“No. I’m maintaining contact. And that’s all. We might need them someday. They give me information because they hope we’ll support them. They set up my inside man for me. Whatever else they do, they do on their own.”

There was the slightest of tremors in Michael’s voice. Ragnarson did not think it was anger. Trebilcock was holding back.

He shifted tacks. “What’s this about Mist?”

Trebilcock sensed that his interest was not casual. “It won’t amount to anything. That sort of thing’s gone on since she got here. There’ll always be cliques that want her for a figurehead.”

“Wanting and getting aren’t the same thing. She’d never settle for anything less than the imperial power. What did you think of the wizard today? Behaving a little strange?”

Trebilcock stared at the woods. “When isn’t he strange?”

“Out of character. Throwing scowls around at people. Like trying to intimidate. Like saying if you open your mouth I’m going to give you a case of the miseries to last you the rest of your life.”

“You’d have to ask him about it. I did catch something between him and Mist.”

“I talked. He didn’t have anything to say.”

Michael shrugged.

“Reason suggests a problem would not be political. Varthlokkur doesn’t get into those games. It would be something personal. And with him personal means Nepanthe. His great obsession.”

Centuries ago the child who would become Varthlokkur had watched his mother burn at the command of the wizards of Ilkazar. The child fled into the Dread Empire and learned sorcery at the knees of Shinsan’s then tyrants, Yo Hsi and Nu Li Hsi. He had come forth from the shadow a man of vengeance and had pulled the old empire down. And when he was done he had discovered he had nothing more for which to live. Nothing except a presentiment that one day a woman would be born that he would love. If he would wait.

Waiting had become more agony than joy, for the woman, when the time came, fell in love with another man. A man who, as the fates snickered, proved to be Varthlokkur’s own son by a brief earlier, loveless marriage.

The woman was Nepanthe and the man Mocker, and they, before Mocker’s death at Ragnarson’s hand, had brought into the world a single son, Ethrian, who had fallen into the hands of enemies during the Great Eastern Wars and not been heard of again, except as the lever by which the Pracchia had compelled Mocker to attempt assassinating Ragnarson.

Ethrian. It was a name accursed.

The man who had fathered the wizard had been named Ethrian and he had been the last emperor of Ilkazar. The woman had named her child for the father, though he had shed the name upon entering the Dread Empire. And he, in his turn, had named his son Ethrian, though the child was but a babe when carried off from his parents and did not know he bore the name till later years, when he had borne the Mocker sobriquet too long to change….