“Do you believe he was ready for this hunt?”

“We will see,” Sangae answered.

The unease this response filled Thaddeus with remained throughout the three days he waited for Aliver’s return. How cruel, he mused, would it be if the prince died now, just before I invite him to find his destiny?

But he need not have worried. When Aliver arrived, he did so amid a cacophony of jubilation that could announce only triumph. Thaddeus stood in the small room Sangae had offered him, watching the scene through a window propped open with a stick. The tumult of black bodies was tremendous. They thronged into the streets like a school of fish in frenzy, all of them learning of the hunter’s return at once, each of them dropping whatever activity he had been engaged in. They seemed more numerous than the village population. Where had they all come from? Thaddeus almost stepped out and joined them, but he felt a need to stay hidden as yet, to observe from the shadows inside his open-air window.

They swarmed around some sort of wheeled conveyance. It was a cart pulled by several men, a thing large enough that normally it would have been harnessed to one of the long-horned oxen the villagers used for larger loads. But instead the men had grasped its leading poles with their bare hands. Thaddeus could not make out exactly what it bore until it passed by his vantage point. It was still a distance away but near enough that he drew back a step. It was a beast, a dead creature so large that at first he wondered if several of the things were piled on top of one another. There was something wolflike in its long limbs, something of a laughing dog in the thickness of its neck, something boarlike in its snout, but it was none of these creatures. Beneath its scraggly coat the beast was purple skinned, a dry, pocked, and scarred surface, scaled by peeling patches. It was a horrible thing, a monster. How could Aliver have killed such a thing with only a spear? It scarcely seemed possible.

A young boy climbed up onto the wagon and tugged the creature’s ears. Several others grabbed it by the hair around its neck and yanked the head this way and that, to roars from the crowd. Still another leaned his weight onto the lower jaw, opening the mouth enough that he could feign sticking his head inside it. But he thought better of this and leaped away in exaggerated fear, stirring still greater mirth.

All this was nothing compared to the reception the hunter himself received. He was easy to pick out. He marched through the throng like an epic hero brought back to life, returning to universal adoration. Or like the ghost of this hero, a paler form of man than those around him. He shouldered his way through arms patting him, faces pushing close to his, each person with some comment to make, so many white teeth moving close to him. They looked, for a strange instant, like creatures thrusting forward to take bites from him, but Thaddeus knew this to be a corruption of his own eyes and not true to the scene before him.

Thaddeus was surprised by Aliver’s height. He was a full head taller than his father had been. Under the constant burn of the sun, his skin had ripened like oiled leather, though it was still pale compared to that of Talayans. He was bare chested. The striations of his muscles carved fine, well-proportioned lines. His wavy hair was tinged with yellow highlights, making it much lighter than it ever would have been back in Acacia. Because of this he might have seemed out of place in a far southern Talayan village. And yet, at the same time he had never looked more at home within himself. He was a sculpted, sun-burnished, hard- and lean-muscled man, strong in the exuberant, absurd manner of youth. He wore that gold ring-the tuvey band-above his left bicep as if it were a part of him and had always been there. He took the attention well, smiling and answering comments in kind, but with no air of superiority.

For a moment Thaddeus wondered if there was a hint of humility in his expression, if in fact he had not killed the beast as these folks imagined. Many an Acacian noble took credit for kills made by their servants. Watching a little longer, he decided that whatever Aliver held back he did so for reasons other than shame. He sent word to Sangae that he did not wish to disrupt Aliver’s homecoming. He asked that Aliver be sent to him later that afternoon, once the commotion had died down.

When they did meet, nothing went as Thaddeus had expected. Months before, when he had imagined this meeting, Thaddeus had thought to greet Aliver with an embrace. He would pull the lad in and squelch any distance between them, any recrimination. The bond would be instant. A touch would do it, and everything else would fall into place. But as Aliver closed the last few steps that separated them, Thaddeus knew that had been a fantasy.

“Hello, Aliver,” he said. He was relieved that he still had some control, spotty though it had become. “I come to you with a call to your destiny. And I arrive at the proper moment. I see you are a monster slayer today. Congratulations. Your father would have been proud.”

How strange, Thaddeus thought, that so much of the boy lived in this man’s features-in the set of his eyes and the crinkle of his upper lip and in the full shape of his head. Yet the face was that of a stranger as well. Staring at him was like listening to a discordant note woven into a familiar song. He had lost all of his soft edges, though this effect was as much a matter of his severe demeanor as it was his sharp features. Was that defiance flaring behind his eyes? Anger? Surprise or disappointment? Thaddeus could not tell, though he held on through the prince’s answering silence, trying to read him.

“Did you really kill that beast yourself?”

When Aliver finally spoke, there was a hint of a Talayan accent in his voice, a looseness of the tongue around the vowels, but he had lost no fluency in his native tongue. “I have learned to do many things. So you are not dead?”

Not the greeting Thaddeus had hoped for. “Sit down, please,” he said. The words came out before he thought them, but he was glad. He still looked calm. He knew that. He still had some command. He waited until Aliver lowered himself, his legs scissored together, cross-legged, his back as straight as a board.

Thaddeus lifted a letter from the low table before him. “Let us begin with this, Prince. Read it. It is important that you do.”

“You know what it says?”

Thaddeus nodded. “But I am the only one.”

“This is not my father’s hand,” Aliver said, after glancing at the words briefly.

“It is my hand, but his words. Read them and judge.”

The young man bent his head to the paper. His eyes slid down it, rose, and slid down it again. Thaddeus looked away. It is not right to watch as another reads. He knew the words by heart anyway. He knew all the ways Leodan had expressed his love for his firstborn. He tried not to think of them, to allow Aliver that privacy. He could not, however, fight back the memory of the words the letter ended with, for he would have to address them when the prince looked up at him.

“This cannot be serious,” Aliver said. He had stopped reading. His eyes were dead on the page, neither looking up nor moving over the words any longer.

“It is all serious. Which portion do you doubt?”

The young man flicked the paper, just enough to indicate that all of it was in question. “This talk of the Santoth, the God Talkers…that cannot be serious. My father, if he meant to tell me this, must have been close to death. He was not thinking clearly. Look what this says. Son,” he pretended to quote flippantly, “now that you are grown, it’s time you save the world…and he asks me to do it by seeking out some mythic mad magicians.”

“The Santoth may be as real as you and I.”

Aliver set his gaze on the man. “May be? Have you seen one? Have you worked magic or seen it done?”