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said, “but it is not true.”
    “How can you say that! My daughter has not yet had a chance to live, and he will kill her! My husband will die. My father, too, but he has had a chance to live a life. My baby hasn’t!”
    She fell to hysterical wailing again, and the Mother Confessor once again drew her into comforting arms. Comfort was not what Abby wanted.
    “You have just the one child?” the sorceress asked.
    Abby nodded as she sucked a breath. “I had another, a boy, but he died at birth. The midwife said I will have no more. My little Jana is all I will ever have.” The wild agony of it ripped through her. “And he will kill her. Just as he killed that man before me. Wizard Zorander is a monster. May the good spirits strike him dead!”
    With a poignant expression, the sorceress smoothed Abby’s hair back from her forehead “You don’t understand. You see only a part of it. You don’t mean what you say.”
    But she did. “If you had—”
    “Delora understands,” the Mother Confessor said, gesturing toward the sorceress. “She has a daughter of ten years, and a son, too.”
    Abby peered up at the sorceress. She gave Abby a sympathetic smile and a nod to confirm the truth of it.
    “I, too, have a daughter,” the Mother Confessor said. “She is twelve. Delora and I both understand your pain. So does the First Wizard.”
    Abby’s fists tightened. “He couldn’t! He’s hardly more than a boy himself, and he wants to kill my baby. He is the wind of death and that’s all he cares about—killing people!”
    The Mother Confessor patted the stone step beside her. “Abigail, sit up here beside me. Let me tell you about the man in there.”
    Still weeping, Abby pushed herself up and slid onto the step. The Mother Confessor was older by maybe twelve or fourteen years, and pleasant-looking, with those violet eyes. Her mass of long hair reached her waist. She had a warm smile. It had never occurred to Abby to think of a Confessor as a woman, but that was what she saw now. She didn’t fear this woman as she had before; nothing she did could be worse than what already had been done.
    “I sometimes minded Zeddicus when he was but a toddler and I was still coming into womanhood.” The Mother Confessor gazed off with a wistful smile. “I swatted his bottom when he misbehaved, and later twisted his ear to make him sit at a lesson. He was mischief on two legs, driven not by guile but by curiosity. He grew into a fine man.
    “For a long time, when the war with D’Hara started, Wizard Zorander wouldn’t help us. He didn’t want to fight, to hurt people. But in the end, when Panis Rahl, the leader of D’Hara, started using magic to slaughter our people, Zedd knew that the only hope to save more lives in the end was to fight.
    “Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander may look young to you, as he did to many of us, but he is a special wizard, born of a wizard and a sorceress. Zedd was a prodigy. Even those other wizards in there, some of them his teachers, don’t always understand how he is able to unravel some of the enigmas in the books or how he uses his gift to bring so much power to bear, but we do understand that he has heart. He uses his heart, as well as his head. He was named First Wizard for all these things and more.”
    “Yes,” Abby said, “he is very talented at being the wind of death.”
    The Mother Confessor smiled a small smile. She tapped her chest. “Among ourselves, those of us who really know him call him the trickster. The trickster is the name he has truly earned. We named him the wind of death for others to hear, so as to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy. Some people on our side take that name to heart. Perhaps, since your mother was gifted, you can understand how people sometimes unreasonably fear those with magic?”
    “And sometimes,” Abby argued, “those with magic really are monsters who care nothing for the life they destroy.”
    The Mother Confessor appraised Abby’s eyes a