Chapter 31 #2
When he saw me, a flicker of recognition crossed his eyes. He settled back into the throne and released a deep breath, as though he had been waiting for me and I had finally arrived.
“Magister Corvo, it is a pleasure to see you,” he said, his voice booming at first. As I approached, his features softened, his tone gentling like a tide easing upon the shore. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you would come to see me.”
“Why may you think I am here, Your Highness?”
“First, I must thank you. For what you did at Drachenfels Keep. And I trust you know the importance of silence.”
I nodded.
“Now,” he continued, “I know of your power all too well. I take it you have seen things.”
“I indeed have.”
“Will you tell me what you saw?” There was fear in his voice. Fear of the truth I might utter.
I wasn’t going to wait any longer. “I saw royal guards abandon Kael in the forest.”
That was what I’d seen in the echo, a fleeting glimpse of a faraway past. Royal guards carrying a babe, Kael, and laying him on the wet ground of the woods. And in that moment I had understood, Kael was not no one. And the king alone could tell me who he truly was.
He closed his eyes and leaned back on the throne. When he opened them again, all that remained within them was sorrow.
He said nothing, so I pressed gently, “Why were royal guards carrying an infant into a forest only to leave him to the wolves?”
“You already have the answer,” he said softly, wistfully.
“But I want to hear it from you,” I said. “Your Majesty.”
He sighed deeply, resigned. “The late queen, my mother, may she rest in peace, was a powerful mage. She taught at the academy before she became queen. At that time, my grandfather sat upon the throne, and I was but a young prince, a Valdum with no power, born into a line of mighty light magi. Do you know the history of my family, Magister Corvo?”
I nodded. “Of course. The Valdum lineage descends from the union between an elven queen they called the Queen of Light and the first King of Vanhaui. Magic has run in your blood since the beginning.”
“It was a shame I possessed no such power,” he said.
“But I cherished watching my mother teach. I was young, not older than fourteen, when I met Eireann. She was my age, with long ash-blonde hair and eyes of a deep winter sky blue. And she was much like you. Misunderstood at first, but revealed in time to be capable of echoing not only memories, but magic itself. My mother called her mirror-mage. As far as we knew, academy and court alike, she was the only one of her kind. She received private tutelage and soon joined us in the castle.”
Another echomage, or whatever they called it?
Another… like me?
“I fell in love with Eireann and we… had a story. But Eireann came from nothing. She had grown up not knowing her parents, raising herself in the gutters until the academy took her in. When my mother discovered our bond, she sent Eireann as far from the castle as she could.”
I knew there was more. And I knew what it was.
The king continued his tale, each word seeming to wound him afresh.
“But from our story, a seed had grown. She left the castle with life in her womb. My mother continued to teach her, and eventually… it was discovered. A child. Our child. Eireann died in childbirth, all alone. No family, no midwives, no one.”
A tear rolled down his cheek, and if I had never known what a sobbing king looked like, I did now. I simply stood there, silent, and listened.
“My mother wished to hide the child, but my grandfather wanted rid of it. And he was the king, after all. He ordered the guards to take the infant into the woods, to a wolf’s den, and let the beasts take their due. That was thirty-four years ago.”
He paused then, catching a breath he had been holding far too long.
I felt his pain, his grief for the mysterious mage who had claimed his heart and whom he clearly had never forgotten.
And as his features cracked, I saw something achingly familiar.
I could not believe I had not noticed it before.
The way he frowned. The way his lips bent when he remembered sorrow.
He looked exactly as Kael did in those quiet, unguarded moments.
“Henrich Eisenberg told me of power never seen before. I learned of a blond boy who could not only wield the magic of light, but carry it beyond known limits and conjure storms. A boy with immense power, raised in a Fae village so close to Befest and yet so far from me. I knew it could only be him, my son, who had miraculously survived nature itself. I sent for the boy. Henrich advised that he needed training, so I agreed. I did everything to keep him near, even with my wife beside me and my daughter just learning to walk. And when my old court wizard retired, I chose him to bear the title.”
For a long while, I could only watch him speak and listen.
The King of Vanhaui, framed by marble and gold, sorrow carved into every line of his face.
His regret was real, so real it made my throat sting.
Part of me wanted to shout at him, to ask how he had allowed a single life to be cast aside.
Kael’s life. His son. And another part of me wanted to weep for the young man he had once been, who had lost both his love and his child in the same cruel breath.
But I did neither. I remained rooted where I stood, while he shed tears for a son who would never return to him in the way he longed for.
Because none of this changed the future.
Kael would never be recognized as the king’s blood.
He would never sit on a throne, never wear a crown that should have been his by birth.
And gods, knowing him, he would never desire such a thing.
That life had never belonged to him, buried long ago beneath wolf-song and stormlight.
Still, he deserved to know.
He deserved to hear that his life had not begun in abandonment, but in the cruelty of circumstance, in the absence of choice.
As the king’s voice faded into silence, a heaviness settled in my chest—no longer anger, no longer simple grief, but a painful, solemn understanding. Whatever came next, whatever I decided to do, this truth belonged to Kael.
Not because I wished to unburden myself.
But because Kael had lived thirty-four years without ever knowing he had been loved at all.
Yet I was not the one who should tell him.
“He deserves to know,” I said.
Lionel sighed deeply and brushed the tears from his cheeks. “I wish I could tell him.”
“You can,” I said again, firmer this time.
Lionel’s hands trembled where they rested upon the carved armrests, his gaze drifting toward the distant columns as though the truth might be easier to bear if it were etched in stone.
When at last he looked back at me, his eyes were a father’s, not a king’s, wide, afraid, drowning in a sorrow he had carried too long.
“If I tell him,” he whispered, “he will be gone.”
The words hung between us, heavy as iron.
I stepped closer to the foot of the dais, not out of boldness, but because I could not speak this truth from a distance. “If you do not,” I said softly, “I will. He deserves nothing less. And you know I speak true.”
He flinched as though struck. “Magister Corvo, please... You do not understand. Kael is loyal to me because I gave him a place. A home. If he learns what truly happened… if he learns what my family allowed…” His breath fractured. “He will walk away. He will never look at me again.”
I shook my head. “No. You are wrong.”
He searched my face, desperate for a lie he could cling to. I offered him none.
“He will not leave you,” I said. “Because here, he has a name. A purpose he has spent a lifetime carving into stone. And because Kael does not give his devotion lightly. Once given, it is absolute. He would scorch the world before breaking a bond he chose.”
Lionel stared at me as though he were seeing Kael through different eyes, through mine.
“You think he will forgive me?” he asked, voice thin, almost childlike.
“No,” I answered honestly. “Not at once. Perhaps not for a long while.” I drew a slow breath. “But he will not turn from you. His loyalty is bone-deep, Your Highness. Forged through hardship, not comfort.”
He closed his eyes. Tears escaped again, but this time something in them had shifted, fear loosening, clarity taking its place.
“And if I stay silent?” he murmured.
I held his gaze. “Then he will discover it another way. And that would break him far more than the truth spoken by your own mouth.”
Silence settled, thick, weighty, and sacred.
Lionel bowed his head like a man choosing the harder path. “Very well,” he whispered. “I will tell him.”
“Good,” I said softly.
Lionel released a long, trembling breath, as though bracing himself for a storm of his own making.
And I knew, in that moment, that the world would shift when Kael heard the truth.
But at last, it would shift in the right direction.
The king wiped the last of his tears, and I bowed, knowing what must come next.
The truth would soon shake the foundations beneath both the king and his court wizard, and Kael would at last learn the shape of the shadow cast at his birth.
But the man he had become, the man I loved, was stronger than any storm.
Strong enough to weather the truth, and strong enough to choose what came after.
Kael awaited me beyond these doors, unaware that the world was already shifting beneath his feet. And when the storm finally met its origin, I would be there beside him, unshaken.
We would stand in its eye and face it. Together.