Bastion

of this had come from an illustrated story. :It did,: Dallen confirmed. :It’s something like the stuff in the Archives, only they make an art form out of historical records. He’s studied this manuscript many times. I think he was a little obsessed with the cousin he’d never met.: Dallen’s images became clearer, revealing that this was, in fact, an illuminated manuscript, or the memory of one. And there were a lot of illuminations. The boy and girl meeting on a bridge in what was clearly a cavern, sitting on a bench under a rocky overhang, walking together on a cliff overlooking the desert.
    This was kind of curious. If this was the story of a pair of runaways, why was it so lovingly detailed?
    :Because the Shadao never gave up on the idea of bringing them back, I think. And the next Shadao—Bey’s father—was the same. I get the feeling this was supposed to be something like a child’s storybook, with the moral at the end being “and one day you must bring the missing ones home.”:
    Well, that made a kind of odd sense. So instead of erasing the runaways from history, as plenty of other rulers would have, the Shadao turned finding them into a quest.
    Given that the insane Sleepbringer—and the half-insane one—and Ice and Stone—and Levor and Kan-li had all been very much aware of this obsession, Bey wasn’t the only one who’d grown up with the story and the quest as a part of his training.
    :The parents were still determined that the betrothed pairs wed. But at the wedding, all four conspired against that, and since all four were wedded at the same ceremony, and all four wore the same costumes, they switched partners and no one knew until the ceremony was over.:
    An image of the young man and young woman standing defiantly against the railing of other, older people. For all that the little painting was stylized, it demonstrated rather graphically that the elders were not at all pleased that their careful plans had been upset.
    :Your parents were the Gifted ones, of course. And you can imagine how someone with Empathy and Mindspeech both felt about—the family business.:
    Mags could, indeed. It had been torture to kill someone who was trying to kill him, and that was only with Mindspeech. With Empathy, he could not begin to imagine how hard it would be.
    :Impossible, really. So after about a year of marriage, and after everyone had more or less settled down and accepted the fait accompli, the two decided to run away, and their siblings decided to help them.: Dallen paused, and Mags waited patiently, figuring that Dallen was interpreting something he had found in Bey’s memory. :Ah, now I have their names. Meric-an and Li-Inaken. You were named for your father, as the first in the line. This is something Bey’s father told him, not in the storybook. This all came to a head when they knew they were going to have a child. They had heard of a place where the talismans and the Power of the Shadao could not follow. They told their siblings that was where they were going to go, because Meric could no longer bear the pain of killing others. It seems every time he did his duty, he got sicker, and his brother was afraid that he would either die of it or slay himself.:
    Mags snorted. How could his grandfather ever have expected otherwise? Knowing his father was Gifted and still expecting him to be an assassin was worse than ridiculous, it was insanity. What they should have done was to—make him a scholar or something. Although, you never knew, for all Mags knew, the mere proximity to all those other cold-blooded killers might have been eating away at his soul, too.
    : They were heading for Valdemar, obviously.: Dallen pointed out. :He must have been talking to anyone he could, searching every record he could find, to locate a place where his father wouldn’t be able to touch him—or you. You saw for yourself what happened to the Sleepgivers that tried using their powers in our borders. Madness. The talismans turning on them.:
    That certainly made Valdemar a logical place to flee to. Mags even had to wonder if they hadn’t just been so desperate that they ran on a mere rumor. “There’s a place in the north where it’s said magic doesn’t work. We’ll be safe forever there!” He could see two lovestruck people striking out in that way. After all, that was what made romantic tragedy.
    :And it was quite a feat of legerdemain, because the pair that was staying undertook to impersonate the pair that