Craning his head, he leaned out perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect. He heard Tisthanna’s whinnying laugh, and it relieved him—somewhat. Tisthanna was nothing if not sensible.

Then the two women were walking side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower’s foundation, talking loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window. Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar—

He nearly followed it clacking down.

Tisthanna let loose an involuntary “Ooop!” then chortled as Achamian, his long white beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.

“Mast-Master Akka!” the children called out in a broken chorus.

The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious …

And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.

There is a progression to all things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world, everything has its reasons.

“So,” she said, her tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, “the Great Wizard.”

There was a strangeness to her, something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.

“What are you doing here?” Achamian snapped.

He had sent Tisthanna and the children away and now stood with the woman in the sunlight to the lee of the tower, on the broad white stone the children called the Turtle Shell. For years they had been drawing on it with the tips of burnt sticks: grotesque faces, oddly affecting pictures of trees and animals, and, lately, the letters Achamian had taught them to write. There was an order to the drawings, with the steadier lines of symbol and verisimilitude struck across the pale remnants of fancy, like the record of the soul’s long, self-erasing climb.

She had instinctively sought out the highest point—something that inexplicably irritated him. She was short, obviously lithe beneath her leather and woollens. Her face was dark, beautiful, with the colour and contours of an acorn. Save for the green irises and a slight elongation of the jaw, she was exactly as he remembered her …

Except that he had never seen her in his life.

Was she the reason why Esmenet had betrayed him? Was she why his wife—his wife!—had chosen Kellhus over a sorcerer, a broken-hearted fool, all those years ago?

Not because of the child she carried, but because of the child she had lost?