'Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.'

'Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.'

'You leave me without hope,' Brys said.

But now Apsalar was trying to tell him that competence was not justification. That necessity demanded its own path and there was no virtue to be found at its h…