Ash shook his black head. “He is nothing—a boy puffed with vanity and pride of birth. You react to him because he has all the things you did not have—wealth and power and good looks. If I am to be your mentor I must make you understand this. I can scarcely follow him in the aethereal, he is of so little account.”

Thorn frowned. “That makes no sense. He burns in the aethereal like a sun.”

Ash flicked his scythe. “You exaggerate.”

Thorn was silent. Trying to make out what Ash might mean—or what he might have just given away.

“After Ticondaga, none will stand against you,” Ash said.

Thorn thought, So you keep saying.

Liviapolis—Morgon Mortirmir

Deep in the university, at Liviapolis, Morgon woke to find that Tancreda had, after all, stayed with him. Her brother was snoring on a chair. She had brought him the manuscript he needed, and he’d begun to read—

More immediately, Tancreda was draped across Mortirmir, who was lying on a bench with a pair of Venike-made lenses in his right hand and a little known treatise by one of the magisters of the past called Optika in the other. He carefully dropped the book and the lenses to the floor.

Her hazel eyes opened.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

“Could I just once be very intelligent, or elegant, or perhaps stubborn or clever?” she asked sleepily. “Must it be beautiful? Always?” She narrowed her eyes. “Who found the manuscript on lenses? Mmmm? Was that beauty?”

Mortirmir glanced at the brother, and then, greatly daring, leaned over her and put his mouth on hers. He winked in his head at the absent shade of Harmodius.

Her lips remained tightly closed until the tip of his tongue licked them lightly, and then they sprang open—a delicious parting that left him giddy.

She moaned deep in her throat like an angry cat. But she was not angry, and she writhed across him until she’d shifted her weight and put an arm behind his head.

The hand on her neck probed a little and found even more luxuriant softness—she shifted again, her lips changing from left to right across his, and her tongue—

Suddenly she sat up. “You are not dead!” she said. “The working!”

For the first time since he was granted powers, Mortirmir cursed all of hermeticism.

Chapter Five

The Albin

Amicia spent their first day on the road reassuring herself and her sisters that she was not leading them to temptation, or even humiliation and death. Riding with the Red Knight and his household—who were, however she might wish to describe them, sell-swords and mercenaries and not knights errant—terrified her two companions.