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and waited for the surging sickness to ease.
    “Sink me,” he muttered, cautiously straightening at last. “Bloody sink me.”
    It was a long, long while since he’d felt this afraid.
    Wiping his mouth on his jacket-sleeve, he looked around. He was still alone, but since he’d told folk where he’d be it most likely wouldn’t stay the case. That ole trout Darran weren’t never happier than when there was something to nag about. He needed somewhere he could think this through. Somewhere he’d not be found. That nobody would ever imagine he’d be. But that were easier said than done. Being who he was—who he’d become, against his will—such a place weren’t so easy to find.
    The answer came to him with a nasty jolt.
    Barl’s Weather Chamber
.
    Of course. Not only ’cause it were quiet, but…
    His mouth still sour, his heart still thudding, he abandoned the sweet and peaceful orchard and made his way to the one place he’d thought never to set foot in again. The place where one Asher had died, and another was born.
    Panting a little, brushing dead leaves and forest cobwebs off his wool coat, he stood in the mostly overgrown clearing and stared at the Chamber. So long since he’d been here. The day after Morg had brought down Barl’s Wall, he’d come, and never once after.
    Ten years now, just gone. Sink me… it’s been that long?
    Yes. That long. Because Rafel was ten now and that was how he measured the length of his life: his yardstick wasn’t Gar’s death, or the Wall’s ruin, but the miracle of his first child’s birthing. The promise of a future untainted by prophecy. A future he’d not been sure would come to pass.
    In the days and weeks following Morg’s destruction, after the fall of Barl’s Wall, when feelings and fears were still running a mite high, there’d been folk who called for this Weather Chamber to be torn down brick by stone by timber by nail, to be splintered and smashed and burned to rubble and cinders. Ripped from memory, from history, as though it had never been. But he’d not agreed to that. Tear this chamber down, and in years to come folk might say it were only a story. The chamber, the magic, the way weather ruled in Lur. Folk might say none of that ever was. Things get made up, they might say. That ain’t nowt but a lullaby for spratlings.
    And that was the time when old mistakes got made fresh.
    In the raw aftermath of the kingdom’s desolation, with the royal family gone and life turned topsy-turvy, he’d had his way. He was Asher of Restharven, who’d slaughtered Morg the sorcerer. Anything he’d wanted he’d got without a fuss. The folk who’d bayed for his blood and then owed him their lives were eager to show him how bygones were bygones. No hard feelings. All friends now, eh?
    “Don’t hate them,” Dathne had told him. “They were weak and afraid, Asher, but they’re not evil. Not like Morg.”
    Which was true enough. And besides, who was he to point fingers and complain with Gar dead to save him and all those harsh words between them never put right? So he’d pushed aside his resentment, the most bitter of his memories—
rotten eggs, cruel jibes, crueler pikestaffs jabbing
—and done his best to see the kingdom restored to an even keel. Had succeeded, with the help of folk like Dathne and Pellen Orrick and those in the Circle who’d not been lost along with Veira.
    And now here he stood, staring at the Chamber’s rough-hewn blue stonework, at the glass dome atop it, knowing in his bones Lur was in trouble, again.
    Fighting down misery, sick with resentment, he stamped his feet to warm them… and then stamped inside.
    The domed chamber was ezackly as Morg left it the day he died, with its circular wall still covered in charts and scribblings, legacy of that lost time when Barl’s will had ruled every life in Lur. Her magic map of the kingdom still took up most of the scuffed floor-space, too, nearly all of it spoiled by Morg’s vicious