He had not missed anything. He was not crazy or inept.
There were only two, deeply disturbing, inconceivable conclusions he could draw: one was that the king wanted his sons to die. The other, equally terrible option, was that the stars had lied to him.
Why?
Why him?
How was that even possible?
Then again, he could never forget what he’d read in that Chevakian book:
The reading of stars, as practiced by the Aranians, falls in the domain of lore, not science. We asked several reputable and well-known fortunetellers to predict the outcomes of various events: elections, harvests, games, not just once, but over a period of many years. They repeatedly failed to predict the same, correct, outcome, and there were even some cases where none of the astrologers predicted the events as they unf
