Dorrin had a moment of stark panic. What was deep in her Verrakai heart? But Paks was still talking.

“I remember you as much like a fine blade—trustworthy, keen-edged, someone any of us soldiers could trust when our own captain was away, someone who never delighted in causing pain. Your own cohort respected you absolutely. When I met you again, last fall, you were the same, but now I could see the flame of life the Marshal-General told us all have. Yours burns clear and clean—it did then, and it does now.”

“I—I am—I don’t know—I make mistakes—”

Paks shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Remember when you told the Knight-Commander you had once dreamed of being a paladin?”

“Yes.” Dorrin felt the heat rise in her cheeks. “It was a foolish child’s dream—”

“Was mine?” Paks asked. “Mine was much the same, barring the part about not wanting to spend my time weaving and shoveling dung. It is not foolish to want to be better, to spend a life helping others.”

“But I was a Verrakai. To think I might be acceptable to Falk, to the gods—of course it could not be.” But even as she spoke, her magery surged again, yearning toward the crown she had put down.

Paks snorted. “If the gods could accept a sheepfarmer’s daughter from the edge of nowhere why would they care about your family? They do not select paladins in family groups, but individually.”

“And I was not fit.”

“Captain—Lord Duke—”

“Oh, just call me Dorrin,” Dorrin said. “We are past rank here.”

“Dorrin, then. What you said that night of the torment you endured as a child—it was as bad for you as the torment the Liartians put me through in Vérella. Worse, for you had no experience of good, had you? And you but a child. I at least knew I’d been chosen. I had seen Gird and the others, when I was fully healed. When you came to the Company of Falk, you were still unhealed, is that not so?”

“Yes, but … what are you saying?” The old dream rose in her mind; her magery took it and held it fast.

“I say to you what Master Oakhallow said to me, in different words: You are what you are, and the gods may have plans for you now that you were not able to fulfill then.”

“It is too late to become a paladin,” Dorrin said, surprising herself as the words came out of her mouth.

“I don’t know if that’s what the gods intend for you,” Paks said. “But consider what you did today. Removing the curse from a well is much like healing it, I would say. And you cannot have that—” She pointed at the table. “—for no reason. If they want you for a paladin, you will become one—after all, they made one of me, after so many thought me a useless coward.”

“You were never that,” Dorrin said.

“You were never a villainous Verrakai.”