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“Osho,” he croaked. And it nearly felled me. That single word. My dying uncle calling me by his brother’s name. Mistaking me for my own father.
“It’s the fever. And the painkillers,” Chapman said quietly. “They can cause some confusion. He’s had some lucid moments, though.” Her grey and black sight stars lingered on Taraken, then returned to me. “I’ll give you two some privacy.”
I jerked my tail in agreement, and she left, her flat foot-shells scuffing across the new wooden floor and then hitting the sand outside with a soft thud. Alone with my uncle, I finally advanced, sitting down beside him where he could easily see me.
“Not Osho,” I said. “His son. Dalk.”
Taraken’s sight stars shifted sluggishly.
“Dalk,” he said, as if tasting the sound. The taste must have been familiar to him, because there was recognition in his weary expression. “It has been too long, boy.”
“I’m not a boy,” I gruffly reminded him. It was an exchange we’d had many times. It hurt to have it now, when it would likely be the last. “There was business in the Deep Sky.”
“Such important... business,” he said, his breathing laboured. “When Gahn Fallo... said he would have you back... at any time...”
I shifted slightly, remembering Fiona telling me something very similar. That if I wanted a reprieve, Gahn Fallo would likely let me come back here and send someone else in my stead. That I had no real reason to stay in the Deep Sky.
“Not just business,” I acknowledged and not without some bitterness. “A woman.”
Taraken’s sight stars, which had always been so keen, even into his elder years, looked milky now with age and fever. They pulsed so weakly.
“A woman,” he asked on a rattling gasp. “Pretty?”
“So pretty that I seem to lose all sense around her.”
He tried to laugh, but it came out as a husky whistle.
“Yes, go ahead and laugh,” I told him grimly even while I felt a flood of affection for him. “The Lavrika has not summoned me and I yearn for someone who may not even be mine.”
“I... understand.”
I gawked at him, wondering if this was some trick of the new women’s medicine. Taraken had never had a mate. And he’d never talked about loving a woman, either.
“You understand?” I asked slowly. “You understand what it’s like to want someone so completely you feel like you will merely... merely fall apart and cease existing if you cannot have her? You understand what it is like to tell her, to her face, that if the Lavrika called another man for her then you would gut him before he could even try to claim her?”
There was no confusion, no hesitation in his reply.
“Yes,” he said. “Though that would have meant... killing my own brother. And that... I would have never... done.”
I frowned at him for a moment, wondering if he’d lost track of the conversation. He’d called me by his brother’s name, after all. Maybe that was stuck in his mind for some reason.
But he looked at me and he saw me as Dalk. And all at once I knew just what he meant.
“My mother,” I said, feeling strangely dizzy even though I was not standing. “You... You loved her?”
“Yes. Still... do. For this day... And all days.”
Stricken, I stared at him, my mind’s eye running over my life with stark new understanding. All those times Taraken had helped my mother, had helped me. All those times he had made sure we were safe and fed after the death of my father, when I’d thought he was merely doing an uncle’s duty, or the duty of a man to his dead brother’s wife. All those times he’d made me stay up late so I could learn to mend my own things so that my mother would not have to. All those times when he was furiously angry with me because I’d done something to disrespect or displease her.
All those times he’d warned me about jealousy. About the way it would kill a man even where he stood.
“Did you ever tell her?” Even as I asked the question I knew he hadn’t. He was too much like me. Too content to shove down his feelings until they were hot and hard as embers in his guts. Even I might have never told Fiona what I wanted, what I felt, if she had not managed to drag it out of me.
My mother had not been the dragging type. She was not stubborn. She was not loud. She was quiet. Gentle. And it suddenly hurt me very badly, to think of her without my father, and to think of Taraken without her, the two of them bleeding invisible pain out of their bodies where the other could not see.
Taraken was more like a father to me than Osho had been, him having died when I was so young. So there was no feeling of betrayal at Taraken’s revelation. I did not feel disgusted, or that he had done something wrong by loving my mother, his brother’s mate. I felt only the ghostly bruise of regret at the fact that a man could be strong and good and worthy and still not get what he wanted most. Could still not get what he deserved.
“No,” he said, answering my question with a wheezing breath. “Never... told her. Think... that is why the Lavrika... never came for me. There could be no mate bond for another... beyond what... I already felt...”
