Luthe stood up, but came only a few steps nearer the fireplace. “I tell you all that I may.”
“May,” said Aerin fiercely. “What can you tell me that you may not? What am I, now that I am neither human—which I understand I never was—nor mortal, which I used to be? Why did you heal me? Why did you call me here at all? Why do you teach me now so much that you threaten me with the mage mark, that all who look upon me may know to fear me? That will be splendid fun at home, you know; I’m so popular already. Why? Why don’t you tell me to go away?” She stopped and looked down at her feet. “Why don’t I just leave?”
Luthe sighed. “I’m sorry. Again. I thought that perhaps it would be easier if you first had some idea of your own strength.”
She was still staring at her shoes, and he stepped toward her, and hesitantly touched one shoulder. The shoulder hunched itself up and the face turned away from him. Her hair was almost shoulder length now, and it fell across her face like a curtain. Luthe wanted to tell her the reasons she ought to stay—good honest Damarian reasons, reasons she would understand and acknowledge; reasons that were born with her as the king’s daughter, however outcast her people made her; reasons that he had to tell her soon anyway. But he wanted ... “Do you wish so desperately to leave?” he said almost wistfully.
“It matters little,” said a low voice from behind the hair. “I am not missed.”
“Tor,” said Luthe darkly.
“Oh, Tor,” said the voice, and it unexpectedly gave a choke of laughter, and then she raised her hands and parted the curtain, rubbing her cheeks hastily with her palms as she did so. Her eyes were still a little too bright. “Yes, Tor, and Arlbeth too, and I do feel badly for Teka; but I would guess they live hopefully, and guess to see me again. I do not mind staying here ... a little longer. I don’t much care to travel in winter anyway.”
“Thank you,” Luthe said dryly. “By spring I shall be ready ... to send you on your way again.”
Aerin said lightly, “And what shall that way be?”
“To Agsded,” Luthe said. “He who holds Damar’s future in his hands.”
“Agsded?” Aerin said. “I do not know the name.”
“He it is who sends the mischief across your borders; he it is who stirred Nyrlol to rebellion just long enough to distract and disturb Arlbeth, and he who awoke your Maur, and who even now harries your City with his minions, whose army will march south in the spring. Agsded, although none know his name now, and the Northern generals believe they band together through no impulse but their mutual hatred of Damar.
“Agsded is a wizard—a master mage, a master of masters. The mark on him is so bright it could blind any simple folk who look upon it, though they knew not what they saw. Agsded I knew long ago—he was another of Goriolo’s pupils; he was the best of all of us, and he knew it; but even Goriolo did not see how deep his pride went.—. . Goriolo had another pupil of Agsded’s family: his sister. She feared her brother; she had always feared him; it was fear of what his pride might do that led her to Goriolo with him, but it was on her own merit that Goriolo took her.
“And I—I must send you into the dragon’s den again, having barely healed you, and that at great cost, from your encounter with the Black Dragon. Maur is to your little dragons what Agsded is to Maur. I teach you what I may because it is the only shield I may—can—give you. I cannot face Agsded myself—I cannot. By the gods and hells you have never heard of,” Luthe broke out, “do you think I like sending a child to a doom like this, one I know I cannot myself face? With nothing to guard her but half a year’s study of the apprentice bits of magery?
“I know by my own blood that I cannot defeat him; though by some of that blood I have held him off these many years longer, that the chosen hero, the hero of his blood, might grow up to face him; for only one of his blood may defeat him.” Luthe closed his eyes. “It is true your mother wanted a son; she believed that as only one of his blood might defeat him, so only one of his own sex might, for to such she ascribed her own failure. She felt that it was because she was a woman that she could not kill her own brother.”
“Brother?” whispered Aerin.
Luthe opened his eyes. “Had she tried, she might yet have failed,” he went on as though he had not heard her, “but she could not bear to try; until Agsded, who knew the prophecy even as she did, from long before there was apparent need to know it, sought to bring her under his will or to destroy her.
“He could not do the former; almost he did the latter, and in the end she died of the poison he gave her.” Luthe looked at her, and she remembered the hand that was not her own holding a goblet, and a voice that was not Luthe’s saying “Drink.”
“But she had meanwhile fled south, and found a man with kelar in his blood, and been got with child by him. She had only the strength left to bear that child before she died.”
Luthe fell silent, and Aerin could think of nothing to say. Agsded beat in her brain; a moment ago she had told Luthe she did not know the name, and yet now she was ready to swear that it had haunted all the shadows since before her birth; that her mother had whispered it to her in the womb; that the despair she had died of was the taste of it on her tongue. Agsded, who was to Maur what Maur had been to her first dragon; and the first dragon might have killed her—and Maur had killed her, for the time she lived now was not her own. Agsded, of her own blood; her mother’s brother.
She felt numb; even the new sensitivities that had awoken in her since her dive into the Lake of Dreams and Luthe’s teaching—all were numb, and she hung suspended in a great nothingness, imprisoned there by the name of Agsded.
After a pause Luthe said, as if talking to himself: “I did not think your kelar would so hide itself from you. Perhaps it was the hurt you did yourself and your Gift by eating the surka. Perhaps your mother was not able entirely to protect the child she carried from the death so close to her. I believed that you had to know at least something of the truth—I believed it until I saw you face Maur with little more than simple human courage and a foolhardy faith in the efficacy of a third-rate healer’s potion like kenet against the Black Dragon. And I knew then not only that I was wrong about you, but that I was too late to save you from the pain your simplicity would cause you; and I feared that without your kelar to draw upon, you would not survive that meeting. And I was terribly near right.
“I have been much occupied while you were growing up, and I do not mark the years as you do; and I have not watched over you as I should have. As I promised your mother I would. Again I am sorry. I have been often sorry, with you, and there is so little I can do about any of it.
“I believed that you would grow up knowing some destiny awaited you; I thought what ran in your veins could not help but tell you so much. I thought you would know the true dreams I sent you as such. I thought many things that were wrong.”
“The kelar may have tried to tell me,” Aerin said dully; “but the message did get a little confused somehow. Certainly I was left in no doubt that my destiny was different than Arlbeth’s daughter’s should have been, but that was a reading anyone could have done.”
Luthe looked at her, and saw her uncle’s name like a brand on her face. “If you wish,” he said lightly, “I shall go personally to your City and knock together the heads of Perlith and Galooney.”
Aerin tried to smile. “I shall remember that offer.”
“Please do. And remember also that I never leave my mountain any more, so believe how apologetic I must be feeling to make it in the first place.”
Aerin’s smile disappeared. “Am I truly just as my mother was?” she asked, as she had asked Teka long ago.
Luthe looked at her again, and again many things crowded into his mind that he might say. “You are very like her,” he said at last. “But you are to be preferred.”