“It is death for me to speak, milady, and yet. . . .  How afraid of them are you?” Halfman asked. Giving his real name was the ultimate commitment. He wanted to throw it down at her feet and abandon himself to her whim, but that was madness on a par with the madness he’d escaped by throwing away his gift of prophecy.

Jenine paused, biting her lip. Her lips were full, pink despite the coolness of this high tower. Dorian—for Halfman would never have dared—couldn’t help but imagine kissing those soft, full lips. He blinked, forcing things carnal from his mind, impressed that this young woman was actually devoting thought to his question. In Khalidor, fear was wisdom.

“I’m always afraid here,” she said. “I don’t believe I will betray you, but if they torture me?” She scowled. “That isn’t much to give, is it? I will keep your confidence to the last extremity I can endure. It is a poor and lame vow, but I have been stripped of riches outside and in.” She smiled then, the same beautiful, sad smile.

And he loved her. May the God who saved him have mercy, he couldn’t believe it was happening so fast. He’d never believed in instant love. Such a thing could surely be only infatuation or lust, and he couldn’t deny that he felt both. But at seeing her, he had an odd feeling of meeting an old friend. His Modaini friend Antoninus Wervel said such things happened when those who had known each other in past lives met. Dorian didn’t believe that. Perhaps, instead, it was his visions. At Screaming Winds, he’d been in trances for weeks. Though his memory had been mostly scoured of those images, he knew he’d lived lifetimes with this woman in those visions. Perhaps that had primed him for love. For he believed that this was real love, that here was the woman to whom he would yield body and mind and soul and future and hopes, unflinching. He would marry her, or no one. She would bear his son, or no one would.

It was either that—or the insanity Dorian had feared for so long had finally caught up with him.

“They call me Halfman,” he said. “But I am Dorian Ursuul, first acknowledged son and heir to Garoth Ursuul, and long since stricken from the Citadel’s records for my betrayal of the Godking and his ways.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. Her forehead wrinkled. He’d seen that wrinkle, in his visions, when it had become a worry line, permanent on her brow. He had to stop himself from reaching a hand up to smooth it away. It would be too familiar. By the God, he thought he’d left all the confusions of being a prophet behind! “Why are you here?”

“For you, Jeni.”