“You?” Han said it louder than he intended. He looked around the circle and saw the truth in every face, as if he and Dancer were the only ones not in on this particular secret.

This old man who bathed once a month at best had been married to a queen? And not just a queen, the queen who’d saved the world. A legendary beauty preserved in countless statues, etchings, and paintings.

“That’s impossible,” Han said flatly. “No offense, Lucius, but, I mean, come on—you’d be a thousand years old.”

“Aye, I am over a thousant, though I quit counting a long time ago,” Lucius said, smiling, revealing his intermittent teeth. “Look at me close, and you’ll see the mark of every one of those years. I was a wizard once. Alger Waterlow’s best friend. I was blinded in the Breaking, and my gift was burned right out of me.”

His voice changed, and he sounded like a blueblood. “The council that wrote the Nǽming chose me to carry the memory of those times, to remind Hanalea of it, in case her memory faded. I was cursed with the truth and the compulsion to tell it. That’s what keeps me alive. This way, no matter how much everyone wants to forget, there’s someone who remembers everything, clear as if it were yesterday.”

Han couldn’t help thinking that he wouldn’t choose a scruffy old drunk for the job, if it was that important. Well spoken or not, who’d listen to him?

Then it struck him: maybe it was the burden of carrying a truth that no one wanted to hear that had made Lucius a scruffy old drunk.

A memory came back from that afternoon on the banks of Old Woman Creek—Lucius telling the story of Hanalea and Alger Waterlow.

She bent her knee for the greater good and married somebody she didn’t love. Meaning himself. Han shivered, feeling sorry for Lucius. But sorry went only so far.

“What’s all this got to do with me and Dancer?” Han asked, thinking of Bird, who’d be waiting impatiently outside, unless she’d already given up. The world was full of secrets, apparently, but maybe he didn’t need to know them all.

“You’ll see,” Elena said. There was no rushing a clan story. “As you can imagine, there was bitter disagreement about what to do with the demon’s gifted child, who might grow to be an extremely powerful wizard.

“The Demonai warriors still argued that the child should be killed, whatever Hanalea said. But the boy inherited something of Alger’s charm. There was something about the Waterlows—they had a way about them.”

Here it was again—people talking about the Demon King as if he were handsome, attractive, someone a queen could fall in love with. Instead of a heartless monster.

“In addition to Hanalea, it was Hanalea’s consort, Lucius Frowsley, who argued most persuasively for the boy’s life,” Elena said, looking at Lucius.

There’s no love between those two, Han thought.