“Here he is,” the Seneschal said.

The bones were neither fresh nor ancient, each set neatly as near to its place in life as possible, and each painted in brilliant colors, scribbled with thin black lines that Kieri now realized were script.

His father. His father’s bones. Kieri stared at the skeleton, wondering what he was supposed to feel. The colors made him uneasy: white bones, clean bones, were natural things, but these colors, this writing, seemed … alien.

“You may not be familiar with the script used,” the Seneschal said. “It is very old. I can translate for you.” Without waiting for Kieri’s word, he bent over the pelvis. “This, right here, tells of your birth. See, the background color is that used for sons, and it gives your birthdate, your mother’s name—”

Kieri shivered. He could read the script now, as he could not a few moments before; the words flowed through his mind in a voice he knew instantly was his father’s.

For on this day my son Falkieri was born, and we rejoice in his strength and pray all the gods for his long life, health, and joy.

“I can read it,” Kieri said, fighting the lump in his throat. He could read all of it, the writing voicing itself, the colors and script together making pictures as well as words, telling the story of his father’s life. Not far from his own birth was the birth of his sister. Not far from that, the anguish his father felt when his wife—Kieri’s mother—and Kieri disappeared, when word came back of her certain death, and his presumed. His father had grieved for years, pouring all his affection onto the sister … had died of grief, in the end.

Tears rolled down Kieri’s cheeks, through his beard. He could feel them, but he could not stop them; he did not try. His father … what would his father have thought of the man he’d become? He could be glad his father did not know what had happened to him, those bitter years of captivity; he wished his father could have known how his son was saved by a family he loved—his friends. He felt now, bone to bone, that human kinship; he knew his father’s favorite flavors, colors, pursuits, as if they were his own.

More than the elven sword, more than the Council’s acclamation, bound him here now. This was the human half of him, bone and blood, not song and immortality and the uncertain bounds of the elvenhome kingdom where his grandmother ruled. This was truly home, not just a childhood memory, but the place his bones knew, and where his bones would lie.

At last he turned from his father’s skeleton. “My sister?”

“Over here, on the women’s side.”

Laid with her were the few fragile bones of her child born dead. She had been taller than their father, as he was; her skull bore the shape of her elven blood, and her pelvis had not yet broadened as much as it might have, had she lived longer. The writing on her bones included the stories she’d been told about him, about the older brother who had disappeared, about her sense of duty, born of his loss. She had resented it sometimes; she had once or twice blamed him for their mother’s death, since that journey had been for him, but she had transferred that blame to their grandmother, and that—no forcing by a nervous Council—was the real reason for her early marriage, her decision to bear a child when the Lady advised against it. It had not been her brother’s fault, she had decided, but their grandmother’s, for insisting that the boy must come to the elfane taig to have the sword pledged to him and his own powers wakened.