“He decreed that for all time he would believe, in total honesty and full conviction, that he’d done not a thing to warrant such a doom- Perhaps this affords some insight into the enormity of his misdeed.”
“But what can he have done?” Jarveena shouted.
“You’ll never guess. It isn’t in your nature to imagine, let alone enact, so foul a crime.”
“Has it tainted you?” She leaned forward accusingly, glad that she could only vaguely see the shape he now endured. “Has it deformed your mind as much as your body?” That was cruel, too, in its way, but she uttered the words regardless. “Have you no mercy? Is not a thousand years enough for even the foulest of villains?”
“Oh, yes.” Enas Yorl’s voice had become like the sough of wind in bare-branched trees. “More than enough, in my view.
“Not in his.”
“You-you mean . . .” Jarveena’s mouth was suddenly dry. “You mean you tried to release him from the curse he wished upon himself?”
“I did.”
“And he refused to let you, being a more powerful magician?”
“Not exactly.”
She threw her hands in the air. “For pity’s sake, Enas Yorl! Whether or not you pitied him, pity me who calls you friend! Never in my life before did I find anyone with better reason to hate the world than had I myself at nine years old! Make plain what you have done and not done!”
“I will try . , .” The voice grew fainter all the time. “But words must strain to compass these events. The spells required are half outside the normal universe … I did succeed! No other wizard now alive could have accomplished what Enas Yorl achieved today, not even he at Ilsig whom they call most skilled, not he at Ranke who ato-serves the court.