“Yes, sir,” I said again, and he fell silent. I knew he was thinking of the Order, his chapterhouse and all the soldiers under his command. We both knew he was asking a lot of them—accepting the word of a known traitor, not surrendering the traitor to St. George, allowing dragons into the chapterhouse without repercussion. Such blasphemous procedures had never been considered before. But nobody had walked. No one had challenged him or me. I’d known leaders of other chapterhouses who’d governed through fear and intimidation, who’d had the soldier’s deference and obedience, but never their respect. Martin was not one of them. The soldiers of the Western chapterhouse trusted him with their lives, even if he was breaking every rule and tradition from the time the Order had been founded. I remembered the way he’d looked out for me after Lucas Benedict’s death, remembered how he’d come to my defense when I had accused the Patriarch of treason, the only officer to consider my words in an assembly of hundreds. And I wondered how many other secrets this man kept close to his chest.

“Can I ask you something, sir?” I ventured. He glanced up and nodded, and I took a deep breath. This might not be a good time to bring this up, but I might never get another chance. “Sir, how long did you know my parents were part of Talon?”

He let out a long sigh, as if he knew this had been coming for a while now. “From the beginning,” he replied, and gestured to the seat across from the desk. I slid into the chair, and Martin folded his hands on his desk. “Right after the raid on the compound,” he began, “Lucas contacted me and told me everything. That the mission was a success, that the target and all its servants were dead, but there was one survivor from the compound that he could not bring himself to kill. When he told me his plan was to bring you into the Order and raise you as a soldier, I said he was making a mistake. I told him that anything that came from dragons was evil, and that one day, you would turn on us and sell us out to the lizards.”

“Sir...”

He held up a hand. “Regardless of what I thought, Lucas would not hear it. He was determined to raise you as a soldier of St. George. He was adamant that there was something from that compound that could be saved, that didn’t have to be pure evil.” He paused, then said in a slow, weary voice, “Lucas knew your mother, Garret. That’s why he took you that day. Before he became a soldier, before she married a scientist and started working for the organization, they knew each other. Apparently, they were very good friends, perhaps even lovers, before life pulled them apart.”