I stared at my mentor, who was just eating and not paying much attention to me at the moment. He did that when he was very angry or very happy, and at the moment I honestly didn’t know which it was.
“Stew?” she asked, holding up a pot of what was making the room smell so good. “Glenda left us enough food to last for a few weeks at least.”
“Nice of her,” Aahz said, the anger clearly there.
“When you didn’t come back for me I thought you were both dead.”
“We would have been dead in four or five weeks,” Aahz said. “When the food ran out.”
Tanda served me up a dish of the stew and then sat down next to me after patting my shoulder.
“So why couldn’t you come back?” I asked, not wanting to eat until I had some answers. “What happened?”
“Well,” Aahz said, still not looking at me, “we both knew Glenda was up to something, and was going to try to double-cross us.”
“And we expected her to leave you on Kowtow,” Tanda said.
“You expected that?” I was stunned and suddenly angry. “Why didn’t you at least warn me?”
Aahz looked me directly in the eye. “Would you have listened, apprentice?”
“Yes,” I said defensively.
Now they both laughed.
Clearly they thought I had been too much under Glenda’s spell. And the more I thought about it, the more I saw that they were right, at least to a point. When Glenda started her act on the bartender, I started to get suspicious, but not enough to think it through.
“You were the closest to her, apprentice,” Aahz said, his voice stern and in lecture mode. “You should have been warning us about her, not the other way around.”