The dean paled and seemed to quiver. Then he mastered himself and pointed at a chair on the other side of his desk. “Of . . . of course. Please sit. You must be weary after such a long journey. From Corsa if I’m not mistaken.”

“You are not mistaken.” Stevic pulled up a leather upholstered chair. “And I will sit, though I’m not tired. What I really want, Dean, is answers. Why is my daughter being expelled from school?”

Dean Geyer changed the arrangement of his glue pot and carving knives on his desktop, and picked up an unattached model mast which he rolled between his fingers. He seemed unwilling to look Stevic in the eye.

“Not expelled, not exactly. Suspended. You see her grades were dwindling, and she’d been picking fights with other students.”

“Those are no reasons for a . . . suspension.”

“I’m afraid they are. We do not abide schoolyard brawls. Fighting is not in keeping with the principles of the school.”

“Brawls?” Stevic said. “My daughter does not participate in brawls.”

The dean pushed his fingers together in a triangle. A smile fluttered on his lips. “A fight, then. A fight which she initiated. Fortunately, the other student involved was not hurt.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Perhaps you do not, but the student’s family complained to the trustees. You must also know she was not doing well academically.” The dean relaxed as he explained Karigan’s shortcomings. “She hardly attended her classes, and even when she did, her grades were still mediocre, not in keeping with our standards. That alone would be enough for dismissal. With this as her background, and a fight she provoked as cause, the trustees determined Karigan should spend some time at home and reconsider her reasons for being here.”

Stevic’s face flushed an angry red. “My daughter is not mediocre. Nor is she a bully who goes about provoking fights.”

Geyer spread his hands wide to indicate the matter was beyond his control. “As a parent, you are entitled to feel that way about your child. Needless to say, the trustees have formed another opinion about her. It is hoped that upon reconsidering her behavior of the past, she will change her ways and return to Selium . . . in time.”

Stevic gripped the arms of his chair, feeling as if he would explode. “I would talk with your trustees. If I don’t receive satisfaction, my donations to this institution will cease. I will talk to the Golden Guardian himself if I must, but first I wish to see my daughter. I have yet to hear her side of the tale.”

Geyer blanched again. “She isn’t home? You . . . you haven’t . . . seen her?”

“Of course not. I told you. . . . What’s going on here? Where is my daughter?”

The dean mumbled to himself and looked around his office as if seeing it for the first time. Stevic felt he would strangle the dean with a strand of the model ship’s rigging for all he could not seem to say anything. Geyer gathered his courage, but couldn’t bring himself to look in Stevic G’ladheon’s eyes. “She ran away. I was the last to see her.”

Stevic struck the flat of his hand on Geyer’s desk. Papers flew off and the ship model shuddered. A freshly glued mast toppled over and clattered onto the desktop.

“My daughter is missing?” Stevic lowered his voice to a hoarse growl. “I thought more of Selium than this.” He pointed a shaking finger at the dean. “I hold you responsible for her being missing. I demand to see Guardian Fiori at once.”

Geyer cringed in his chair. “The Guardian isn’t—”

Stevic didn’t wait to hear the rest. He threw the double doors open, stormed out of Dean Geyer’s office, and searched up and down corridors for the Golden Guardian’s office. He flung doors open, startling administrators and disrupting classes. He pushed clerks out of his way when they blocked passageways. Exclamations and curses followed in his wake.

When he thought he had searched every office, he found another corridor branching off from one of the main ones. He struck off down the poorly lit corridor not slackening his stride. Candles ensconced on the wall sputtered at his passing. The rich red pile disappeared, revealing scuffed and scarred floorboards. Finally, he came upon a door adorned simply with the symbol of the golden harp. He opened it and entered.

The office was a disarray of musical instruments. They hung on the walls, lay on shelves, and leaned in corners. Some were in pieces, or had broken strings curling crazily from tuning pegs. Countless books were stacked on the floor—there was no space on the shelves for them. A thick layer of dust coated everything, and the scent of resin hung thick in the air.

“This is the Golden Guardian’s office?” Stevic said with incredulity.

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

Beyond the plain pinewood desk in the center of the room, a girl in a uniform of indigo with a white apprentice knot at the shoulder, looked up with sea-green eyes from the book she had been reading.

“I beg your pardon,” Stevic said, “but I need to see Guardian Fiori.”

The girl’s book thumped closed, and she sighed. “I’d like to see him myself, but he’s the only one who knows where he is.”

Stevic waited for an explanation, but the girl seemed to have sunk into her own thoughts and didn’t go on.

“Ahem,” he prompted. “What do you mean?”

“He’s doing what a minstrel does best. He’s journeying. He could be in the northlands, Ullem Bay, or Rhovanny for all I know. He never knows where he’ll be until he’s there. He has been gone up to a year, and longer than that before I came to live with him.”