“Tea, please,” Alberich replied, and watched with interest as Geri moved efficiently about the tiny kitchen, heating water in the pot over the hearth and getting mugs for both of them. “I don’t know why I haven’t come here before, instead of making you come up the hill.”

He said that, because the kitchen smelled right. Those were Karsite spices he could taste faintly in the air, and a uniquely Karsite black tea that was steeping in that kettle. There were sausages hanging up in the corner of the hearth—both for further smoking and because the smoke kept insects away—sausages Alberich would bet tasted like the ones from the inn where he’d grown up.

“So what is on your mind?” Geri asked.

“A great many things,” Alberich replied, now fully relaxed, with Geri’s good tea on his tongue. “Tell something, though. What do you think about Myste?”

“I like her, but she’s deceptive. I don’t mean that she lies, I mean that her appearance is deceiving. She looks and sounds harmless, but she’s a hunter,” Geri said instantly. “She won’t let anything stand in her way once she’s on a scent. Though I’m not sure what quarry she’s stalking. Probably a lot of things, one of them being answers.”

“Ah, but to what questions?” Alberich replied.

“She’s stalking those, too. Why do you ask?” Geri responded curiously.

“I’m not sure. Now that I’m not having to browbeat her into training properly, and she’s a full Herald and Elcarth’s Second, we’re peers, so we’re no longer in conflict with one another; she intrigues me, I suppose. It must be that instinct, one hunter recognizing another. She’s the one who sent me here tonight, in fact.” He took a sip of tea and savored the flavor. It was the right flavor, the one from his childhood, although the flavor from his childhood was a diluted version of this. “I’m hunting answers myself.”

Geri regarded him with a somber gaze. “You, of all people, ought to know that you aren’t going to find many of those here. Questions, certainly, but precious few answers. Ours is a faith, Alberich, not a map or a guide, and certainly not a set of certitudes. At least, that is the way it should be—”

“Not what it has become.” He said that sadly, and once again, he was back in childhood, with that kind, yet stern priest, who tried to show him in ways a child would understand, just what the Sunlord was and was not. “We are the mirror of Valdemar—”