The High Magistrate had spent eleven years looking for someone to replace her, and this morning she admitted she had failed. She said it plainly, the way she said everything hard. She and the High Councillor sat in the glass pavilion of the council hall, where ferns climbed the pale stone and light fell green through the dome. The two of them had built Alcove's government together after the old world fell. Now the High Councillor had asked the one question the High Magistrate could not answer. "If you could no longer serve," the High Councillor said, "who leads?" The High Magistrate set down her cup. "No one. I have searched since the founding. The law requires a witch. I have found four with the gift. None with the judgment." The High Councillor did not look surprised. She rarely did. She folded her hands and waited, the way she waited in a hard room until someone said the true thing. Her silver hair rose in broad waves above her sharp, tired eyes. She had moved too fast once, long ago, and people had paid. She would not rush this. "Then your standard is wrong," the High Councillor said. The High Magistrate's voice went flat and proud. "My standard is justice. A successor inherits power over everything we protect. If their judgment fails, the whole thing fails with them." "You want someone who thinks as you do." "I want someone who will not do harm." "Those are not the same." The High Councillor leaned forward. "You are looking for a copy of yourself. There is no copy. That is why you have found no one." The words landed. The High Magistrate had trusted the law more than she trusted any person for forty years. She had believed her best skill was knowing which questions mattered. Now a question she had buried pressed up through the floor of her. She had been testing candidates against her own certainty. She had rejected every mind that challenged her own. She was quiet a long moment. The ferns stirred in the warm air. "You are saying I should choose someone who will disagree with me," she said. "I am saying you should choose someone worthy of disagreeing with you." The High Councillor's tone turned formal, the way it did when she was done arguing. "That is a different search. You have never run it." The High Magistrate stood. For eleven years she had looked for a reflection. The hunt was over. She would begin a new one, for a witch whose judgment might cut against hers and still be sound. But she knew where such a mind would have to come from. A gifted line. A bloodline. And the only witch bloodline strong enough had been driven out of Alcove long ago, its name struck from the rolls by a hand close to her own. To find her successor, she would have to reopen the thing she had spent her life burying.