Treason

We left the forest and traveled east until at last we reached Britton, and in the easternmost part of Britton's east peninsula, we came to Humping. In the last few centuries nothing had changed. A new lord ruled from cliff house, but he called himself by the hereditary name Barton. Glain's and Vran's house was now a garden and someone else's house stood a few meters off, but the house was full of children and nothing had been changed. The people were still poor, still taciturn, still good to the heart.

Sara

The Humpers aren't surprised that though they grow old and die, we don't grow old. We have lived to cure the ills of children whose grandparents' broken legs we fixed. It's a quiet life, but a good one, and sometime soon Sara

But we're not quite ready for that now. Life is still sweet enough for us without children, though I look at Sara

Under everything I still hear the scream of the earth, but it no longer taints the things I see and do. Instead, it heightens my pleasures, and sunrise is brighter because of the dark place inside me, and Sara

Whether Treason is a better place to live now I'm not the one to judge.

Whether we are progressing as well as we did before the Ambassadors were destroyed I don't know. It's not up to me to evaluate how well we've done with the opportunity I made.

Sometimes I marvel that I accomplished it at all. "You don't exist," Sara

But whether there's some grand design really matters little to me. My only hope was this: To see what might be, to believe that it should be, and then to do all I could to bring it to pass, whatever the cost. When a life spins out as joyfully as mine has done, then the price, once paid so painfully, is now recalled in gladness. I have received full value. Here among the shepherds, my cup is filled with the water of life; it overflows.