Now it was back. Not all the time, and there were still times when he thought about the fire and raged or wept or both. He wasn’t going to turn his back on these people, not until he figured out what their angle was. But for the most part it was back, like a gift, something he’d never thought to have back again.

After that, he knew he couldn’t leave. Out there, without Cymry, he’d go back to being alone against the world. In here, with her, there was one absolutely true thing he was certain of. Cymry loved and needed him, and he loved and needed her. The rest—well, he’d figure it all out as it came.

But he woke every day with two persistent and immediate problems to solve. When his fingers itched to lift a kerchief or a purse, he wondered what would happen if he gave in to the urge—and when Kris and Jeri accepted him without question as one of themselves, he worried what would happen when they (and the rest of the Trainees) learned he’d been a thief. Cymry might be the center of his world, but he’d had friends before in Bazie and the boys, and he liked having them. He didn’t want to lose the ones he was getting now.

He woke one morning exactly six days after he had arrived, a day when he knew the rest of the Trainees would begin coming back in, signaling the beginning of his real classes tomorrow, although it would probably take two or three more days for all of them to make it back. It helped, of course, that they all had Companions, and however long their journeys were, they would travel in a fraction of the time it took an ordinary horse to cross the same distance. He had met most of his teachers, and even begun lessons designed to allow him to fit into the classes with some of them. He had no idea how many of them—besides Alberich and Teren—knew his background either.

And eventually, it would come out. Secrets never stayed secret for long. Eventually someone would say something.

He had worried over that like a terrier with a rat; in fact, he’d gone to bed that night thinking about it. And when he woke, it was with an answer at last.

Whether it would be the right answer was another question entirely. But he knew who to consult on it.