kill him, I thought as I followed Sarah through the dark passage that led back to the dormitory. I don’t care what this is, I don’t care how important. I am going to get the message from him, and then I am going to kill him, slowly and painfully.
I couldn’t have mistaken that look in Sarah’s eyes. Could I? I knew I was a dimtorch about this, but what else could it have possibly meant? Why else would her eyes begin to soulflare when nothing in our environment or our conversation would have brought up such intensity of emotion? And with her leaning in so close.… Then there was her temperature. She normally ran cool, and that was a cool room, so the increase in her heat had been striking. And her scent as her power stirred.…
Gah, I nearly went mad with all just remembering, nearly grabbed her in that dark tunnel and pulled her up and to my mouth.
But.…
I couldn’t. I had promised. She had to ask. Or…give permission.
I could ask. Surely that was allowed now. Now that I had seen a request in her eyes, which I didn’t think even I could mistake, for something of a very different flavor than friendship.
But…the Trees.…
So ask Them first, you dimtorch, a voice in my head said impatiently.
I…would.
I would finally ask Them. And I would face Their answer.
I couldn’t put this off any longer. Even as cowardly as I was about it, the next time Sarah asked—Flame Above and Below, please let her ask again—I had to have an answer.
That resolution made…I went straight back to plotting how to murder my leftwing. I studiously ignored the fact that he had potentially saved me from committing a transgression against Their will. If he hadn’t interrupted, then at least I could have gotten one kiss in before They denied more to me.
I had that settled just in time for Sarah to push open the door to the dormitory and step out.
“Fascinating,” I heard Kor say.
Sarah yelped and spun in the direction of his voice. “You.…” she growled, fists curling.
Her display of aggression was so adorable, it helped take the edge off my temper, so that I was able to fix my face into something merely stern as I squeezed my way through the small doorway.
Kor was ignoring Sarah and studying the door with interest. “So, I was right. That’s where the entrance to the other passage is. Or at least one of the entrances.”
“You knew?” Sarah exclaimed. Then huffed and turned to push the door closed. “Of course you did.”
“Of course I did,” Kor agreed. He pointed to his room, which was one of the two on either side of the door, the other being mine. “That’s my room, after all. You thought I wouldn’t notice a hollow space on two sides of it?”
“How.… Never mind,” Sarah said, stomping off to the kitchen. “Come on. If this is so darn urgent, let’s get on with it.”
Her temper was doing wonders for mine. It gave me yet another sign that maybe, just maybe, she was finally interested after all. If she was this mad with Kor.…
Kor looked back at me with a smirk. Sorry for interrupting.
Torch it. Now I couldn’t even punch him without admitting that he had been interrupting anything. And…admitting that I was mad that he had. I’d almost forgotten my resolve to not tell him I had changed my mind about Sarah. That was still the best policy with Kor, until and unless the Trees and Sarah said yes.
So as much as it killed me…I pretended not to be bothered. Though passing him by sorely tempted me.
Just one hit, a voice in my head wheedled. Just one.…
But I kept my fists to myself and followed Sarah into the kitchen.
Yvera was already there, carefully avoiding eye contact with everyone as she ate a kalla fruit. I inwardly winced at what she must have thought of Sarah and me being somewhere alone together, but…I wasn’t going to stop. I just wished there was something I could do to help her.
She was my friend, after all. Sister, practically…but I should stop thinking of her in that way if it bothered her so much. I guessed that was the one thing I could do.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” Kor said, making his entrance last. “I am certain you are all on pins and needles to know why.”
For once, Yvera summed up all three of our sentiments when she said, “Cut the dramatics, Kor. Spill, or shut up and let me go to bed.”
“Fine,” Kor said, rolling his eyes. “For you, dear rightwing, I’ll cut to the chase. The urgent matter is this: Olsdak Hold has formally invited Ben as the guest of honor at the Moonfair, and I think he should accept.”
Silence. Yvera was incredulous, Sarah confused, and I.…
“I am going to kill you,” I said flatly. “That is your ‘urgent’ matter?”
Kor’s eyes were wide with innocence. “They have given us the next deken to respond. It couldn’t wait.”
“Fine, then,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Here’s my response: no.”
I turned to find something I could beat the stuffing out of. Then, after getting in a more reverent frame of mind, find a private place to ask the Trees a long overdue question.
“Ah, Ben,” Kor said. His voice was deadly serious now. “Once you’ve heard me out, you are going to accept. Trust me.”
I paused. Turned. Then glared at him. “What can you possibly say that would possess me to accept an invitation to the Moonfair, now?”
Kor smirked. “What if I told you I am eighty percent certain that’s the next moongate location?”
We all stared at him, and his smirk only widened.
He lived for these moments.
“Do I have your attention now?”
I took a deep, calming breath. “But the others have all been remote locations, Kor. Olsdak is…”
The second-largest hold on Oshal, and its cultural heart. But I didn’t need to tell Kor that. It was his ancestral home, the hold of his birth—as familiar and beloved to him as Crownhold was to me.
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought Kor was letting his fondness for Olsdak cloud his judgment. But I did know better, so I bit back the comment. If I accused my scholarly leftwing of bias, especially before hearing his evidence, he would bite my tail off.
“Ah,” Kor said. “I have thought about that. Has anyone else thought it odd that Peacegrowth didn’t get a world until after the Moontouched left, and yet there, on Ykran, we found the first moongate?”
Again, we just stared.
This time, Kor huffed and folded his arms. “Really? No one?”
Sarah raised her hand, like a polite student in a classroom. “Uh, I’m new here.”
“You get a pass, Sarah,” Kor said without looking at her. Instead, he glared at me. “Ben doesn’t.”
I…deserved that one.
I sighed. “What’s your theory? In brief, please.”
“In brief, it goes something like this: the Moontouched always knew they were going to leave.”
Kor let that sink in for a moment.
“What?” Yvera snorted. “Nonsense. Even I know they left because the Lady—”
“That was the reason they gave. But the theory that makes the most sense is that somehow, they always knew it would come to that. How do I know this? Well, we have had abundant evidence by now that the Moontouched had, at least at some point, some kind of foresight. That’s how they built and supplied this hold with technology we have only just invented ourselves or haven’t yet. That’s how they wrote Sarah’s name on an archival that predates their departure—and yes, I have done tests on it to prove it.”
Kor declared the last triumphantly. As if any of us were about to challenge him. He paused, then when none of us did, he huffed a bit and went on.
“So, with that kind of foresight, knowing that they would one day have to leave…they began to prepare immediately. Long before they actually did. Perhaps centuries before. Did you think this hold could have been built in a quick scramble in the aftermath of the Lady’s assassination?”
He only paused slightly this time. “No! It would have taken years, at least. And that was after they even built a moongate to come to this world. Which would have required the help and approval of the Tree of Ice. Which means that even the Trees always intended for the Moontouched to leave!”
Kor paused to catch his breath.
In the silence, Sarah said numbly, “But…why?”
To even my surprise, I was the one to answer, quietly. “Because They knew. They knew that the other clans would never respect the Moontouched properly, they would never treat the amón as they deserved. They gave us our chance…but They prepared the Moontouched for when They knew we would ruin it.”
“They may have known that, Ben,” Kor said, softening to a surprising degree. “But…and I can’t believe I’m the one saying this…the Trees know how to make flames from the coals. They also knew that we would reach this point again: the point of change or die. So, by removing the Moontouched for a time, They prepared for our salvation now. They took away the Moontouched…to allow them to change into what we need today.”
Could that…be true?
“Alright, that’s great,” Yvera said impatiently. “But how does this relate to…anything?”
“Right,” Kor said, taking a deep breath. “I got sidetracked, sorry. Being on the cusp of rewriting our entire history is getting me a bit excited.”
“Rewriting our entire history?” I said.
Kor smirked at me. “Oh, yes. Because, you see…at least some of the Moontouched never left. In fact…I think most of them did not.”
Silence.
“What?” I said flatly. Had Kor finally lost his mind?
“Stay with me,” Kor said, smirk deepening. “Remember my paper on how drakón are now more widely distributed in the population?”
“Yes.…” I said uncertainly.
“That required me to pour through an obscene number of bloodlines. But it meant that I noticed a trend: a lot of the bloodlines with the heaviest concentrations of amón began at the same time. The time…”
He paused for dramatic effect. “…around the Moontouched departure. Now, I know what you are thinking—or should be, if you were keeping up. ‘But Kor,’ you say. ‘Records were spotty back then. Blood registrations were only just beginning to be standardized and made mandatory. Plenty of people were registered for the first time during that century.’ And you would be right. Except for one thing: these amón-heavy bloodlines that I was noticing often had an exact match with one of the Moontouched records we have. An exact match…except for the last generation.”
Kor grinned triumphantly, waiting for…a gasp, or applause, or something.
His face fell when it didn’t come. “Really? You all still don’t see it?”
“OK,” Sarah said. “Since I’m the new one, I’m not afraid to say it: What?”
Kor groaned. “Alright. Maybe if I explain in terms even an Earthren can understand, these two dimtorches will finally get it.”
“Hey,” Yvera said irritably.
“Look,” Kor said, pulling out his stylus. He went over to the kitchen wall and began frantically drawing.
While we watched him scribble, I thought hard about what Kor had said so far. I think I almost had it. I caught a glimpse of what he was saying. It was just so…enormous that I wanted to know for sure. I needed every bit of Kor’s evidence and logic before I would accept the same leap.
When he had something he was satisfied with, he pointed to the first diagram. It was a shape that I and even Yvera were well familiar with: a single line at the bottom that branched as it rose into two, then those two branches split again, and those four branches split again. Kor had stopped there, probably for the sake of time.
“Sarah, this is a bloodtree. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Oh!” Sarah gasped. “That’s why it looked familiar. It’s a family tree. You’ve just made it more…tree-like.”
“Excellent,” Kor said with relief. “That makes this next part easier.”
He tapped the first bloodtree again, this time on the branches. “You see these runes?”
“I can’t read those,” Sarah said.
“You don’t need to for this purpose,” Kor said dismissively. “Just know that each of them represents a clan. Can you see how this bloodtree represents a unique heritage for this person?”
He tapped the trunk of the bloodtree.
“I…guess?” Sarah said hesitantly. “Are you sure that combination couldn’t happen twice?”
“A bloodtree like this is just a shorthand representation of a bloodline. In other words, the bloodtree has the barest of details that someone can draw by hand. Just trust me when I say that the original bloodline has far richer detail that uniquely identifies each branch, and therefore—” he tapped the truck “—the person in question.”
Sarah nodded slowly. “OK. Like a DNA test. I can accept that.”
“Say this represents a Moontouched bloodtree. We actually have quite a few of them in our records. Relative to the clan size, Moontouched were some of the swiftest and most compliant adopters of the blood registration practice, before it even became a mandate. So, surprisingly, we estimate that most of the Moontouched clan is accounted for somehow in our blood archives.”
“Blood…archives?” Sarah said, making a face.
“Another time,” Kor said, holding up a finger. Which he then tapped on the trunk. “This person—let’s call him Haman—is a Moontouched. Because we always thought Haman left for Earth, our bloodtree for him ends here. No descendants of Haman that we know of. Are you with me?”
“Yes,” Sarah said firmly.
Kor pointed to the second diagram.
“This is a bloodtree that goes both ways. These are the ancestors—” He tapped the branches above the truck. Then he tapped the roots below. “—and these are the descendants.”
“Got it.”
“In our records, this person is identified as ‘Aman.’ Aman lived at the same time as Haman. At exactly the same time. Yet, because he is ‘Starkissed,’ he is fully accounted for, backward and forward, all the way to today.”
Sarah’s eyes were widening. Even she was catching on now.
Yet, since Kor had started this, he was going to finish it. He was about to give the final flourish, after all.
“If these were two different people—Haman and Aman—there would be differences in the ancestor portion of their blood trees. Yet, if you lay them over each other, like so.…”
Kor drug the first diagram over the second. Since I had already seen this conclusion coming, I had the mental capacity to appreciate how brilliantly Kor had drawn each chart. Even freestyling, even in a hurry, he had made them…
To overlap torched near perfectly, runes and all.
In case the conclusion was not now self-evident, Kor turned back to us and pointed. “These are not two different people. Haman…is Aman. Aman was not…or at least was not born…Starkissed. But he died one.”
Again, silence. This time…judging from his smug expression, it seemed to be the kind Kor could appreciate.
“How is that possible?” Sarah asked with a frown. “Can you change your clan?”
“Drakón can’t,” I said quietly.
“But amón can,” Kor added.
“And most of Moontouched by then was amón,” Sarah finished in a murmur, eyes wide.
Kor’s eyes glimmered. “Precisely. This is not an isolated instance. I first noticed a few cases, and then I and my scribes began searching for more. As of today, we think we have found a match for eighty percent of our Moontouched records.”
“Eighty,” I breathed. “Flame Above and Below. This…changes everything.”
Then my eyes narrowed at the familiar percentage. “Wait, when you said you were eighty percent certain—”
“I’m getting to that,” Kor said. “Don’t you dare interrupt my dramatic conclusion. Because you’re right. This changes everything.”
He paused, making sure all eyes were on him. “The Moontouched never left. Not entirely. Not even mostly. Only the ones who could not hide themselves went to Earth. The rest disbanded, scattered across the Six Realms, and joined other clans. Oh, they were smart about it. They always went to a different world than the one they were first registered on, and usually they resettled in the remotest parts of those worlds that they could.”
“The remotest parts.…” Sarah breathed.
Kor smirked at her. “All the better to blend in, you see. Those were the regions that were most likely to not already be registered. The most likely to not care too much where you had come from and why you wanted to join their clan when you got there. The areas with the faintest records of population numbers, where a spike would not be noticed even by scholars studying for centuries afterward. The places where no one would notice them quietly continue to build moongate after moongate, and perhaps even continue to help with the work on this hold. The only clue they left behind as to where they had gone—and they were so careful about everything else that it must be a deliberate clue—”
He pointed to the bloodtree. “—is their bloodlines.”
And, of course, no one had noticed the patterns in those bloodlines until…Kor. Because no one else besides Kor had bothered to study the amón ones. At least not in such depth. And no one else had his brilliance to see the first few patterns.
“Kor.…” I said, shaking my head.
“Say it,” he said with a grin. “You know I’ve earned it.”
He had, so I said it.
“You’re a torched genius.”
“Alright, this is great,” Yvera said flatly. “Moontouched descendants are among us. Yay. But why am I staying up for this?”
“As I said in the very beginning,” Kor said innocently. “Because of the deadline for Ben to respond to the Moonfair invitation, which is due in about half a deken now. It isn’t my torched fault it’s taking this long to convince Ben to say yes. He could have just trusted me, told me to send whatever reply I thought was best, and you all would have been on your merry way. But no.”
I pointed to the bloodtree. “You still haven’t explained what all of this has to do with that.”
“I’m getting there. Now, I said that the Moontouched usually resettled in remote regions. But we have so far found one very notable exception.”
I suddenly saw it.
“Let me guess,” I said flatly. “Olsdak.”
“Indeed,” Kor said, looking at the bloodline fondly. “After all, the Starkissed always were the greatest allies of the Moontouched, which is perhaps why such a concentration dared settle together there. In fact, the founder of the hold, Olsdak herself, was.…”
“Let me guess,” I said with a sigh. “Moontouched.”
“The daughter of one, since Olsdak was drakón, so she must have been Starkissed at least by the time of her becoming. But from how she sheltered so many Moontouched under her wing, you could say she did not forget her roots.”
“But what makes you think that just because so many settled there that they broke their pattern to build a moongate there?”
“Because the Olsdak Moontouched were among the first migrators. Before the assassination, in fact. Think about it. What would they need to build the first moongate? Allies. A secure, secret location, but with access to resources, artisans, sophisticated tools.… And a lot of magic users. A greater concentration than the Moontouched normally had, with so few drakón among them—and after the assassination, the Moontouched drakón left.”
I sighed. “All of that…pointing to Olsdak not just being as good place to check for a moongate, but that Olsdak is likely to have been the first moongate, perhaps created before even the assassination.”
“Believe it or not,” Kor told Sarah. “I had a logical reason for suggesting we go to my home realm first. I already had my suspicions by then, but the past few days of my and my scribes’ research have only strengthened it.”
“I won’t say I’m sorry,” Sarah said with a raised eyebrow.
“Oh, I’m not asking you for an apology. This way is better. This way…our arrival can be timed for the Moonfair.”
“Kor,” I groaned. “The Moonfair is the absolute worst time of the entire year for me to visit Olsdak.”
“You mean the best,” Kor smirked at me. “Think about it, Ben. Just think. What other time in the next six days are you going to be able to snoop around Olsdak without looking like you’re snooping? Because…you’ve been invited.”
That gave me pause. There…really was no other time I could go. Not in the next six days. If I turned down the invitation, I couldn’t exactly show up a few days earlier or later and say, Excuse me, my Crown business that has me rocketing around too much to attend your sacred festival has taken me here outside of it. Don’t mind me poking around in dark corners looking for a thousand-year-old moongate.
I had thought that the one good thing about this mad rush of a quest was that I would be able to turn down the invitation this year guilt free.
And now.…
I moaned, putting my head in my hands.
“In case that isn’t enough to convince you, I have other reasons,” Kor said.
“I tremble to know what they are,” I said with a sigh as I lowered my hands.
“Don’t worry too much. I saved the most important for first. But there is the fact that you missed last year.”
“I had krathenis!”
Kor narrowed his eyes. “Which I almost think you got on purpose.”
My eyes darted away from his, and my cheeks warmed.
“Ben!” Yvera exclaimed.
“I won’t do it again,” I muttered. “Don’t worry. I learned my lesson.”
To my intense surprise, the unending agony of krathenis was slightly worse than being the centerpiece of the Moonfair. Slightly, but enough.
“Whatever the reason, you missed,” Kor said. “Now it’s more important than ever to the Starkissed that you go. The King won’t be able to this year, for obvious reasons, so Crown representation falls to you.”
“They don’t care about Avva for the Moonfair, anyway,” I muttered.
Not the old widower. All they cared about was having me, the bachelor Heir, for their torched pageant.
“What is—” Sarah began.
But Kor spoke at the same time and held the stage. “And there’s a final reason, Ben. Right now, your public image needs a bit more…humanizing.”
I blinked. “Why?”
“Oh,” Sarah breathed.
I looked at her. If even Sarah could immediately understand.…
“Ben, the only thing the Realms are talking about right now is the fact that you turned into a berserk, nearly mountain-sized draká. At night. And then challenged the Devourer itself.”
I gaped. “I did what?”
“You don’t remember?” Yvera asked incredulously.
“No,” I said numbly. “My memories are…spotty. What did I say?”
Kor began reciting, no doubt from near perfect memory, his deadpan voice a stark contrast to the words. “‘I defy you, Devourer. Send your legions. Send your lish. I will destroy them all. I will avenge her death on you a hundredfold.’”
Sarah started at the last words, as if they were new to her.
“I said that?” I said numbly.
“Projected it with your inner voice for elden,” Kor said flatly.
That kind of projection should not have been possible, but since it was hardly the most shocking revelation right now, I didn’t even think about it.
His quotation struck chords of familiarity in my mind…but in a much different key now.
Now they filled me with horror.
“Oh. That…”
…had been perhaps the most recklessly idiotic thing I had ever done.
I was a dead man.
Of course, in six days…we might all be dead. So perhaps I wasn’t in much more danger than everyone else.…
I looked at Sarah. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told you to ask Kor for the details,” Sarah said, biting her lip. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t hear that.”
“We’ll talk later, Ben,” Kor said impatiently. “Long and hard, trust me. But right now, we only have about a quarter of a deken to respond before they find someone else to take your place.”
“His place for what?” Sarah asked.
Kor ignored her and pressed on, feeling me begin to cave. “You have been so much out of the public eye for the past year. They all know you’re doing secretive, dangerous things. And now this. And they’re understandably nervous—for you and about you. Right now, they need to see you, Ben. This you. Not the Ben who is protecting them. The Ben who is one of them.”
I looked at Sarah. She gazed back at me soberly.
This is your choice, she whispered silently to me.
I tried to hide my start at hearing her in my head. So that hadn’t been a onetime thing, or something she could only do in the most pressing of circumstances. Now she had an inner voice.…
At least with me.
You have nothing to prove to them, she continued. And nothing to prove to me. Only do this…if you want to prove it to yourself.
Prove to myself…that I was no monster. Surrounded by practically half the Starkissed clan and a good fraction of all the others, all descended on Olsdak for the fair. With everyone staring at me, more convinced than ever that’s what I was.
Could I…do that?
Perhaps…I needed to find out.
I took a deep breath, nodded slightly to her, then looked at Kor.
With the grimness of someone accepting a duel to the death, I said, “Alright. Tell them…yes.”