There was a limit to what he could endure, he decided finally. There was a limit to what he could demand of himself. He was broken by what had happened in San Sobel, and he could not put himself back together again. He no longer cared who he was or what he had pledged himself to do. He was finished with everything.

Let someone else take up the Word’s cause.

Let someone else carry the burden of all those lives.

Let someone else, because he was done.

Chapter 5

Ariel paused, and Nest found that she couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “You mean he quit?” she demanded incredulously. “He just quit?”

The tatterdemalion seemed to consider. “He no longer thinks of himself as a Knight of the Word, so he has stopped acting like one. But he can never quit. The choice isn’t his to make.”

Her words carried a dark implication that Nest did not miss. “What do you mean?”

Ariel’s childlike face seemed to shimmer in the midday sun as she shifted her stance slightly. It was the first time she had moved, and it almost caused her to disappear.

“Only the Lady can create a Knight of the Word, and only the Lady can set one free.” Ariel’s voice was so soft that Nest could barely hear her. “John Ross is bound to his charge. When he took up the staff that gives him his power, he bound himself forever. He cannot free himself of the staff or of the charge. Even if he no longer thinks of himself as a Knight of the Word, he remains one.”

Nest shook her head in confusion. “But he isn’t doing anything to be a Knight of the Word. He’s given it all up, you said. So what difference does it make whether or not he really is a Knight of the Word? If he’s not only stopped thinking of himself as a Knight, but he’s stopped functioning as one, he might as well be a bricklayer.”

Ariel nodded. “This is what John Ross believes, as well. This is why he is in so much danger.”

Nest hesitated. How much of this did she really want to know? The Lady hadn’t sent Ariel just to bring her up to date on what was happening to John Ross. The Lady wanted something from her, and where Ross was concerned, she wasn’t at all sure it would be something she wanted to give. She hadn’t seen or heard from Ross in five years, and they hadn’t parted under the best of circumstances. John Ross had come to Hopewell to accomplish one of two things—to help thwart her father’s intentions for her or to make certain she would never carry them out. He had seen her future, and while he would not describe it to her, he made it clear that it was dark and horrific. So she would live to change it or she would die. That was his mission in coming to Hopewell. He had admitted it at the end, just before he left. She had never quite gotten over it. This was a man she had grown to like and respect and trust. This was a man she had believed for a short time to be her father—a man she would have liked to have had for a father.