“Hello, Aliver,” he said. He was relieved that he still had some control, spotty though it had become. “I come to you with a call to your destiny. And I arrive at the proper moment. I see you are a monster slayer today. Congratulations. Your father would have been proud.”
How strange, Thaddeus thought, that so much of the boy lived in this man’s features-in the set of his eyes and the crinkle of his upper lip and in the full shape of his head. Yet the face was that of a stranger as well. Staring at him was like listening to a discordant note woven into a familiar song. He had lost all of his soft edges, though this effect was as much a matter of his severe demeanor as it was his sharp features. Was that defiance flaring behind his eyes? Anger? Surprise or disappointment? Thaddeus could not tell, though he held on through the prince’s answering silence, trying to read him.
“Did you really kill that beast yourself?”
When Aliver finally spoke, there was a hint of a Talayan accent in his voice, a looseness of the tongue around the vowels, but he had lost no fluency in his native tongue. “I have learned to do many things. So you are not dead?”
Not the greeting Thaddeus had hoped for. “Sit down, please,” he said. The words came out before he thought them, but he was glad. He still looked calm. He knew that. He still had some command. He waited until Aliver lowered himself, his legs scissored together, cross-legged, his back as straight as a board.
Thaddeus lifted a letter from the low table before him. “Let us begin with this, Prince. Read it. It is important that you do.”
“You know what it says?”
Thaddeus nodded. “But I am the only one.”
“This is not my father’s hand,” Aliver said, after glancing at the words briefly.
“It is my hand, but his words. Read them and judge.”
The young man bent his head to the paper. His eyes slid down it, rose, and slid down it again. Thaddeus looked away. It is not right to watch as another reads. He knew the words by heart anyway. He knew all the ways Leodan had expressed his love for his firstborn. He tried not to think of them, to allow Aliver that privacy. He could not, however, fight back the memory of the words the letter ended with, for he would have to address them when the prince looked up at him.
“This cannot be serious,” Aliver said. He had stopped reading. His eyes were dead on the page, neither looking up nor moving over the words any longer.
“It is all serious. Which portion do you doubt?”
The young man flicked the paper, just enough to indicate that all of it was in question. “This talk of the Santoth, the God Talkers…that cannot be serious. My father, if he meant to tell me this, must have been close to death. He was not thinking clearly. Look what this says. Son,” he pretended to quote flippantly, “now that you are grown, it’s time you save the world…and he asks me to do it by seeking out some mythic mad magicians.”
“The Santoth may be as real as you and I.”
Aliver set his gaze on the man. “May be? Have you seen one? Have you worked magic or seen it done?”
“There are records,” Thaddeus began and then had to lift his voice above Aliver’s rebuttal. “There are records-of which you know nothing-that testify to the Santoth in great detail.”
“Myth!” Aliver spat the word, making it a curse.
“Myth lives, Aliver! That is a truth as undeniable as the sun or the moon. Do you see the moon at this moment? No, but you believe you will again. Your father tells you the Santoth can walk the Known World again. They can help us win back power as they did before. All they need is for you-an Akaran prince who will be king-to remove their banishment. This is part of why you were sent to Talay, to be nearest to the Santoth, so that you would know this land and have the skills to search them out, to hunt for them. Your brother and sisters went each to their different places as well, although little of that went as we wished. I will tell you about all of it, Aliver. You will know everything I know. Everything. I will tell you news of Hanish Mein as well. He is planning something for his ancestors, the Tunishnevre. They are another force that you might think were no more than myth, and yet it is they who gave Hanish the power-”
“Who is this ‘us’ you mentioned?”
“There are many who await your return. In a manner of speaking, the whole world awaits you. There are reasons only you can-”
“Why should I care about your world or believe a word you say? I have found another life, with people who speak only truth.”
Thaddeus felt his pulse hammer along his neck. He had a momentary impulse to slap his hand over it, but he controlled it. “There was a time when you called me uncle. You loved me. You said so with your child’s mouth, and I loved you in return. I am still that man. And I know that you care about the fate of the world. You always have. Nothing could beat that out of you. Aliver, this is what your father intended. The things you have learned here…the man you have become…” Aliver’s face was unreadable, utterly unreadable, and it caused Thaddeus to pause. “I see you want to be a mystery to me, but you are not.” With greater certainty he repeated, “You are not.”
“You say what I do is my choice?”
“Yes.”
Aliver said, “Then you have already spoken half-truths to me. You know I have no choice. Nor have you admitted that you betrayed my father. An honest man would have done so from the start. Yes, I know. How could I not? The world knows of Thaddeus Clegg’s treachery. Hanish Mein himself declared it, and I heard of it before I even arrived here, while still in the camel caravan. Men debated whether you were evil or just a fool. I did not add my voice to theirs, but I know the truth: you are both. You may not have put the blade in his chest, but-but you might as well have. If you were a true servant of my father, you would drop to your knees and beg for forgiveness.”
The prince pushed himself to his feet with one smooth exertion, rising straight up as his legs disentangled themselves. He was finished. He was turning to go. He lifted a foot and leaned to stride away behind it. Thaddeus had not been prepared for this moment. He had not planned for it, had not imagined Aliver would say what he just had or that he would respond to it as he was about to.
He lunged from his seated position. He wrapped one hand around Aliver’s leg. His other hand scraped him forward, and in a few moments he had the young man’s legs gripped in a two-armed embrace. This was not at all what he had intended, but he did not let go. He held tight, ready to feel the prince’s fists crashing down on his head. Only then did he understand completely what he had waited all these years to do, what he had feared and wanted most, what mattered with an urgency greater than the fate of nations. Forgiveness. He needed to be forgiven. To be so, he would have to tell the truth entirely. That was what he would do. For once, he would rely on the entire truth. And if Aliver was the prince the Known World needed, he would know how to face it all.
CHAPTER
The young woman watched the eel as it cut a squirming path through the glass-blue water. She lay on her stomach, naked save for a cloth wrapped snugly around her hips, the brittle, dry wood of the pier abrasive on her abdomen and chest and legs. The sun beat down upon her back with a force that made her flesh tingle. Her skin was brown from long exposure, peeling in spots, her thinner hairs bleached blond. She had not been a girl for some years now-hence the wrap around her waist-but at twenty-one she retained much that was boyish in her figure. Her breasts were shapely enough that the priests had trouble keeping their eyes off them, but they were small and really no bother to her, which suited her fine. She did not in any way look like the earthly embodiment of a goddess, but that was exactly what she was. She was the priestess of Maeben, the chief female deity of the Vumu people, revered throughout the splattering of islands known collectively as the Vumu Archipelago.