Connor Crane whipped his sword in a blinding series of arcs. The Vai’Ensai dodged them with minuscule turns and steps, and then hefted his immense sword to knock aside Connor’s slimmer blade. Connor felt the blow up to his elbow but held on. He countered and Kyre jerked his head back just enough to and let Connor’s sword tip whistle under his chin, then brought his own broadsword down in a chopping blow. The sword thrust was easy to avoid. Connor danced out of reach, then dodged the kicking boot that came at his midsection.
The Vai’Ensai nodded his horned head. “Good. Yesterday was not so good.”
Connor laughed. “That’s for certain! I still have the bruise on my rump to prove it.”
They squared off again; the empty yard rang with the sound of clanging steel. Connor met the Vai’Ensai blow for blow but he suspected Kyre was taking it easy on him now.
“Do you think,” Connor asked between parries, “we’ll need to leave Isle Lillomet?”
“It is not for me to say.”
Connor stepped back and held up a hand to stop their sparring. The afternoon sun was cloaked in clouds, its heat trapped in thick, wet air. He wiped his forearm across his brow. “Don’t start that again.” He grinned. “You came for me, remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Kyre said, his brow ridges furrowing. “It was only eleven sunsets ago that I found you.”
Connor shook his head and laughed. “I meant, seeing as how you sought me out, don’t you think you should know what for?”
Kyre rested his huge hands on the huge pommel of his huge broadsword. “I told you all I know. The stone and fire spoke your name and then it spoke mine. My threefold duty was clear: walk with you, protect you, die for you.”
His clawed hand went to the iron disc around his neck. He had shown the pendant to Connor the morning when Kyre had surprised them all by striding into the infirmary and declaring he wasn’t to leave Connor’s side. The iron disc bore strange markings that looked like small rents clawed into the metal. Kyre said it bore the name Connor Crane.
A strange thrill went through Connor each time he thought that he had some part in a strange Vai’Ensai ritual. He smiled now. Kyre came for me.
“Why do you give me so strange a look?” Kyre asked.
“What look?”
“Grateful. I have not yet fulfilled my duty.”
Connor shrugged and sat down on a bench. Kyre automatically moved to stand beside him. He did not sit.
“See up there?” Connor pointed to a window carved into an upper floor of the Moon Temple.
“Yes.”
“They’re up there right now, talking about you. About me. Us.”
“They ask many questions,” Kyre remarked.
“And they’ll ask more. Be warned.”
Kyre shrugged his massive shoulders; his wings shrugged with him. “Questions do not scare me.”
Connor smiled at that and then sighed. “I should consider Celestine, even in my thoughts, as the High Reverent. But she is a good friend of father’s, or like a sister to him, which makes her like an aunt to me. That’s how I think of her. And since the Two-Faced God doesn’t Hear me, I guess it’s all right to think of her as an aunt first and High Reverent after.” He waited for the old familiar ache that always came with the admission the god didn’t Hear him. He smiled. “Not this time.”
Kyre didn’t reply. He spoke little and listened more. Connor liked that.
“And my father…” Connor continued. “He worries. Because of my episodes. And he feels bad because I want to be a Paladin and that’s the one thing in all Lunos he can’t give to me. Well, that or my mother. She died having me and he thinks that’s his fault too.” He shielded his eyes from the muted glare of the sun. “Do you have a mother?”
“Yes,” Kyre said.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Don’t you miss her? Or your father?”
“Miss?” Kyre pondered this for a moment. “My father was an outstrider—one who patrols the coasts of the Cloud Isles. He was gone for many turns of the moon at a time. That was his duty. My mother laid her eggs with other females during the season of regeneration. When my nestmates and I hatched, the females raised us while keeping guard over the isles.”
Connor’s eyes widened. “You were hatched from an egg?”
“Yes.”
“But you seem more human than…lizard.”
“Lizards,” Kyre said with mild distaste tinting his words, “do not form tribes, nor read fire and stone, nor fight, nor speak…”
“Aye, right then,” Connor held up his hands, laughing. “I meant no offense.”
“I take none,” Kyre said and Connor wondered what it would take to really rile his strange new friend.
A threat to me, he decided.
He looked up at the windows where he was sure his father and Celestine were also discussing his strange new friend. But he’s mine.
“I didn’t know my mother either,” Connor continued. “She wasn’t from here, but some other isle. I don’t even know which because my father doesn’t remember the name. A tiny little place, he said, with forests and lots of strange stones that were stood up in strange formations all over. My father met her while he was a Captain. He says he loved her and I guess he did since he brought her back to Isle Lillomet and married her.”
Kyre said nothing.
“On the night I was born, my father said there was a storm like he’d never seen. A storm that wasn’t common to the season. He said that the lightning crashed so often and so close that the sky was lit up like day.” Connor turned to Kyre. “That means something, don’t you think?”
“It is not for me to say.”
“It means something,” Connor decided, pleased. “It must. Anyway, my mother is gone and my father doesn’t talk about her anymore. All he talks about is Skye. Do you know Skye?”
“I have heard stories from the Zak’reth war,” Kyre said. “She is a great warrior.”
“She is more than that,” Connor said, ticking off the titles with his fingers. “Commander, war hero, Justarch of Lillomet, High Reverent... She married my father after the war. He was obsessed with her. And she was with him too, I guess. For a time. But she left him four years ago. Just sailed away. Not a word to anyone until real recently.”
Kyre remained silent.
“I don’t care where she is or what she’s doing, but she hurt my father. She left to unite Lunos they say, but he’s been devastated. I used to think she was spectacular. Now, I hate her.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Connor glanced around, certain Reverent Taliah was listening and ready to pop out from hiding and chastise him.
“I don’t care if she never comes back. I hate that she hurt him, but when she’s around, nothing exists for my father but her. I don’t exist. The whole Alliance could fall apart and I don’t think he’d care so long as had Skye.”