"Your brother's?" I asked mystified.
He grinned.
"Aye Lucien Sercel, my half-brother. Our mother furnished me with a very nice class of relative. So just you show some respect."
"So he's related to THE Sercels? The Lord Electors of Middle Moria?"
"My dear little sister, he IS one of the Sercels. My father is Sandor Sercel, the Lord-Elector himself. Now don't you look so doubtful. It's not proper to doubt your big brother."
"But how..."
"Marnie used to work as a chamber maid at the White Tower of Lammerquais. You know the story. Hot-blooded young master, pretty young maid. Along comes Tomas. I'm his oldest son. His first mispilled seed. And he's proved a good enough father. He's taken good care of the rest of Marnie's children too. If he'd remembered my existence when you were four, we could probably have sent you to school instead of off with Michael. But he didn't discover me till I was fifteen and came up before him for stealing. Lucky for me. And for him. A bastard son is just the kind of person you can ask to do those little tasks that aren't quite honest. Like forging travel passes or smuggling mages into Moria."
He grinned at me again. "You don't believe a word of this, do you?"
"Oh I ...," I was flustered. The Lord Elector Sercel was one of the five great noblemen who elected the Dukes of Moria. Still it was not inconceivable that he could be the father of an inn servant's child or that he acknowledge the fact.
Tomas reached out and pulled a battered tin water flask out of his pack.
"Old Sandor only ever managed to have one legitimate son," he said. "So he was pleased to acknowledge me. Look!"
He turned it upside down and pressed the bottom. It slid away and beneath it was a small cavity. There was a ring fitted neatly into the cavity.
"Look at this. Do you recognize the seal?"
Two snarling wolves against a background of lilies. Any Morian child could recognize that device.
"He trusts you with his seal?"
"Sandor Sercel is a great and powerful friend. I would never do anything to jeopardize that and he knows it. Anyway if I misused it, I've no doubt that he'd have me sent into slavery before the wax was even dry."
"Sandor Sercel is in exile in Floredano," I pointed out. "The Church of the Burning Light has pronounced an anathema on him."
"He signed his lands over to his son before he went. Lucien Sercel is Lord Elector of Middle Moria now. The family lands are largely intact. The Burning Light has no quarrel with him. Don't worry little sister. I use this seal with my half-brothers approval too."
He pressed the seal into the dab of wax.
"Yes indeed, Tomas has learnt his lesson. It is better to be a nobleman's bastard than an inn servant's bastard. There was a time when I would have nothing to do with him for all that he paid to have me taught to read and write."
"Why not?"
"He ruined our mother, didn't he? He made her pregnant and she lost her place and he did nothing. Except go off to Mangalore and get engaged to some well-born maiden the following year, while she got pushed into a miserable marriage.
"Our mother was married?!"
"Oh yes. Our grandfather Joseph Holyhands Senior was a respectable fellow for all he was a drunk. He wasn't going to have any unmarried daughters around with bastard children. So he fixed up a deal with an old farming crony who owed him money. Francois Cremer. A sour old sod."
"He was cruel to her?"
"No. Marnie told me they tried to have a proper marriage at the start, but they never had a single thought in common. She was only eighteen and he was almost her father's age, over fifty, and very set in his ways. Probably a bit obsessed with being cuckolded too. At the end it was just two polite strangers living in a house. Marnie worried that she had made him unhappy, but me, I think it almost killed her trying to fit into his idea of a proper wife. Her gift for foretelling was a continual embarrassment to him although he was happy enough to make use of it when it suited him. She never sang or even smiled if he was in the house and he used to have the maid servant spy on her.
A possibility had occurred to me.
"So how long ...?"
"They were married over 5 years before he died. They had two daughters together, Silva is his daughter, and so was Byrda. Byrda fell off a horse when she was ten and broke her neck."
"So I was born after this Cremer died."
"Oh yes. You and Hamel and Tasha and Karac. But even before you lot were born, she was the village scandal. She said she wasn't made for respectability and that she was tired of having to do what people told her. So she refused to be proper and live with her step-son till she found another husband, and she came back to the inn and worked there as a drudge for her half brother. Spent any spare time she could find with the Wanderers. Her father was dead by then and Uncle Jos ... He never let us eat with them, but he would never have let us starve either."
Another possibility had occurred to me.
"Do you know who my father was then?"
"Who can say?” he said absently. Then he caught sight of my face. His own softened. "Ah Dion don't look so disappointed."
"I'm not," I lied.
"I'm afraid she never told me. Though I don't doubt it was some Wanderer man, from your powers. She went on a journey with them just before you were born. Ah. Now that reminds me. I do have something that she gave me. Something for you. She did think of you."
He began digging around in his pack again. "She talked of you while she was dying. She told me that you were in Gallia at the College of Magic there. When I heard the stories of Dion Michaeline the Demonslayer, I knew she was right."
This sounded so nice that it was probably a lie, though I remembered her warm-hearted face in his memory.
"How did she know where I was?"
"Hard to say. Someone might have told her. She was very close mouthed, was Marnie. Comes from a lifetime of being the odd one out. She may have just have seen it in a dream or vision."
He bought out a cloth-covered bundle and placed it on the table.
"I'm afraid I've been making use of this even though it's yours, which is why I carry it. I hope you'll forgive me, but it has come in mighty useful on occasion."
Even before he had unwrapped the bundle, I felt the dread. When he had spread it out on the table I saw why. An iron necklace. And such an iron necklace. It was not a thing odd in itself. In the interests of preventing them from becoming too powerful, mages on the peninsula are not allowed to inherit lands or titles. Wearing iron around the neck prevents the wearer from practicing magic, so therefore thin necklaces of iron links are a common feature of aristocratic wear proclaiming, as they did, the wearer's lack of magery and fitness to inherit
The necklace itself did nothing to lessen the dread it made me feel. It was a thing of old and arcane design, of short iron spikes covered in runes and wound together so that it looked like a necklace of thorns. It was a savage looking thing.
"How do you like it?" said Tomas. "Its very old and, I think, valuable."
"But ... But why? Why would a woman who had magic powers give an iron necklace to a daughter with magic powers?"
I'd hoped for, I don't know what, some small token of affection. Instead here was this hateful thing.
Tomas picked it up. "Its not as bad as it looks, you know. Look."
He put it over his head. "See. It just looks bad. The spikes don't stick into you even if you sleep on it. It won't show under your clothes and strangely enough it can't be felt by anyone either.