From Darkness Won - Jill Williamson [137]
It could. But if Shung stands with you to give you strength to close your mind quickly, you should be safe.
It’s worth the risk, Sir Caleb. Achan gripped Shung’s wrist, then held out his other hand to Lord Nathak, who gripped it tightly.
Images flooded his mind. Flashes of memory. Lord Nathak’s memories.
Sitting on the knee of a young King Axel.
The scowling face of Queen Dara.
A boy riding in a wagon, looking back at a castle on a lake.
Macoun Hadar, mid-age, coaching a young man in a bloodvoicing exercise.
A young, unscarred Lord Nathak kneeling before a man shrouded in black. Being knighted by the same man. Training alongside black knights.
Slitting Queen Dara’s throat. Stabbing King Axel and staring into his shocked, yet loving eyes as he died.
No! Lord Nathak had killed Achan’s parents? Achan tried to pull away, but Lord Nathak’s other hand clapped on top of Achan’s and held him there.
Dragging a toddling boy out from under an allown tree. Raising the bloody knife. Stabbing down. Lightning striking the tree, striking Lord Nathak. Falling.
Watching two small boys play together in a field.
Watching a young Myet brand one of the boys. Watching him brand Achan.
Giving the child to Poril.
Standing before Lord Levy and the Council of Seven, masked, holding the other boy in his arms.
Lord Nathak released Achan then.
Achan pulled his hand away and met the eye of the man who’d taken his childhood, enslaved him, killed his mother and father. He lunged to pick up Ôwr and thrust it at Lord Nathak.
The man jumped aside, elbowed a soldier in the jaw, and stole the man’s sword. Achan took Ôwr in both hands and stepped to the middle of the dirt road. Lord Nathak crouched, ready to fight.
“You’re my own… brother?” Achan recalled Toros’s story of the Battle of Gadowl Wall. The rumor of an illegitimate child born to King Axel. Eighteen years before Achan had been born. Nathak was about that much older than Achan.
And the way Lord Nathak had just shared his memories. The chill that came whenever he was around. “And you can bloodvoice.”
Lord Nathak smiled. “It was best if no one knew.”
“Then my mother—Queen Dara—was not your mother.” Achan knew this now, but wanted to hear Lord Nathak explain, for none of it seemed possible.
“The inability to produce a child shames any woman. But Queen Dara, pressured by the crown on her head, felt it more than most, I suppose. Especially when one of King Axel’s mistresses conceived before she did. The young woman gave birth to a boy, whom the king named Luas.”
Nausea shook Achan like a violent sea. He faked for Lord Nathak’s legs and cut for his head.
The blades clanked as Lord Nathak parried the blow. “It was covered up, half-brother. Swept away. Only the king, queen, my mother, and Macoun Hadar knew the truth of my lineage. My healthy birth only magnified the queen’s failure. She begged King Axel to send my mother and me away. And he did. Father banished us with a large sum of money to what became Sitna. And I became a stray. Scandalous, is it not?”
Achan could think of nothing to say. From what Kurtz and Sir Caleb had said of his father’s philandering ways, he didn’t doubt that it could be true.
Lord Nathak was his brother? His brother? Half-brother. Who killed his parents.
Achan stabbed. Lord Nathak knocked it aside. Achan swung under Lord Nathak’s blade and backslashed across his front. Ôwr’s tip scratched Lord Nathak’s leather jerkin.
Achan’s soldiers circled around, but no one tried to stop him from fighting Lord Nathak. They were likely as dumbstruck as he was.
“I was given âleh to stifle any possible bloodvoicing, so no one would discover me,” Lord Nathak said. “That was my— our—father’s idea. Macoun, being a stray himself, took pity on me. He ordered my mother to stop feeding me the drink and taught me to use my gift. He first taught me to block, so no one would know I’d learned to bloodvoice. Macoun mentored me for years. But he was taking orders from the Hadad, even then.
“And one day Macoun introduced me to Jibhal Hamartano, who was training