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Mari stood up, her eyes on Professor S’san. “Thank you, Professor.”

S’san blew out a disdainful breath. “For helping to guide you into this mess?”

“Yes,” Mari said, surprised to realize she was sincere in saying that. “You tried, where others are content to ignore truth and reality. I can’t fault that. And if you hadn’t taught me the way you did, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten to know a certain young male Mage. Will you be safe?”

S’san made a face. “That’s hard to say. No one can tell what the future holds, unless you believe in that fortunetelling the Mages do. What they call prophecies, like that about the daughter.” She directed another look at Alain. “What do have to say about that?”

“Foresight provides warning and visions, though it is unreliable,” Alain answered. “Its meaning is also often unclear.”

“Why would it be unclear?” S’san asked.

“There is only a vision,” Alain said. “It may be…what is the word…an allegory, such as a vision of an oncoming storm, that must be interpreted. But even a clear picture provides no understanding of how the events in the vision came to be, what decisions led to it, or what is happening outside the range of the vision. I have also come to understand that the person you see in the vision of the future, if it is you, may not be the same person you are. If a year ago I were to have seen a vision of myself at this moment, I could have neither interpreted nor understood any part of it. Why do I not wear my Mage robes? Who is the young woman beside me and why does she smile upon me? Who is the Mechanic and why do I speak with her? Where am I? Why did I come there? Though an accurate view of the future, the vision would offer no answers, only questions.”

S’san had been listening very closely. “Remarkable, yet also completely logical. A picture of the future lacks all context, so by the time you can understand a vision of the future, you’re there. It provides no useful information, you say?”

“It can,” Alain corrected. “It may show a possible event. The decisions made can lead to that event, or lead to something else.”

“Oh, Mari,” Professor S’san said, “if I could have only a week with this Mage to see how much I can learn! But I won’t imperil either of you by insisting on that. In a week, who knows what might have happened to me?”

Alain shook his head. “I have had no visions regarding your fate, Elder S’san.”

“If it’s a dire one, I have only my own mistakes to blame. Forgive me, Mari,” S’san said in an unusually quiet voice. “My errors placed you in grave danger.”

Mari walked forward to hug her old teacher. “You have not just my forgiveness but my thanks for what you’ve taught me. I have a lot of thinking to do. Since you taught me how to think well, maybe I’ll make the right decisions.”

But as the door closed behind her, Mari could see nothing ahead. Momentary optimism, fleeting hope, dissipated into nothing as she thought of her situation. “All of these people think I’m going to make some huge difference,” she said to Alain. “Including you. But how? It’s impossible. I’m out of options. It really is hopeless.”

Chapter Thirteen

They left the apartment building quickly, walking back toward the center of Severun. Alain kept searching for danger, but at some point he realized that his watchfulness was making him look suspicious. Thereafter he tried to appear less interested in the world while still watching. Not as disinterested as a Mage, but like the commons around him and Mari. The Imperial citizens they passed were absorbed in their own business, and the local police had their attention fixed on the people carousing in taverns along the way. At one point Alain saw a couple of Mechanics in the distance and nudged Mari, but she gave the two a disinterested glance as they disappeared down another street.

Within moments after leaving S’san’s place and expressing her fears Mari had sunk into moody silence. She walked without another word until Alain spoke to her. “What should I do?”

“Nothing.” Mari shrugged. “There’s nothing anybody can do. I already said it. It’s hopeless. All we can do is hide, while the entire world goes to blazes.”

“Perhaps when we talk we can come up with some ideas.”

She stared down the street they were on, shadows stretching across it as the setting sun dropped lower in the west. “I don’t know. There are certain hard realities here, Alain. I can’t change them by wishing and hoping. You can’t change them, either. This isn’t something as simple as…all right, I was going to say as simple as walking through solid walls, but that doesn’t make sense.”

Mari shook her head, gazing morosely down toward the waters of Lake Bellad. “Professor S’san taught me never to give up on a problem, to keep trying different things until I found a solution. But I don’t know if any different things exist to try. And I admit that it shouldn’t be surprising by now to find out that my Guild deliberately allowed me to be placed in peril for its own ends, at a time when I had done nothing against my Guild, but it still hurts. It also reinforces that anything I try now would not only likely be futile but also might end up causing harm to people who know me. While I was in there with Professor S’san I could pretend that there might be hope, but now? What else can be done that won’t be futile?” Mari fixed her eyes on the ground passing beneath their feet. “Let’s find a safe place to sleep. I’m tired. Very tired.”

Alain steered them by a cafe first. Mages were taught simply to take what they wanted from commons too frightened to resist, but Mari had shown him the basics of ordering and paying for meals, so he was able to buy some food and drink while Mari stared silently into space beside him. He made her eat despite the scowls he earned from Mari for his efforts. Only then did he head for a hostel, finding a plain but clean one a fair distance from Lake Bellad which had plentiful vacancies with the winter coming on. Mari had to check them in, since Alain had not yet learned how to do that.

She roused enough to ask for privacy, for a room without anyone in the rooms next to it, a request the clerk granted with a smirk at Alain. But once in the room, Mari sat down glumly in a chair with a view out the window to the lake, where nothing could be seen in the darkness after sunset but the flickering torchlights of fishing boats and other watercraft, gliding like ghost beacons across the surface of the water.

Alain sat down near her. “We need to make plans. Where do we go now?”

“It really doesn’t matter, does it?” Mari shrugged. “Pick a place. Maybe Cathlan. Blazes, Alain, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding.”

He felt the tug of urgency that had first appeared when he saw the vision in the desert. “We cannot afford to hide. There is no such time to waste.”

She glanced at him, then quickly away. “Then you should make the best of what time is left. Maybe if you left me, you could get back in good graces with your Guild. That way you could be with Asha.”

The words startled him. “Why would I leave you to be with Asha?”

Mari shook her head, looking drained. “Only you of all men would ask that question.”

“You would not leave me in the hopes of gaining forgiveness from your Guild. Why would you expect me to leave you? I have promised to stand by you and assist you in bringing the new day. We can make plans in the morning if you prefer that. A night’s sleep–”