“We don’t die. We have faith.” Harathes looked to Dion. “Don’t we? If we have faith in the Light, then we’ll win against the odds, surely.”

“And everyone else who ever fought him was, what, secretly consumed with doubts?” Cyrene asked, throwing her hands up in the air. “We can’t do it without Enth.”

“Maybe it is better to fail, and be pure, than to succeed by such means,” Dion said.

She let the silence of that remark spread out across the room. Even Harathes didn’t seem that taken with it. Because, most of all, Harathes wanted to win. Win the fight, win the holiness contest, win Cyrene. “Penthos, you are a magician of noted power. You are the most powerful magician I have ever met. How would you stand, against all the armies of Darvezian?”

Penthos’s lip trembled a bit. She thought it was fear at first, but then she realized that her compliment had reduced him close to tears. At last he said, “You flatter me. Not without cause, admittedly. I would inflict dreadful harm on the forces of the Dark Lord. Thousands would burn at my behest. For you, I would tear down his fastnesses and fortresses, exterminate his Doomsayers, lay waste to his works. But defeat him, with all of his servants together? That would be beyond me, or any magician. I am truly sorry.”

“That’s all right.” She spared him a small smile of thanks. “Then… then I don’t know what we do. I fear that, if we go onward with the creature, we will be irrevocably lost to virtue. If indeed that has not already happened.”

“We have to destroy it,” Harathes decided.

“No!” Cyrene insisted.

“Do you have any idea of how much work I put into reworking that creature?” Penthos complained. “An unparalleled work of wizardy, and you’re just, ‘We have to destroy it.’ ”

“For Dion,” Harathes said.

“Oh, ah.” Penthos’s eyes darted to the priestess. “Well, for Dion…”

“It would have killed me,” Harathes pointed out. “Despite all Penthos’s strictures, it would have killed me if it could.”

“You would have killed it!” Cyrene spat.

“And what of that?” Harathes spread his hands, appealing directly to Dion. “It is not a person. It is a thing, an animal at best, a monster at worst, a creature touched by the Dark. It is ours to destroy or use as we see fit. I am a man, a child of the Light. It is my right to destroy this abomination if it poses a danger to me, or to any other human being. It has no such rights to life.”

“Will you just listen to yourself?” came Lief’s halfhearted rejoinder.

“It would have killed me,” Harathes insisted, locking eyes with Dion. “It violated Cyrene. It must be destroyed.”

“It—!” Cyrene started, then stumbled to a halt with all eyes on her. “It wasn’t like that.”