of emptiness sometimes made it hard for me to respond convincingly. He was quick to see such moods.
"You did the right thing, you know, Gav," he said, looking at me with his clear eyes. "I know what you're thinking about. Back there in the city ... You think, 'What a fool I was! To run off and starve, to live in a forest with ignorant men, to slave harder than I ever did in my masters' house! Is that freedom? Wasn't I freer there, talking with learned men, reading the books of the poets, sleeping soft and waking warm? Wasn't I happier there?'—But you weren't. You weren't happy, Gav. You knew it in your heart, and that's why you ran off. The hand of the master was always on you."
He sighed and looked into the fire for a little; it was autumn, a chill in the air. I listened to him as I listened to him tell all his tales, without argument or question.
"I know how it was, Gav. You were a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, with kind masters who had you educated. Oh, I know that! And you thought you should be happy, because you had the power to learn, read, teach—become a wise man, a learned man. They let you have that. They allowed it to you. Oh yes! But though you were given the power to do certain things, you had no power over anyone or anything. That was theirs. The masters. Your owners. And whether you knew it or not, in every bone of your body and fiber of your mind you felt that hand of the master holding you, controlling you, pressing down on you. Any power you had, on those terms, was worthless. Because it was nothing but their power acting through you. Using you ... They let you pretend it was yours. You filched a bit of freedom, a scrap of liberty, from your masters, and pretended it was yours and was enough to keep you happy. Right? But you were growing into a man. And for a man, Gav, there is no happiness but in his own freedom. His freedom to do what he wills to do. And so your will sought its full liberty. As mine did, long ago."
He reached out and clapped me on the knee. "Don't look so sad," he said, his white grin flashing in his curly beard. "You know you did the right thing! Be glad of it, as I am!"
I tried to tell him that I was glad of it.
He had to go see about affairs, and left me musing by the fire. What he said was true. It was the truth.
But not my truth.
Turning away from his tale, I looked back for the first time in—how long? I looked across the wall I'd built to keep me from remembering. I looked and saw the truth: I had been a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, obedient to my masters, owning no freedom but what they allowed me. And I had been happy.
In the house of my slavery I had known a love so dear to me that I could not bear to think about it, because when I lost it, I lost everything.
All my life had been built on trust, and that trust had been betrayed by the Family of Arcamand.
Arcamand: with the name, with the word, everything I had forgotten, had refused to remember, came back and was mine again, and with it all the unspeakable pain I had denied.
I sat there by the fire, turned away from the room, bent over, my hands clenched on my knees. Someone came near and stood near me at the hearth to warm herself: Diero, a gentle presence in a long shawl of fine pale wool.
"Gav," she said very quietly, "what is it?"
I tried to answer her and broke into a sob. I hid my face in my arms and wept aloud.
Diero sat down beside me on the stone hearth seat. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried.
"Tell me, tell me," she said at last.
"My sister. She was my sister," I said.
And that word brought the sobbing again, so hard I could not take breath.
She held me and rocked me a while, until I could lift my head and wipe my nose and face. Then she said again, "Tell me."