“We can’t. Not anymore.” He knew it now for certain, and there was a strange relief in the knowing. “He must be told who he is.”
She sprang to her feet, terrified. “No! Please, Rohan—please!”
“It’s time. It must be tonight.”
“No!”
“Would you see him die because he can’t use power he doesn’t know he has?” he lashed out.
Green eyes blazed in a face the color of chalk. “We could tell him he gets the diarmadhi blood from one of us, we could—”
“Lie to him? Again? When do the lies stop, Sioned? Who are you protecting now—Pol or yourself?”
“And what happens when he finds out the man who wants his death is his own brother?”
“He’ll just have to accept that, won’t he!” Rohan turned for the door, but her next words stopped him in mid-stride.
“The way you accepted him when you returned to Stronghold that winter? You could barely look at either of us! I’d brought you a son you didn’t want, and Pol was living reminder that you weren’t perfect! Shall we tell him that, too?”
He heard his voice become the chill, brittle one he used when forced to address someone he loathed. “He will be told who is he tonight. You may attend or not, as you choose. But he will be told.”
34
Stronghold: 34 Spring
By sunset Stronghold had been turned inside out. The guards and Sunrunners scoured the area around the keep while light lasted, reporting nothing out of the ordinary. Rohan expected as much. Ruval and Mireva would assume there’d be a search of this kind, so he had to provide it. He hoped the show would satisfy them so that his next gambit would come unanticipated.
But before he began it, there was Pol.
They met in the library again at Rohan’s request. Pol had just arrived when Sioned entered and sat down on her side of the double desk. Rohan would have bet half his princedom that she wouldn’t come, especially after their clash today—that she would flee this thing she had dreaded for so long. But she met his eyes squarely, unflinching.
Pol had pulled up a chair near Sioned’s desk, curious at his parents’ tense silence. “What is it you wanted to talk about?”
Rohan locked the door and leaned back against it. He had struggled with the words a thousand times, trying to imagine this moment, to find the right way to say it that would spare Pol and Sioned any pain. But the words escaped him, and there must be pain.
Sioned folded her hands atop her desk, her shining head bent, the graceful lines of her throat and shoulders highlighted by candleglow. Rohan had lit the candlebranch earlier, knowing that if she had done it by Sunrunner means, the flames would leap and flare with her emotions. Refracted light from the emerald ring on her left hand trembled slightly, the only sign of her terror.
Aware that he was delaying the inevitable, he glanced around the room. Tapestry map, books, parchments piled on the desks, boxes containing the seals of their princedom—perhaps he should have chosen another place. This was, after all, a political room. But it was too late to move to a private chamber, one in which they could be people and not princes.
Drawing in a deep breath, he began. “Pol . . . you are everything we ever wanted in a son.” The young man’s head tilted to one side in a gesture of puzzlement. “You know your own strengths. You’ve explored your abilities as a prince and learned how to use your faradhi gifts with confidence and wisdom. You are a Sunrunner.”
“That’s made painfully obvious every time I cross water,” Pol said, smiling a little. “What are you trying to say, Father? That my Sunrunner skills can defeat Ruval’s sorceries? If so, keep talking—because I’m dreading it, even knowing what’s in the Star Scroll.”
Sioned murmured, “You have no cause to fear, Pol. You are everything we ever dreamed you would become.” She hesitated, glancing once more at Rohan. “And you are everything you always were, no matter what you might hear about—about who you are.”
Blue-green eyes widened. “Mother! Don’t tell me you’re worried about that old rumor?”
“What rumor?” Rohan asked, sharp-voiced.
“I heard it first while I was at Graypearl. The gist of it is that I’m not really your son—that Mother couldn’t have a child with you. Some say my real father is someone here at Stronghold, and others say a Sunrunner was brought here in secret. It was merely insulting until they got to the part about Mother only marrying you because Lady Andrade told her to, and that she never loved you at all. That made it ludicrous! I always laughed it off—and so should you,” he added with gentle chiding to Sioned.
“I never heard that one,” Rohan mused.
“There are others. All of them just as ridiculous. Mother, don’t concern yourself with—”
“Pol, please!” She shied to her feet like a nervous cat and paced to the other side of the desk. “Just listen. Don’t make this any harder.”
Obviously bewildered now, Pol looked to his father for an explanation. Rohan said softly, “There’s no easy way to tell it. Pol, do you believe that possession of diarmadhi power is inherently evil?”
“I’ve already been through this with Riyan. If I ever did believe that, which I don’t, he’s ample evidence otherwise.” He shifted impatiently, flinging a look at Sioned. “Will you please just tell me whatever it is you feel you have to tell me?”
Her shoulders straightened as though she was bracing herself. She stood behind Rohan’s desk chair, gripping its carved wooden back. She drew a slow breath—but Rohan spoke first.
“You are a Sunrunner, Pol,” he said. “But you are also diarmadhi. You are my son, but not hers. Your mother was Princess Ianthe, youngest daughter of High Prince Roelstra and his only wife, Lallante.”
Shock froze the young face. His eyes went blank, his skin colorless. Rohan watched confusion, denial, suspicion, a hundred emotions play across his son’s features. At last Pol’s lips moved in a deathly whisper. “Why would you tell me such a lie?”
Rohan could hardly breathe. Sioned clung to the chair so hard her hands were bloodless.
“How?” Pol’s voice was harsh, hollow.
Sioned answered. “I lost every child I ever carried. All failings of a princess are forgivable but one: failure to bear a son. But I—I saw myself in a vision of Fire and Water. I was holding a newborn. You. So much your father’s son that there could be no doubt you were his. Yet I knew I would never conceive again.” She stood very still, staring down at her hands. “You know that Ianthe held your father captive at Feruche. I was there, too. When she was certain she was pregnant, she let us go.”
“I do not excuse myself, Pol,” Rohan said quietly. “I—”
“The first time,” Sioned went on as if he had not spoken, “she went to him while he was drugged with dranath and fevered from a wound. She . . . pretended to be me. She wished an heir to Princemarch and the Desert both, her vengeance on him for Choosing me instead of her.”
“The second time, I raped her.” Rohan heard the revulsion he’d sworn he would never reveal, and cursed himself. “I prefer to believe you were the result of that first—” He stopped, swallowed hard. “When—afterward—I joined our armies already in the field. Sioned stayed at Stronghold and emptied it of all but a few servants. Tobin and Ostvel were here as well.”
Pol flinched. “Then . . . they’ve always known. Who else?”
“Chay. Myrdal. Maeta.” She pronounced the names slowly, reluctantly.
“And the servants?”
“All dead now, but for Tibalia.” Her eyes, liquid with anguish, beseeched him. “People who love you, Pol. Who—”
“—don’t hold it against me?” For the first time there was an edge to his voice, a strange spark in his blue-green eyes.
Rohan said softly, “She kept watch. She waited just as if she was the one carrying you in her body. You were hers, Pol. Do you understand? She’d seen you in her arms. Our child.”