Then again, she’d be a happier person if she were a little more like me. Wouldn’t she? She always seems so sour.

Stop thinking about it, he told himself as he took his pants back off, and his underwear and socks, and slid into bed to try to sleep. Stop thinking about it.

But he didn’t stop. Pat was all over his thoughts before he slept, and while he slept, and he woke up thinking about her in the morning, cursing himself for a fool as he prepared to head over to Coach Lieder’s house. The last thing he needed was to have a woman on his mind.

Confession

10

CONFESSION

Wad gated to the farming village in the high country of Iceway. He appeared near the public well, so that there was no chance that his manner of arrival would go unremarked. He came showing his power: A gatemage is in the world, and he came here, and he walked from this well directly to the house where the strange woman and her two damaged, terrified sons were brought only a few days ago.

It was the house of Roop and Levet where Wad walked. Inside, he found—as he expected—that the eldest daughter, Eko, was tending to Anonoei, the onetime concubine of King Prayard, and her two sons, eight-year-old Eluik and six-year-old Enopp.

The boys had spent the past two years in total isolation, living like tortured animals. For Enopp especially, the two-year imprisonment had been more than half his life, for who remembers anything before the age of three? Their imprisonment had ended in terror and violence, with soldiers stabbing at them; and then they had been magically gated to this high mountain place, to be cared for by strangers, and their wounds healed, and their mother restored to them, and her children restored to her, and all was …

Not well. Wad did not expect things to be well at all.

The boys did not speak, but they saw him come in. They did not fear him. If they thought of him in any way, it would come from the fact that they had seen him magically heal wounds, that he had arranged for them to be fed and kept warm. They would think of him as the great mage who had rescued them from hell. If they were capable of rational thought at all.

Wad was looking at the boys, who were looking at him. Anonoei was looking down at the table, where she was chopping an onion. Chopping it very, very fine.

It was Eko, the eldest daughter of the house, who spoke first. “The man in the tree,” she said. “Have I done well with them? Do they look strong to you?”

“Yes,” said Wad.