Five years later, Nerine and Valdin murder each other.

They are found in Nerine's Chialto house, dead on the floor of the kierten. Her bones have been crushed to powder inside her skin. Valdin's body is unmarked except for blood leaking from behind his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and other orifices. Further inside the house there is damaged plumbing and twisted wooden furniture.

Nerine's and Valdin's children - on the advice of Kiri and Alser - have a loudly public reconciliation of the families to calm the general public's alarm about this rivalry potentially spilling to broader segments of society. They pool money for the cost of the funerals, the Serlasts make a gift of replacing the furniture and the plumbing in the Lalindar house, the Lalindars give the Serlasts a small winery, the both of them start looking for any conveniently marriageable relatives to pair off.

It is "the Lalindars" and "the Serlasts" because the actual heirs to the deceased are nowhere to be found.

Their personal possessions, of course, are divided up in the normal way among their family members, but the family stewardship has failed to fall on any of Nerine's more or less coru descendants, nieces, nephews, or cousins, and likewise Valdin has no one stepping up to replace him as the prime of wood and bone.

Neither of them had obvious heirs like Kiri was or like Patience still seems to be, but this is ridiculous.



But Kiri has a suspicion.

She sends Jayce on a project to gather information from all their libraries and all allied repositories of data about...

...weather patterns in Soche-Tas and neighboring nations.

In case it starts raining a lot, somewhere that a certain relative of Nerine Lalindar's might have found a convenient escape route.