"Wait, what?" I asked. I almost pointed in the direction of the retreating Seamus; who had turned out to be Eric in disguise. Of course Bolthos didn't know that, so I turned it into an idle gesture; circling my finger in the air like an idiot. "How do you NOT know who the Master is? Tall guy? Muscles? Grey eyes? Magic?"
"The guy you've been living with," Bolthos added.
I nodded, "Yes."
"The one you've been trying to kill," he said.
"Right," I said.
Bolthos made a face. A face I hadn't seen him make before, but I'd seen it on other people's visages. Eric had made that face often -- especially often. It meant roughly, "Hear me out; you're going to hate what I have to say." My stomach dropped.
"It's hard to explain. I'd been worried about Saymar for a while, long before all this Hand business came up. He always seemed like he had been preparing for something else, you know? -Something other than just getting rid of the Master. There was this time..." Bolthos suddenly paused in the story, raking over the memory for a way to tell it, and shaking his head. "He's not trustworthy, Dor."
"I'm not going to argue with you," I replied.
"There's three reasons I know Saymar is the Hand. It would take some telling to explain two of them. But the one easy thing is this: I know for certain that he truly believes that man you've been living with all this time, is not the Master. Saymar once believed that the Master had gone back on his word, changed his mind -- that's the long part of the story... But it wasn't until Saymar found you in the stables that he decided that the man you've been there with wasn't the same man who invaded the kingdom."
The words coming out of my mouth surprised me; I was whispering and not sure why, "What do you mean?"
"The person who came here and killed your family," Bolthos began, and already I was shaking my head. I couldn't have been wrong all this time. That... that... "The person who obliterated the military and then burned the villages, letting children die in waves," Bolthos continued.
-I tried to ignore that voice that came from somewhere beside my lungs, that shock of thought I had kept burying all these years that was now smugly yelling, Eric's always been all talk! He makes these armies, and he goes about ordering the commoners around, and he certainly bruises up the resistance, but when have you seen him really honestly do wrong? I had seen him kill a man. I was 22. Eric was still young, and it was horrifying to watch the darkness in his young face. It was the first time I feared him. That was a condemned prisoner, YOU ASS. A prisoner condemned by the locals who had been killing random people left and right and had raped two women. If you had been in charge, you'd have killed him too! Badass, my ass.
"That guy, well... He may have been here as long as a year. -Maybe less. I'm not sure. Saymar thinks though that at some point one of the Master's own kind came to replace him. I don't think he knows where the real Master is, or whether he's even still alive."
Eric wasn't the Master.
Fuck.
Oh fuck.
No, wait.
Oh fuck.
He didn't kill my family. He had just taken me in and hung out with me and protected me and healed me and... I had tried to kill him. I had tried to kill him more times than I could count. For... nothing.
I betrayed him.
And... I loved him.
Oh man, how did this happen?