Alira could make out the sounds of Therin and Devan’s voices as she manoeuvred carefully into the hollow of the wall. Inside was a makeshift ladder, cobbled together with pieces of wood of various sizes, nails and screws. It led up, where the voices came from. Gingerly setting her weight on the first rung of the ladder, she waited for the creak of breaking wood but it seemed sound so she slowly climbed up.

“But she trusts me, sir, I can bring her back for questioning and–”

“You are not on duty right now, Therin,” Devan said quietly, a tinge of hurt in his voice. The ensuing silence filled the space above her as she climbed into a small area between the floor of Devan’s study and the ceiling of Noran’s room. If she sat with her back pressed to the wall, she could put her head near an opening that appeared to be just behind the bookshelf she had sat at earlier. She was, for all intents and purposes, inside the study.

Beside her were the signs of someone having spent a lot of time up in the small space. A blanket lay crumpled near the opening below her and she shivered. If it had been winter, she’d have been freezing within minutes. Even with the warmer weather outside she shivered in the dry chill of the space between rooms, never intended to be warmed.

“Yes, Father.” Therin’s voice lowered and Alira pictured him lowering his eyes with his comment, looking down at the top of the desk, perhaps.

“I’ll leave for the monastery in a few hours after I’ve finished going over the household things with Mrs. Jones. You can accompany me and I’ll excuse your…” he dropped his voice to a dark rumble. “Absence.”

“Father,” Therin said, and even Alira could hear the hint of pleading that tinted his words. “You don’t understand.”

“Then be quick about making sure I am up to speed. I am busy and have to clean up this mess when I get back.”

“Sir–Father,” Therin began, correcting himself. “The witch trusts me and I can bring her back,” he repeated. “I know I can.” Devan remained silent and Therin cleared his throat and continued. “She knows where something valuable is. Something I can bring back.”

“Therin,” Devan began, exasperated. “I told you. Don’t worry about your trials. I will ensure you have a suitable heroic deed to claim and–”

“Father,” Therin said again. “I’m not worried about it. I know this will be an adequate, more than adequate deed.”

“No, the tenuous relationship we hold with the High Inquisitor and her minion make your ascension a very tricky thing. Any hint that you’re not doing exactly what is required and she will make sure you never become a paladin.” The insult toward Noran was said with such heat that Alira gasped quietly.

“Elect a new Inquisitor,” Therin said with a shrug to his words.

“You know it’s not that simple. She must be found guilty of not following the codes and so far she has done nothing wrong.” Devan sounded frustrated and Alira pictured him fisting his hand.

“What if,” Therin said quietly and Alira wondered if he had leaned forward on the desk, closer to Devan. “What if I told you she tortured someone before having substantial evidence of witchcraft?”

Devan scoffed softly. “If we could catch her in such an act, I could bring down the entire might of the church onto her. The only reason she holds that position is because of me and she knows the laws are very strict when it comes to that particular role of the church.”

“This,” Therin said and Alira wished she could see what Therin was pointing to, “is from her.”

His burn. Henry said, figuring it out just as she did.

Devan was quiet and Alira could imagine how he looked as he studied Therin’s wound, raw and red still.

“How?”

“Not why, Father? How she did this is your concern?” Therin’s disappointed tone turned bitter as he rushed to continue. “She heated her claws in a candle that she and Noran keep just for this sort of thing. He lit the candle for her, watched as she pressed her device to my face, and I felt nothing but the satisfaction of what he had helped her do.”

“Why were you with her? I told you to stay away from her.” Devan’s tone was suspicious.

“It’s not been like that for years, and you know it.” Therin said defensively. “Not since that winter.” They both seemed to be sucked into the past, memories that each recalled different sifting through their minds in tandem. “I was a stupid kid then. I’ve done a lot of growing up since.”

“Then why were you with her?”

Therin’s hesitation was too long for what he said next to be anything but a half-truth at best.

“She wanted answers about the witch out of me.” The silence between father and son stretched on and on.

“I’m going to ask you, one time, Therin, to be honest with me. I want the complete truth from you, for once in your life.” The words were a slap and Alira could imagine Therin clenching his jaw and balling his hands into fists at his sides.

“When have I ever lied about the big things? The things that matter?”

“Your affair with Mara comes to mind.”

“I told you–”

“Yes. Yes, you did. You were a stupid boy in love with a beautiful woman and led astray by your…heart. You told me she was nothing, it was nothing, I needn’t worry that the daughter of a farmer,” he spat. “Would ever have the son of a High Lord.”

“That is the truth.”

“But it wasn’t, Therin! You promised yourself to her!” The High Lord’s words were so raw it was difficult to tell if he was angry or just pained.

“And Noran saw to the end of that!” Therin hissed back. “He spared you the misery of having to claim her as a daughter-in-law when he got sick. Throwing him away on her seemed fine. He was never going to make you proud anyway, so let them have each other, right?” Therin wasn’t shouting, his cold voice spilling into a whisper.

“You blame me for her fickle nature?” Devan sounded outraged.

“I blame you for never treating Noran and I the same, ever. What I did was never good enough, what he did was never right. But our standards were always transitory, our achievements never quite what you wanted. And you blamed me for what she did, never once stopping to think about how I was still a child! I wasn’t even fifteen when you sent me away. Children make mistakes, Devan.”

“Mine certainly do.”

“See! That, right there! Never good enough. I’ll never do anything good enough.”

“She would have ruined your life!”

“She has anyway!” Therin’s pain made his shout raw. Silence settled uncomfortably.

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“Who do you hate more? Me, or Mara?” Devan asked quietly.

“I’ve never hated you. But instead of letting me learn my lesson, or Gods forbid, teaching me the lesson, you bundled it all up yourself and fixed my mistake. And the cost for her silence, for not holding me to the childish promise I made her, is that she now runs the most wicked Inquisition this church has ever seen, allowing her to torture innocent people.”

“The witches are not innocent,” Devan stated. Something must have passed in Therin’s eyes, giving away some hint of what he was concealing.

“What are you not telling me?” Devan waited. “What has she done to you?” Therin must have shaken his head or given some other kind of sign that Devan was on the wrong track. “The witch.” Devan’s voice had curdled, his anger deepening.

“She’s not what she seems,” Therin whispered. Alira knew that Therin was talking about herself, not the High Inquisitor. Devan’s silence was now chilly.

“Another woman enters your life and you throw everything you have away.” Devan’s voice was flat and cold.

“It’s not like that, Father.” Therin said, but he was deflated.

“You’ve been seduced,” the High Lord declared and she heard the creak of his chair as he stood. The sounds of his steps took him a short distance, perhaps around the desk to face his adopted son.

“I don’t have to tell you, Therin, the dangers of the Morinn. The scars across my back are my reminders, all fifty lashes a stern denouncement of their sins. What they are is nothing but corrupted, rotten nature, a blight on man. They are the antithesis to our beliefs. A perversion of what was once good.”

Alira’s back ached as she held still, her breath caught in her chest. She waited for the younger man’s reply, fear and dread pooling inside her gut with thick, inky coldness.

“Yes,” Therin breathed. “But she’s not like them.”

“Neither was Erin,” the High Lord’s voice didn’t break but Alira could hear the hesitation he had in saying her mother’s name. “And look how she ruined Galvyn’s life.”

Alira was taken aback by the name of the fallen paladin. Her heart wrenched for his ruined, wasted life. How had her mother destroyed him? What had he done for her that drove him to the brink of nothing, no way out of but to end his young, bright life? She didn’t doubt that whatever her mother had set in motion had also set this man careening, unable to stop the inevitable. The sadness of it made her chest ache.

Therin said nothing and Devan sighed. His footsteps retreated across the room and she heard the clink of glass on glass, the sound of liquid pouring. He sat down again behind the desk and his voice sounded muffled, as though he had his face in his hands.

“I’ve done everything I can to protect you, my son, from the dangers of this world.”

“Father, I–”

“And it seems that nothing I do gets through to you. I failed with Noran and now I’m watching you fall before my eyes, and you will burn for your choices if I do not stop you.” His voice grew stronger as he lifted his head to face Therin.

“You’ve not heard a word I’ve just said,” whispered the monk softly. Therin was incredulous as his father willed away his earlier passionate words.

“When we get back to the monastery, I will draw up the paperwork for your mission. While you wait for me to finish the necessary steps, you will take your trial and finish your book list. I will send you across the sea to Dinaru to bring home their tithes.”

“Father–” But Devan continued, not listening.

“When you return, Therin, I will award you with your hammer. You can take a post either back in Dinaru or some other pagan land. I’ll grant you a title and land. We’ll arrange a marriage if you wish for a wife. You will be out of harm’s way, and out of trouble.” The finality of Devan’s tone brooked no argument and Alira knew Therin could feel the same chains she could. The High Lord had sorted out the rest of his life, no chance for glory, no chance to prove himself worthy of all that he was to gain.

“I don’t want my hammer handed to me, Devan!” Therin burst out and the silence following his declaration was thick with surprise. “I’m going to find the book you let get stolen, and I’m going to bring it back.”

“Therin,” Devan warned, his voice dark. “You will not take that tone with me.”

“I don’t want your help with this. All I want is the letter allowing me to go on the mission and come back. I want to prove to you that I am capable and that I can do these things. I want you to treat me like you would any other monk at that monastery and give me a chance! Can’t you see that you’re drowning me!” He slammed his hand onto the desk, rattling the writing set and Devan’s glass, startling Alira. A gasping sob escaped Therin, the emotion of years of frustration bubbling out in a moment.

“Please, Father. Please let me prove myself.”

Devan’s silence was unreadable. Alira desperately wished she could see their faces to understand better what was going on.

“I see,” Devan’s short reply was soft and Alira wondered if he did indeed see.

“I just want a chance,” Therin said, his voice hoarse with emotion, “to prove that I am a good man, a good son.” Alira counted to a hundred before Devan replied and she could hear the tears in his voice.

“Then you shall have it.”

She couldn’t tell if his tone was decisive or laced with finality.

When father and son were done talking, their tones in the final part of the conversation hushed and wrought with feeling, Alira climbed back down the inside of the wall and exited into Noran’s room. She dusted the years of dust off her dark clothes and pulled the cobwebs from her two braids. As she did, she wondered what Devan would do if she just left the room, found Therin and took him away. If she threw an angry glance over her shoulder as she disappeared with the young monk.

He’d give you to Mara. Henry said and Alira shuddered and put her tongue to the cheek that had recently had a hole through it. He might be willing to tentatively trust Therin but you’re persona non grata with our dear High Lord.

Banishing Henry with a shake of her head, she returned to the desk. On some kind of whim, she opened the bottom drawer again and took out the thicker package of letters, shoved both bundles into her pack, and sat on the floor before the hearth to think about all she had learned in the last few days.

That Therin was trying to help her was still evident. He had not revealed that she was in the house, nor had he been truthful when he had told Devan she knew where the book was. His faith in their ability to track it down concerned her. It could take forever and then there was the issue of the clock ticking inside her until Shadesorrow unleashed the Unmaking. They were racing against so much: her own ability to resist Shadesorrow, the witches finding Erin’s soulstones, and now it seemed, Devan’s patience.

A little pressure is good for motivation.

“And if that pressure tips me over into the darkness?” Alira whispered aloud.

Then it doesn't matter anymore, does it, pet?

She drew her knees up and put her head in her hands, the hopelessness edging into her chest.

“Henry, what if I had never escaped the slavers?”

What do you mean?

“Would the Morinn find her soulstones and resurrect her and she’d find us?”

Alira, Henry began and she groaned at his condescending tone. You would have ended up at Bloody Hawk when you did, no matter what. Only something hugely catastrophic could have deterred you from this path.

“What do you mean?”

Do you know how a prophecy works? The humor in his voice made her angry.

“Obviously, I do. It’s predetermined.”

Yes and no. Prophecies such as the ones the witches wrote down, are merely how things should be. What will happen if the wrong, or right, steps are taken. They are the trajectory that our reality is careening on and very little alters the path.

In her mind, Henry spun a vision of planets and stars moving, passing each other in brief blips of light.

If we don’t alter that path, we will end up exactly where we were meant to.

In her mind, two planets collided, the explosive light silent and blinding. The glittering leftover debris was lifeless but starkly beautiful.

But if we find a way to alter the path…

The image started over, one planet being struck by a much smaller celestial body and shoving it out of the path of the other planet. The planet that had been struck wobbled, and spun away in a new direction, and the two large bodies missed each other, one utterly unharmed, one lop-sided, changed, but still mostly intact. The meteor was nothing but dust, forgotten and lost to time.

We may not save everyone. In fact, we may even wind up destroying this reality in a completely new way, unseen before. But we avoid what we know is devastating. We avoid what we know for a fact will not benefit anyone.

“Am I the meteor?”

What do you think you are? His voice had lost some of its usual harshness and a soft, patient tone replaced it.

“I think we need to see what that book says about me so we can change the course of this disaster.”

I think that’s the most intelligent thing you’ve ever said, Alira. Either I’m rubbing off on you or you’re finally growing up.

“Shut up, Henry,” she said as she got up.

There’s my girl. An annoyed blush crept up her cheeks and she felt Henry’s delighted laugh. A ghostly caress on her mind sent shivers down her spine. Let’s find that book, shall we, pet?