He could not change anything, could not take control of him—Danny North was master, and there was not enough of Wad within his captured gates for him to hope to take control. The deepest self of a gatemage was not in his outselves, the way it was with other kinds of mages. This was why gatemages could raise no clants. But the gates were still a part of him, and so now he was a part of Danny North.

And all the gates that Wad had stolen over the centuries, they had felt the same. The mages were not as strong as Wad, and so perhaps they had not felt themselves inside him as clearly as Wad now felt himself inside Danny North. But they must have been aware.

And because Wad had lived on and on inside the tree, the captured gates had not faded and died after their mages died. They were all still alive.

Wad had suppressed them, kept them silent. But they had been watching. They knew him as no one could ever know another human being, from the heart out—unless manmages also had such deep understanding.

In only a few days inside Danny North, Wad knew him intimately, the feel of him, the kind of man he was, the loves and fears and hopes and hates of him. So in these fourteen centuries, how well did the other gatemages still shadowed in Wad’s hearthoard come to know him?

And now their knowledge was inside Danny North.

Wad could feel them, too, the gates that were fellow captives of this boyish Gatefather. He realized now that he knew them all, that even as he suppressed their cries, the tumult of their rage and despair, their surges of will, he had come to know them. They had been a part of him, and now that they were gone, he missed that intimate connection. At such great distance, in another man’s hearthoard on another world, he longed to listen to them now.

The trouble was, they hated him. Even inside Danny North’s hearthoard, they stayed as far from Wad’s gates as they could. For even there, Wad’s power was great, his hoard of gates vast indeed compared to theirs—though all of them were puny before the billion gates that belonged to Danny North himself. The other gates—the remnants of so many dead mages—still feared and hated Wad.

And loved Danny North.

That was what astonished Wad, when he understood it. These gates were no less captive than they had been before. Danny North had not set them free. Yet they responded to their new master as if he had liberated them. As much as they had hated—still hated—Wad, they loved this boy.