"Kicked out of the Temple of the Sword for being too violent?"
He laughed, but there was an edge to it that told me it caused him at least a small amount of grief. "My sister is conflicted...about her duty and her place in the family. My mother would like to see her marry, settle down, and give her grandchildren to dote on, but I'm afraid Eyildr has seen a lot of grief surrounding love, and what its loss can do to someone." His voice had gone hollow, and his eyes were far away. "Seeing what Behr went through when he lost Egrid is a lot of it, but Eyildr and my mother have never quite been the same since my father died."
"What happened to your father?" I asked, tentatively. "If it's not too..."
He shook his head. "It was a long time ago," he said. "But to answer your question, he was old. More than five hundred years old. He died in his sleep—" he looked like he was counting before he added, "—thirty-seven years ago."
The concept of time for someone who lived five hundred years must have been a lot different than it was to me, because I found it hard to grasp someone that old fathering children who were only Io's age.
I was oddly reluctant to ask him how old he was. He only looked to be in his mid-twenties, thirty at the very oldest. But the slowed aging of the fae meant that he was likely barely older than me and would be long after I grew old and died.
"So, is your mother also old?" I asked instead. I regretted the question immediately—bringing up his mother's mortality after talking about his father's death. "That was rude," I said before he could answer.
"Not at all," he replied, resting his chin on top of my head. "She’s still quite young—only eighty. They married when she was only twenty or so."
"And he was like...four hundred years old?" I asked, chastising myself for being rude again.
He only laughed. "Four hundred isn't old for the Fae. We only really start aging in the last decades of our lives.
"Oh," I said. "So you are..."
"Fifty-nine," he answered. "Behr is sixty, Eyildr is forty-four, and Fyr, to her absolute horror, is only twenty-two. Which to the fae, is more like on the verge of sixteen."
“So, your mother remarried, then?” I asked.
“She did not,” he replied, and I might have kicked myself for how ill-mannered I had apparently become, but he continued, “Fyr’s father is a great mystery. My mother won't tell—although I have my suspicions.”
“Who?” I demanded, pushing up to look at him. All semblance of civility had apparently been obliterated by my curiosity.
“You’ve met him,” he said, arching a brow.
“Aben?” I guessed.
“Gods no,” he laughed. “He’s her nephew, even if they don’t share blood.”
I searched my mind. “Malach,” I breathed, thinking of the tall, gorgeous dragon rider. Ithadto be him. He was the only other man I’d met.
He chuckled darkly. “He never denied it, even when I planted my fist squarely in his pretty face.”
I covered my mouth, imagining what a fist fight between two powerful dragon riders might have looked like. “I would never have guessed the two of you had any discord,” I told him.
“We don’t. That was a long time ago. And Malach would have done right by Fyr if my mother had ever allowed him to.”
"Are you a close family?" I asked, curious about them all despite my general desire to leave thoughts of Nightfall, and the future that existed there, somewhere outside in the snowstorm.
"In some ways.Theyare all close—though I've always been a little on the outside."
"Because you grew up in Darkwatch? I asked. The idea of him as the outcast broke my heart for him.
"Mostly. Behr and I were close when we were very young, and then again when we were both in the Tyrion as boys. But something changed along the way, and we grew...perhaps a little too competitive."
"And your parents?" I asked, trying to steer the subject away from Behr.
"My mother and I have always managed to remain somewhat close. Though, she is above all, a stoic and proper queen. Not one to get her hands dirty picking up a filthy little boy, even when he skinned his knee or bumped his head."
I did not like to imagine him as a little boy, hurt and wanting his mother, finding only a cold-hearted queen before him. I didn't remark on it though, knowing instinctively that my pity would not be well-received.
"But anything approaching familiarity with my father was next to impossible,” he continued. “The Aldurs can be a stiff family—which is, no doubt, why my stoic mother fit in so well. I’ve always been amazed at my aunt Yadala's warmth, having come from them."
