Something slipped from its moorings inside Rem’s spirit. He was worn out. Truth was making a fair bid to revolt him.
“Yes,” he said. “Very noble. Well, be pleased I’m leaving.”
“I would take it as a victory if you’d stay.”
“Why, in the name of the gods?”
“Something. You remind me of someone. My youth, maybe. The best and worst of it.”
Rem got to the door, blindly.
“No,” he said, “no, I won’t take this. I’ve taken all the rest. Not this.” He wanted to end it, but words kept trying to come. He remembered the lashing at Istris, and Lyki’s house, and vomiting from pain in front of her before he could prevent it. This was the same. And beyond this, anyway, there was nothing. The baggage trains and killing starving thieves, the Zastis nights in brothels. Not even the dawn star of the child to guide him, however hopelessly, pathetically, toward nothing that did not know it was nothing.
“Rem,” said Yannul.
“I’ve taken my beating,” Rem said, “like all the beatings. Kesarh’s. Her protectors with their fat hands. Lyki’s bloody sticks and pails of scalding water.”
“What did you say?” said Yannul.
Rem thrust himself to silence. At last he said, swathing himself in the doorway’s glare: “Nothing.”
“I caught a name. Lyki.”
Why not answer? He never spoke of her, but he had already said too much for more to matter.
“The woman who was my mother. When I was a child, and she wasn’t mooning over her days at the Koramvin court, mistress to some Dragon Lord, she used to knock me about. Or her gentlemen friends would do it, to save her delicate wrists.” There was another silence. “My father apparently deserted her,” said Rem. “I can quite see why. I never knew him. A shame.”
He swung round and was in the courtyard when he heard Yannul shout.
“For the sake of Aarl! Wait!”
For some reason, Rem looked back around the door.
Yannul was gray in the face even through the darkness of his skin. Rem checked. Was the man ill? More quietly than he had intended, Rem said, “Truce, sir. There’s nothing you can say to make me remain here now.”
“Isn’t there?” said Yannul. “What if I were to say you’re the son of Raldnor Am Anackire, god and hero, and former Storm Lord of Vis?” Yannul grinned even through his grayness. “Would you stay for that?”
There were fireflies stringing necklaces from the shrubbery to the terrace. And there was also Rem, who was Rarmon son of Raldnor son of Rehdon, standing looking at them.
There had been talking all day. He was numb from talking as from yet another lashing. That numbness before the agony came.
They had told him all they could. Too much. He was brimmed over by knowledge. To have nothing. Then to be given this.
The gods must be extant somewhere, after all, playing their board games with men, as the fables said.
Lyki. How often she had muttered of her passionate love-affair with royalty. The hero Raldnor’s mistress, of whom he tired. He had preferred the betrothed bride of the King. A year later, Lyki had been part of an abortive plot against his life—how she had hated Raldnor Am Anackire, the father of her son.
Why had she never told him, that bitch? Viciousness—or was her hurt, also, too great? It must have hurt her, a woman like his mother, to fare as she had. To be reduced as she had been reduced.
And after all was said and done, Raldnor had willingly let this son be taken from him. Sown without wish, cast off with the woman. Maybe, as Yannul said, his goddess had possessed Raldnor, blotting out humanity that he might do Her will. Even so, he had planted Raldanash in Vathcri with intent and purpose. Lyki’s bastard had been nothing to him.
There was a step on the flags. Rem knew it. His whole body tensed, then relinquished tension. He had ceased fighting, for a little while.
“In one second I can be off the terrace,” said Lur Raldnor.
“Never mind.”
“If you wanted to be alone.”
“Each of us is always alone.”
Lur Raldnor (my father’s namesake) laughed his golden laugh.
“Still Rem, despite everything.” He moved forward, standing parallel with Rem, but some way off. “Do I call you ‘my lord’?” Rem did not answer this sally. Lur Raldnor said, “What will you do?”
“Nothing. Very little has changed.”
“Everything has changed, and you know it.”
“But only I, and your family, do know.”
“I think he almost knew from the beginning, my father,” said Lur Raldnor. “The first evening, riding back here, he said to me, ‘That man’s like Raldnor. The way he was before Anack laid hold of him.’ I think he was waiting for you to give him the key to it, even if he didn’t realize there was one.”
Rem observed the fireflies. He felt young and afraid. Fifteen years old. And it was too late for that. He should have had this from the commencement, or not at all.
“By rights,” said Lur Raldnor, “you’d go to Dorthar, with me. Present yourself to the Storm Lord on my father’s authority, with myself as your witness. Raldanash is your half-brother. Do you even see?”
“Perhaps not,” said Rem.
He moved away along the terrace, and Yannul’s son followed him.
“Come to Anackyra, Rem,” said Lur Raldnor. “It isn’t just the war. It’s everything else. That place is—like no other place on earth, because of what it was, what’s happened there. You have to see it. Walk over it. You were the first-born: by Dorthar’s laws you don’t threaten Raldanash. It wasn’t even legal—forgive me. But you’re part of the legend, still here in the world, as he is.”
Rem damned the legend, garishly.
“In any case,” said Lur Raldnor, “I never did get that knife-to-sword pass as it should be.”
“The passage to Hliha could take a quarter of a month. The crossing to Xarabiss is six days. The land journey to Dorthar is a deal longer than either.” Rem looked round and confronted him. “In all that time, just suppose I can’t keep my hands off you? We may end the most perfect of enemies.”
Lur Raldnor looked quizzical.
“I thought the premise was I didn’t know.”
“If your father knew, he’d make sure you did. So you could be ready, how did he put it? To say ‘No’ loudly enough.”
“I love my father,” said Raldnor, “and I revere him. A lot of the time, he can speak for me. Not all the time.”
“You’re saying you’d lie on your face like my whore?”
“No. I’m not saying that.”
Humiliated by his own responses. Rem looked away. The boy said:
“When my mother was younger than I am now, she killed a man. He—your father—made her do it. By telepathy, willpower. It was when they broke Amrek’s occupation of the ruined city in the Plains. She’s never forgotten.”
“That has something to do with this.”
“This much. None of us know what there is in our blood, or souls, or minds. But what we are, what we can—or cannot—do, these things make themselves known. We don’t need to struggle always toward them. Or away. It’s like breathing. Rem. If we need it, it happens, without thought. Better, without thought.”
The fireflies hung in the bushes, flaming.
Far off, the boy said to him, “Come to Anackyra, Rem.”
The wolf, which had left its prints around the bis pond, and so drawn them to the hills that day, never returned. It was never mentioned. In after years, if they spoke of it, they would recall it as intrinsic to the will of Anackire, Her messenger. Only Rem would never, he knew, speak of it in that way.
In the end, it was still Zastis when the small party for Dorthar left the villa-farm near Amlan.