Prologue
Part One
Araleya had worked the fields of her uncles since she was strong enough to hold a rack and old enough to take orders. The fire that had taken her parents had also taken her older brothers and sister. Being alone, even among her own kin, was all she could remember of life, and working the fields of her uncles was all she knew to do with that life.
As the years passed, Araleya became an integral member of her family's clan; but integral was hardly an acknowledged quality in the world of Araleya. It was simply assumed of her to labor without complaint, working the fields, caring for the younger children, tending to the chores of cottage and barn, allowing no whim or fancy to deter her. Whims and fancies were the stuff of dreams, and since it took an imagination born of daydreams and the fantastical dreams of sleep, fueled by whatever tales of a better life were used to inspire fantasies of any kind, Néluwyn peasant women were not known for their imaginations. However, Araleya was not exactly that. A learned and steady self-control had given her the ability to keep her secret imaginings to those few short solitary moments when the mind could wander free of the field and pot, free from the uninterrupted monotony of a life devoid of hope. To be a woman of the crops and the smoke, as most of Araleya's countrymen referred to their peasant women, Araleya had long ago intuited that this was a requirement for surviving what fate had bequeathed her. She would keep her dreams of a different kind of world to herself.
As in all isolated reaches of Zurbala, the smallish northernmost valley of Vallespell, far from the centers of Zurbalan rule where most Néluwyns had become almost indistinguishable from their Zurbalan neighbors, their women were referred to as servants of the earth and slaves of the sky; words used by poets and minstrels not known for offering hope in a world where such seeds were left to die in the parched-ground history of a beaten people. Araleya was no exception. Indeed, there were no exceptions to be found in all the hinterlands of Zurbala.
It had been more than two hundred years since Kingdom of Zurbala had overrun and supplanted the ancient Kingdom of Nede, the Néluwyn's name for their beautiful land of rich farming valleys and encircling forests. And, for all that time, the women and men of Vallespell, Néluwyns all, had given their short years of life to ensure the safety and livelihood of their families. Possibly because of this isolation far from the numbing realities of the absolute subjugation experienced in the larger towns and cities of Zurbala, the ancient stories of Nede continued to be faithfully recounted. But, since few Néluwyn fathers and mothers were capable of passing along these stories, History Keepers, said by some to be the ancestors of ancient Nede nobility, had been entrusted with the reciting of the stories along with the recounting of the principal actors in their nation's vaunted history. Because of this, History Keepers were given an accepted place of honor with most of the Néluwyn population, no matter the level of actual esteem awarded them as individuals behind the closed doors of a Néluwyn cottage.
As in most Néluwyn small towns and villages across Zurbala, Vallespell, the name of both the village and the valley around it, had its own Tilgh or story place. It was here in these designated dwellings where History Keepers spent their lives struggling to instill and maintain Néluwyn pride. Their most ardent followers had long ago become known as Tilghens or servants of the stories, but to refer to a fellow Néluwyn as a Tilghen was not always a compliment.
In the centuries prior to Araleya's birth, the most passionate of the History Keepers had become known as Rescuers, due to their secretly held hopes for an all-out rebellion or uprising against their Zurbalan overlords. The most loyal followers of these radical History Keepers were known by Néluwyns and Zurbalans alike as Armed Ones since it had only taken a short time for these most zealous of Tilghens to take up arms, taking seriously the call for a rebellion. But armed resistance, when left to the words and actions of such few Néluwyns, had never risen above the level of incidental brush fires, never succeeding in jumping the fences of their limitations. In isolated regions like Vallespell, Armed Ones mattered little. An occasional visit by a tax-collector was their only contact with Zurbalan authority, making the words and actions of Armed Ones comical to many listening in on their fervent and repeated calls for an uprising.
But Araleya, along with the majority of her village, continued to visit the tilgh to hear the stories for herself, and to marvel at how so much had been lost in the two-hundred odd years of servitude, even though the work that awaited her every morning of her life outside the walls of the tilgh invariably kept the questions and the dreams of ancient times locked away in her heart like sacred objects kept hidden from prying eyes.