I don’t know where Grandmother gets her provisions, but Wendar would kill to find out. On a platter in the center of the table were cheese, sausage, and bread. Simple fare, certainly not the kind of things one would expect a powerful mage to savor—but they were the best Kero had ever tasted. It wasn’t just hunger adding flavor, either; even after one was pleasantly full, the food at Kethry’s table tasted extraordinary.

Beside the platter was a second, holding fruit; not only apples, pears and grapes, but cherries as well.

Definitely not natural. Those are fresh apples, pear season is over, grapes are ripe, but cherries won’t be for another moon, and apples don’t ripen until fall.

But the sun felt wonderful, the apple she’d just cut into quarters was pleasantly tart, and Kero didn’t much want to think about anything for a while.

I’m going to enjoy this, however it came about. Father was wrong about Grandmother, and he was probably just as wrong about mages in general.

“Think you’re ready for some family history?” Kethry said, casting a long look at her from across the old table, as Kero reached for a piece of sausage. “I think I have a fair number of surprises for you. For one thing, you have some rather—unusual—cousins. Quite a lot of them, in fact.”

Kero froze in mid-reach.

The sorceress sat back in her cushioned chair, tucked flyaway hair behind one ear and smiled at her expression. In her russet gown of soft linen she looked nothing at all like a feared and legendary mage. She looked like the matriarch of a noble family.

And I must look like a stranded fish, Kero thought, trying to get her mouth to close.

“Don’t look so stricken, child,” Tarma said, and reached across the table, picked up the sausage, and dropped it into her hand. “There’s no outlawry on the family name. It’s just—well, you have a lot more relatives than you know about. Those cousins, for instance.”

“I do?” She gathered her scattered wits, and took a deep breath, only then becoming aware that she was still clutching the sausage. She put it down carefully on her plate. “I mean—you said something about daughters and granddaughters earlier, but Mother never said anything—I didn’t know what to think. How many? Did Mother have a sister or—”