Solon sat up, brushing filthy straw from his hair. “What has she done?” It was early morning and chilly, and Kaede wore a purple samite wrap over her shoulders. Solon was relieved he wouldn’t have to spend the interview trying not to gape at her breast like a mainlander—relieved and disappointed.

“Do you know why or not?” Kaede demanded. The steel in her voice reminded him of his visions when Khali came to Screaming Winds, trying to tempt him to his death. He’d known those visions were false because Kaede wasn’t furious with him. Being right had never felt worse.

Standing, Solon walked to the bars. “It will not be easy to tell or hear.”

“Humor me.”

Solon closed his eyes. “After I completed my training with the blue mages twelve years ago, I came home, you remember? I was nineteen. I asked my father for permission to seek your hand. He told me your family would never consent.”

“My mother never stopped at anything to advance my family. That’s why I never understood her hating you. She should have been pushing me to marry a prince.”

Solon lowered his voice. “Your mother feared that you were my sister.”

In rapid succession, emotions flitted over Kaede’s face: bewilderment, incredulity, understanding, surprise, revulsion, incredulity again.

“Kaede, I don’t wish to slander either of our parents. The liaison was brief—only as long as my mother’s last ill-fated pregnancy. When she and the baby both died, my father took it to be the gods’ judgment on him. By then your mother was pregnant. Years later when my father noticed my interest in you, he requested a green mage come to tell him whether you were his daughter. In return for determining your patrimony and keeping their silence, I was to take my schooling with the green mages. Neither they nor my father expected me to show any Talent. They merely hoped to have a Sethi prince as a friend. As it turned out, I wasn’t that Talented at Healing.” Though he had met Dorian there, which had changed his life, and not only in good ways. “Regardless, they told my father that you were definitely not my sister, but your mother never trusted magi. Her fears told her that you looked more like my father than yours.”

Kaede’s eyes were cool. “How do I know any of this is true?”

“I wouldn’t lie about my father. He was a great man. It wounded me when he told me he’d been faithless to my mother. It wounded him, too. He was different after she died. Can you think of anything else that makes sense of your mother’s actions? Why don’t you ask her?”

“Why didn’t you come back?”