Traitor's Moon

had told him to bring Seregil, he’d assumed they would make their visit together.
    They climbed three flights of stairs in silence, meeting no one in the dark corridors. On the third floor they followed a short hallway to a small chamber. A clay lamp flickered in one corner, and by its wavering light Alec saw that the room was empty except for an ornate metal brazier by the far wall. Not knowing what was expected of him, he turned to ask his guide, but he was already gone.
    Strange folk, indeed
, he thought, yet they held the key that could unlock his past. Too excited to sit still, Alec paced the little chamber, listening anxiously for the sound of approaching footsteps.
    They came at last. The rhui’auros who entered wore no mask, and Alec recognized him as the old man he’d met at the tavern. Striding over to Alec, he dropped the leather sack he carried and clasped hands warmly.
    â€œSo you have come at last, little brother. Seeking your past, I think?”
    â€œYes, Honored One. And I—I want to know what it means to be Hâzadriëlfaie.”
    â€œGood, good! Sit down.”
    Alec settled cross-legged where the man indicated, in the center of the room.
    Elesarit dragged the brazier to the center of the room, summoned fire there, then took two handfuls of what looked like a mix of ash and small seeds from the sack and cast them into the flames. Sharp, choking smoke curled up, making Alec’s eyes water.
    Elesarit pulled his robe over his head and threw it into a corner. Naked except for the tattooed whorls covering his hands and feet, he began to slowly circle Alec, bare soles whispering across the floor as he moved. Thin and wizened as he was, he moved gracefully, weaving his patterned hands and thin body through thesmoke. Alec felt goose flesh break out on his arms and knew at once that, like the dances of the Khaladi he’d watched earlier, these movements were a form of magic. Faint music, strange and distant, hovered at the edge of his perception, perhaps magic, perhaps only memory.
    It was unnerving, this ceremony: the old man’s silence, the shapes that twisted themselves from the smoke and dissolved before he could quite make them out, the heady smell of the substances burning on the coals of the brazier. Lightheaded, Alec fought against a sudden wave of dizziness.
    And still the rhui’auros danced, moving in and out of Alec’s field of vision, in and out of the ever-thickening smoke that seemed to wind itself into denser coils in his wake.
    The man’s feet fascinated Alec. He couldn’t look away from them as they whisper-shuffled past: long toes, brown skin, and branched ridges of veins beneath the shifting black tracery.
    The smoke stung Alec’s eyes, but he found he didn’t have the strength to lift his hand and wipe them. He could hear the rhui’auros circling behind him now, yet somehow the feet stayed before him, filling his vision.
    Those aren’t his feet
, Alec realized in silent awe. They were a woman’s—small and delicate in spite of the dirt that edged the nails and darkened the cracks on the callused heels. These feet were not dancing. They were running.
    Then he was looking down at them as if they were his own feet, flying beneath the edge of a stained brown skirt, running along a trail through a frost-rimed meadow just before dawn.
    A misstep on a sharp stone. Blood. The feet did not stop running.
    Fleeing.
    There was no sound, no physical sensation, but Alec knew the desperation that propelled her on as clearly as if the emotions were his own.
    Meadow gave way to forest with dreamlike speed, one landscape melting into another. He felt the burning in her lungs, the clenching ache deep in her belly where dark blood still flowed and the slight weight of the burden she carried in her arms, a tiny bundle wrapped in a long, dark sen’gai.
    Child
    The infant’s face was still covered in birthing blood. Its eyes were open and blue
    as his own
.
    Gradually his line of sight shifted upwards and he gazed through her eyes at a lone figure in the distance, standing on a boulder against the first pale wash of dawn.
    The girl’s desperation gave way to hope.
    Amasa!
    Alec had recognized his father first by the way he carried his bow across his shoulders. Now the wind whipped tangled blond hair back from that square, plain, bearded face in which Alec had tried so often without success to find himself. He was young,