Bastion

was fleeing. Your parents stole a talisman for Meric and took both girls’ jewelry—quite a lot of it—and fled. Bey’s parents managed, by moving around the palace and changing clothing a lot, to hide the fact that they were gone for three days, giving them a good head start.:
    Now Mags understood some of the things he’d seen when drugged. The young couple on the run, the birth of the baby—which was him.
    :I’m not sure how you managed to see those things, Mags. I’m not sure if they’re real, or someone’s—Levor or Kan-li’s—ideas of what happened. I’d be more inclined to think the latter.: That wouldn’t have been in that storybook, of course, nor the cruder versions which the young second-rank Sleepgivers would have seen. No one would have known what had happened to the pair. But Dallen thought that Levor and Kan-li had good enough imaginations to patch something into their own memories, since they knew about Mags.
    Mags agreed. There had been a sort of vague blurriness about those sequences that made them stand out from some of the others. And since his own Mind-magic had been coming back at the time he took the drugs, he could easily have picked that up from the two Sleepgivers.
    :And there the tale ends. Bey’s parents would have been in a lot more trouble if the Shadao hadn’t been trying to find his fleeing son. And when it was obvious that your parents had escaped successfully, the Shadao was too overcome with grief at losing his eldest to punish them. And then, right when the grief faded and the anger began, Bey’s mother was pregnant, thus giving the Shadao the heir he desperately desired.: Dallen sighed. :I will say this, Bey’s father has a fine sense of the melodramatic. According to Bey’s recollection, he made quite a production out of his attempt at placating his father. He went to the Shadao and offered to kill himself in reparation. He got as far as slicing a wrist when the old man forgave him. He became such a model Sleepgiver that the old man completely relented and bequeathed the title of Shadao on him at his own death.:
    “You know, Bey, all this sounds like a bad play,” Mags said aloud. “Lovers fleeing, twins impersonating each other, and capping it all off with an attempted suicide and a reconciliation . . . it smacks of being awfully contrived.”
    Bey opened his eyes, and smiled slightly. “That is because there was a great deal more machination, politics, and secret maneuvering on the part of my father, the Shadao, in order to restore himself to the good graces of his father.” Bey even chuckled. “He set things up perfectly, and my grandfather was very fond of drama. He knew it for the tool that it was.”
    “Sounds like a clever old goat,” Mags responded, dryly.
    “As for the entire melodrama with your parents and mine . . . knowing my father and my mother, I believe that he only went along with the charade to please her and in hopes of winning her love at last.”
    “Oh?” Mags gestured to him to continue. Bey seemed happy enough to oblige.
    “My father is a hard man, a very hard man. But your father was not the only one who fell in love—inappropriately. He was not at all pleased with the twin that shrank from him. Frankly, he thought her weak-willed and preferred her sister. So from his perspective, the switch in spouses was ideal. My mother, at first was not enamored of either son and yielded to her beloved sister’s pleas that they secretly exchange on the eve of their marriage in order to make her happy.”
    “Well, that starts to make a lot of sense,” Mags said thoughtfully. “One of the Gifts—what you call Blessings—that they had was something that our Healers generally have. That Blessing makes it hard for Healers to really want to be with a spouse that doesn’t want it too.”
    “Oh? Interesting. This explains a great deal.” Bey brooded a bit. “Well, as to my mother, she was contented enough to have a husband who was good to her and the position of the heir’s wife. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if she didn’t conspire with her sister’s flight in order to have that position for herself. Only after, indeed, only after she was with child, did she come to adore her husband as he adored her. So in the end, perhaps, the gods spoke. Who can tell?”
    “Well, what about how your father scraped out?” Mags persisted.
    “He was always the political one. He had made important allies, he had taken very important