Book One – Chapter 20

It was ridiculous, as boring as it was cringe-worthy. The sheer banality of it, coupled with the embarrassing fact that of all the shit Yu had been forced to learn, this was the one thing that had actually stuck. It was not even special knowledge — hardly secret. Anyone living in the settlements knew about the rivers and the families. The whole presentation had been a pathetic task, the kind of easy, meaningless pity-assignment they handed out believing it could boost the self-esteem of dumb finlings, if they just disguised it as some grand privilege of vital importance.

Yu had seen through it right away, back then.
  He was convinced he had.

                                Of course he had.

                 It had been stupid then,
                     and it was stupid now.

 It was so stupid.

What really made him angry was how people pretended to take pride in the Coat of Arms, as if it meant anything. They were so eager to ignore the truth, so willing to accept a symbol instead of reality. They wanted to be ignorant of reality, like those suicidal tairan women who forged bonds with bormen. Just how much could people pretend to see in a few scribbled lines and some mutant fish?

First off: there was no unity. Ever since the bormen had settled, it was one constant war over land, rights, and power. The five families? Sure, they had names. But in the end, they lived in the same shitty clay huts as everyone else. What makes them different? Their huts were slightly bigger. That was it. That was all they had to their name. If they were not yet split into feuding factions, that is.

Since that disastrous first-grade presentation, Yu had learned and heard more, obviously, about their history and claims to the land. Tria had actually told him things that were not in the books. Mainly, because Yu had made it a habit of not reading THE . BOOKS. Also, because some things were not in there; things only a few people knew, and even fewer could prove.