‘I have indeed heard of this,’ Kellaras replied. ‘Yet I tell you, after my audience with your lord, I saw nothing afflicting his intellect. Rather, he speaks in abstractions, in the language of poets. When the subject demands precision, his wit sharpens quickly. This requires a facility, a definite acuity of the mind.’

Galar Baras shrugged. ‘I reveal no secrets here, Kellaras. The rumour is long out – our lord feels afflicted, and the keenness of his intelligence, that you so surely describe, is to him evidence of the war he wages with himself, with the failings he senses besieging him. He strikes out with precision to battle the blunting of memories.’

‘I had first thought that he feared this return to childhood,’ Kellaras said, frowning. ‘But I began to suspect that he will welcome it, should it come to him. A release from all the fraught things of the adult world.’

‘You may well be right,’ Galar admitted. ‘Will you report to your master on this matter?’

‘He has promised Anomander a sword – do his skills fail him?’

‘No, we have seen nothing like that.’

‘Then Lord Henarald’s fears for his own health have no bearing on the commission.’

‘I thank you, Kellaras.’

Kellaras waved the gratitude away. ‘Besides, I could tell you my master’s likely response should he hear of your lord’s assertions.’

‘Oh, and what would he say?’

‘I imagine he would nod most thoughtfully, and then say: “There is much to be said for a return to childhood.”’

After a moment, Galar smiled, and this time there was no sadness to be found in it.

* * *

Kellaras drank his fair share of ale and offered up easy company that did much to ease the turmoil in Galar Baras’s soul, and when at last the captain rose, slurring his words of departure, and made his way unsteadily from the chamber, Galar was left alone once more, helpless to fend off the pain caused by the sight of Toras Redone.

The room was quieter now; the candles little more than stumps, as weary servants cleared plates and tankards, with only a few tables still occupied. She still held command of one of those tables, although her compatriots were drifting off where they slumped in their chairs, and when she at last rose, wavering for but a moment, and made her way over to Galar, only then did he realize that he had been waiting for her. And that she had known it.

‘How fares your courage, Galar Baras?’ Alcohol had rounded her words in a way he well recalled.

He watched as she took the chair Kellaras had been sitting in earlier. Stretching her legs out, the mud-caked boots edging towards his own leg upon the right, she folded her hands on her lap and regarded him with red-shot eyes.

‘You have come from the south?’ he asked.

‘Where else? Patrolling the Forulkan border.’

‘Any trouble?’

She shook her head. ‘Quiet. Not like the old days. But then, nothing is, is it?’