The truth wasn’t pretty, so rather than tell her, Urden gave her an answer she was prone to scolding him for: he grunted something incoherent.

They had been traveling for four years. When he’d returned to her village and learned of her foster father’s death, he’d taken her with him. She had made a life for herself in her home, respected as much as she was feared. She had been the village healer, maintaining her foster father’s home as her own.

Discreet questions had provided him with the information that she hadn’t been using her touch, depending on herbs and locally made elixirs to treat injuries and cure diseases. At least those she could. But he hadn’t groomed her for her village. No. He had prepared her for greater things. So he took her, to the villagers’ dismay.

The elders had threatened when he’d informed them of his decision, forgetting they had rejected her many years ago. The decision to leave was his or hers, but never theirs. So he had threatened back, and his had borne the greater weight.

It took him two years to make her use her gifts. If she were to be of use in the events that would come, then she needed to be versed in its mastery. But fear had kept her from it. As a child, her village had dealt enough damage simply for the reason that she had it. Still, she was slowly beginning to embrace it. At first, she could only use it twice before succumbing to weakness, however, two years now, and she had enough mastery to conjure it five times before facing the risk of unconsciousness.

“So…” Her gaze flickered between him and Arfina, and he saw a mild hope in it. “… are we staying more than one night?”

He studied her expression for only the briefest moment. What happened while I was gone? he thought, but instead, said: “No. we leave before first light.”

She presented him with her displeasure in a pout before returning to her parchment. He smiled at her childishness and discarded himself to one corner of the room. Near her eighteenth summer and she was still prone to childish behaviors.

Away from the harsh sun of her lands, her skin had lightened from the dark brown to one so light he felt it would turn olive with more time, but he doubted the possibility. Her skin was now a soft brown. A complexion it would maintain, never lighter or darker unless taken back to her land where the sun would be more than happy to scorch it again.

Although short, she didn’t look it or seem it from afar. If she were to be seen walking on the way, anyone could easily mistake her for an average height. Perhaps it was the way her body filled out itself, taut and curvy. A beautiful girl who had garnered proposals from men in her village who had once stayed away from her simply because the village priest claimed her cursed. He knew the reason she had never accepted any of them was because she could never forgive her village, and that was something he could understand.

When they’d arrived at the tribe after two days of climbing the trying, frostbitten mountains of Nornavoth, she had caught the attention of many unmarried men of the tribe… and a few of the married. They had watched her with a greed. Not only was she beautiful, to them, she was also exotic. A foreign delicacy to bed one or more times before settling for whatever woman they chose to raise a family with. They could breed with outsiders, but Dinma was clearly too far on the outside to mix their bloodline with.

“So,” Dinma began, abandoning her parchments when Arfina had excused herself with the reason of needing to talk to someone she knew. “Can you tell me about this boy?”

“Which boy?” Urden knew who she spoke of. The child he had adopted in the realm. The one who had chosen the path of evangelist. The boy he had mentioned on one or two occasions in her presence. A boy that was now a man.

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Dinma frowned. “Don’t play coy with me, father. You know which boy.”

“Well,” Urden shrugged, “the boy I know is now a man.”

“And…?”

“And you will meet him, eventually.”

Dinma shifted closer, seeming to not want to miss any information she could get, but he hadn’t seen the boy since he’d left him in the mist. He’d heard enough rumors to garner that the boy had grown into quite the priest. But beside that, he knew nothing.

“I haven’t seen the boy in a very long time,” he told her. “Perhaps too long.”

His words seemed to have conveyed the wrong message because Dinma beamed now. An idea forming in her head, evident in the way her eyes gleamed like water under the light of the moon. “Then let’s go and see him.”

Urden’s lips twitched in a withheld smile. She could turn anything into an opportunity.

“In due time,” he said. “First, we have to finish what we came here for.”

Nodding in a mix of agreement and contemplation, Dinma bit the nail of her thumb. It was something he had learned she did when she had a question she thought was too personal and wasn’t sure if she had a right to ask.

Urden sighed, hoping it was a question he could answer. “What is it?”

Dinma hesitated, but pulling her wits around her, she spoke. “How do you know Arfina?”

“I saved her from the realm.”

“Did you bring her home yourself?”

He nodded. There was no need to speak when the action could suffice.

“And how long did you stay before you left?”

Her questions were leading somewhere, and now, he was as curious as she was. “A month… maybe two.”

“Why not longer?”

“Because I had to leave.”

“Why?”

Urden found a sigh escape his lips. It had been the same question Arfina had asked him twenty years ago. “Because I couldn’t stay.”

“No,” Dinma complained. “Don’t give me a generic answer. I’m old enough to know the truth. You either tell me the truth or nothing at all. I’m not a child.”

She was right. She was no longer the child he had saved in the village, or the child he had asked an elder to watch over. If nothing had told him this, then the four years he’d spent with her should’ve. He mentally apologized for his actions and chose to tell her the truth. “I cost her elder brother one of his arm.”

“Cost him?”

“I took it from him.”

“So you cut of her brother’s arm.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She didn’t sound so surprised. “Why?”

This was the easy part. “He tried to take my head from me.”

“Why?”

And this was the complicated part.

Sometimes she asked too many questions for her own good. She’d learned to control her curiosity, but when given leeway, her control often eluded her. “I ask myself the same question every now and then,” he lied.

She was old enough for a lot of truths, but this truth wasn’t one of them.

But it was more believable than the truth, not that he didn’t think she would believe him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to burden her with such truths. If Ezril already knew such truths, then he would rather his adopted son taught her of it when the time came. For now, he wasn’t going to tell her he had struck to kill Arfina’s brother, because had he not, the god that had possessed him heartbeats before his attack would have proved a greater threat.

Fighting a god in a broken vessel was far easier than fighting one in its perfect vessel.

Not all truths can be handle, however, there were things Dinma needed to know before she entered the realm when the time comes. “Dinma.”

Her attention had long since returned to her parchments but she swiveled it back to him just as easily. “Yes, father.”

He liked the way she called him. It gave him a true delusion of fatherhood. Tamaron had given him a similar feeling, but it had been more of that of a master than a father. He often missed the man, but he could not deny that in his disciple’s bid to give the people hope with the secret he had trusted him with, he had created quite a problem. Telling them the chosen one was coming had been a stupid decision. He sighed, returning to the present.

“We will go to the realm,” he told her. “And we will find the boy.”

“Your son,” Dinma interrupted.

“He’s adopted.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“We will go to the realm,” he started afresh, his tone demanding an end to interruptions. “And we will find the boy. However, only I will speak, while you watch. The next time you meet him, you will know enough to judge and make decisions. Is this understood?”

Dinma seemed to have more questions, perhaps objections. But the tone of his voice and the weight of his words must have been conveyed well enough because she said: “Clear as Umunari skies.”