Heir to the Shadows

them her best unsure-but-game smile.
    "Witch-child, go terrify someone else for a while."
    After Jaenelle slipped out of the room, they studied one another.
    "You look a lot better than the last time I saw you," Saetan said, breaking the silence, "but you still look ready to keel over." He pushed away from the desk. "Care for some brandy?"
    Turning toward the less formal side of the room, Lucivar settled into a chair designed to accommodate Eyrien wings and accepted the glass of brandy. "And when was the last time you saw me?"
    Saetan sat on the couch and crossed his legs. He toyed with the brandy glass. "Shortly after Prothvar brought you to the cabin. If he hadn't been standing guard duty at the Sleeping Dragons, if he hadn't managed to reach you before—" He stroked the rim of the glass with a fingertip. "I don't think you realize how severe the injuries were. The internal damage, the broken bones . . . your wings."
    Lucivar sipped his brandy. No, he hadn't realized. He'd known it was bad, but once he was in the Khaldharon Run, he'd stopped caring what happened physically. If what Saetan said was true . . .
    "So you let a seventeen-year-old Healer take it on alone," he said, struggling to keep a tight rein on his rising anger. "You let her do that much healing, knowing what it
    would do to her, and left her without so much as a helper or servant to look after her."
    Saetan's eyes filled with anger that was just as tightly leashed. "I was there to take care of her. I was there all the time she put you back together. I was there to coax her to eat when she could. I was there to watch the web during the resting times so she could get a little sleep. And when you finally started rising from the healing sleep, I held her and fed her spoonfuls of honeyed tea while she wept from exhaustion and pain because her throat was so raw from singing the healing web. I left the day before you woke because you had enough to deal with without having to come to terms with me. How dare you assume—" Saetan clamped his teeth together.
    Dangerous, shaky ground. There might be a great many things he could no longer afford to assume.
    Lucivar refilled his glass. "Since there was so much damage, wouldn't it have been better to split the healing between two Healers?" He kept his voice carefully neutral. "Luthvian's a temperamental bitch most of the time, but she's a good Healer."
    Saetan hesitated. "She offered. I wouldn't let her because your wings were involved."
    "She would have removed them." A small lump of fear settled in Lucivar's stomach.
    "Jaenelle was sure she could rebuild them, but it would require a systemic healing—one Healer singing the web because everything had to be pulled into it. There could be no diversions, no hesitations, no lack of commitment to the whole. Doing it Luthvian's way, the two of them could have healed everything but your wings. Jaenelle's way was all or nothing—either you came out of it whole or you didn't survive."
    Lucivar could see them—two strong-willed women standing on either side of a bed that held his mangled body. "You decided."
    Saetan drained his glass and refilled it. "I decided."
    "Why? You threatened to slit my throat in the cradle. Why fight for me now?"
    "Because you're my son. But I would have slit your
    throat." Saetan's voice was strained. "May the Darkness help me, if she'd cut off your wings, I would have."
    Cut off your wings. Lucivar felt sick. "Why did you breed her?"
    Saetan set the glass down and raked his fingers through his hair. "I didn't mean to. When I agreed to see her through her Virgin Night, I honestly didn't think I was still fertile, and she swore that she'd been drinking the brew to prevent pregnancy, swore it wasn't her fertile time. And she never told me she was Eyrien." He looked up, his eyes filled with pain. "I didn't know. Lucivar, I swear by all I am, until I saw the wings, I didn't know. But you're Eyrien in your soul. Altering your physical appearance would have changed nothing."
    Lucivar drained his glass and wondered if he dared ask. This meeting was bruising Saetan as badly as it was bruising him—if not worse. But he had come here to ask so that he could make an honest decision. "Couldn't you have been there sometimes? Even in secret?"
    "If you have some objection to my not being part of your life, take it up with your mother. That was her choice, not mine." Saetan closed his eyes. His fingers tightened around his glass. "For reasons I've never