“He did.” Mikeli sighed a little. “Very well, then. Juris also told me Aris has been out windows and up on roofs since he was knee high and only fell once … but here, once would be more than enough. And both of you are heavier now.”

“We’ll be careful,” Camwyn said. Another few bites of stirred eggs and he said, “I … do understand now, sir king, why you took Egan away.” He looked up to meet Mikeli’s serious gaze. “He was making me not like some people … lying about them.”

“Yes,” Mikeli said. “I hated the necessity—he was only a boy, and maybe a boy could learn to change, but the danger was too great.”

“I don’t think he would have changed,” Camwyn said. He dropped his gaze to his plate and stared at the last two sausages. “I think … I think he was one of those with someone else inside them.”

“Why?” Mikeli asked.

“One time…” Camwyn had not been able to bring himself to tell anyone about it before; he had tried not to remember it in the days he thought of Egan Verrakai as his best friend. “One time he was close to me … very close … and his eyes … and his voice … he was saying things I could scarcely hear, just a murmur…” He shivered at the memory, the sudden jolt of fear, the instant of revulsion so strong that he’d jerked away from Egan. And Egan had grinned.

“Just a trick his brothers used to play on him, he told me,” Camwyn said. “But I was cold—I shivered and shivered, and you remember the physicians said I had taken a chill.” He looked up and saw his brother’s face white as salt, a look of stark horror.

“Cam! And you told no one?”

“I—I was afraid. And I didn’t know—”

“Bless Gird and the High Lord for protecting you,” Mikeli said. “For I believe what you describe was an intent to take you over—to kill you, the real you, and insert a false you—whichever ancient Verrakai inhabited Egan—instead.”

A sudden thrill of fear ran through Camwyn. “Could there be … anything left? Of them—him—it?”

“In you? I’m certain not,” Mikeli said. “And Egan—his body and whatever lived in it—is very thoroughly dead.”

Camwyn was not so sure. What if Egan had been trying to insert magery—just that? Or if the insertion or wakening—whichever it was—of magery had been only the first step in taking him over?