When I felt they’d had time to feel such guilt as they would, I continued. “Both reasons for rescuing Kellen are true. But it is also true that I know Jakoven will not let me or mine hide in peace again. I no longer have the luxury of hiding here in Hurog and hoping the king will forget me again.”

“Alizon’s rebellion is doomed,” I said. I let my gaze sweep across the room and saw agreement in some faces and repressed anger in others. “Or so I thought. But as it turns out, it has never been Alizon’s rebellion—it is Kellen’s.”

I let the murmur of conversation swell for a beat or two, then continued. “So by helping Kellen out of that hellish place—” Someone smiled and I stopped.

“Don’t any of you believe the fictions that Jakoven spouts about luxury and good treatment in the Asylum,” I said. “I’ve been there and I wouldn’t leave a dog I cared about in the ‘gentle’ keeping of the men who run the King’s Asylum for Noble Embarrassments and Inconveniences.”

I’d put too much feeling in it. I would rather have left them believing that all that Jakoven’s wizards had done was question me while I played stupid.

I swallowed and continued on in deadly seriousness, my carefully memorized speech forgotten. “So as Orvidin has already speculated, it was entirely self-interest that led me to help Kellen and join in his rebellion. But I believe that it is a self-interest that all Shavigmen share.”

I took my tankard off the table and let the sweet water pour down my throat. My uncle gave me a small smile of encouragement that would have been invisible to anyone farther away. I set the empty tankard down, and turned back, trying not to notice the way the sound of the metal tankard hitting the table echoed in the silence of the room.

They want to be convinced, my uncle had said. They’ll listen as long as it takes you to do it.

“Let me tell you why it is imperative to your survival that you help us here,” I said. “It is the reason that Jakoven will not let my family alone.”

I took a deep breath and plunged on. “While I was in the Asylum, I saw Jakoven produce an artifact he found while renovating his castle at Estian: a staff head bearing a dragon with a black gem.”

“Are you telling us you think Jakoven found Farsonsbane, Pup?” asked Orvidin.

“I’m telling what I saw,” I said. “And I’ll tell you that Jakoven told me he found Farsonsbane and I, a wizard, believed him.”

“Even so,” said someone else. He sat near the eastern Shavig group, but the room was shadowed and I couldn’t tell for sure who it was that spoke. “There are no dragons left to activate it.”