Guardians of the Keep: Book Two of the Bridge of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

Preceptors of Gondai have come to wait upon their Prince. I’ve put them off for more than three
    months, and if I don’t produce you, they’ll cause trouble. I can’t spare the energy to fight them, so you
    must get up and present yourself.”
    “The Preceptors . . . Exeget, Ustele, the others?” The urgency of his words prodded me to function at
    some minimal level. I sat up, trying to stir some blood into my limbs.
    “Yes, you blithering boy. They sit in my library at this very moment in all their varieties of
    self-importance and deception. I told them you were sleeping, but they said they would await Your
    Grace’s pleasure. So if you would like another hour’s sleep before we begin work again, rouse yourself,
    get to the library, and get rid of the bastards. We’ve no time to dally with them.”
    “What will I say? I know nothing more than a twelve-year-old.” My faith in Dassine’s assurances that
    all I now remembered was truth took an ill turn. What if the memories he had instilled were only wild
    fictions and not the unmasked remnants of my own experiences? But a glance at the sagging flesh around
    his eyes reminded me that he slept no more than I. I couldn’t swear that his mysterious game was the
    only hope of the world as he insisted, but I believed that he did nothing from cruelty or indifference. I had
    to trust him.
    “You will say as little as possible. They’re here to verify that I’m not grooming some impostor to
    supplant the line of D’Arnath.”
    I couldn’t help but be skeptical. “And how am I to prove that? I doubt I can reassure them by telling
    the story of my life—lives.”
    Dassine jabbed at my chest with his powerful fingers. “You are D’Natheil, the true Heir of D’Arnath.
    You can pass the Gate-wards, walk the Bridge, and control the chaos of the Breach between the worlds.
    The blood in your veins is that of our Princes for the last thousand years, and no one—no one—can deny
    or disprove it. It’s true that you’ve had experiences others cannot understand, and we cannot tell these
    fossils about them quite yet, but I swear to you by all that lives that you are the rightful Prince of Avonar.”
    It was impossible to doubt Dassine.
    “Then they’ll want to know what I’m doing here with you all these months, which, lest you’ve
    forgotten, you’ve never explained.”
    “They have no right to question you. You are their sovereign.”
    Ah, yes. It didn’t matter that in my life in the mundane world, my younger brother, Christophe, had
    inherited the gift of Command from my beloved father, the Baron Mandille. In my life here in the world of
    Gondai—in this Avonar of sorcery and magic—I, D’Natheil, the third son of Prince D’Marte, had been
    named Heir of D’Arnath when my father and two older brothers had been slain in quick succession.
    When my name had been called by the Preceptorate—the council of seven sorcerers who advised the
    Heir and controlled the succession—I could scarcely write the letters that comprised it, because no one
    had ever thought that a third son, so wild, and so much younger than the others, would ever be needed to
    rule my devastated land.
    My memories of D’Natheil’s life ended abruptly on the day I turned twelve, the day my hands were
    anointed and I came into my inheritance. On that day these same Preceptors waiting for me now had
    decided that I must essay D’Arnath’s enchanted Bridge and attempt to repair the weakness caused by
    years of war and neglect and the corrupting chaos of the Breach between the worlds.
    Gondai and the mundane world—the human world—had existed side by side since Vasrin gave
    shape to nothingness at the beginning of time. Dar’Nethi sorcery and human passion created a delicate
    balance in the universe that no one quite understood. At the time of the Catastrophe, when the Breach
    came into being and separated the two worlds, upsetting this balance, we Dar’Nethi found