“You would be dead right now,” Talamir repeated uncomfortably. “You couldn’t have denied your Gift. With or without Kantor, sooner or later it would have betrayed you, and you would still have gone to the fires—”

“But my own death it was, and mine was the choice to face, or to escape it,” he pointed out, anger and resentment coloring every word. “That choice, from me was taken. Perhaps the witch-sight I could have fought, taken from me also was the option to try. And in the first place, had not the witch-sight come upon me when and where it did, condemned I should not have been.”

A village might have gone under the sword, though—

The silence that fell between them was as heavy and uncompromising as lead.

But it was not Talamir who answered him.

:I am sorry, Alberich,: said the voice in his mind humbly and full of contrition. :You are absolutely in the right. You had a life and choices, and I took them from you. I shan’t even bother to make all of the arguments that a Valdemaran would accept. You aren’t a Valdemaran, and there is no reason you should accept them. For you, my actions were nothing less than arrogance and a smug certainty that I was in the right to run roughshod over you. All I can do is apologize, and try to make it right with you.:

He closed his eyes, his own heart contracting at the hurt and pain in that voice, armoring himself against it with the anger and resentment in his. “A better way, there could have been found,” he said aloud.

“In a sense,” Talamir replied quietly, “this is between you and Kantor. But ultimately, all of us are responsible, so I must apologize as well. We take such pride in our freedom here—and then we turned around and robbed you of yours. With the best intentions in the world—”

“Even the Voice that to the Fires sent me, good intentions may have had,” Alberich retorted, opening his eyes again. “If not to save my soul, then those souls about me.”

Again, Talamir winced.

“Served my people, did I, and served them well,” he continued, bitterness overflowing at the thought that he had been forced to abandon those villagers who depended on him to stand vigilant guard over their safety. “Who now, protect them will? The Voices? Ha! Those who willed, in my place to stand?” He glared, daring Talamir to answer him.

“I do not know,” Talamir admitted quietly. “But I have already offered any remedy that you could ask. What do you suggest? Name it, and I will do my personal best to see it done.”

In the face of such a reasonable answer, Alberich’s anger suddenly collapsed, like an inflated bladder with a pin put to it. “I—” he began, and rubbed his eyes, faced with uncertainty of monumental proportions. “I know not.”