The White Road Read Free Page A

cards when Seregil came in with the wizards. Magyana looked most of her two centuries today; under a fringe of grey bangs, her lined face was pale and tired, but her eyes were kind as always. Thero, still in the youth of his first century, was tall and dark, with a thin beard and dark curling hair pulled back from a long, somewhat austere face. But his pale green eyes were warm, too, as he took in the sight of Alec and Sebrahn.
    “We need to talk,” Seregil said, sitting down on the bed beside Alec.
    “I’ll leave you to it,” Micum said, putting Sebrahn on the bed and rising to go.
    “Please, stay,” said Thero. “We have no secrets from you in this matter.”
    This sounded serious, and all the more so when Magyana threw the latch and cast a warding on the room to keep out prying ears.
    “Now then, this creature—” she began, her lined face somber.
    “Please don’t call him that,” said Alec. “He’s a person and he has a name.”
    “He is not a person, my dear,” Magyana told him gently. “You may be right about the rest of it, but he’s not human, or ’faie, either.”
    “There’s something we need to tell you,” said Thero.
    “What is it?”
    “Thero sensed it, but not clearly, when he first saw Sebrahn in Plenimar,” Magyana explained. “It’s true that therhekaro has been given the semblance of a child, but another form radiates beyond the physical. I don’t understand it, but what I see around him is the form of a young dragon.”
    Alec stared hard at Sebrahn, squinting his eyes, but saw nothing unusual. “A dragon? That’s impossible! Sebrahn was made from bits of—me!”
    Seregil was frowning at the younger wizard. “Why didn’t you tell us, Thero?”
    “I wasn’t sure what I was sensing. It’s Magyana who sees it clearly.”
    Magyana took Alec’s hand in hers. “Seregil has told me something of how Sebrahn was made. I believe you can tell me more. Do you know what materials he used?”
    Alec shifted uneasily; it was a time he didn’t really want to remember. “Sulfur and salt, tinctures—”
    “Nothing of dragons?”
    “I saw dried fingerling dragons hanging in his workshop, but I didn’t see him put any in.”
    “Very well. What else do you remember?”
    “There was something he called the ‘water of life’—some kind of silver, I think.”
    “Quicksilver?” asked Magyana.
    “Yes, that was it. He put that all in with my tears, blood, shit and piss, hair, and my …” He faltered, blushing under the weight of their collective gaze.
    “His semen,” Seregil finished for him. “How in Bilairy’s name do you get a dragon out of all that?”
    Thero shrugged, his pale green eyes serious. “We don’t know yet. But they did.”
    “It was my Hâzadriëlfaie blood that
Ilban—”
Alec faltered, horrified to have the slave word for “master” slip out so easily. “That’s what Yhakobin claimed he needed the most. He said that it was the only thing that would work to make a rhekaro. But since I’m
ya’shel
, he did a long purification process first, trying to get rid of my human blood, he said.”
    “Ah, that would explain it,” Magyana murmured. “I thought you looked different, more ’faie.”
    That was a sore topic. “I had to drink tinctures of metals and wear amulets; seven of them, I think: tin, copper, silver, gold—I don’t remember the others. And he kept taking drops of my blood and making them burn to see what color they were. When it got to the right shade, he used more of my blood to make the mixture do whatever it did.”
    “Right out of his chest,” Seregil growled. “They tapped him like a keg and hung him up to bleed on their mess.” He paused, then leaned over and pushed the hair back from Alec’s left ear, showing them the small blue dragon bite tattoo on his earlobe. “Could this have something to do with it?”
    Magyana raised an eyebrow. “It’s possible, I suppose. But it’s such a tiny bite. There wouldn’t have been