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Catrin’s two most advanced students, were buried deep in her illusions. They believed they were fighting demons, taunting predators who disappeared and reappeared in landscapes of madness. They had likely been fighting for several hours. The morning was heavy and damp, and their skin was dripping with sweat, though in their minds they were probably bleeding and slimed with nastiness spewed from their opponents. As we watched, the shorter one, Drych, dropped his sword and held his stomach, letting out a groan of agony as he sank to his knees.
    Three younger boys stopped their sword practice to gape. Catrin snapped at them to get back to their business or they would never make it so far as Drych. Then she gave me a shove with her hand on my back. “Go pull him out. Make him believe he’s not as worthless as he thinks. His practice was much harder than Tegyr’s. I’ll bring this one down to earth.”
    Tegyr, blond, wiry, and the taller of the two, carried an oval glass in one hand—an imitation of the Luthen mirror. He appeared to have vanquished his invisible foe, for the mirror was raised as if to show the demon its own reflection, and the young man’s knife was ready to send the demon to its death. While I went and dragged the gasping, moaning Drych back to reality, giving him a moment to feel his abdomen and realize that he was not watering some alien landscape with his blood, Catrin stood beside the silver curtain and drew her fist through the air, leaving a silvered pattern hanging like the trail of a falling star.
    “Brynnidda!” Tegyr cried out, then leaped backward and fell on his backside, dropping the mirror. He began to struggle desperately. Apparently his illusory opponent was not quite defeated. You had to be certain that the physical manifestation was dead before attacking the demon itself. Always a hard lesson. And Catrin would have no mercy on the boy. He had called out his paired Aife’s name—a slip so grave it could set him back three months. Names are the channel to the soul. Demons tried every maneuver to elicit the names of Wardens or Aifes.
    Drych bowed to me without greeting. For him to speak unbidden in the middle of a training session was improper. He was still quivering, either with relief that his ordeal had been only illusion, or perhaps in terror that he would be found wanting and never make use of all his hard lessons. In the next two hours I required him to review every move of his fight for me, so that we could find his mistakes, and we practiced until he had the needed corrections so imprinted on his mind and body that he would still be repeating them when he slept that night.
    At one point in the middle of the session, I glimpsed Catrin and Fiona talking to a tall, formidably constructed gray-haired woman. Talar. As ever when I saw Fiona’s mentor, the First of the Mentor’s Council, annoyance and resentment seethed beneath my skin. Talar was the instigator of the humiliating watch on me, seemingly determined that I should be proved corrupt because I dared disagree with her. She had dragged it out for almost a year already, with six endless months to go.
    Ysanne could have stopped it at any time, of course. My wife was the Queen, chosen to rule our land and people as our goddess Verdonne ruled the forests of the earth. But she had insisted that it would be better to let it go on. “Let them see. Let them be satisfied. If I suspend the watch, Talar will claim we’re hiding something, and you’ll never be free of suspicion.”
    On this day my resentment of the gray-haired Aife was worse than usual. Talar leaned upon an ash walking stick—the same I’d seen in my home on the night my son was laid out to die. Of course the self-appointed guardian of Ezzarian purity would have been there to make sure all was done correctly.
    I worked alongside Drych and the other older students through the rest of the afternoon until they were wilting like scalded lilies. And then I made them