Tavi frowned. “You mean... my grandfather?”

“Yes. When you were at the Academy. After. He would watch over you, though you never knew it. Often, he would look in on you while you slept. Making sure that you were safe seemed to give him... a kind of satisfaction I never saw in him, otherwise.”

Tavi frowned quietly up at the ceiling of the tent. Alera said nothing and let him think. She had, literally, inhuman patience. If it took him a week to consider his answer, she would be there waiting when he was ready. It was a portion of her personality that was both reassuring and annoying. One simply couldn’t employ stalling tactics against her.

“I... We didn’t speak to one another very often,” Tavi said.

“No,” she replied.

“I never understood... if all that time he knew who I was, then why didn’t he ever... ever want to talk to me? Reach out?” Tavi shook his head. “He must have been lonely, too.”

“Horribly,” Alera said. “Though he never would have acknowledged such a thing openly, of course. He was, perhaps, the most isolated Aleran I have ever known.”

“Then why?” Tavi asked.

Alera turned to one side, frowning thoughtfully. “I know your family well, young Gaius. But I cannot say that I knew his thoughts.”

Tavi squinted at her and thought he had picked up on what she was hinting at. “If you were to guess?”

She smiled at him in approval. “Sextus had the gift of many of your bloodline, a kind of instinctive foreknowledge. You yourself have demonstrated it, now and then.”

“I had rather assumed that was you,” Tavi said.

She smiled whimsically. “Mmmm. I’ve already noted tonight how much your folk do without being aware of it. Since I am created by them, perhaps it follows that I am just as blindly unperceptive. I suppose it is possible that I am somehow unaware of knowledge I am inadvertently sending you.”

“Sextus?” Tavi prompted.

Alera nodded and lifted a hand to draw a fallen lock of her hair back from her face, a very human gesture. The nails of her hand had turned black. Veins of darkness had progressed over her fingers and wrists. Tavi steeled himself against the further evidence of the fury’s decay.

“Sextus had the gift more strongly than any scion of the House I have served,” Alera said. “I think he sensed the storm coming years ago, since shortly after Septimus’s death. I think he thought that he would be the one to guide your folk safely through the troubled times—and that you would be safer kept at a distance, until matters had calmed down.” She sighed. “If not for the poisoning, he might have been right. Who can say?”

“He wanted to protect me,” Tavi said quietly.