Piaras cleared his throat. We were keeping our voices down, and he wasn’t standing right next to us, but there was nothing wrong with the kid’s ears. After all, he was an elf.

“Sir, do you want me to see what’s keeping Maestro Cayle?” he asked.

Mychael smiled. “Ronan knows where we are, Cadet Rivalin. As you were.”

The tips of Piaras’s ears flushed pink. “Yes, sir.”

Four Guardians were standing around Carnades—hands glowing with magic at the ready, weapons doing the same—just waiting for the elf mage to so much as breathe wrong.

I shifted uneasily. “They do look rather eager to cut loose on Carnades, don’t they?”

“Ready and all too willing,” Mychael assured me, the sparkle in his sea blue eyes saying he’d like to get to Carnades first.

A big part of Carnades’s evil-master-plan-gone-wrong had been to either disband the Guardians, or use them as his personal enforcers once he’d seized the archmagus’s throne. Mychael had been the man standing in his way. Carnades’s plan had Mychael standing before an executioner.

“They’re not the only ones,” boomed a voice from the doorway.

Archmage Justinius Valerian entered the room and crossed over to us in a sweep of formal robes that had to weigh as much as the old man’s lean and grizzled body.

I looked him up and down. “Aren’t you a little overdressed for an invasion?”

“I need to stand out, girl. There’s hundreds of panicked old coots running around this island in mage robes. I don’t want any of them to doubt who I am and how far I will kick the asses of any of them if they don’t do as I say. Immediately. I’ve told the lot of them to leave their egos at home, not to give me any lip, and we all just might live through this.”

Justinius had called an emergency meeting of the Conclave of Sorcerers early this morning to warn them of our situation and to tell them that Vegard would be acting paladin until he said otherwise. The Conclave was the governing body for every magic user in the seven kingdoms. In my opinion the only thing worse than a bunch of arrogant mages was a bunch of arrogant bureaucratic mages.