Seregil was quiet for a moment, his face lost in shadow, then he gestured up at the moon. "When I was a child, I used to sneak out at night just to walk in the moonlight. My favorite times were in the summer, when people would come from all over Aurenen to the foot of Mount Barok. For days they'd gather, waiting for the full moon. When it rose over the peak, we'd sing, thousands of voices raised together, singing to the dragons. And they'd fly for us across the face of the moon, around the peak, singing their answering songs and breathing their red fire.

"I've tried to sing that song once or twice since I've been here, but do you know, it just won't come? Without all those other voices, I can't sing the Song of Dragons at all. As things stand now, I may never sing it again."

Alec could almost see the scene Seregil had described, a thousand handsome, grey-eyed folk in white tunics and shining jewels, massed beneath the round moon, voices raised as one. Standing here in this winter-ruined garden, he felt the crushing weight of distance that separated Seregil from that communion.

"You hoped your sister was going to say you could go home, didn't you?"

Seregil shook his head. "Not really. And she didn't."

Alec sat down beside him on the rim of the fountain.

"Why were you sent away?"

"Sent away? I was outlawed, Alec. Outlawed for treason and a murder I helped commit when I was younger than you."

"You?" Alec gasped. "I–I can't believe it. What happened?"

Seregil shrugged. "I was stupid. Blinded by my first passion, I allowed what I thought was love to cut me off from Adzriel and all the others who tried to save me. I didn't know how my lover was using me, or what his intent really was, but a man died all the same, and the fault was rightly mine. The details don't really matter—I've never told anyone else this much, Alec, and I'm not going to say more now. Maybe someday—At any rate, two of us were exiled. Everyone else was executed, except my lover. He escaped."

"Another Aurenfaie came to Skala with you?"

"Zhahir i Aringil didn't make it. He threw himself overboard with a ballast stone tied around his neck as soon as we lost sight of the coastline. I very nearly did the same, then and many times later on. Most exiles end up suicides sooner or later. But not me. Not yet, anyway."

The few inches between them felt like cold miles.

Clasping his flask, Alec asked, "Why are you telling me this now? Does it have something to do with what Nysander meant?"

"In a way. It's something I don't want secret between us anymore, not after tonight." He took another drink and rubbed his eyelids. "Nysander's been after me since he met you to tell you that—"

Seregil turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Alec, you're faie."

There was a gravid pause.

Alec heard the words, but for an instant he couldn't seem to take them in and make sense of them. He'd rehearsed a dozen dark possibilities during their walk from the Palace, but this had not been one of them.

He felt the flask slip from his fingers, felt it bounce on the damp, dead grass between his feet.

"That can't be!" he gasped, his voice unsteady. "My father, he wasn't—"

But suddenly it all fell into place—Seregil's questions about his parents, veiled remarks Nysander had made, all the rumors that he and Seregil were somehow related. The impact of this sudden revelation made him sway where he sat.

Seregil's grip on his shoulder tightened, but he could scarcely feel it. "My mother."

"The Hazadrielfaie," Seregil said gently, "from beyond Ravensfell Pass near where you were born."

"But how can you know that?" Alec whispered. It felt like the entire earth was spinning out from beneath his feet, leaving him stranded in a place he couldn't comprehend.

At the same time, it all made terrible sense: his father's silence regarding his mother, his distrust of strangers, his coldness. "Could she still be there?"

"Do you recall how I told you the Hazadrielfaie left Aurenen a long, long time ago? That their ways are different than ours? They don't tolerate any outsiders, especially humans, and they kill any half-breeds that are born, along with the parents. Somehow your mother must have broken away long enough to meet your father and have you, but her own people must have hunted her down in the end. Even if she'd gone back of her own accord, the penalty would still have been death. It's a miracle your father and you escaped. He must have been a remarkable man."

"I never thought so." Alec's pulse was pounding in his ears. This was too much, too much. "I don't understand. How can you know any of this?"

"I don't, for certain, but it fits the facts we do know. Alec, there's no getting around the fact that you are faie. I saw the signs that first morning in the mountains, but I didn't want to believe it then."

"Why not?"

Seregil hesitated, then shook his head. "I was afraid I was wrong, just seeing what I wanted to see—But I wasn't wrong—your features, your build, the way you move. Micum saw it right away, and the centaurs and Nysander and the others at the Oreska. Then, that first night we came back to the Cockerel, I went out again, remember? I went to the Oracle of Illior about another matter,and during the divinations, he spoke of you, called you a "child of earth and light" — Dalna and Illior, human and faie—there was no question what he meant. Nysander wanted me to tell you from the start but—"

At that, a wave of anger burst up through Alec's shocked numbness. Lurching to his feet, he rounded on Seregil, crying out, "Why didn't you? All these months and you never said anything! It's like that Wheel Street trick all over again!"

Seregil's face was half black, half bone pale in the moonlight, but both eyes glittered. "It's nothing like Wheel Street!"

"Oh, no?" Alec shouted. "Then what, damn it! Why? Why didn't you tell me?"

Seregil seemed to sag. Lowering his face, he rested both hands on his knees. After a moment he let out a ragged breath. "There's no single answer. At first, because I wasn't certain." He shook his head. "No, that's not true. In my heart I was certain, but I didn't dare believe it."

"Why not?"

"Because if I was wrong—" Seregil spread his hands helplessly. "It doesn't matter. I'd been alone for a long time and I thought I liked it that way. I knew if I was right, and if I told you then, if you'd even believed me, then it might create a bond, a tie. I wasn't willing to risk that either, not until I figured out who you were. Illior's Hands, Alec, you don't know, you can't know, what it was like—"

"Enlighten me!" Alec growled.

"All right." Seregil let out another unsteady sigh. "I'd been exiled from my own kind for more years than you've been alive. Any Aurenfaie who came to Skala knew who and what I was, and was under prohibition to shun me. Meanwhile, all my human companions age and die before my eyes."

"Except Nysander, and Magyana."

"Oh, yes." Now it was Seregil who sounded bitter. "You know all about my apprenticeship with him, don't you? Another failure, another place I didn't belong. Then, from out of nowhere, comes you, and you were—are—"

Alec looked down at the bowed figure before him and felt his anger slipping away as quickly as it had come. "I still don't understand why you didn't want to say anything."

Seregil looked up at him again. "Cowardice, I guess. I didn't want to see the look that's on your face right now."

Alec sat down next to him again and sank his face in his hands. "I don't know what I am," he groaned. "It's like everything I ever knew about myself has been taken away." He felt Seregil's arm go around his shoulders, but made no move to push him away.

"Ah, tali, you're what you've always been," Seregil sighed, patting his arm. "You just know it now, that's all."