I was a sickly child.
The High Priest said my weak temperament came from my mother. Bad blood, he’d said. It was thought I would die of the same illness that took her.
Before that haze of death and burning herbs and the blurry insides of the room I didn’t leave for months, I remember my mother taking me to the countryside in the south. It was just her, and her lady-in-waiting, and me.
I must have only been about four, but I still remember the fields of golden crops, and the rolling hills—scattered with farms and small villages—and the cabin in the woodland by a great blue lake that we stopped at.
I suppose our early memories shape us in some ways, and I wonder if that small taste of adventure stirred something inside me all those years ago. Something I buried within me. Something that
