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reason, Rani made her way to the dimly lit Apprentice’s Corridor, a narrow passage that skulked behind the Hall of Discipline. She had spent more time in this darkened space than she cared to admit. The stone walls curved above her, hulking to barrel vaulting without even the narrowest of windows. Indeed, the only light in the oppressive passage came from the candles that burned on altars spaced down the corridor. Each altar was dedicated to a different god - Lene, the god of humility, Plad, the god of patience, Dain, the god of contemplation.
    Altogether, there were a half dozen altars, each littered with trinkets offered up by straying apprentices. Rani had studied her fellows’ offerings on many occasions; the most censured apprentice each week was charged with replacing the massive tallow candles that smoked on each altar. The candles were as long as Rani’s arm, and as thick around as her neck, and she needed to stretch on her tiptoes to light them.
    Now, she fought the compulsion to lug out replacements for the low-burning candles on the cluttered altars. Such attention to detail would have been absurd - Tuvashanoran was dead. The prince had died because she had called him; she had cried out. Rani did not need to be a soldier to know that the deadly arrow would have passed harmlessly over Tuvashanoran’s head, without her interference. If she had just kept silent, Tuvashanoran would have been spared. No burning wax in a darkened corridor was going to absolve Rani this time.
    She might ignore the candles, but she could not dismiss the final altar, at the end of the shadowy passage. This was the single place within the guildhall where Rani had spent the most time since her tumultuous arrival. The altar itself was fashioned out of a massive block of stone, and its front was inlaid with dark tiles of smoky glass. The altar was sacred to a deity almost entirely foreign to Rani - Sorn, the god of obedience. It was customary for an apprentice who was summoned to the Hall of Discipline to kneel before Sorn, to ask forgiveness before punishment could be meted out by the guild disciplinarian.
    Sorn was a harsh master, as Rani had learned too often. A kneeler was fashioned at the foot of his altar, ostensibly to provide greater comfort to petitioners who sought divine guidance. Rani knew, though, that the kneeler was just another element of the disciplinarian’s craft, for its wooden surface was embossed with the tools of the glasswright’s trade - grozing irons and coils of lead stripping, pincers and rectangular glass tiles. It was impossible to kneel upon that narrow bench without transferring those sharp-edged images to tender knees.
    Nevertheless, Rani could not approach the Hall of Discipline without at least a token obeisance. Traditionally, the disciplinarian’s first move was to check a petitioner’s knees. If Rani showed up without a visible symbol of her worship, she would merely be sent back until she was marked. Sighing, Rani lowered herself to the familiar kneeler.
    She should not have been surprised to overhear the conversation in the Hall of Discipline. After all, the altar was especially situated so that one apprentice could make out the … instruction of another, thereby fostering greater discipline through the imagined penalty. Many a time, Rani had emerged from her own instruction at the hands of the disciplinarian, only to face the whey countenance of another apprentice, looking up anxiously from Sorn’s altar.
    Still, when Rani realized that the voice was Guildmistress Salina’s, she caught her breath, the better to make out the hissed words.
    â€œOf course it did not go as we wished!”
    Rani could not make out the other person’s response, but it rumbled around the corner, a man’s timbre.
    â€œWe knew there was risk in using our scaffold,” Salina insisted, “but we never intended to call attention to a glasswright in the middle of the