These words, spoken through the lense of wise and weary confidence that was Obotegwa, chilled Sorweel to the pith. Demons were so much easier! This … this …

How does a child war against a father? How does a child not … love?

Sorweel could feel the dismay on his face, the bewilderment, but his shame was muted by the realization that Zsoronga felt no different. “So what are his wishes, then? The Aspect-Emperor. If all this is … is a fraud, then what are his true ends?”

They had climbed out of the shallow marsh and now crested a low knoll. Zsoronga nodded past Sorweel’s shoulder, to where, in the congestion of the near distance, the young King could see Eskeles’s absurd form fairly bowing the back of his huffing donkey. More lessons …

“The Wizard does not say,” the Successor-Prince continued when he glanced back. “But I fear that you and I shall know before this madness is done with.”

That night he dreamed of Kings arguing across an ancient floor.

“There is the surrender that leads to slavery,” the Exalt-General said. “And there is the surrender that sets one free. Soon, very soon, your people shall know that difference.”

“So says the slave!” Harweel cried, standing in a flower of outwardhooking flames.

How bright his father burned. Lines of fire skittering up the veins wrapping his arms. His hair and beard a smoking blaze. His skin blistering like pitch, shining raw, trailing lines of fiery grease …

How beautiful was his damnation.

At first he battled the slave, crying out. Porsparian was little more than hands in the darkness, fending, pressing, and then as Sorweel eventually calmed, soothing.

“Ek birim sefnarati,” the old slave murmured, though it sounded more like a mutter in his broken wood-pipe voice. “Ek birim sefnarati …Shhh … Shhh …” Over and over, little more than a shadow kneeling at the side of Sorweel’s cot.

Illumination slowly tinted the greater dark beyond the canvas planes of his tent, a slow inhalation of light.

“I saw my father burn,” he croaked to the uncomprehending slave.

For some reason, he did not begrudge the gnarled hand that rested on his shoulder. And it seemed a miracle the way the slave’s cracked-leather features gained reality in the fading gloom. Sorweel’s own grandfather had died on the Pale when he was very young, so he had never known the indulgent warmth of a father’s father’s adoration. He had never learned the way the years opened the hearts of the old to the miraculousness of the young. But he thought he could see it in Porsparian’s strange yellow-smiling eyes, in the rattle of his voice, and he found himself trusting it completely.

“Does that mean he’s damned?” he asked thickly. A grandfather, it seemed, would know. “Dreams of burning?”