What was it about fathers, Clay wondered, that compelled so many of them to test their children? To insist that a daughter, or a son, prove themselves worthy of a love their mother offered without condition?

Would you look at us, Clay thought scathingly. We, who might once have faced down a dragon and only stopped to ask how it preferred to get its ass kicked, baulking at glow-in-the-dark spiders!

Lucky,” said Gabriel. Clay glanced at him sidelong. “I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.” “We.

Clay found himself wondering what the Council of Courts etiquette was regarding vomiting your breakfast onto your boots. He suddenly wished he were elsewhere, anywhere – or better yet, someone else entirely. A simple man doing simple things. A cobbler, maybe. Cobblers rarely, if ever, made enemies of vengeful immortals, or so he figured.

As individuals they were each of them fallible, discordant as notes without harmony. But as a band they were something more, something perfect in its own intangible way.

This day, this moment, is when you step out from the shadow of the past. Today you make your name. Today your legend is born. Come tomorrow, every tale the bards tell will belong to you, because today we save the world!

Are all of us broken? Tam wondered. Each of us scarred in some way by our fathers, our mothers, our harsh and heartless pasts?

We were giants once, remember? Kings of the Wyld.

Clay smiled like a man who’d won first place in a “Whose Life Sucks the Most.

There were, naturally, several casualties during the course of the fair, but what was any good party without a few deaths?