“I know you all.”
The same sensation surrounded him as he sat in his old room. He ran his hand over his silken bedspread. He picked up the statue of Telamathon-he who had defeated the god Reelos and his five disciples-and felt the man’s face with fingers. He studied the tapestries on the wall and the busts of the early kings, facing east to greet the morning sun. His room had remained furnished as he remembered, almost as if it had been preserved for his return. He knew it had not been. Nobody had expected his return, least of all him. But he was here, body and mind; and with each passing hour he became more and more himself. Less and less whatever he had been.
It felt almost like his flesh and skin were shrinking to fit his form, just now growing snug around him. Whatever Corinn had done to bring him back to life should not have been attempted. He knew that as surely as he had ever known anything. But it was done, and he could only live with it. Just how to live he was not sure. Wandering about the palace seemed to be helping, though. He rose and continued.
He could not have explained how he knew where to find the boy. He simply rose and looked. And looking, he knew. He entered the room as a servant came out of it. Surprised by his presence, she slammed herself against the doorjamb and stood straight as a board as he approached. Much the same reaction the other servants gave him when he encountered them. He studied her soft-featured face a moment, not recognizing it but finding it pleasant, and then he nodded as he passed by her into the bedroom.
Aaden, a child of eight, lay on his bedspread. Dressed in silken green bedclothes, he curled to one side, his knees pulled up and his hands clasped together. Something about the posture looked choreographed, too precise to be natural. Perhaps the servant had just repositioned him. Yes, that was it. They were caring for him as he slept.
Aliver sat beside him. He felt as if he already knew the boy, as if he could sit without fear that the boy would think it a trespass, as if he had spent time with him already. He had not. Corinn had always delayed their meeting, but she was gone for the time being. A good thing, too. He was coming to know himself and the present world faster without the tightly wound energy swirling about her to contend with.
“When will you wake?” he asked. “I should like us to talk, just us for a time. I was a boy like you once. A prince promised the world. No doubt you’ve been lied to… for your own good, they’ll believe. But nothing good comes from lies, not even well-intentioned ones. One thing they don’t tell you is that the world is not truly yours. You are but a part of it. You have been born not to be served by it but to serve it. At least, that’s how it felt with me. Perhaps your birth into this family is no accident. You may be the greatest of us all.”
Greatest of them all? Was that his idea? Strange to feel it anchored in him, though he knew nothing of this boy beyond his parentage. Corinn had said something about Aaden’s greatness. She had said many things; and she had not said many things. Aliver was aware of both. Their conversations had created an unease that itched at the edge of his awareness. He could not find a way to draw it nearer or to pull it over himself and inhabit it as some part of him wanted to. Even when she had said things he did not agree with, he was powerless to truly object.
A few days ago, before she left for Teh, she had told him that she believed the Santoth had reached out to her. She claimed that they had spoken to her through people in her dreams. “Once I wouldn’t have thought that possible,” she had said. She sat sharing the late evening with him. The fire had burned to glowing coals and grown warmer for it. He watched her fingers as they kneaded a lacy shawl, squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go. “But now anything is possible. Anything at all.”
“What do they say?” Aliver asked.
“Promises. Entreaties.” She did not look at Aliver. She seemed almost to be carrying on both sides of their conversation herself. “They ask and ask and promise. It’s all quite jumbled really.”
“What do they ask?”
“They ask me to rescind their banishment, bring them back to Acacia, and give them The Song of Elenet. They act like it’s theirs! And what do they promise? They’re vague on that. To be my army of sorcerers. To protect me from forces I don’t understand. As if I need them for that.”
“Perhaps you do. They cared for me. Corinn, I went in search-”
“Of them. A foolish thing to do. They helped us win the war, so I don’t fault you too much for it, but it was the song itself we needed, not other singers of it.”
Perhaps she knew best. His thoughts were still cloudy on his past life. And yet… “In the end I didn’t find them; they found me.” That was exactly right. He had thought they were stones. He would have died just a few feet from them, had they not risen and saved him. “They wanted only to be released from banishment and to study the Giver’s tongue again.”
“I know that much,” Corinn said. “They’re desperate for my book. Too desperate.”
“Wouldn’t you be desperate, too?” This brought her gaze up. “Imagine if-” He could get no further. With Corinn’s eyes on him, intense and flashing warning, his words clipped off as if his throat had been squeezed shut. For a moment he did not breathe. Then he gasped and knew that he had breath. It was only words that could not pass his lips.
Corinn looked back to the shawl in her lap. “They’ve left me alone recently. I’m glad of it. My dreams are cluttered enough without them. We don’t need them. Tinhadin didn’t; I don’t.”
“But what if-”
“No, I am right,” she said. “Leave it at that.” Before the reverberation of her words had completely faded he believed she was right. It was a relief in a way. So much confused doubt replaced by her certainty. He was not even sure what he had been about to say.
“Oh, look at this!” Corinn plucked at something on the shawl. “A slipped stitch.” She tugged on the yarn pinched between her fingers. It slipped free easily. She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, a reprimand for whoever had knitted it. Then, after a studied pause, she continued ripping the stitches out.
S itting beside Aaden now, Aliver sighed. Thinking of his sister fatigued him and exhilarated him at the same time. He could make no sense of it yet. He reached out and stroked strands of wavy hair back from the child’s forehead. He was handsome. How could a child of Corinn’s not be?
“I do wish you would wake and speak to me, but you can’t. I should speak to you. How about a story? Would you like a story?” Aliver stretched out next to him. “Let’s see…”
And tell stories he did. Not just one. Several. He told of the girl Kira, who had one magical gift. She could fold bits of paper into winged shapes and toss them into the air, turning them into living birds. It was a simple talent that she thought largely useless until she learned better. He told of an adventure Bashar had while hunting his brother in Talay, how he fell into a deep pit and could escape only with the aid of a legless man who climbed on his back and described the way out for him. He told bits and pieces as he recalled them from his own childhood, and he told half the tale of Aliss, the Aushenian woman who killed the Madman of Caraven. Only half, though, for he realized at some point that the ending was a bloodier thing than he wished to describe to a sleeping boy.
He talked long enough that his voice grew hoarse and he fell into a long, ruminative silence, staring at the ceiling and listening to the boy’s quiet breathing. Eventually, when the pipers played the passing of a third hour, Aliver swung his legs to the floor and rose. “Sleep peacefully, my nephew. Wake soon.”