“Karon! No!” I screamed, yanking at the iron grate as if to rip it from the mortar.

The chamber erupted in frenzy as Karon slumped to his knees. The giant Gar’Dena rushed forward bellowing and gathered him in his brawny arms. His cry of grief shook the walls of the chamber. “Great Vasrin, alter this path! What have we done? The Heir of D’Arnath is dead!” Madyalar and the two old people screamed for guards and Healers, while Y’Dan slumped into his chair and laid his head on the table, weeping.

Darzid stiffened and unsheathed his sword. Grabbing the wide-eyed Gerick, he backed away from Karon and the Preceptors.

An expressionless Exeget watched the madness and did nothing.

Fate could not be so brutal, so unfair. “Why did you do it?” I sobbed, gripping the iron bars. “I could have helped you. Oh, love, why? Why didn’t you wait for me?”

As if in echo of my words, there came a flutter in my head, a delicate brush of words… wait for me… Then, in a moment of grace, my mind was filled with Karon, without pain, without fear, whole, knowing everything of our life together… Seri, beloved, forgive me… Then he was gone.

The guards had to peel my fingers away from the grate as I hung onto the sweet echo, straining to hear more. But strangely enough, as Paulo and I were taken inside the Preceptors’ house, a different voice whispered in my head. Do not be afraid, it said. Say nothing.

I wasn’t sure about that voice. Certainly it was not Karon’s. I might have named it Dassine’s voice, though Bareil had told me that the old sorcerer was buried in his own garden. And, too, the tenor of it was not quite the same. This sounded more as my own father might have done were he able to speak in the mind-my grim warrior father, who thought nothing of leading a thousand men to their deaths in order to slay a thousand enemies, all for the glory of his king. Once, when I was a child, my favorite pony had been crippled in a fall. After commanding a servant to slay the suffering beast, my father had taken me on his knee and awkwardly dried my tears. “The world goes on, little Seri,” he said. “A soldier never dies. His blood makes the grass green for his children.”

Grief threatened to unravel me, all the more devastating after the hopes of the past summer-the love and grace I had been granted after so many years of bitterness. Yet this strange and sober voice reached through the storm that racked my soul and assured me that the universe was not random, not careless or capricious. The Way was laid down, and somewhere I would find a reason for its turnings.

Perhaps it was my imagination. Perhaps I was a fool. But when Paulo and I were brought before the Dar’Nethi Preceptorate, I said nothing, and I was not afraid.