from Aron’s once more. “What was so important about the people you rescued, that you would place yourself and your guild at such risk?”
Aron snatched at his blankets instead of snatching at Falconer’s scant hair. “Leave now, before I lose control of myself and send you waddling out of Triune like a duck—or maybe I should have you hop like a rabbit, all the way back to Eidolon.”
Falconer stood to his full height again, but he made no effort to leave the cell. Aron was breathing hard, trying to control the pound of his heart and the rush of blood to his head as Falconer struck too close to truths he didn’t need to understand.
“I haven’t been able to stop wondering,” Falconer said, once more taking on the tone of an adult speaking to a much younger child. “Was it only the fact of your guild master’s sister being at risk, or was there more? Who was the boy she was protecting, the one with mind-talents almost as powerful as your own?”
“Go!” Aron shouted, aware that he was giving away too much, but also aware that he was perilously close to striking at Falconer with his mind. “I won’t ask you again.”
Falconer smiled at him, and Aron’s insides twisted. “Perhaps that question is worth more exploration before I leave this place. What do you think, Aron?”
“I think Aron asked you to go,” Dari said from the cell door.
Her voice startled both Aron and Falconer, as neither of them had heard or sensed her approach. Aron noted that she had her graal completely masked, all of it. Not even a hint of color escaped her dark skin, but he thought he saw a trace of Stormbreaker’s lightning in her eyes.
“Did Lord Baldric give you permission to intrude on Aron’s solitude?” Dari asked Falconer, her tone calm and icy. “You have some jurisdiction to question orphans and the sheltered, but you have no business bothering apprentices of Stone—least of all those only weeks from their final trial.”
Falconer spun toward her and took a quick step in her direction.
Dari stepped aside to let him pass.
For a moment, Aron was certain the man was about to grab her, perhaps even by the neck, but a pair of low, menacing growls reverberated through the House of the Judged. Aron recognized the traditional Sabor warning gesture. He hadn’t seen Blath behind Dari, but he assumed she was standing with Iko, just out of his sight, but well within view of Falconer.
The man’s anger seemed to flare, then vanish, as if he had crammed his emotions into some deep cavern in his heart, inaccessible even to him. Falconer’s breathing slowed, and he looked less the frenzied, cruel lunatic he had been in Aron’s cell. Aron watched, amazed and disgusted, as the man shrugged on the persona of High Master of Thorn as quickly and easily as normal men donned a robe or tunic.
“You, my dear, are as much a puzzle as Aron here,” he said. “Aron and the boy he rescued when he retrieved Tiamat Snakekiller from the plains of Dyn Cobb.”
“I suggest you concern yourself with the puzzle of leaving Triune, and getting your new charges safely back to Eidolon.” Dari’s voice was tense and quiet, yet it carried the force of thunder, so much so that Aron expected to hear the distant rumble. “Aron won’t be amongst that number, and neither will I, nor any recent rescues.”
Falconer glanced over his shoulder at Aron, his eyes blazing with new fury. “Think on what I said. If you’re so good at reading truth, then you know I spoke it. You know the sanest option is to leave this place with me.”
Aron looked away from Falconer, and heard the man’s footfalls as he finally departed the cell, and ultimately the building.
“What an ass,” Dari murmured as the outer doors slammed closed behind the Thorn Brother.
When Aron looked up at her, he had a moment of wondering if Dari was speaking about Falconer, or about him. He had resisted her visits since his return, but as he gazed at her standing at his cell’s entrance, splendid in the dusty sunlight filling the House of the Judged, he couldn’t quite remember why.
Reality crept back, despite her beauty.
He was dangerous. Possibly doomed by his trial, or by Judgment. He had done horrible things to Nic and Snakekiller, and should he survive the fate waiting for him when Lord Baldric decreed it, he might do equally horrible things in the future. He