Summary

Chapter One opens with a piece from a lamentation of the Night of Knives.

The story starts in the year 315 of the Sun, 10 years before Convergence. 12-year-old Serapio drinks a liquid meant to numb pain as his mother says he will become a god. As she rubs red dye on his teeth, she says his father tried to ban her from wearing the clothes of the Carrion Crow, but the day is too sacred. Serapio says their father is afraid, and his mother says the Obregi fear what they cannot understand. Serapio still feels pain from the carving she did that morning: crow wings on his back and a crow skull at the base of his neck.

He asks if the Obregi are bad, as his mother is a foreigner from Tova while Serapio was raised in his father's ancestral home. She says...