“I’m listening,” Halveric said. He reached out and pinched something from the limb. “I listen better when my hands are busy.”

“Well, then … I should have known everything in there, but I didn’t. And the oldest were written long enough ago that the writing and the words are both difficult. It is no proper excuse, but my life has been busy; I never looked back more than a few hundred years until recently.”

Halveric nodded, his gaze now fixed on a row of herbs. He rolled a fragrant leaf in his fingers.

“The earliest—” Andressat swallowed. He still found it hard to frame the words to describe what he’d read, the horror he’d felt, the urgency of his concern. “—the earliest are from Old Aare itself. I had no idea we had anything that old. There’s a little glass pitcher supposedly from Old Aare, and a small tapestry hanging that was in my mother’s room, but I always thought that was a fabrication. Nothing could last so long.”

“Jeddrin,” Halveric said, looking him in the eye. “Just tell me.”

Andressat stiffened. But Halveric was right; he had been dancing around the core of it. “I found scrolls from Old Aare, describing what happened there, why people left—fled—to Aarenis and, more than that, across the Eastern Sea. Evil came to Aarenis before them; more came with them, and lingered even to this present day. The elder peoples left Aarenis, as that evil invaded and took over their own powers. I do not know how—whoever wrote that scroll does not know how—only that some weakness, some division, among them made it possible.”

“Lingers even now?” Halveric said, facing him once more, his face furrowed. “Are you sure?”

Andressat spread his hands. “How else explain that once rid of Siniava, we have one who is, I swear to you, just as evil. How explain the constant warfare, the constant draining of our resources?”

“Evil gods are everywhere,” Halveric said, making the avert sign with his heart-hand.

“Everywhere, but not with the same power everywhere,” Andressat said. “As water flows downhill and gathers in hollows, so evil finds ways and places where it can gather and then … then flow out, to poison the world. By supporting Alured, you and your king opened such a conduit, I believe, and I see no one who can save Aarenis—not just my land of Andressat, but all of Aarenis—but he.”

Halveric scowled. “You want Kieri to come back to Aarenis? And do what? He’s our king now; he can’t just leave.”

“I don’t know what he can do, but he must at least know what is wrong,” Andressat said. “If he cannot come himself—and I understand he has responsibilities here—he can send his former Company, perhaps.”

“Over whom he has no command, now,” Halveric said. “And I will tell you this, as well. Kieri knew he had erred in Aarenis, in the end. He regretted that he had not recognized Alured’s nature, but he could not think of any way to restrain Alured that would not make things worse—lead to more protracted war, more damage for people who had done no wrong.”