LX

I SPEND THE NEXT HOUR largely listening to the miraculous sound of my father’s voice. Laughing at his familiar straight-faced humour and shedding tears at shared memories. Revelling in his sheer closeness, and through it all, through the haze of joy, doing my best to comprehend what he is telling me.

In the end it is simple in explanation, if not in believability. There was a war against something our long-past ancestors created, though the records found were unclear on its exact nature. The winning of that war not only necessitated both the Aurora Columnae and the Cataclysms, but also split the world into three separate ones: called Res, Obiteum, and Luceum.

And that by activating the ancient device beyond the Labyrinth, I, too, have been split. Copied.

Of everything my father has told me tonight, this is by far the hardest to countenance, even as it fits the pieces I already know. I make him repeat it. Argue it, despite recognising the name “Luceum” from those branded moments leaving the Labyrinth when I lost my arm. But eventually it sinks in. The people here have never heard of Caten because Caten does not exist here. Another version of me is still there, in Res. Still with Emissa and Callidus and Eidhin, or maybe left for Jatiere, if I—he—somehow won the Iudicium. My father, I think, knows more than he says about that. But he does not speak of it, and I do not press. There is too much else I want to know. And, perhaps, some I would prefer not to.

Eventually, my father’s knowledge runs dry. Anyone else, and I do not think I would credit a word of it.

Which brings me to my next question.

“How are you here?” The more he’s explained, the more I’ve wondered at his presence. “Did you get away from Military and then follow me through the Labyrinth? Were you… copied, too?”

“No.” He grimaces. “When Dimidius Quiscil woke me, I told him what I knew. The Cataclysms. The weapon. Solivagus. Everything.” Shame in the admission, even as he adds, “They have a way of controlling the dead. Ensuring that you answer truthfully. It’s impossible to resist. So they were satisfied, and returned me to the dark. And then one day, a stranger woke me. A man calling himself Ostius. He’s tall. Thin. Has a scar along here.” He traces a line down his face.

I nod slowly. “I’ve seen him. Last year, back in Caten. He’s working with the Anguis.”

“He is using the Anguis, I think,” my father corrects me quietly. “He wanted to know what I had told Military, and then he wanted to know about you. Your personality, your weaknesses. Ways you might be manipulated. It was the first time I realised you must be alive.” He smiles at that.

I hesitate. “What did you tell him?”

“About your weaknesses? Where did I start. Your temper, obviously. Mule-like stubbornness. Rashness. Inability to believe you could be wrong about something. Hmm. What else? The fact you’re terrible when it comes to anything even approaching artistic. Oh, and the way you used to go red and stuttery every time a pretty girl tried to talk to you—remember that? And you were very slow to pick up—”

“Gods. Alright.” My amused glower relents to a grin in the face of his. “Maybe I’ve changed?”

His smile wavers and he tousles my hair. Nods. “So much, Diago. So much, and not at all.” He sighs. “Ostius left me there for… I don’t know how long after that. But when he woke me again, it was to ask for my help. You’d made it through the Labyrinth and he would free me, so long as I agreed to keep watch over you here.”

I frown. Shake my head. “Why you? And how did you get here?”

“How? He has the ability to jump between Res and Luceum. Not Obiteum. I don’t know how he does it.” My father chews his lip. A habit of his, when he is thinking. “As for the why… I asked the same thing, and he said it was because he needed someone he could trust would want to help you, not just follow the letter of his instructions.”

“You think he was lying?” I can hear the doubt in my father’s voice.

“I think he had further reasons. The best I have come up with is that he feared I might have been used against you in Res. But I also think your being here was a surprise he hadn’t figured out how to work into his plans, yet, and he was scrambling. The druid you told me about—Cian? I was meant to smooth things over with him when he brought you to me. He was expecting Ostius to meet him on Solivagus when someone eventually came through the Gate, but by the time Ostius found out about you, you were apparently already on the boat heading back to Fiachra.” He shakes his head. “In the end, though, Ostius’s real motives didn’t matter. Not to me. The reason he gave me was enough. I only asked that he let me say goodbye to the version of you in Res, and then we came here.”

I’m silent, then, “You spoke to me? The other me?”

“For far shorter a time than I wanted. And he was… recovering. I’m not even sure he will remember it.” His smile is rueful. “It was selfish. I just… it felt wrong, to just leave him. To leave you without saying goodbye.”

“But you chose not to come to me, here?” The faintest hint of hurt to the other question that’s been plaguing me. I still sense that strange pulse from him. “I know you were at Loch Traenala, warned me of that raiding party. And before that, at Didean, when Lir came. You could easily have met with me then. Why tonight?”

“Those were because of what was coming—things I could draw your attention to, but not prevent. Now, it’s because of where you are going.”

“Fornax?”

“Caer Áras.” He pauses. Takes a deep breath. “You cannot go, Diago.”

I murmur a half laugh. Sure he must be joking, but the hope fades as I see his expression. That, too, is familiar. “Why?”

“Why do you think?” He gives me a sad smile. “I have just told you that you may be the key to preventing a world from dying. I’ve told you that I have been brought back from the dead in order to protect you. You are marching toward not just a war—a war, Diago—but the very men who are hunting you! And from all I have seen along the path here, they are going to win. If you do not fall in battle then they will capture you and they will sacrifice you to their gods, and either way, an entire world will be lost.”

I stare at him. “I have already given my word that I will be there. They are my friends. I have to go.”

“No, you don’t. If they are your friends, Diago, and they knew what we know—they would surely tell you the same.” Gentle. I feel the weight of his expectation all the same.

“It’s not their decision.”

“You have a greater responsibility.” An edge to his voice. Perhaps not expecting resistance, here. “A prince should—”

“I am no longer a prince.”

The silence lingers, after that. The anguish of the statement in his expression as much as burning in my chest. I said it with anger but it is loss that leadens it, grinds the conversation to a halt from which neither of us seem to know how to recover.

Eventually, I stir. “I ran, five years ago. Did you know that? Cari died and I made it out and I ran, while you and Mother and Ysa were still prisoners. I made a choice and I survived the ones I loved.” I look up. Ignore the welling in my eyes and put all of my determination into my words. “Never again.”

My father’s eyes mirror my sadness and he smiles through the pain at me. “That was the choice the ones you loved wanted you to make. Are so, so glad you made. Believe me.” He crouches in front of me and wraps me fiercely. “I would not ask this of you if there was anyone else.”

“But there could be. It doesn’t have to be me. It’s just… poor luck, that I’m in this situation!”

“Poor luck?” He holds me back to take me in once again. “No. Poor luck is being the Octavus who sees the truth of the Hierarchy. It is being the farmer, or soldier, or merchant who comprehends the absurd power of those above them, but has no way of convincing them to act. It is being those of us who know these great and terrible dangers are coming and cannot do anything about them. Poor luck? Poor luck is being powerless, Diago. Poor luck is being without choice. So many of us are aware of these currents, but are able only to drown in them. Millions upon millions of people have poor luck. But you are not one of them.”

He finishes with stern emphasis, and I say nothing. Gut-punched by his firm, calm belief, and perhaps more tellingly, the truth I know is behind it.

My father retreats to his seat on the other side of the fire, and sighs.

“Do you remember about… I don’t know. Six months before the invasion, maybe,” he says suddenly. “When you and Ysa were learning about the political structures of Cymr?”

“Um. Vaguely?” I’m thrown by the turn in conversation.

“She was waiting for me one afternoon. I finished in the Great Hall, and we went into the dining room, and as soon as we were alone she burst into tears. You just picked up things so much more easily than her. She would struggle and you would barely blink.”

My brow crinkles. “I… didn’t know,” I say softly.

“I know. And I know if you had, you would have played it down. Made it less obvious to her. Found a way to make her feel better. I am not telling you this to hang it around your neck, Diago. You are empathetic in many things and when you are, you are one of the most kind-hearted people I know.” He exhales. “But sometimes, talent and empathy fight for the same air. You always found things so easy that your expectations of others got skewed. You never really understood what they can and cannot do.” He lays a hand on my shoulder. “This is all to say, Son—it has to be you. You. Not just because you find yourself in this situation, not just because you are lucky. But because you are one of the very few who could. You have always been a marvel. And that gift, that talent, isn’t costless.”

I don’t respond for a long time. Turning over the words. I don’t want to fight with my father. Never did. He was always so sure. Always right.

“But you don’t know.” I say it quietly. Not quite willing to meet his eye. “You don’t know Fiachra will win. You cannot be certain I am delivering myself into Ruarc’s hands. It is a risk, but so was training at Loch Traenala every day. So was the voyage here. So was walking through the forest at night. I could die this evening from tripping on a stone. You don’t know.” I do meet his gaze, now. “I don’t either but it is my decision, Father. No matter whether you think it is the right one.”

He gazes at me for a long time, the fire between us. Not angry, to my relief.

“You asked me why I didn’t speak to you before tonight.” He chews his lip. “I found you a month after you got here. You were with that family. Working on the farm. I nearly came to you then, but… I have spent the last year hoping that in this world, you would have a second chance. A chance at a life that I would want for you. The one you deserve. One where you are happy, and free.” He pauses. Thinks. “Freedom is as much about leaving things behind as it is about not being chained. I am a part of you, Diago. I always will be and I am indescribably proud of that fact. But I am a ghost, and what I bring with me, this thing that we have been tangled up in, is pain. All this time, even knowing what I know, I have been hoping that was something I could spare you.” He rubs his chin. “And the time I have been able to spare you, I do not regret. The fact is, if I had told you earlier, it would have been to my benefit and not yours. It would have been selfish.”

“But I am so glad to know you are alive. If you had just told me—”

“And asked you to live a life of deceit again? Holding secrets you cannot tell your closest friends?” He smiles. “I have watched you, Diago, and you have grown, this past year. You have come to trust and love in a way that I was not sure you would be able to again. You have found a joy and peace here that I thought would be forever lost to you. And though that time may be at an end, it has helped shape you into the man I always hoped you would be. Not just in your achievements—I was always proud of those. But in your happiness. In your outlook on life. You have taken these scars, these horrible scars, and you have learned not to let them define you.” A crack in his voice. “You were never alone here, Diago. And it was not because I watched over you.”

He embraces me and I return it. “So you… you won’t stop me?”

He laughs. Holds me close. “I could not even if I wanted to. Which is how it should be. I may not agree with you, but this is still the man I always wanted you to be, above all others,” he whispers. “Your own.”

And like that, some of the unease lifts. Not because I am getting my own way. Not because my father thinks it is the right choice. But because he is willing to let it be mine.

We talk more after that. The tension not entirely gone, but not between us, either. We laugh and it is genuine and warm. He explains that the pulse I sense from him is the Will imbued in him; Ostius told him little else except the distance he needed to stay away to avoid me noticing it. Explains how he came closer in order to alert me to the raiders, that night. Shows me how he was able to track me, all these months—a roughly ten-inch, grey stone stylus that Ostius gave him, which pulls gently toward me as he dangles it from a chain. When I recognise it as the one Relucia gave me at the naumachia, and explain softly its connection to me, he immediately and sorrowfully tucks it away again.

I ask about the test tomorrow, Fornax. He knows nothing of it.

Eventually I catch the fact the moon is sinking rather than rising. My father sees it too.

“You could join me.” I say it into the reluctance we both clearly feel at the idea of parting. “Lir doesn’t have to know—”

“I can’t.” He looks uncomfortable, then sighs. “The druids here. They will sense exactly what you sense, if I get too close. And they will know why,” he says firmly, as if determined not to sidestep the fact. “Ostius warned me—they have ways of dealing with the dead. Quickly and efficiently. I have to keep my distance.”

“Oh.”

He hears my disappointment. “That does not mean you have to keep yours. I’ll stay nearby. Close enough for you to know where I am, now. Whenever you are able to get away, Diago, I will be here.” He matches my sudden smile fondly. “But now, you should get back, before your druid notices you’re missing. Get some sleep. And whatever this task of yours is, tomorrow—be careful.”

We embrace again. It still feels impossible, his arms around me.

“I love you.” I haven’t said it yet, and the words almost stick in my throat. I’ve needed to tell him that for so, so long.

“And I love you, Diago. Always.” He squeezes me tight, then releases me.

It’s hard, walking away. Parting so soon, after so long. And yet I can, because I know I can come back. I know my father will keep his word and that when I need him, he will find a way to be there.

He always has. He always does.

Lir’s snores still boom off the hills long before I reach the halo of our campfire’s embers, assuring me that my absence hasn’t been noted. I settle in to sleep. My father’s pulse, faint though it is, sits reassuringly in the back of my head.

And as I close my eyes, I find myself smiling.