Naset.

  Squab moaned out in her sleep, though the nearest person to hear her was dead and the next nearest was far across the room with a thick iron door between.

  Naset Alon, mother of none. Daughter of a fool and a lecher. Naset Alon, I come to speak to you…

  She felt the dream solidify around her. She had returned to the shores of another river, one she had lived along and played by in a life long ago. She ran to the river, running for the first time since any man had called her the Lady Hill in dreams or life, putting her feet into the warm clear sandy water.

  Naset. Mother of none. Walk with me in the river. Speak close and let me tell you secrets. Secrets not meant for mortal ears.

  She saw him rising from the waters then. A boy she had seen once, a silly boy who she had thought was a waking dream. His eyes had been like green flame, his skin the color of the bronze sand squishing between her toes. She remembered his teeth, as sharp as knives and golden, and when Lord Hill claimed her wifely duties she would think of her perfect river boy and find her pleasure there.

  The boy was a man in this dream, strong and muscled like a man who had spent his life in work on the river. Naset saw the scars of casting nets on his body, where they glowed with the same green fire of his eyes.

  “Have I come to the Land of my dead? Am I to accompany my daughter?” she spoke in her native tongue, in the voice she had years ago before living in the crypts and cold damp temple walls.

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  No. Did your father not teach you of your land? This is a place of the living, a first and second life with the River. You have lived too long beside the Mother, her banks muddy and her flow slow and steady save when the Father pours himself into her. This is the river of life, the place the holy men bring the sick to heal them. And I am the keeper of this river, a holy man among the holy men.

  She went to him then, her clothes seeming to fall away from her as she walked forward. She had her body again, the form that caught the eye of many men before the Lord Hill claimed it. Her skin was dark, darker than her sister’s skin, darker even than her father. What had become tarnished in the gloom of the crypts was burnished in the blazing sun, and Naset Alon let the man of the river take her into its waters.

  They lay beside each other on the banks, spent and rejoicing in the sun. Naset felt herself stronger, ready for the terrible day to come. When she saw him sit up she smiled, tracing her fingers over his chest, down his smooth thighs. The river brushed her hands away, pulling her eyes to his and staring into Naset’s very being.

  You must give your daughter’s vessel to these heathen gods. No matter the price. For do not all rivers flow to me, and I them? Bring your daughter to the flame, and kill any man who stands in your way. He will be our servant when you return to the River, and I will bring your daughter back from her first death to marry a man of standing.

  “She has never seen this place! She will not eat, she will not sleep.”

  She is a daughter of this river though you have not seen it in so long. Bring her, and we shall make ourselves a dynasty that will make the people of the valley quake in fear.

  Naset went to kiss her lover and saw his eyes flicker from fiery green to dull grey. She looked into them and saw for a moment fire, a man battling against the dead. The river blinked, his eyes returning to green, and returned her kiss.

  She woke in the morning to blessed relief. Around her bed sat several sacks tied shut with ribbons the color of His eyes.

  No one must stop you my love.

  She opened the sacks and looked within. They were filled with knives.