Vestakia winced as Kellen's fingers found a particularly sensitive spot. Kellen cast about for something to distract her.
'You said you'd tell us how you came to be here?' he asked. 'This would be a good time.' He glanced over his shoulder. Jermayan was taking an awfully long time getting the tea to boil.
'I suppose I owe you the tale,' Vestakia said, hanging her head. 'I warn you, Wildmage, it isn't a pretty one.'
'Well,' Kellen said lightly, 'it's bound to be interesting.'
She managed a wan smile. 'My father, as you know already, was a Demon. My mother told us that he called himself the Prince of Shadow Mountain, and though all Demons lie, I have no reason to think that this one time he wasn't telling the truth.'
Interesting. He wondered why she was so sure, but decided to let Vestakia tell the story in her own way. He could always ask questions later. Beside him, Shalkan was listening with rapt attention.
'My mother was a Wildmage, who lived with her sister in a little village far to the east of here. My father seduced her in human form and got her with child, intending to leave her on some pretext and come back after I was born and claim me for his own. It is a common practice among Demonkind and well known among the Mountain-folk—perhaps you have heard the songs we sing about it?'
Kellen hadn't. Vestakia shrugged.
'It doesn't matter, because this time his plan failed. One night my mother wore a Talisman of the Good Goddess made from braided unicorn hair to their bed. He did not recognize it for what it was, and he touched it. It burned him, and he vanished.'
Kellen blinked at that; he'd known that the living unicorns were inimical to Demons, but unicorn hair!. He filed the information away for future reference. It could be very useful.
'She knew him for what he was then, of course, but by then it was too late.' Vestakia sighed. 'She was with child, of course, and—and that doomed her to lose the life she had always known, and it would be only that, only if she was very fortunate indeed.'
'Why?' he asked, because Vestakia had stopped talking.
'If the villagers found out that she had been Tainted by a Demon's embrace, even accidentally, they would put her to death,' Vestakia told him flatly. 'If they found out she was pregnant by a Demon, they would put her to death even more swiftly—and there was no point in trying to abort in secret what she carried: Demon-children cannot be gotten rid of except by killing the mother. So she faced death twice over for her error— but my mother was a powerful Wildmage, and she was very clever as well, and she was not going to lie down and wait for death.'
If she was anything like you, and I expect she must have been, I can certainly believe that, Kellen thought.
'She took stock of her options and resources, and made plans. No one but she knew that she had taken a lover at all, much less that her lover had been a Demon: she would be disgraced in the eyes of the village elders when she was found to be carrying a bastard, but not murdered—not until the child was born and showed unquestionable signs of Demonic Taint. And—she didn't intend to give birth to a child that would grow up to destroy and corrupt all that it touched.'
'Well, I can see where that would be a problem,' Kellen replied, keeping his eyes on her ankle, and his tone light, but not too light. He didn't want her to think he was making fun of her, or not taking her story as seriously as it deserved to be. 'I assume she must have had an idea of what to do about it.'
'She did,' Vestakia said solemnly. 'She called upon the Wild Magic to help her.'
He blinked. 'Oh. My.' It was a completely logical solution, given that the woman in question was a Wildmage, but how many would have had the courage to take it, knowing that the price asked was likely to be very high, and there was no one to bear it but herself? Idalia would, Kellen thought with a flash of pride. But how many others?
'And so according to the ancient ways, because she had asked only for help, and not what kind of help, my mother was offered a choice, and a price.'
He looked up, then, into those solemn, yellow eyes, and thought that he could guess the choice. But he didn't interrupt Vestakia. Jermayan was eavesdropping, although he pretended otherwise, and he needed to hear this from Vestakia's lips.
'Her choice was that the child to be could be completely hers in spirit, and its father's in body; or its father's in spirit, yet hers in body. So I could look like him, yet be human inside, or look like her, yet be his in every way that mattered—a Demon. No matter which choice she made, she would sacrifice twenty years of her allotted span of years.'
