“Really?” He looked surprised. And then relieved. “Oh, good. It’s just, well, Pythias always end up with war mages, don’t they?”
“Do they?”
“Oh yes. Makes sense when you think about it. Who else do they meet? And if they do go on a date, who is there, glowering at the poor chap the whole time? Makes a man feel intimidated.”
“It didn’t intimidate you.”
“Yes, well, wasn’t the same sort of thing, was it?” He looked at me over his glasses. “By the time your mother and I officially met, we’d known each other for over a decade.”
“After I showed up?” I asked, because no way hadn’t they connected the dots by now.
“I suppose you could say you introduced us,” he said dryly. “Although we’d have likely met in any case. She used to hunt out there.”
“In the Badlands?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Same reason as the rest of them. She was hungry.”
The little creation he was working on started smoking, and he let out an abortive curse and slapped a shield spell over it. Just before something smattered against the inside and oozed its way down the sides, pinkish gray and viscous. Roger sighed and grabbed a towel.
“Why not go back to hunting demons?” I asked as he mopped up. “That’s how she got powerful before, right?”
“That’s how she became more powerful,” he corrected. “Enough to build that barrier of hers. But she was already more so than her prey when she started, or they would have turned the tables fast enough!”
“Like the gods did in that battle, after the wall went up?” I said, remembering something I’d been told.
He shook his head. “While it was going up. Her fellow gods realized what was happening at the last moment, and almost overwhelmed her. She triumphed, but was brought so low in the process that, afterward, any demon powerful enough to be useful was also powerful enough to be dangerous.”
“So she hunted ghosts instead?”
He shrugged and threw the smoking rag into a shielded trash can. “Life energy is life energy, wherever it comes from: demons, ghosts, or the Pythian power itself—which was part of Apollo’s life force once, if you recall. It’s what drew her to the court, but as an acolyte she had very limited access. Hunting augmented that slightly, and in the process we kept . . . meeting up.”
“Meeting up?”
“When she was dragging me back to my cell,” he admitted, and I grinned.
“How many times did that happen?”
“More than I care to admit.” He rooted around in a basket for what turned out to be burn ointment, for a few red patches on his hand. “But we finally got around to talking, and discovered that we had . . . mutual interests.”
“Like what?”
“A lot of things,” he said, not looking at me. “But in time, she agreed to help me escape from that damn court, and . . . well, we kept in touch.”
“While you were bilking the Black Circle out of their power?”
Last time I was here, Roger had told me how he’d joined up with the dark mages after Mom sprang him from jail, supposedly to construct them a ghost army. The Black Circle hierarchy had been receptive to the idea, which had promised invisible spies on the Silver Circle, and possibly even foot soldiers in the coming war, if Dad’s weird ghost golems worked out. In reality, he’d never given them a damn thing, instead using the opportunity to gain access to their magic, which he’d plundered mercilessly. I still didn’t know why.
“Trying,” he agreed. “And running. And hiding . . . It was an eventful decade.”
“I know the feeling.”
“But it’s different for you, isn’t it?”
“What is?”