"... e então, quando ele jogou fora a lona, não era nada além de lanças quebradas", diz sua mãe, concluindo uma longa história sobre a traição de algum clã troll das Montanhas de Jann, durante a guerra. Ela bebe o resto de sua pequena cerveja enquanto você balança a cabeça pacientemente, limpando os últimos pedaços de mel e manteiga com seu pão.

"Nada a dizer?" ela pergunta.

Você interveio aqui e ali para desviar as frustrações e suspeitas de sua mãe, mas agora ela apenas ri sombriamente. "Você é um bom filho", diz ela. "Embora às vezes eu gostaria que você discutisse comigo em vez de apenas ouvir."

While your mother attends to a small line of petitioners outside, you clean the house and get dressed, throwing your blue-gray mantle around your shoulders. Then you step outside into the sun. The Pine tribe is busy with preparations for the trolls' arrival, and with the everyday business of manufacture and trade. Laborers are rolling up the sleeves of their plain wool tunics, eager to start work on the unfinished temple to Yune. Their breath steams in the cold morning air. Local overseers and merchants, eager to impress visiting temple functionaries, wear brightly patterned clothing with checks, squares, Sea Kingdom meanders, and Desert Empire stripes. (The people of Pine regard the form of all their crafts, including their textiles, as essentially perfect, and so only their colors and patterns vary.)

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After dealing with the petitioners, your mother does not head directly to the great hall to conduct the day's business, or to the rectangular pit that demarcates the future location of the new temple. Instead she looks at you.

"I have not seen you studying, DARK NUNS. Have you been following in your father's footsteps, as I asked?"

As you approach adulthood, your mother has been increasingly insistent that you maintain the skills your father taught you before he died, and so acknowledge your filial debt. You suspect that she also wants to avoid her obligations in the great hall and would like a demonstration of what you have learned.