She spent innumerable watches lost in revery during this time, her soul’s eye conjuring visions of the man she secretly named her father. When she arrived, it seemed that everything was the way she imagined it. Exactly. A lonely hillside spilling skyward, trees scarred with sorcery’s dread murmur. An even lonelier stone tower, a makeshift roof raised across its collapsed floors, grasses growing from rotten-mortar seams. Stacked-stone outbuildings, with their heaped wood, drying fish, and stretched pelts. Slaves who smiled and talked like caste-menials. Even children skipping beneath great-boughed maples.

Only the sorcerer surprises her, probably because she has expectations aplenty of him. Drusas Achamian, the Apostate, the man who turned his back on history, who dared curse the Aspect-Emperor for love of her mother. True, he seemed entirely different in each of the lays sung about him, even in the various tales told by her mother, by turns stalwart and doubt-ridden, learned and hapless, passionate and cold-handed. But it was this contradictory nature that had so forcefully stamped his image in her soul. In the cycle of historical and scriptural characters that populated her education, he alone seemed real.

Only he isn’t. The man before her seems to mock her soft-bellied imaginings: a wild-haired hermit with limbs like barked branches and eyes that perpetually sort grievances. Bitter. Severe. He bears the Mark, as deep as any of the sorcerers she has seen glide through the halls of the Andiamine Heights, but where they drape silks and perfume about their stain, he wears wool patched with rancid fur.

How could anyone sing songs about such a man?

His eyes dull at the mention of the Gnosis—the inward look of concealed pity, or so it seems. But when he speaks, his tone is almost collegial, except that it’s hollow.

“Is it true, what they say, that witches are no longer burned?”

“Yes. There’s even a new School.”

He does not like the way she says that word, “School.” She can see it in his eyes.

“A School? A School of witches?”

“They’re calling themselves the Swayal Compact.”

“Then what need do you have of me?”

“My mother will not allow it. And the Swayali will not risk her Imperial displeasure. Sorcery, she says, leaves only scars.”

“She’s right.”

“But what if scars are all you have?”

This, at least, gives him pause. She expects him to ask the obvious question, but his curiosity seems bent in a different direction.

“Power,” he says, glaring at her with an intensity she does not like.

“Is that it? You want to feel the world crumble beneath the weight of your voice.”

She knows this game. “Was that how it was for you in the beginning?”

His glare seems to falter over some inner fact. But it means less than nothing, winning arguments. The same as with her mother.

“Go home,” he says. “I would sooner be your father than your teacher.”