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was here, there was no conversation during a meal. Lycaelon did not believe in conversation at mealtime. He had to put up with it when he entertained, but when he and Kellen were alone, silence prevailed. And certainly in Lycaelon's absence, Lycaelon's servants would not presume to begin any conversation with his son.
     When he was finished, Kellen pushed his chair away from the table and left the footman to clear up. The library — I should go look through the books in the library, he thought. I'll bet that's where I found those references to my books. If I go check now, I should have plenty of time to look in the likeliest places long before Father gets home.
     Books that hid their nature…
     Lycaelon apparently had never even noticed that Kellen used his library on a regular basis. I think I'd like to keep things that way, too, he thought as he walked in through the library door and headed straight for the curtains, to pull them wide and let pale sunshine stream in through the windows. In fact, he had been reading the books on magick for a very long time now—and he was at least familiar with a great deal more than his father or Anigrel suspected, even if he couldn't yet manage to put his knowledge into practice.
     And I know things that neither of them want anyone under the rank of High Mage to know about, he thought, pulling one of the ladders over to the bookcase that housed some very esoteric volumes on the top shelves— volumes that, had Lycaelon or anyone else known he was poking around in the place, would surely have been removed or locked up. There were a lot of things on those shelves that were not meant for a Student's eyes.
     It didn't take long at all for Kellen to find what he was looking for, because the more he thought about his finds, the more convinced he became that they were books that were hiding their nature for a very good reason.
     Sure enough, he found the reference precisely where he'd begun to suspect it was, in the Ars Perfidorum, the Book of Forbidden Acts.
     Kellen wasn't even supposed to be aware that the Ars Perfidorum existed, much less have leafed through it. For that matter, he didn't even think his tutor was supposed to know about it; knowledge of this particular book was, if he recalled correctly, restricted to members of the Council and specific senior Mages. And the reason Kellen knew that was because Lycaelon had once allowed one of his fellow Council members to use the library, and the fellow had carelessly left the Ars Perfidorum and two other similarly restricted books out in the music room where he had been reading them. The resulting explosion when Lycaelon found them there had been memorable.
     Lycaelon had not been aware that Kellen was anywhere about, and the entertainment value of hearing his father swear and curse the stupidity of another adult—a High Mage at that!—had been so great that Kellen took his chances on being caught in order to eavesdrop. He made very sure to get back to his own rooms as soon as the coast was clear—but after that he'd been afire to find those books and see them for himself.
     He vividly recalled his disappointment at finding them to be deadly dull. It had seemed to him that a book with such an exciting title should have been full of horrors—bloodcurdling examples of Forbidden Acts, in excruciating detail, so that Mages down the centuries would know exactly how to recognize a Forbidden Act when they saw it. In fact, Ars Perfidorum was a mealymouthed prude of a book, more intent on outlining the punishments to be meted out for each perfidious deed than describing the deeds themselves. It was—it was a clerkly sort of book, and sent him off into a near-doze when he tried to read it.
     Maybe I thought that book was dull then, he thought, swiftly leafing through the text, but that was before anybody shoved the History of the City in Seven Volumes under my nose — hah!
     There they were—just as he remembered. His three