“I knew of you for many years before you asked me to join you in this crusade,” Penthos told her awkwardly. He was still holding out the little flower, she realized, and she could not make herself take it. “We people of power, we keep track of our peers, do we not? Dion, watching you, your deeds, your triumphs, I began to… slowly there was a… I started to think that… I haven’t… I need to…” His face twisted into a savage snarl, but it was directed entirely inward, at his own sudden lack of articulation. “What I’m saying, trying to say, what I’m, it’s… you’re… to me, you’re… I…” And abruptly there was a flare of fire about the flower in his hand, and he was blowing at it frantically, muttering, “No, no, no,” and trying to rescue the creation he had forced such effort into. But it was gone, gone to cinders in the heat of his frustration, and there was nothing left of it at all.

“Penthos.”

His look to her was agonized.

“I have vows,” she told him.

He let that echo for a long while before taking a deep breath and saying, “I had thought… these might be unusual times, given the significance of what we are about.” He could not have known he was making the shadow of an argument already tried and fumbled by Harathes earlier that night.

“Then my vows are all the more important,” she told him gently. “If ever we might need Armes’s grace and favor, then it is when we enter the country of our enemy.”

She saw him framing arguments in his mind, each one swimming up close enough for it to move his lips, his hands, and then sink away unspoken. Some five or six times he was on the point of trying to tackle her. She could not guess what case he might have made: demands of recompense for his services, perhaps; guilt; recriminations for leading him on; tantric mystic nonsense about acts required to boost his magic. Surely they were all turned up as he stirred the pool of his invention, and were revealed to be so much silt.

He straightened up, drawing his dignity about him like a cloak. “I had to try,” he whispered, and that nearly broke her. She felt tears come to her eyes suddenly: the greatest magician of the age, perhaps, his heart raw and exposed like a lovestruck schoolboy’s, and yet from somewhere had come this self-possession, this knowledge of when to admit defeat.