As the final strand loosened, an amazing, glowing panorama of ancient Lathmere unfolded within Pella’s mind. She saw the great river delta as it had existed two hundred years before the first stone of the Summoners’ College was quarried. An endless, shimmering expanse of golden reed-beds, gray alder islands, and deep, clear gravel pools where six-foot salmon rested in the shadow of fallen timber.
She saw the ancient ferrymen—men with broad, bearded faces who carried Hal Rook’s very jawline and her own gray eyes—guiding heavy oak flatboats across the braided shallows using nothing more than hand-twisted hemp hawsers and long ash poles. They didn’t command the river with magic rods. They didn’t build iron extraction crowns to squeeze sky energy from its currents. They studied its eddies, they respected its spring freshets, and when the winter floods arrived, they pulled their boats high onto the dry meadows and waited for the mud to recede.
The memory was heartbreaking in its pure, simple dignity. For two hundred years, human beings had lived beside this water as neighbors, sharing its fish, drinking its shallows, and paying their respects with an honest stroke of an oar. It was only when the College arrived with its grand royal ambitions that the river had been turned into an enemy to be chained and conquered. The truth was not in the high towers. The truth was in the reeds.
