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A short while after my confession, Rod summoned the royal knight mage in charge of the crystal ball that was his hotline to Ged.
I moved from my cot to a chair while Aunt Elianora re-cast [Silent Shadows] and the mage set up the connection. Once the new king’s image appeared before us, I tried to rise in order to curtsey.
“Rod,” Ged immediately said, sharply, but Rod’s hand was already dropping on my shoulder.
“Stay seated,” Rod told me. “You’re barely able to stay upright in a chair, so forget about standing.”
I had walked to Rod’s tent earlier for breakfast, so I wanted to disagree, but Aunt Elianora was nodding and Rod and Ged both looked like they would brook no argument. I just nodded and relaxed.
The prince turned back to his brother, bowed and declared, “Your Majesty, thank you for making time on such short notice.”
I likewise bowed my head in place of my omitted curtsey.
The new king sighed and replied, “This is a private conversation, Rod. We’re just family here.”
Rod cleared his voice, then noted, “Well, that’s actually the subject of this meeting, Your Majesty.”
“Ged,” Ged said firmly. “Continue to call me Ged. You never called me ‘Your Highness’ in private, and I won’t hear something other than my name now. That’s final, Rod.”
“Fine,” Rod huffed, then nodded defeat. “Fine. Ged.“
“Better.”
Rod then spent about a minute going over the information from Serera about Mother and the amulet. I showed it to him, and told him that it looked like Mother’s aura was somehow mixed into its mana signature now. Toward the end, I began tearing up, and had to force myself to finish without sobbing.
Ged nodded gravely, then asked, “Do you have any idea what she meant about Deharè having a chance to live again?”
“She stated definitively that Mother was dead, Your Majesty,” I told him, trembling now. “That’s… unmistakable in fairies. The corpse we leave finishes mummifying in as little as an hour, and it can’t be revived. But even if nobody else knows what the god who spoke to Serera meant, I suspect the Fairy Queen will know.”
I would be asking Gaia directly, as soon as I could, but I didn’t mention that.
“I see,” Ged stated calmly. “Thank you for telling me. We’ll need to send a regent to Pendor as soon as possible. I may have to send you, Rod. Let’s expedite getting the command structure rebuilt and a commander appointed so you can leave Atianus.”
The prince nodded, then pursed his lips, looked down at me, and noted, “My Lady has something else to explain to you.”
I sighed, and blinked the tears out of my eyes. I didn’t want to do this, but Rod had been adamant. The king’s eyebrow rose.
“Since when did you call her ‘My Lady’?”
Rod pressed his lips together and looked at me. I answered for him, “Since just a short while ago, Your Majesty.”
After steeling myself, I more-or-less repeated what I had just told Rod about Tiana, and about who I was and why I was in her body. While I spoke, Rod kept frowning, and his hand occasionally tightened on my shoulder, evidence he was barely containing his emotions.
Ged simply sat and listened, not reacting to anything, allowing me to speak to the end. By the time I finished, I was certain that something was off about his reaction.
I finished by saying, “I deeply regret having to deceive you, Your Majesty.”
He gave me a peremptory nod as I said it, as if I had just stated some unnecessary nicety rather than making the heartfelt apology that it was. His reaction really perplexed me.
I think Rod was having similar confusion, because he began trying to justify his brother’s behavior. “I’m having a lot of trouble believing it, myself, to be frank. But Tiana is too honest to play a joke this long. Even if she tried, she would have given up and admitted it by now.”
Ged nodded. “In addition, our old Tiana was too pragmatic and serious to concoct such a wild tale in the first place.”
Our old Tiana…
Ged had already adjusted to the idea, speaking in past tense even though Rod was still using present tense. My thoughts were rapidly getting more confused. Where was the dismay he should be showing? Or the sense of betrayal, or denial, or something… I knew for certain that Tiana had been important to him. Why wasn’t he upset?
Rod blew a breath out through his lips, and nodded. “Which means… it’s true that she’s gone, I suppose.”
He had been holding it in, but I noticed tears starting to glisten in his eyes too. He blinked them away, forcing himself to stop.
But Ged simply said, “I hope you haven’t said anything too unfortunate, Rod. She’s still your fiancée.”
I blinked. “But… wouldn’t that change now? Since I’m not the original Tiana…”
Ged interrupted me. “The woman he recited his words of engagement to, the woman who accepted that proposal, that woman was you, was it not? According to your statement, the old Tiana died several weeks before that event.”
Feeling a deep pang of guilt, I glanced away. “Well, that is true…”
“We can discuss that later,” he decided. “I need to correct a certain misunderstanding, first.”
“A misunderstanding?” Rod asked, because Ged had looked at him when he said it.
“You implied she wasn’t family, a little while ago. Leaving aside the fact that she is still your fiancée, she is also still Deharè’s daughter.”
I grew confused. “Your Majesty, I was just telling you that wasn’t the case?”
He stared at me for a moment, then stated, “Deharè herself told me otherwise.”
“Huh?” was the highly intelligent repartee I returned. Then I simply sat and wore a puzzled frown.
“Ged… you’re being strangely calm about all of this,” Rod said, beginning to get angry. “Don’t you care? Our Tiana is gone!”
“I care considerably,” Ged answered calmly. “And I drank myself blind drunk when I heard about it the first time. But that was ten days ago.”
Neither of us had a response. We just stared at him.
“During my last face-to-face meeting with Father and Deharè, she told us about the first Tiana’s death, and the new Tiana’s original identity.”
Shock replaced confusion. Ten days ago…
That meant she had already told Uncle Owen before the last time I saw him. I had started to tell him, but he told me Mother had already done so. But he never mentioned the part about the first Tiana dying, and me being a different person. I had assumed she didn’t tell him…
Had he been waiting to see if I would tell him myself? No, he had simply omitted it, and said that Mother told him not to press me for details, which was as good as telling me not to speak about it.
Even though she already told him the most important detail, Uncle Owen still treated me as his foster daughter. He hadn’t changed how he treated me at all. My eyes began filling with tears again, remembering it.
Ged’s voice became more gentle. “She told us very clearly how this Tiana carries all of the other’s emotions and memories, and that she considered this Tiana to also be her daughter. She told us in no uncertain terms we were to continue treating her the same.”
“That would be like forgetting about our Tiana, Ged,” Rod spat out.
I patted his hand, still resting on my shoulder, and replied, “You’re right. That’s why I don’t want you to do that. You shouldn’t…”
“We aren’t forgetting her,” Ged declared firmly, interrupting me. “That’s not what Deharè wanted. She told us, ‘She’s not replacing my daughter; she’s my new daughter. She loves everything that Tiana loved. I want you to see her as Tiana’s younger sister, and care about her the same way she cares about you’.”
Rod huffed, still wrestling with his emotions. He griped, “I’ll never understand fairies. How can I just add a new Tiana to my heart, with the same name, the same face, the same personality, and not replace the old one?”
“You can do it because Deharè told us to,” Ged said firmly. “You need to respect her wishes, Rod.”
I grew confused again. “Why would you have to do it just because my mother asked you?”
Ged frowned at me, then grew thoughtful. “It was Amelia’s thirteenth birthday when she told us, wasn’t it?”
The prince nodded. “Yeah. It was because she decided Amelia was old enough to understand.”
“So you weren’t with us, Ti,” he said to me. “Perhaps you don’t know about it.”
“About what?”
“Your mother is practically our mother too.”
“Huh? Just because she and Uncle Owen were lovers doesn’t make her your mom, Ged.”
Rod let out a hmph. “That’s not what she was talking about. Well, it’s part of it, but…”
“Deharè is the woman who gave birth to us, Tiana,” Ged declared. “We are not biologically her children, but she conceived and carried us herself.”
I simply stared at him blankly.
“You know very well what an incredible mage she was,” Ged noted.
“But you three are completely mortal,” I protested. “She couldn’t give birth to you!”
A fairy’s child has to be magical, either a fairborn or a fairy. It’s simple biology.
“In nature, that is true,” Ged answered. “But Deharè’s magic overturned nature.”
“And Amelia was born only two months before me! There wouldn’t be time for me to be born!”
“Fairy pregnancies take longer than human pregnancy, Ti,” Rod pointed out. “You two grew together in the womb. Deharè delivered Amelia when she was ready to come out and kept you inside her for two more months.”
I stared up at him blankly. Was that even possible?
“She didn’t go through labor to deliver any of us,” Ged stated, possibly guessing at what was on my mind. “When we were ready to come out, she used fairy magic to pass us directly out of the womb.”
Once he mentioned it, I recalled that I had done the same thing as Senhion, to deliver Oberon. Since I also have fragments of Sirth’s memories of childbirth, I grew weirdly envious of myself.
“The reason for it was quite simple. Our parents had no love for each other. They married because they shared the same fairy lover. Your mother loved both of them and they both loved her. Our mother never once shared a bed with our father.”
Rod shook his head, wearing a small wry smile. “That’s a strange thing to hear, isn’t it? But our mother was the same as you. She had no interest in men at all.”
Ged raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “Is that true?”
I nodded, feeling another pang of guilt. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I should have told Rod before the betrothal.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Rod insisted firmly. “My reasons for proposing had nothing to do with the bedroom.”
“I said, we’ll talk about your marriage later,” Ged reminded us. “The point is, our father loved Deharè and wouldn’t accept any woman other than her. But the Privy Council would never accept a fairy queen or half-fairy royal scions, so Deharè asked him to make her other lover his queen, and she would take care of the rest.”
I already knew this story though, at least up to this point. Sylphana had been a baron’s daughter. The coincidence that Mother had relationships with both the king and a noble girl eligible to become his queen was slightly suspicious, but Mother was adamantly opposed to allowing mortals to become fairy-touched. I trusted that she hadn’t done that.
“I know about your mother’s preferences,” I told him, “and I know that Mother helped her get pregnant, but I thought she used magic to minimize the number of times she needed to share a bed with your father.”
“Deharè somehow took our mother’s eggs inside herself with magic, then laid with our father to conceive,” Ged explained. “Even though the parentage spell confirms that we are our mother’s children by Father, Deharè gave birth to us, and you– or rather, the first Tiana– shared her womb with Amelia. Our parents never slept together at all.”
The bloodlines of all royal and aristocratic children are confirmed by magic. They used that spell to prove that Duke Egon was my father, too.
“Our mother’s pregnancies were just Deharè’s illusion magic,” he continued. “It’s a good thing she didn’t carry us, because she died long before Amelia was born. They pretended our mother was still alive until Amelia was born, then announced she died in childbirth. Had our sister been in our mother’s womb, we would have lost her, too.”
Looking at Rod, he said. “The woman who did all that for us wanted us to consider this new Tiana our sister. So that’s what I’m doing.”
I bit my lower lip and looked down. I seriously wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Wouldn’t it be better for them to consider me a stranger? Or at least, something like a distant relative?
Besides, Ged might be able to force himself, but I was not confident that Rod could do it. Nor did I actually want them to do it, no matter how much it hurt to imagine them stopping.
