the study of things lost, of magics no one could teach but a goddess. There was everything but friendship, companionship, love—but what were those things if he was going to go mad and couldn’t enjoy them anyway? This was his birthright, and people had been trying to take his birthright for as long as he’d lived. He’d given everything to be here. What would happen to his harem if he left? He’d given those girls a decent life, a better life than they could have imagined. He couldn’t live without the vir. He’d quit it once, and quitting had nearly killed him. He couldn’t do it again. Jenine was dead to him anyway. Besides, he wanted to crush Neph, to teach him finally who was the master and who the student, to avenge all the cruelties Neph had inflicted on him growing up.
Wanhope turned to go inside.
“Dorian?” a man shouted from halfway down the hill. “Dorian?!” In the cobblestone street, a hundred paces away, Solon emerged around a corner, riding a chestnut destrier. He gestured with one hand to what must have been soldiers in the street behind him, telling them to stop. “Dorian! My God, Dorian, it’s good to see you! I thought you were dead!”
Godking Wanhope was wearing his white robes and heavy gold chains of office. The vir were darkening his skin, and Solon pretended not to see any of it.
Solon rode toward him, not touching his Talent, not holding any weapon, not making any move that might seem threatening, as if he were approaching a wild animal. “It is you. Dorian.”
He said the word like it had power, like he was calling a dead man back to life. And it was life. Even with all the luxury and the fulfillment of every whim, Dorian had lived these last months hunted. There had been no rest, only stupor. There had never been communion, not even with Jenine.
The two hundred Vürdmeisters were getting nervous at Solon’s approach. They could smell the potency of his Talent, and even to Wanhope’s nostrils it reeked. He hated it. It smelled of light, scouring, revealing, shaming light. But the Vürdmeisters wouldn’t attack Solon, not without the Godking’s word. Solon ignored them. The man always did have brass balls. “Dorian,” he said. “Dorian.”
Dorian had spoken a prophecy over Solon once. Ten, twelve years ago? It ended: “Broken north, broken you, remade if you speak one word.” The cheeky bastard was asserting that the word was “Dorian”? He was turning Dorian’s own prophecy back on himself? Solon had a little grin twisting his lips in the way Dorian knew so well. A laugh burst out of Wanhope and then was strangled in a sob. It sounded insane to his own ears.
He looked down the hill. Moburu had closed with the Cenarians holding Jenine, and the ferali was plowing through them in a cloud of black dust, tearing them apart, sticking their bodies to its flesh—growing.
Inside, Neph was working to give Khali flesh. The goddess would enslave all Midcyru, maybe all the world. Enslave and destroy. Without a body, she had turned Khalidor into a cauldron of filth, a culture of fear and hatred. What could she do with a body? The best thing Dorian could do was stop him. Godking Wanhope could stop Neph. He knew Neph. He knew how Neph would fight. The girl was a tangent, a distraction in the big picture. Dorian was too important, his skills too valuable to go after a girl when the real battle—the battle that would determine the fate of nations, perhaps of all Midcyru—was only paces away. Dorian would go inside as Godking Wanhope one last time. He would take the vir one last time, and destroy all Neph had wrought. He would destroy Khali’s works—and he would die. His fighting would be done at last. Unable to live well, he would at least die well.
Besides, Jenine was dead to him.
“Dorian,” Solon said. “Dorian, come back.”
Jenine was dead to Godking Wanhope, she was dead even to Dorian—but she wasn’t dead. This delusion was the same temptation that had snared him a hundred times: allow this present evil for some grand, future good. To change an entire nation, to undo the evil his father had wrought, he had taken a harem, raised krul, slaughtered children, raped girls, and started a war. In fact, he’d accomplished most of the things for which he hated his father, and in far less time. The truth was, Dorian had always