Erin and Kirchel exchanged a brief look and then both turned back to watch the dark shape moving through the trees. Kirchel’s hand was still on Erin’s arm, and Erin could feel it trembling.
A moment later, a cloaked figure stepped out into the lamplight and came cautiously toward them. Kirchel and Erin sat still and silent, waiting.
When they were only a few yards apart, the figure stopped and slowly pulled down its hood. “Kirchel...?”
Erin heard a sharp intake of breath and turned to see Kirchel put a hand over her mouth. She was shaking more than ever, and even in the dim light Erin could see that her face had gone chalk white. For a minute, she simply stared at the man standing in front of her. Then she slowly lowered her trembling fingers.
“Amani?” she said in a quavering whisper.
“Yes,” Edward said softly. “It really is me.” His voice was almost as unsteady as hers was.
Kirchel slowly got to her feet and took a few hesitant steps forward. Then she stopped, looking uncertain. Erin had the impression that she half wanted to run straight into his arms but didn’t really dare to do it.
“I know it’s hard for you to believe,” Edward said, moving a little closer. “I’m sure my death must have seemed very real. But it wasn’t. I’m here. I’m alive.” He paused, watching Kirchel’s face intently. “I’ll be glad to offer you proof if I can. Is there something I could tell you, some question you could ask, that will help you believe that I am who I say I am?”
Kirchel was silent for a minute, apparently thinking hard. Erin could see her biting nervously at her lower lip. Then suddenly she stopped, and Erin could have sworn that she actually smiled faintly.
“All right,” Kirchel said, her voice sounding more confident. “If you really are my father, you’ll be able to tell me this: Who is Pickle, and what is his secret?”
Erin raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“Ah, yes. How could I ever forget Pickle?” Edward said with a small laugh. “Pickle is the stuffed anaurian that your mother made for you before you were born. He was green, and he had purple eyes, just like you and your mother. And he was your best friend when you were a little girl. For years your favorite bedtime stories were the Amazing Adventures of Pickle, which we made up together.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “And Pickle’s secret was that he was really the famous hero Green Lightning, who saved dozens of cities and damsels in distress from evil villains.” He gave Kirchel a smile. “Does that help?”
Kirchel nodded. She was smiling now, too. They stood there for a moment, both looking a little hesitant. Then, at almost the same time, they both moved forward, and a second later, Kirchel was in her father’s arms, crying into his shoulder.
“Amani, I missed you so much,” she said, her voice shaking with sobs but sounding happy at the same time.
“I missed you too, sweetheart,” Edward said, holding her tightly.
Erin sat and watched them with a slight feeling of déjà vu. She couldn’t help remembering that she’d seen Kirchel crying into another man’s shoulder not too long ago. Although the atmosphere of that scene had been much less pleasant....
“But I don’t understand,” Kirchel said after a few minutes, moving back a little so that she could look her father in the face again. “How can you be here? You were dead—I saw your body and everything!”
“I know,” Edward said gently. “I know.” He glanced over at the bench where Erin was still sitting and then looked back at Kirchel with a sigh. “Why don’t we sit down? I’ve got quite a long story to tell you.”
He and Kirchel walked over and sat down on the bench next to Erin, who slid over to make room for them.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Erin,” Edward said, smiling at her. “And thank you for giving Kirchel my message.”
“No problem,” Erin said, returning his smile.
It had been something of a problem for Arturyn, of course. But she didn’t think this was the time to bring that up.
“How long can you stay?” Kirchel asked her father, looking worried. “Erin said that you were in a hurry to leave when she saw you yesterday because you would be in trouble if someone found out you were gone.”
Edward nodded. “Yes, but don’t worry—it’s safer for me to be out tonight. I should be fine for a few hours, I think.”
“Out of where? And why aren’t you supposed to leave? Erin said you mentioned the name Nievar. Who’s he? The only person with that name I’ve ever heard of is Nievar Aieryl-Cryn, the king of Raylmiyr.”
“That’s him,” Edward said with a grim smile. “And, being the king, if he finds out I’m not staying where he left me like a good little prisoner, he has the power to have me tortured or executed or something equally unpleasant. He’s threatened to quite a few times.”
"What?" Kirchel looked horrified. “Then you shouldn’t be here! You can’t risk that!”
“It’s all right. He’s not going to find out if I’m only gone for a few hours—I made sure of that before I left. I could probably stay even longer than that if I needed to, actually. I doubt Nievar’s really going to be checking on us anytime soon, considering that he’s on his deathbed. That’s the reason I was able to get out at all. As he’s grown weaker over the last several months, so has the magic he used to bind us.”
“But why on earth has he been keeping you prisoner?” Kirchel asked. “What did you ever do to him?”
Edward sighed. “Like I said, it’s a long story. But to give you a brief answer, what I did was marry your mother.” He put up a hand to stop Kirchel, who looked startled and had opened her mouth to ask a question. “I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. I think it’s best if I just start at the beginning and tell you the whole story. I’m sure it’s going to sound very strange, and parts of it will be hard for you to believe. I don’t know that I’d believe it myself if I hadn’t been living through it all this time. I just ask that you hear me out. But first….” He turned to Erin. “Has Kirchel told you about her mother?”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“A little bit,” Erin said. “I know her name was Kiari and that she was into herbs and things like Kirchel is. And she accidentally got poisoned while she was working with some of her plants one day when Kirchel was a baby.”
“Then you probably know that Kirchel and I lived in the human world after that? And that I was supposedly killed in a car accident when she was nine years old?”
Erin nodded.
“Good, then we can go from there.” Edward paused for a moment, apparently thinking, before he began his story. “I don’t remember much about the crash itself. I just know that I suddenly lost control of the car, and it went off the road. It was on a steep hillside, and I remember the car starting to slide down toward the trees at the bottom. Then I blacked out.
"When I woke up, I was lying on a bed, and there was a woman leaning over me. At first I thought I must be in a hospital, and the woman was a nurse. But then my head cleared enough for me to recognize who she was. It was Kiari, your mother.”
He smiled a little at the incredulous looks on Kirchel’s and Erin’s faces.
“Well, then of course I thought I must be dead or dreaming. How could I be seeing her otherwise? But when I asked her if I was dead, she said I wasn’t and neither was she. After that, she started crying and saying that she was sorry and that it was all her fault.
"Well, of course I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about, and I was somewhat in shock from seeing her there alive. I still wasn’t convinced that it was true and that I wasn’t just dreaming. But after a little while, she calmed down enough to explain where I was and what was going on.
"It turned out that I was in Raylmiyr, in a secluded spot that Nievar, the king, had enchanted to make a kind of prison for us. It’s a lovely prison—I’ll give it that. There’s a nice little house and some forest and a small lake. But we couldn’t go outside the boundaries, which still made it a prison. That prison is where I’ve been for the last forty years. It’s also where your mother had been since the time we thought she had died. But, as she explained to me, her death had been faked, just like mine was.”
“But how?” Kirchel asked. “I mean, healers examined the bodies. Why couldn’t they tell if they weren’t real?”
“Because they didn’t know what to look for,” Edward explained. “The healers were trained in Elarith magic. That’s the variety of blood magic that Silmariths and humans use,” he added in response to Erin's puzzled look. “But the magic used to create those illusions was Thryith magic—done by the Nirayl king himself. Most Elarith healers wouldn’t have thought to check for signs of Thryith magic. Most wouldn’t even know how to.”
“What’s a Nirayl?” Erin asked curiously.
“They’re the people that live in Raylmiyr,” Kirchel told her. “They’re...well, they’re a lot like fairies, I guess you could say. Not the cute little pixie type—I mean the elegant, powerful ones. Nirayls are very magically powerful, and they don’t like humans or Silmariths much, which makes them dangerous to deal with.” She turned back to her father. “I still don’t understand why the Nirayl king would want to lock the two of you up for getting married, though. What did it matter to him?”
“Well, like you just said, Nirayls don’t like humans or Silmariths as a general rule. They think we’re weaker, less intelligent, less culturally refined…. Nirayl society regards it as a disgrace to seek the company of humans or to treat them as equals. So, knowing that, can’t you imagine what Nievar’s reaction was when he discovered that his daughter—his very own daughter—had actually gone so far as to marry a human?”
A long silence followed these words.
“Are you saying…?” Kirchel began uncertainly.
“Your mother is a Nirayl. Yes.”
“But…but….” Kirchel seemed to be at a loss for words. “You’re saying she’s Nievar Aieryl-Cryn’s daughter? You’ve got to be joking….”
“I’m not joking, Kirchel,” Edward said seriously. “Your mother and I have spent more than half of our lives imprisoned by Nievar’s magic because she’s his daughter—remember that.” He sighed. “Of course, legally she’s not his daughter anymore. He disowned her when she left home to come live here in Silmar. But, even so, after he found out about our marriage, he couldn’t bear to risk anyone finding out who she was and what she had done. That’s why he faked her death, kidnapped her, and locked her up.
"Then, later on, it occurred to him that if I, thinking that your mother was dead, decided to marry someone else, and then someone found out the truth, he would have an even bigger mess on his hands. He might have also realized that his daughter was going absolutely crazy on account of being torn away from her husband and child and being stuck in solitary confinement for eight years. Either way, he finally decided it would be safest to have you and me hidden away along with her.”
“So he faked your death just like he did hers?” Kirchel looked indignant, and Erin couldn’t blame her. Protecting a social reputation seemed like a very poor reason to force a little girl to grow up without her parents. “But why didn’t he take me, too?”
“Well, you can thank your grandmother for that. She found out what your grandfather was doing at about the same time he imprisoned me, and she was furious with him. She couldn’t persuade him to let us go, but she did manage to place a kind of protective magic on you before he could get to you. I don’t understand exactly how it worked—I’m far from being an expert on Nirayl magic. But it made it so that he couldn’t kidnap you and lock you up like he had with us.”
Edward was quiet for a moment, and his expression turned somber.
“She spoke to us about it beforehand. It was a very hard decision to make, of course. We wanted so much to have you with us.... But for all we knew, we would never leave that prison again, and we wanted you to have a life and a future. I trusted that my family would take good care of you. And your grandmother kept an eye on you for us until she died, which was about ten years later. You were her only grandchild at the time, and she was very fond of you. You’re named after her, actually.”
“So her name was Kirchel, too?” There was a look of comprehension on Kirchel’s face. “But I remember her! She was at your funeral, and she told me then that we had the same name. She came to see me sometimes after that, too. But she just said she had been a friend of yours and Mother’s....” Kirchel’s expression darkened. “If she was really my grandmother, why didn’t she ever tell me? And why didn’t she tell me that you were alive?”
Edward sighed. “Again, it was a hard choice. She felt—and your mother and I agreed with her—that it would be better for you not to know. Not for a while, at least. Perhaps we were wrong, but it didn’t seem that knowing your parents were alive but were locked away and couldn’t be with you would be any easier to deal with than believing we were dead. We were also afraid that you might get it into your head to try to come and find us, which would have been very dangerous for you.
"Of course we wanted to tell you that we weren’t really dead. But it was more important to us to keep you safe and free to live your life how you wanted. And we did intend to let you know once you were grown up and had enough experience to be cautious. But, like I said, your grandmother died before she felt you were ready to know, and we had no way to contact you after that. Not until recently, and then we didn’t know for sure how to find you. That’s why I was at Zeiryn yesterday—I was trying to contact some old friends who I thought might know where you were.”
All three of them were silent for a few minutes.
Kirchel looked like she didn’t yet know what to think or feel about everything her father had just told them.
Erin still had some questions. Not being very familiar with this world’s culture and politics yet, she didn’t entirely understand some parts of Edward’s story. But it seemed better not to interrupt right now. So she just sat quietly and watched Kirchel trying to sort through her thoughts.