That was why the Brethren generally married distant cousins, with no secrets to be kept. When they did marry outside their own—and it was good for the bloodlines, at least—they tried to keep the truth from their spouses. Untold generations of those who married into the Brethren had spent their entire lives ignorant of what would befall them at the moment of death, unaware that they had cursed themselves from the moment of consummation, just as their children were cursed, and their children’s children.
