah or not, this had made waves. The machine had been set in motion, however, when Robin had been reported missing. As he was a brown-hornian child, the case was no longer the sole responsibility of the Fysses, and the repeated efforts of Sesh and the widow Ronna with the legates and the justicary of Castle-Horn had sown the seeds of general mobilization. The day after my abduction, there was not a single citizen of Brown-Horn who was unaware that two children had been kidnapped within the city walls.

The next morning, when I made my wobbly appearance on the banks of the Brown wharf, the overly superstitious mob first took me for a ghost, since my skin was so bluish from the cold, and many of them thought they were dealing with the spirit of a drowned man who had appeared from the river. Of course, the misunderstanding was cleared up when Nep's patrol appeared on the scene and he recognized me. The guards listened gravely to my trembling account and, urged by my revelations, decided to act accordingly. When they had undressed me and dried me, they put me down by the fire in the pillbox on the dock. Harnessed for war, about twenty armed men had walked on the sawmill. The boat was seized without resistance at dawn, its crew captured, and Brindy, still trapped in the artificial sleep induced by the mad-care, was eventually discovered in the hidden compartment of the bow. By mid-morning, Sesh had arrived at the head of a detachment of reinforcements, and, on a stroke of good fortune, he intercepted Ganav Estu, the owner of the sawmill, who was trying to escape through the woods with two henchmen. The scandalous news spread quickly, and by noon the whole town was in turmoil.

Muscular interrogations were carried out on the spot. The guard learned the full story when Sesh questioned the smugglers' crew about Tom Minnow's death, reminding them of the unenviable fate of murderers and child abductors. A first man snapped, and soon all the prisoners shoved each other to give their side of the story in exchange for promises of magnanimity.

Of course, none of them admitted to having played a significant role in the case, and Sesh gave them the benefit of the doubt in exchange for information. All of them unhesitatingly incriminated Ganav Estu as the main instigator of the story. Since he was indeed the owner and operator of the seized boat, as well as the employer of the captured crew members, their testimonies seemed credible.

According to the smugglers, for several years already, Estu had been using clandestine holds to avoid river taxes and sometimes to supply the black market of the Stream with narcotics, which he indirectly acquired at Franlake. Several officers of the guard, including Captain Nad, received his bribes, and those officers had made it clear to their men that there were certain warehouses - and certain investigations - that they should not be interested in. The Minnow case was one of them, which shed new light on the guard's unwillingness to discover the identity of the dead man, as well as on the strange warning that Nep had given me the day I met Randu Lemis. After maneuvering to keep his crews composed only of scoundrels with little love for the tinted ones, Ganav Estu had implemented a stratagem that flattered their hatred of savages and made the contraband compartments he had had built on his buildings more profitable.

The tinted children that Estu's men took away, always the day before the departure of one of his ships, were sold under the table to a Rajjan merchant who transited between his native land and Sand-Port. Despite his reputation as a smuggler, Tom Minnow had not wished to take part in this horror, and as a result, he was killed. Versions of Minnow's death differed widely and, although most smugglers admitted that Estu was not present, the real killers were obviously on the second boat, which by now must have arrived at Franlake. Considering the situation, it was likely it would never come back.

The ramifications of the case were significant. Ganav Estu was undoubtedly one of the richest merchants in Brown-Horn, but also one of the most influential men among the old families of the upper class. It seemed unlikely that his secret was not known to his friends, which raised many difficult questions. How far had the intent to harm spread? How many had known, and had said nothing?

How many had approved? How many were planning worse? If there was a real complicity between Estu and other influential members of the Brown-Horn aristocracy, then little more was needed to imagine a general conspiracy of the elders aimed at all the half-bloods, including the primate.

Beyond the wildest theories that were circulating in the smoky air of the taverns in the days following Gavan Estu's arrest, there was no doubt that in certain circles, both upper and lower classes, the actions of the merchant were to be celebrated as a great achievement. The first blow had been struck against the tinted invader, and Estu himself was to be considered both a hero and a martyr. In the opposite camp, public execution was called for. It was unthinkable that a man who traced his ancestry back to the ancient Sarp could commit a crime as heinous as slavery. Even more revolting, these misdeeds had no motivation except hatred and the will to harm.

Estu had no need of the derisory amounts of money that the sale of the children had brought him, and from the point of view of the half-bloods, these abductions looked like awful whims, the vindictive depravity of a jealous and idle rich man. A purulent wound had been discovered in the midst of the city, and the bursting of infected humors had revealed a previously suppressed evil that now threatened to set everything ablaze.

And I didn't care about any of that, because I knew I would never see Robin again. The justice of Brown-Horn had no weight outside its borders, and while Bard offered a series of generous bounties for the capture of the smugglers who were missing, it was obvious that for Robin and the others who had disappeared, it was too late. I imagined Robin, his mischievous little face twisted by pain and tears, feet and fists bound as I had been, in the bottom of a filthy hold heading for the dust of the slave markets of Rajja. To have been in his place, I knew he must have felt lonely and scared. I was miserable and irascible, consumed by a remorse as unjustified as it was devouring, to which was added a desire for revenge whose violence frightened me.

In spite of our deprived existences, in spite of the hunger that tugged from time to time and the hits that we sometimes received, I believe that it was only when fate took Robin from us that I really discovered the feeling of injustice. The remnants, what was left of preconceived notions of how the world worked, of the silly notions that had been nurtured by the brownian and clan tales, the deserving rewarded and the wicked punished, were definitely shaken up.

As the weeks went by, it was actually the irrevocable aspect of this thing that haunted me more than anything else. I could hardly imagine that I would never again hear Robin playing his pipe, that I would never again see his puny smile. Perhaps, despite the sometimes abject poverty in which I had grown up, there had also been a counterbalance, a somewhat harsh freedom that had until then removed us from the implacable machinery of the world. Hunger was a curable state, bruises were quickly healed, nothing was systematic or eternal. The hope of better days was not something intangible, when we waited, as we did, for tiny joys. And here the immutable had entered our lives, in the form of mountains and roads and the sea, those infinite miles that separated us from the chains and from a foreign coast whose name we knew only. Robin would not return. It had suddenly occurred to me that the world was too big and that its angles could cut through in a terribly definitive way. All my landmarks were fading away and beyond this broken frontier there was only a dark territory, a marasmus teeming with unanswered questions.

I went back to live at the Ronna farm with Ucar and Brindy, but everything was different. The sad look in the old woman's eyes, the awkward exchanges with my companions, the unsaid things on both sides. I had secretly nurtured the hope that our abduction would lay the first stones on the road to a definitive reconciliation between Brindy and myself. Reality soon showed me how wrong I was. Instead, it seemed that this painful experience had only succeeded in widening the gap between us. Somehow I resented her for being the cause of our kidnapping, even though we got out alive, and I think Brindy thought that I had abandoned her the morning of my escape, and that for her it was one time too many. Ucar had obviously taken sides, and treated me with the same coldness as she did, as if I had been responsible for what had happened to Robin, which only served to deepen my dishonor.

I watched them create a new hard core together, from which I was de facto excluded, and, as the days went by, the feeling that my already bruised heart was slowly dying was exacerbated.

I saw Dera again two brief times before her departure for the wintering. Thanks to her exuberant efforts and her big admiring eyes, she managed to make me forget my misfortune for a while. However, I was not good company and I could see that my sadness was hurting her. Then came too quickly that cold morning that Rue and Mesh had chosen, and the family began to dismantle the yurt in order to leave the Basin for the winter. A little apart from the activity, dark and sullen, I observed these preparations, with death in my soul. The yurt was disassembled and installed on two of the family's mountain horses, while a cart was harnessed to the third one to carry the grandmother. Ceremoniously, Rue, Mesh and Vaug bid me farewell. Dera tried not to cry and hugged me, telling me without conviction that the good weather would soon return and promised to bring me many gifts. I watched them, more alone than ever, as they disappeared together in the forest.

As the fall was coming to an end for good, I resumed the habit of deserting the farm. As I had nowhere else to go, I wandered, between the city and the river, brooding over dark and angry thoughts. Sesh had tried to contact me several times, but obstinate and resentful I had not responded. I couldn't understand why he hadn't told me anything about Robin's abduction, and I had the absurd idea that if I had learned of his disappearance sooner, I might have been able to save him, and for that reason I resented him terribly.

Meanwhile, the faltering politics of Brown-Horn were taking their course.

Bard the Younger was in a very delicate situation, and no doubt he did the best he could. It would certainly have been fairer and even easier for him to engage in general reprisals against the old families, by abolishing some of their privileges, for example the exclusive commercial rights they held over the exploitation of wood or stone. However, this could have had very unfortunate consequences for the economy of the primacy. Worse, the support of a section of the mob for the aristocracy of the upper classes could have led to a civil revolt with dubious results. Bard therefore attempted a compromise.

The probable complicity of the old families was swept under the carpet, and Bard appointed two new counselors among the citizens of the upper class.

At the same time, as in exchange for these liberties granted in order to guarantee public order, justice was implemented as severely as Bard could afford. Ganav Estu was sentenced for his crimes in a closed trial, rumored to be dominated by the incriminated's furious outcry against a primate "corrupted by wild blood". Bard condemned him to exile. His possessions were seized, but strategically redistributed among the more moderate members of the upper class, a reminder that the hand that gave was also the hand that held the stick. There were many demonstrations of public unity, dinners here, speeches there, but the majority were not fooled and, under the table, the games of power continued.

Captain Nad was the only member of the guard to be dismissed. To set an example, he suffered the same fate as the captive smugglers: his ear was cut off and Bard declared him outlawed before banishing him from the primacy, which provoked a series of heated debates in the taverns of the lower part of the town, but also at the garrison of Castle-Horn.

Other officers had been incriminated by the smugglers' confessions, but it was quite clear that the primacy could not afford such a purge within its own armed corps. Alienating some of the upper crones was one thing, but increasing the ranks of the disgruntled with idle soldiers was another. So the slate was wiped clean, but this poorly made coating only highlighted the cracks and fissures. The power of the primate had been publicly chipped. The primate, however, still had a few tricks up his sleeve. In the hectic week that followed, as the first winter frosts took hold of the region, Bard Govon once again demonstrated his ability to manipulate the hearts of the crowds.

On a cold morning with an azure sky, the primate of Brown-Horn announced his marriage.