"Desmond?" Kaleit crossed his arms, giving Leslyn a sideways glance. "Another brother of yours, I presume?"
"No. I don't know anything about him, but this has to be him." Leslyn stood next to Kaleit in Erin's room in Tannoran's guest wing, the two of them still riveted on the impossible image on the slabbet. An image of a badly-scarred Erin and a young man who was uncannily identical to Leslyn himself. He looked excruciatingly tired. Knowing Erin, Leslyn could sympathize.
“Could’ve fooled me.” Kaleit jabbed at the man’s nose with a finger, careful not to touch the surface of the slabbet. “He looks just like you, if your hair was darker and your nose a bit larger.”
It was true. He could have easily passed for a twin. It was no wonder that Erin had mistaken Leslyn for him when they’d first met.
Leslyn tried not to think too deeply about it, but breezy whispers of further family secrets and infidelity began tickling his mind in a most unappetizing way. If Liren had sired a daughter outside of wedlock, what assurance did he have that his own father hadn’t done the same? He had married Leslyn’s mother quite quickly after the death of Liren’s, or so Leslyn had always been told. Was that done to bury something else besides the man’s grief for his first wife?
The thought that he might actually have another brother, possibly an identical twin, and that their lineage might be questionable at best… it made Leslyn’s stomach feel cold and heavy. Could it just be that the image was just a creation of the merling’s illusion magic? He stared at the slabbet, wondering if the cursed device held further knowledge of Desmond and his relationship to Erin—how did they even come to know each other, for one? And what did happen to Erin’s face?
“Right, we need to translate these letters,” Kaleit said, taking the words right out of Leslyn’s mouth. “I have a table in my room, we’ll use that for now. I’d rather the housekeeper not catch me in here, in any case. She’ll be the first to spread some sort of rumor to the rest of the staff.”
With a snort at the ironic lack of introspection regarding rumor-milling, Leslyn followed him into the hallway. He was surprised when the tall youth simply opened the door just across from Erin’s. “You live in the guest wing?” he accidentally said out loud.
“I do,” Kaleit replied without missing a beat. “It’s quietest in this wing. The staff spend most of their time loitering in the kitchen or keeping up the main rooms of the house.”
“I see.” How convenient. He was beginning to see why Kaleit was so concerned about rumors. They were probably well-deserved.
Kaleit’s room was all but identical to Erin’s, its furniture consisting of a bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, and a few personal items like the table and a chair. There were papers all over the table, and Leslyn was not surprised to see that quite a few of them bore drawings representing griffin flight formations of varying shapes and sizes. There were also a handful of dossiers, each of them a copy of the official breeding records of certain female griffins. It seemed Kaleit was already thinking ahead to when Zabor was of breeding age—not that Leslyn suspected anyone would be very interested in breeding more potentially dangerous keets like the unruly black.
Kaleit gathered up those documents and set them aside. After pulling the table up to the bed, he sat down and put the slabbet on the table, propping it up with a dragon-shaped metal paperweight. Leslyn took the chair and sat on the other side, and they set to task, each taking up a pen and paper and copying several sentences from the slabbet to work with. It quickly became clear that there were extra letters in what should have been much shorter words, but within a half hour, they came up with a cipher that seemed to make sense with most of the odd letters.
“Hailing from… Earth, Erin was… orphaned at age… sixteen,” Kaleit slowly read from the slabbet, comparing with a copy of the cipher held in his hand as he went. “She did lie about her home town. I knew it.”
“I don’t see why she thought she needed to,” Leslyn said. “I doubt anyone’s heard of Earth any more than Lupabell, or wherever it was she said she came from.”
“Lutendel,” Kaleit automatically corrected, and read on. “Save for her uncle D… Desmond, she lost her entire family in an… accident that… permanently crippled her from the waist down, leaving her bound to a wheelchair—“ he slapped the cipher down on the table, “—for Ardor’s sake, what is this nonsense? She’s obviously not crippled.”
“No, she’s not,” Leslyn agreed, but his mind was back on Koben’s ship, where he’d first seen the girl asleep in the cabin.
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“Not only was she paralyzed, but her face was also horrifically scarred by a spray of shattered glass…”
The first thing Erin had done upon waking was to touch her own face… as if feeling for scars that weren’t there. Then she got up and ran, flinging herself across the other bed, kicking her legs and squealing with inexplicable joy. It had been so bizarre that Leslyn would likely never forget the sound of her laugh that day.
“Could the merling fool us all into believing that someone’s scars were miraculously healed?” Leslyn asked, suddenly quite anxious for the sheer impossibility of what he was about to believe.
“I doubt one merling could affect more than a handful of people at a time,” Kaleit said, frowning as he silently read on for a few sentences. “Maybe he made her believe she had them in the first place, when she never did. He could probably manage to force her to believe she was paralyzed, as well. She’s not very smart.”
“I’d wager she’s smarter than you think. Anyway, if Coyrifan could only work his magic on a few people, I’d have a lot of trouble believing that he could force such a detailed ‘memory’ on someone, and for so long.” Leslyn held out his hand for a turn with the slabbet, and Kaleit obligingly slid it over.
The next couple of paragraphs were quite sad, describing the way Erin lost her large, close-knit family, then the unexpected parting with her same-age peers to live alone with Desmond in relative squalor for the next three years. Leslyn was surprised Kaleit hadn’t read those parts out loud for his own amusement. He continued on until something very interesting came up.
“Kaleit… It says here that she knew about the two of us long before she came to Nilvar, as well as Prince Koben and Aeriemaster Gunu. It says she often dreamed about watching us from afar, to such a degree that she was able to paint your likeness.”
Across the table, Kaleit’s lip curled. “Say what? Let me see.” He reached for the slabbet, sort of beckoning with a flick of his fingers for Leslyn to hand it over faster. “It does say that, but why should we believe it’s true? She’s been annoying since the moment we met, but she never gave any indication that she knew me. It’s just a story that the merling created for her.”
The strange bits of information were slowly beginning to coalesce into something oddly logical. “She hid her face from you.” Leslyn pointed at him, his eyes going wide with realization. “That day we first arrived in Nilvar, in Wrath’s apartment. You walked in unannounced, Wrath screamed, and when Erin jumped away, you caught her. The moment she looked up and saw you, she flinched and covered her face.”
“So what?”
“She never hid from anyone else, only you.”
“What are you trying to insinuate? That I frightened her with my mere presence?”
“No, that's not it.” Leslyn snapped his fingers as it connected. “It was the scars. She didn’t want you to see them. Why would she care what you thought if she'd never seen you before?”
“Leslyn.” He put the slabbet down on the table with a firm thump. “This is so stupid that I can’t even take this perfect opportunity to make fun of Erin for being as infatuated with me as she obviously is. You’re as ridiculously fanciful as she is. She doesn’t have scars. She didn’t know either of us. It’s just a merling tale.”
“She also made all sorts of strange comments about griffins that seemed a little odd for someone who’s never been to Nilvar. Things that a merling certainly wouldn’t know, such as the rarity of Wrath’s color. How do you explain that?”
“It isn’t my responsibility to explain your fancies, you feathered fool.” He picked up the slabbet and read on, silently at first, then began to read aloud. “One night, as Erin slept, she was transported to Emerrane, drawn by a voice no one had heard in generations. When she woke in the world that she’d only known as a dream, somehow healed of all of her earthly wounds, she continued to believe it was just that—a dream. Little did she know that her life had changed forever. She now had a true purpose to fulfill.” He slammed the slabbet down again. “This reads like a ridiculous children’s fairy tale.”
“Wait—“ Leslyn held up his palms, brow creasing as he contemplated what Kaleit had just read. “It says that she was transported to Emerrane. Is it trying to say that she came from another world?”
If that was the case… a lot of things would suddenly make a lot more sense. It could explain why Erin was so infuriatingly cavalier in the beginning, telling Leslyn not to worry about things that she had no right to assure him of. It had been as if she was unafraid of obvious dangers, like Wrath, until the “dream” finally became too real to ignore. But, if she was from another world, where would her connection to Leslyn’s family fit in?
“It seems to be claiming so, but do you really want to consider trusting what is clearly a merling lie?”
“The voice unheard for generations—could that be Ardor?”
Kaleit’s eyes went to the ceiling. “Yes, Leslyn, Ardor must have brought Erin here because she’s one of Queen Katharesa’s knights, destined to save the world.”
He’d said it very sarcastically, but Leslyn couldn’t help but stare at the slabbet, wondering if Erin did in fact have some particular purpose in Emerrane. A lot of odd coincidences had occurred since meeting her. If not for her foolishly approaching Wrath’s nest, he might not have become so involved with the blue griffin and her capture, thereby leading to his being hired by Koben, and later bonding with Valiant. Erin’s own bond with the merling Coyrifan, unnatural as Leslyn believed it was, enabled her to become a valuable tool for Koben to use in his attempt to trade for the Queen’s lost Medelapura. If they did manage to retrieve the Medelapura, would the Queen then be able to move forward with her search for the five knights?
“Stop thinking about it.” Kaleit got up, leaving the slabbet on the table. “Just stop with this nonsense. She’s as cut out to be a knight as I am.”
“I would be careful what I said around that slabbet,” Leslyn warned. “If it is telling the truth, you might have just given it another prophecy to record...”
To Leslyn’s utter satisfaction, Kaleit’s face went just the perfect shade of pale.