Stalking Darkness

23

The unexpected reunion with his sister had shaken Seregil to the core of his soul. A fierce sorrow seemed to emanate from him as they left the Palace, and the weight of it left Alec feeling mute and helpless. What could he say, what could he offer in the face of this? And what was it Nysander had meant, that Seregil had something to tell him?

He trailed anxiously in his friend's wake, the sound of their horses' hooves echoing from the ornate walls of villa gardens as the misshapen moon sank slowly toward the western rooftops. Alec couldn't forget the sight of that single tear rolling slowly down Seregil's face. He'd never imagined him capable of weeping.

Seregil paused long enough to steal two flasks of sweet red wine from a vintner's shop, then rode on until they reached the wooded park behind the Street of Lights. Dismounting, they led their horses along a path to an open glade beyond.

A small fountain stood at the center of the little clearing, its stone basin filled now with rain and dead leaves. Sitting down on the rim of it, Seregil handed Alec a flask, then uncorked his own and took a drink.

"Go on," he told Alec with a sigh. "You'll need it."

Alec found his hands were shaking. He took a long swig of the sweet, heavy wine, felt the heat curl down into his belly. "Just tell me, will you? Whatever it is."

Seregil was quiet for a moment, his face lost in shadow, then he gestured up at the moon. "When I was a child, I used to sneak out at night just to walk in the moonlight. My favorite times were in the summer, when people would come from all over Aurenen to the foot of Mount Barok. For days they'd gather, waiting for the full moon. When it rose over the peak, we'd sing, thousands of voices raised together, singing to the dragons. And they'd fly for us across the face of the moon, around the peak, singing their answering songs and breathing their red fire.

"I've tried to sing that song once or twice since I've been here, but do you know, it just won't come? Without all those other voices, I can't sing the Song of Dragons at all. As things stand now, I may never sing it again."

Alec could almost see the scene Seregil had described, a thousand handsome, grey-eyed folk in white tunics and shining jewels, massed beneath the round moon, voices raised as one. Standing here in this winter-ruined garden, he felt the crushing weight of distance that separated Seregil from that communion.

"You hoped your sister was going to say you could go home, didn't you?"

Seregil shook his head. "Not really. And she didn't."

Alec sat down beside him on the rim of the fountain.

"Why were you sent away?"

"Sent away? I was outlawed, Alec. Outlawed for treason and a murder I helped commit when I was younger than you."

"You?" Alec gasped. "I–I can't believe it. What happened?"

Seregil shrugged. "I was stupid. Blinded by my first passion, I allowed what I thought was love to cut me off from Adzriel and all the others who tried to save me. I didn't know how my lover was using me, or what his intent really was, but a man died all the same, and the fault was rightly mine. The details don't really matter—I've never told anyone else this much, Alec, and I'm not going to say more now. Maybe someday—At any rate, two of us were exiled. Everyone else was executed, except my lover. He escaped."

"Another Aurenfaie came to Skala with you?"

"Zhahir i Aringil didn't make it. He threw himself overboard with a ballast stone tied around his neck as soon as we lost sight of the coastline. I very nearly did the same, then and many times later on. Most exiles end up suicides sooner or later. But not me. Not yet, anyway."

The few inches between them felt like cold miles.

Clasping his flask, Alec asked, "Why are you telling me this now? Does it have something to do with what Nysander meant?"

"In a way. It's something I don't want secret between us anymore, not after tonight." He took another drink and rubbed his eyelids. "Nysander's been after me since he met you to tell you that—"

Seregil turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Alec, you're faie."

There was a gravid pause.

Alec heard the words, but for an instant he couldn't seem to take them in and make sense of them. He'd rehearsed a dozen dark possibilities during their walk from the Palace, but this had not been one of them.

He felt the flask slip from his fingers, felt it bounce on the damp, dead grass between his feet.

"That can't be!" he gasped, his voice unsteady. "My father, he wasn't—"

But suddenly it all fell into place—Seregil's questions about his parents, veiled remarks Nysander had made, all the rumors that he and Seregil were somehow related. The impact of this sudden revelation made him sway where he sat.

Seregil's grip on his shoulder tightened, but he could scarcely feel it. "My mother."

"The Hazadrielfaie," Seregil said gently, "from beyond Ravensfell Pass near where you were born."

"But how can you know that?" Alec whispered. It felt like the entire earth was spinning out from beneath his feet, leaving him stranded in a place he couldn't comprehend.

At the same time, it all made terrible sense: his father's silence regarding his mother, his distrust of strangers, his coldness. "Could she still be there?"

"Do you recall how I told you the Hazadrielfaie left Aurenen a long, long time ago? That their ways are different than ours? They don't tolerate any outsiders, especially humans, and they kill any half-breeds that are born, along with the parents. Somehow your mother must have broken away long enough to meet your father and have you, but her own people must have hunted her down in the end. Even if she'd gone back of her own accord, the penalty would still have been death. It's a miracle your father and you escaped. He must have been a remarkable man."

"I never thought so." Alec's pulse was pounding in his ears. This was too much, too much. "I don't understand. How can you know any of this?"

"I don't, for certain, but it fits the facts we do know. Alec, there's no getting around the fact that you are faie. I saw the signs that first morning in the mountains, but I didn't want to believe it then."

"Why not?"

Seregil hesitated, then shook his head. "I was afraid I was wrong, just seeing what I wanted to see—But I wasn't wrong—your features, your build, the way you move. Micum saw it right away, and the centaurs and Nysander and the others at the Oreska. Then, that first night we came back to the Cockerel, I went out again, remember? I went to the Oracle of Illior about another matter,and during the divinations, he spoke of you, called you a "child of earth and light" — Dalna and Illior, human and faie—there was no question what he meant. Nysander wanted me to tell you from the start but—"

At that, a wave of anger burst up through Alec's shocked numbness. Lurching to his feet, he rounded on Seregil, crying out, "Why didn't you? All these months and you never said anything! It's like that Wheel Street trick all over again!"

Seregil's face was half black, half bone pale in the moonlight, but both eyes glittered. "It's nothing like Wheel Street!"

"Oh, no?" Alec shouted. "Then what, damn it! Why? Why didn't you tell me?"

Seregil seemed to sag. Lowering his face, he rested both hands on his knees. After a moment he let out a ragged breath. "There's no single answer. At first, because I wasn't certain." He shook his head. "No, that's not true. In my heart I was certain, but I didn't dare believe it."

"Why not?"

"Because if I was wrong—" Seregil spread his hands helplessly. "It doesn't matter. I'd been alone for a long time and I thought I liked it that way. I knew if I was right, and if I told you then, if you'd even believed me, then it might create a bond, a tie. I wasn't willing to risk that either, not until I figured out who you were. Illior's Hands, Alec, you don't know, you can't know, what it was like—"

"Enlighten me!" Alec growled.

"All right." Seregil let out another unsteady sigh. "I'd been exiled from my own kind for more years than you've been alive. Any Aurenfaie who came to Skala knew who and what I was, and was under prohibition to shun me. Meanwhile, all my human companions age and die before my eyes."

"Except Nysander, and Magyana."

"Oh, yes." Now it was Seregil who sounded bitter. "You know all about my apprenticeship with him, don't you? Another failure, another place I didn't belong. Then, from out of nowhere, comes you, and you were—are—"

Alec looked down at the bowed figure before him and felt his anger slipping away as quickly as it had come. "I still don't understand why you didn't want to say anything."

Seregil looked up at him again. "Cowardice, I guess. I didn't want to see the look that's on your face right now."

Alec sat down next to him again and sank his face in his hands. "I don't know what I am," he groaned. "It's like everything I ever knew about myself has been taken away." He felt Seregil's arm go around his shoulders, but made no move to push him away.

"Ah, tali, you're what you've always been," Seregil sighed, patting his arm. "You just know it now, that's all."

"So I'll see Beka get old, and Luthas, and Illia and—"

"That's right." Seregil's arm tightened around him. "And that wouldn't be any less true if you were Tirfaie. It's not a curse."

"You always talk like it is."

"Loneliness is a curse, Alec, and being an outsider. I don't have a clue why the two of us ended up in the same dungeon cell that night, but I've thanked Illior every day since that we did. The greatest fear I've had is losing you. The second greatest is that when I finally did tell you the truth, you'd think it was the only reason I'd taken you on in the first place. That isn't so, you know. It never was, not even in the beginning."

The last of the shock and anger drained away, leaving Alec exhausted beyond measure. Reaching down, he retrieved the wine flash and drained what was left in it. "It's a lot to take in, you know? It changes so much."

For the first time in hours Seregil chuckled, a warm, healing sound in the darkness. "You should talk to Nysander, or Thero. Wizards must go through these same feelings when they learn they have magic in them."

"What does it mean, though, with me being only half?" asked

Alec as a hundred questions and comparisons flooded in. "How long will I live? How old am I, really?"

One arm still around Alec, Seregil found his own flask again and took a sip. "Well, when the faie blood comes from the mother it's generally stronger. I don't know why that is, but it's always the case and all those I know of lived as long as the rest of us, four centuries or so. They mature a bit faster, so you're about as old as you thought. There's also a good chance you'd inherit any magic she had, although it seems like that would have shown itself—"

He trailed off suddenly and Alec felt him shiver. "Damn it, I'm sorry I didn't say anything sooner. The longer I waited, the harder it got."

Without giving himself time to evaluate the impulse, Alec turned and put both arms around Seregil, hugging him tightly. "It's all right, tali" he whispered hoarsely. "It's all right now."

Taken by surprise, Seregil hesitated a moment, then returned the embrace, heart beating strong and fast against Alec's. A weary peacefulness came over Alec at the feel of it, and with it a whisper of pleasure at their closeness. From where they sat, Alec could see the glimmer of a few lanterns shining through the bare trees from the Street of Lights beyond. Seregil's fingers were twined in his hair at the nape of his neck, he realized with a guilty start, the same way he'd touched the young man at Azarin's a few short weeks ago.

First that strange, perception-altering night, he thought wearily, and now this. Illior's Hands, if things kept up in this manner, he'd end up not knowing who he was at all!

Releasing him at last, Seregil looked up at the moon, half-hidden in the tangled treetops.

"I don't know about you, but I've had about all the excitement I can deal with for one night," he said with a hint of his crooked smile.

"What about Rythel?"

"I guess Tym can keep an eye on things one more night. We'll track him down in the morning."

As they mounted for the ride home, it was Alec's turn to chuckle.

"What's so funny?"

"It could have been worse, I guess," Alec told him. "In the old ballads, orphans turn out to be the long-lost heir to some kingdom, which means they end up either cooped up in the family castle learning royal manners, or get sent off to slay some monster for a bunch of total strangers. At least I get to keep my old job."

"I don't think anyone will get much of a ballad out of that."

Alec swung up into the saddle and grinned over at him. "That's fine by me!"