Before We Forget

Ninety-five years ago, a war nobody living can fully explain burned the world's great cities and froze two winters straight behind it, killing nine in every ten people left alive. Out of what used to be Portugal, three nations grew from the ashes that no longer remember being one country: Portucália, a kingdom of crown and church in the cold north; Lusitânia, a council republic rebuilding gunpowder and the rule of law; and Pax Júlia, a confederation of horse-lords and salt in the south. Each is certain it alone is the rightful heir to the country that no longer exists. For nine years, they went to war over who gets to call themselves Portugal again. This is the record of that war, and the uneasy peace that followed it, set down three years after the last battle by the one person the victors could find young enough to have taken no side in any of it. Sofia Maia didn't fight this war. She's the one who has to explain it: tracking down soldiers, smugglers, and survivors on every side, trying to write down what actually happened before the people who lived through it can agree on a version that flatters them.