PART ONETheTurning WheelEnd of PART ONE1Tears and SmokeTiamak found the empty treelessness of the High Thrithing oppressive. Kwanitupul was strange, too, but he had been visiting that place since childhood, and its tumbledown buildings and ubiquitous waterways at least reminded him a little of his marshy home. Even Perdruin, where he had spent time in lonely exile, was so filled with close-leaning walls and narrow pathways, so riddled with shadowy hiding places and blanketed in the salt smell of the sea, that Tiamak had been able to live with his homesickness. But here on the grasslands he felt tremendously exposed and utterly out of place. It was not a forting feeling.They Who Watch and Shape have indeed made a strange life for me, he often reflected. The strangest, perhaps, of any they have made for my people since Nuobdig married the Fire Sister.Sometimes there was solace in this tho
