Maugris watched with interest. He understood hating death. He had spent generations and centuries avoiding it himself. Looking down at the elegant but wrinkled fingers of his own hand — a woman’s hand this time — he knew he could easily have a decade or three more in this body. And yet Constantine, in his present state, might not last so long. He would burn up — all ambition and impulse and no strategy.

Master Joseph had done good work, separating him from the Magisterium, from the people who cared about him. Maugris allowed himself a moment of pleasure and pride in his cultivation of that mage. A man broken enough to be manipulated, broken enough to break that child, had been an excellent choice for an apprentice. And yet he had never suspected his Master of anything but inflaming his own ambitions. He had certainly never suspected her of being a Makar. The mouth of the woman’s body he wore curled up into a smile.

The last time he rose in power, the last time he had made a bid for taking a bite out of the mage world, was long enough back that they would never connect him with those who had come before. That was the value of lying low for several generations: It gave the world time to forget. But this new Makar had tried some interesting experiments. He had failed to bring back the dead, but he’d given Maugris an idea for an army. An unstoppable army.

It was time to become Constantine Madden.

This has all been and will be again.

Call opened his eyes again, back in the stone room with the bed. The scorch marks were no longer on the wall, but he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined them or if they’d just been washed away. He heard howling — Havoc? Chaos wolves?

“Call?” came a soft voice. He turned his head. “Do you remember who you are now?”

Celia was there, her wispy blond hair pushed back with a headband, her face so pale that what stood out was the redness of her eyes. Call frowned at her, trying to place her in his memories. She didn’t like him.

Had he burned down her tower and scorched all her lands? Murdered her family? Spit in her soup? There were so many crimes rushing through his head.

“Call?” she said again. He realized he hadn’t answered.

“You …” he croaked, raising a finger to point accusingly at her. She’d done something, too, he remembered that.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you must be wondering why I’m here when I’ve been so awful — and I was awful. I was afraid. I had family here at the Magisterium when your father — and you, I mean not really you, but him.” She stopped speaking, clearly having gotten herself tangled up in her words. “When Constantine was at the school, no one thought he would become the Enemy of Death. They knew he was all puffed up about being the Makar and believed he could do things no one else could, but it didn’t seem that bad. Until it did. A lot of my family died in the Mage War, and when I was growing up, they warned me over and over again about how brave I would have to be to stand up to Constantine, but that if someone had, none of this would have happened.”

Murdered her family, Call thought. That was what I did to her.

Call, came a voice in his head, a voice that startled him. Call, you have to focus. Push back the memories.

“I know that’s an excuse,” Celia said. “But it’s also an explanation, and I wanted you to have one. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

“Why now?” he wanted to know. Why had she decided to forgive him when she’d been right all along? He wasn’t trustworthy. He wasn’t even sure he was Call.

“You nearly died saving Jasper,” she said. “Constantine wouldn’t have. Maybe he’d have done some of the other stuff to look good, but I couldn’t think of any reason to do what you did other than being Jasper and Tamara and Gwenda’s friend. And then I started to think about the walks we used to take with Havoc and how horrible it would be for everyone to think something bad about me for something I couldn’t control. And then I thought that it wasn’t fair you had to almost die for me to think better of you. And then I heard you weren’t okay and I wondered if things would have been different if we hadn’t — if I hadn’t — ”

“It wasn’t that,” he started, but then the room tilted again and he got a lungful of smoke. He was standing on the deck of a ship and in the distance he saw an entire armada on fire. He watched mages leaping into the sea, but when they got to the water, tentacles reached up for them out of the depths. He needed to warn her. The girl. The girl who was sorry.

“There are elementals,” he told her urgently. “Under the waves. Waiting. They will drown you if you let them.”

“Oh, Call,” he heard her say, voice soft and broken up by sobs.

He was lying on a narrow wooden bed. He knew he was dying. His breaths were coming in ragged gasps and his body felt as if it were full of fire.

This was not what he had planned for his life. He had been a brilliant student of the best Magisterium in the empire. His teacher, Master Janusz, had been the wisest and most powerful Master, who had chosen him first at the Iron Trial. He was a Makar who could shape chaos. He had been assured of a long life of power and riches.

And then the coughing had begun. He had dismissed it at first as the product of exhaustion and long nights working in the laboratory he shared with his Master. Then, one night, the coughing had bent him double and he had seen the first red spray of blood across the floor.

Master Janusz had brought the best earth mages to heal him, but they could do nothing. His power had waned with his health, and he had become a prisoner in his garret, eating only when his landlady or Master Janusz brought him food, waiting in a fury for the inevitable.

At least until the day he realized.

He had always known it. The opposite of chaos is the soul. But he had never really, truly thought about what it meant. Since the day he had thought of it, he had lain in his bed, considering the possibilities, dwelling on method, on opportunity …

The door to his garret opened. It was Master Janusz. Still a man in his prime, he bustled over to the dying mage’s bedside. The man in the bed hated his former master. How dare he have health and a future when he had already had so many years?

He seethed as Master Janusz fussed with his pillows and used fire magic to light the candle by his bed. The room was already growing dark. He listened as the older mage wittered on about how he would be well soon enough, as soon as the weather was warmer.

“Nonsense,” he said, when he could stand it no longer. “I am going to die. You know it as well as I do.”

Master Janusz paused, looking stricken. “Poor Maugris,” he said. “It is a shame. You could have been a great Makar. One of the greatest the world has known. It is a shame and a pity for you to die so young.”

Rage came upon Maugris. He did not want pity. “I would have been the greatest Makar history has ever known!” he roared. “The world would have trembled before me!”

It was then that Master Janusz made his mistake. He came toward the man in the bed, hands outstretched. “You must calm yourself, my boy — ”

The dying mage reached out with all his strength, not of his body but of his mind. The idea that had burned inside him flared into life. He was a manipulator of chaos. Why couldn’t he also manipulate the soul?