What I am doing here is telling my own history: how I, Meliara Astiar, who grew up running wild with the village girls and scarcely knew how to read, managed to find myself swept up in the affairs of kings. Who will read my history? I try to imagine my great-great-great-granddaughter finding this book some wintry day—because in summer, of course, she will be rambling barefoot through the mountains, just like I did. Harder to imagine are people in other lands far from Remalna, and in future times, reading my story. You might ask why I wrote this, when we have court scribes whose job it is to record important events. One thing I have learned while reading histories is that though the best scribes will faithfully report what people did at crucial moments, they often can only guess at why. The scribes will begin, for example, with the fact that I was the second child born to the Count and Countess of Tlanth, a county high in the northwest mountains of Remalna.
