“And you are the Trickster,” she noted. “Did you try to fool me?”

“Why should I, when I don’t want to influence you? None of us wants to influence you. That’s why you get truth—perhaps more than you can handle.” The sudden concern in his look said what his voice did not. Was it too much?

She raised her hands and let them drop limply. “I’m here.”

“Thank you,” he said, looking directly into her eyes.

His gaze shifted to a silent figure sitting quietly nearby on the ground. “Here’s Patience. I’ll leave you to it.”

He walked away.

Still cool, still removed, Patience observed Miranda for a moment. “Take a little time,” she suggested. “If you have questions, I will try my best to answer them.”

“Who is Chance?”

Patience actually smiled. “An experiment. Which makes his offshoot . . . an oversight. To make Chance fully human, I had to remove from him some aspects of his undying nature.”

“That sounds painful.”

Patience shook her head. “It happens all the time. When the undying ones have traced all their paths, they return to me, their source, and go out from me anew, reformed, with different selves. Or sometimes they send out their own fragments of Being to trace separate paths, becoming sources themselves.”

“And what you removed . . . has chosen to become a killer.”

“I am not omniscient. I did not anticipate envy. No undying in the world has ever been fully human. Chance is the first. The other is trying to become the second, but on his own terms.”

“But what about Ajit?”

Patience shook her head. “Ajit is the ultimate trick. Paama would not have had two sons born alive without my interference, and Ajit is not precisely the same as the son who would have died.”

Miranda showed her confusion. Patience smiled and spoke more plainly. “He’s like Mr. Reis—a changeling, using the shadow of a stillborn child.”

Miranda hunted for a question with an answer she might be able to understand. “Why did Outis say I’m worse than an amulet?”

“You are bound to Chance’s future.”

“To him? Not Ajit? But when we met, Chance treated me like he barely knew me.”

Patience looked at her with amused eyes. “Of course. He knows you as you will be, not as you are now. And yet he made a world for you. What more do you want? But I have not finished answering your question.”

Miranda nodded slowly, waiting, sensing that Patience was hesitating.

“I may also have something to do with what you will become, but ultimately it depends on the choice you make,” she said.