“What will you do?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“There is little I can do,” he said. “But I can hold him off, even as our parents did. And you, my sister, must leave.”
“Please, brother,” I cried, “don’t make me abandon the City of Wings!”
“You must go,” he said, “so that Etalpalli may be saved. Seek out the Brothers Ashiun, the Knights of the Farthest Shore. They may be persuaded to help us.”
“How?” I asked.
“I do not know,” Tlanextu replied. “It is said the brothers possess gifts, strange weapons forged in the fires of Lumé and filled with the light of Hymlumé. Perhaps these same weapons may be enough to drive Cren Cru from our demesne. You must go to them and plead our cause.”
The idea filled me with dread. I had never before ventured beyond the Faerie Realm, never flown across the boundaries of Etalpalli, my beautiful home. I knew of the worlds that lay beyond our borders, the vast Wood Between, and the strange Near World, where people lived and died by the cruel hand of Time. The idea of journeying anywhere near that place was enough to make my blood run cold.
But Tlanextu asked me with death staring from his eyes. How could I refuse?
The Chronicler had a way of deflecting attention from himself, a skill honed to perfection over the course of his hidden life.
Nevertheless, standing now in the candlelit room, watching her teacher bend over the sickened earl, it was impossible, Leta thought, to miss the resemblance between them. Though Ferox was weakened to skeletal frailty, though the Chronicler was deformed in body, their faces were as like as ever were father and son. Save the Chronicler’s features were softer with youth and, perhaps, with his mother’s influence.
Leta saw it all. She did not know who else might. Mintha knew, but did Alistair, standing on the far side of the bed, looking on with eyes full of surprise and perhaps horror? Did her own father, lurking in the near shadows, know this great secret of his fellow earl?
“I have been no father to you,” Ferox said, his voice so thin and quavering that Leta strained to discern the words. The Chronicler leaned closer, and his mouth worked as though struggling to form a reply.
“I’ve been no son to you,” he said at last, scarcely above a whisper.
“I gave you a place,” the earl continued. In desperation he tried to raise his head, but the effort was too great. His shaking hand slid across the heavy rugs of his bed, seeking the Chronicler. “I gave you a profession. I gave you a chance for power beyond that of other men, the power of words and pen.”
The Chronicler drew his hand away from the earl’s. But he said, “You . . . you have been good to me, my lord.”
“No.” The muscles in the earl’s neck quivered as he shook his head. “I have not been good. I have been a coward.”
“Enough of this,” Lady Mintha said. “My dear brother must not be bothered at this time. Away with—”
“Be still,” Alistair growled, and his mother lapsed into silence, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Leta felt the tension in the earls surrounding her, heard the sharp breaths of her own father. But she did not turn her gaze from the scene playing out before her. Every sense in her body focused upon that isolated space of candlelight and death.
“You are like your mother,” Ferox said. His eyes, clouded with memories, wandered across the room, seeking something he could not find. But he still spoke to the Chronicler. “Very like. She too was . . . clever. She wrote and she read. And she was small. Too small. Not so small as you, but too small. And she died. You lived. I thought I hated you.”
Leta saw the tears on the Chronicler’s cheeks. They were in a world apart, that father and son, a world that fit only the two of them, and she dared not draw near even had she wished to.
“A sonless earl can never be a king.” Ferox’s wandering eyes at last fell upon the face of his son. Slowly, as though lifting a mighty mace and chain, he raised his hand. The fingers trembled like dried leaves with the strain. “A cowardly earl can never be a man.”
The Chronicler reached out. He took that trembling hand in his. For a moment his eyes were as fierce as ever the earl’s had been. “You are strong,” he said, and there was pride in his wounded voice. “You are the earl of Gaheris, the greatest man in the North Country.”
“I will never be a great man,” Ferox replied. “But before they inter me in the dark, I will be a true man.”
With a gasp of pain, he lifted his arm up high so that all in the room could see how their hands were clasped. He raised his voice so that it was almost as loud as it had been in the fullness of his life. He said: