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“No, I don’t think it’s impossible. Look, what if… I think maybe Eldredaz, do you have anything to write with? No, here—” I knelt by the riverbank’s mud and started to write with one finger. Tarelay sloshed closer, then bent over with his hands on his knees.

“Meda?” Oraik said. I turned and blinked, having nearly forgotten he was there. “I’m going back to Kalcedon. Find me when you’re done.” He squeezed my shoulder and walked away. I glanced back at Tarelay, who was looking at me intently. I blushed, feeling foolish for presuming I could show him anything.

Tarelay squinted at me, his head cocked to the side. I looked away from his eerie black eyes.

“You look alarmingly like Marael,” he told me.

“Who?”

“One of mine,” he answered and took me by the chin to turn me this way and that. I let him. The rush of fae magic from his touch did not alarm me as much as it should. “Hundreds of years past. Yes, remarkable. I rather think you are.”

“Yours?”

“Go on, little illsruer,” the faerie said.

Tarelay’s? I was related to Tarelay?

“What’s an Eels-roor?” I breathed as he let go of my face. He waved the question away with a long-fingered hand.

“A rare gift, one you and I share. It means one who speaks the dragon tongue. I am surprised to find it in such a weak witch.”

“Dragon-tongue?” I sputtered. Tarelay smirked.

“Go on. Show me what you would write, after that.”

Karema’s band left in late morning, after she handed her younger brother a series of amulets and growled at him to stay put, because there would be other relatives who wanted to meet him.

We spent that night around a fire: Kalcedon, Tarelay, Oraik, and myself. Tarelay had offered to raise a hall of the Silver Palace for shelter. I didn’t ever want to step foot in that mountain again, but Kalcedon saved me from having to say so.

“I’d rather sleep under the stars,” he said.

They were everywhere. Even the column of smoke from our crackling fire could not hide that fact, as tree-cover had the night before. A million lights sparkled across the sky, and a smudge of blue haze that Tarelay said was neither Ward, nor cloud, but rather worlds beyond our own.

“I’m finding it very hard to wrap my mind around all this,” I admitted. Kalcedon lay with his head in my lap, staring up at the sky as I leaned back on my elbows to do the same. Oraik hummed as he roasted river fish over the flames.

“Around what?” Kalcedon asked.

“Everything. It’s changed so quickly. And to think your father was the Sorrowing Lord… why now? Why, after almost forty years?”

“Maybe I wasn’t useful to him before,” Kalcedon suggested. He lifted his head to glance at Tarelay, who appeared lost in the flames. The faerie blinked, and peered down at Kalcedon.

“No,” Tarelay said. “In truth, for many years, he did not know you existed at all. It took time for rumor to reach his ear.”

“That’s funny,” Oraik commented, quirking his lips as he turned each fish. “I thought gossip was normally quite fast.”

Tarely shrugged.

“I have little sense what life is like inside my Ward,” he informed us. “Very little news comes to us from inside. But rumor came, eventually—oh, three years past, I think—of a gray half-faerie of your age. We do not sire children easily. He puzzled it out.”

Perhaps that was why Kalcedon’s mother had chosen Nis-Illous. As far from Sorrow as she could get, and as quiet, with little contact from the rest of the Protectorate.

“Still. Three years,” I said.

Tarelay laughed silently.

“Three years is no time at all,” he informed me. “And he was, ah… delayed by my refusal to tell him how to enter the Ward.”

“He turned you into a bird.” I remembered the blurry vision from Eudoria’s mirror.