Spring, 4709

Kali had finished packing up her room and was helping her mother with what was left in the study. The wagon that would move these final items to their new home in Magnimar would arrive before noon the next morning. Delays in the deed transfer on the warehouse and office space there had kept Akmal from returning to Sandpoint to help them finish. Denea was loath to hire help for crating up what was essentially a collection of sensitive and personal family items—Next time we move, we’re packing these first, she thought—so it was up to her and Kali to finish.

Kali was clearing some papers out of the main desk in the study when she saw one that caught her eye.

“Mom…what is this?”

It was a letter addressed to Denea Borellan, sent by Aneka University in Korvosa in early 4687. They were offering her a tenured teaching position.

Denea came around the desk and waited while Kali read. When she finished, Denea spoke in a light voice as she reminisced, half-smiling.

“That was the year your father asked me to marry him. He proposed just a month after they sent me this.”

Kali knew surprisingly little about her parents before they had met. There were stories, of course, but that part of their lives had always seemed like a different place and time. She knew her mother had taught before marrying her father, but she had never heard about this.

A tenured position?

And her mother would only have been twenty-two or twenty-three.

“You…you gave this up?”

It was the wrong thing to say and she immediately regretted it. The expression on her mom’s face turned hard in an instant.

“That is what your grandparents think, yes,” she said sharply.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Kali.”

Kali stopped.

She had known for years that her mother’s relationship with her parents was strained. She had overheard enough arguments behind closed doors to know that, and some of the things they said to each other had been truly awful.

She had just never understood what lay underneath them.

I guess now I know, she thought.

Denea’s face softened, as did her voice.

“Even before I met your father, I was happy. I was researching and teaching Thassilonian history, and a little of world history after the fall of Thassilon. I was a socialite in a Varisian city-state. I knew what I wanted from my life. What I wanted was that.

“Then I met your father and I fell in love. And because of your father, I am happier than I ever was or thought I would be.

“I am discovering the world for myself instead of learning it from books behind a desk. I am a contributor to many of those same books that I used to read, I find and touch relics from history instead of seeing them in museums and sometimes I even put them there myself. My world is much larger than one city of modest influence and an inflated sense of its own significance.

“And most important of all? I have you.

“Now. Tell me. What have I given up?”

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