HE awoke—for real, this time—to find Jermayan shaking him, a hand over his mouth to muffle his shouts, and Shalkan standing over him anxiously.
'Are you all right?' Jermayan said when he was sure Kellen was really awake.
'I… sure. It was just a bad dream,' Kellen said, sitting up. But the details of the dream didn't fade, the way dreams did with waking. If anything, they seemed to become clearer, sharper, as if they were an old memory that had just been waiting to be summoned to life.
Had that been him—some ancient version of him? Or had the coincidence of names been no more than that —a coincidence? Lycaelon had always taken pains to remind him that he'd been named for a revered ancestor, that generations of Kellen Tavadons had upheld the honor and traditions of House Tavadon in Armethalieh. He wondered how proud his father would be of the name if he knew…
'It must have been some dream,' Shalkan commented sourly.
Kellen looked around. It was still full dark, sometime after moonset but long before dawn. Jermayan had lit the lantern, and was making up the fire to brew tea, the Elven panacea for all ills.
'It was,' Kellen said in a low voice. He hesitated, not wanting to make things more real by speaking about them. But hadn't keeping secrets caused enough trouble already?
Enough of secrets. If there is something wrong with me, I want Jermayan to know about it, before —
Before it was too late? But what if it already was too late?
But perhaps it wasn't. All he could do was to tell the dream, and let events play out as they would. 'I dreamed about the battle… the one Jermayan said was fought here. I don't know if it was real, or just my imagination, but…' He stopped, reliving the horror of the moment when he realized that the other-Kellen was fighting for the enemy, had actually embraced the fate that Kellen himself feared so greatly.
'Probably a little of both,' Shalkan said. 'You'd have to be blind and deaf not to feel a little of what happened here, but we didn't have a lot of choice about where to stop, really. So what did you see?'
'Monsters,' Kellen said bitterly. 'Monsters, and dragons… they always talk about war like it's such a grand adventure, but if real battles are anything like what I saw, why would anybody ever do that twice?'
'Because the alternative to fighting is worse,' the unicorn said somberly. 'Or people think it is. And in this case, we know it was. But that isn't what's bothering you, is it?'
'No.' Kellen glanced past Shalkan's shoulder. Jermayan was staying politely on the other side of the campfire, keeping busy with the tea-things and pretending not to hear, but Kellen already knew that he wasn't out of earshot. Never mind. At the moment, he valued even the illusion of privacy for what he had to say.
'There was someone there. A Wildmage, I guess—an evil one. With my name. I didn't see him clearly. He had a dragon. And he was fighting for the Endarkened.' The words came quick and harsh, and having said them, Kellen felt better and worse, as if he'd managed to gag up a meal of bad meat.
'That's bad,' Shalkan agreed, lowering his head to rub his cheek against Kellen's in a quick caress. 'But it could be nothing more than your own fears talking, you know.'
'I know,' Kellen said, trying to convince himself.
'No one knows the names of all the Mages who were corrupted,' Jermayan said, coming to kneel beside Kellen and place a cup of tea in his hand. 'When we return, I can go to the Hall of Memory and discover what I can, if you wish. But no matter what I find: that man is not you. That you share a name, even a lineage, means nothing. A man is not his bloodline; a man is what he is.'
'I know,' Kellen said miserably. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank, savoring the heat and the unfamiliar spicy flavor. They might be forced to exist on Elven trail-rations, but Jermayan had still packed a dozen different kinds of tea, suitable for every occasion. And the 'small magics' of the Elves ensured you could get a hot cup of tea on short notice, even in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.
'It just… I know it probably didn't even happen, and if it did, it's just some kind of coincidence. But I feel… betrayed. It's stupid, but there just isn't any other way to describe it,' Kellen said.
'Yes,' Jermayan said softly. 'And so were the great dragons of the earth betrayed in those days, who bound their immortality to a span of mortal years in a bond of love and more than love such as even we Elves can only dimly guess at, and found that love profaned in unimaginable ways when their Wildmage mates were corrupted by the blandishments of the Endarkened. It was in many ways the worst of all of the betrayals of the War, for the dragons could do nothing but what their mates willed, and so they found themselves fighting friends, battling their own kindred, and could not stop themselves, though their great hearts were breaking. Perhaps it is that sorrow you sense here, Kellen.'
'This just gets better, doesn't it?' Kellen said bitterly. It wasn't bad enough that Darkmages were creatures of cruelty and evil—no, they had to ruin the lives of creatures who had even given up immortality for them. He took
