The Nemisin Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

neither could
walk away from it.
    The time had
arrived for choices. For truth. With people swirling around them,
gradually less and less, they halted beside the mosaic pool.
    Tristamil
said, “I told you it changes nothing.”
    “Then you are
fooling yourself. It’s time for me to go back to Luan, to think. I
told you on Atrudis you would be the next Vallorin and we both know
what that implies.”
    She stared
into the water and recalled the summer when she was six years old.
Her father brought her for a visit and ended up staying for weeks.
Lanto and Torrullin had a strange connection, a deep compassion and
liking for each other beyond the superficial, and they spent those
weeks talking with Skye, welcome on both laps and in both sets of
arms, treated like a princess by two indulgent men.
    Here she
learned to swim under Torrullin’s tutelage and many times he joined
her in the water, laughing all the time. She was half in love with
him that summer and would have done anything to stay with him
forever, as long as Lanto could as well.
    The twins
arrived from the White Palace. One look and they replaced their
father in her childish affections. The boys were ten at the time
and appeared worldly to her. Tymall’s brash cockiness entranced,
but she was too shy to speak to him. Instead she befriended the
calmer, more accessible brother. She and Tristamil had been friends
a long time.
    “Friends,
Tris,” she said. “We’re friends before all else and that means
everything to me. More than a relationship … heartache … for Aaru’s
sake! We have to be friends and no more, can you not see that?”
    “Is it Ty?” he
demanded. “Look at me.”
    “Does it
matter?” She looked up and away again. Perhaps it would be better
if he thought that. He would walk and this would go no further. It
would hurt, but it would hurt worse later. “Ty is beyond my
reach.”
    “He is beyond
us all. Gods, still Ty?”
    She sighed,
knowing she could not lie. She had not the gift. “Ty was, if I’m
honest, a dream I have had since I was a child. Maybe, in letting
the dream go, I let the child go. It’s like saying goodbye to my
father. You know you must, but it hurts and is hard to do.”
    “Sometimes,
saying goodbye to the child is a good thing,” Tristamil responded,
also staring into the pool.
    “I know
that.”
    “It is hard, I
understand that. But,” and now he looked at her, “after that? Am I
to assume our recent rapport is based on long friendship only?
Another child’s dream? Is that what you will cling to when you
decide it is time to be a woman?”
    “To be a man!
To foolishly trample everything!”
    “What do you
want of me?”
    “You see me as
a kid. How does that actually help me, help us? Are you not
the one clinging to fantasy?”
    “For someone
so reserved you hand it out.” He paused to study her flaming
cheeks. “Mortified? You should be. I never entertained a childhood
fantasy about you other than the one where you were my little
sister, someone to be protected and nurtured.”
    She remained
wordless, stricken.
    “You saw my
brother as a knight and now you know he was never that. The idiot
deserved none of your hero worship. I saw you as a sister and now
you know that is no longer so. Tymall saw–”
    “No.
Please.”
    “Tymall saw
you at best as a nuisance, and at worst as someone to trick into
tears. For him little has changed, except in degree. Skye, wake up.
Your hero does not exist.”
    “And us? When
did a sister become more?”
    “After your
father died we saw little of you. I admit I had other problems and
thought about you only time to time; a lazy brother kind of way,
and then came our Coming-of-Age and there you were in the crowd. My
whole world turned inside out, for I saw you for the first
time. I didn’t know it then, but I loved you completely from that
moment, and knew when I saw you look at my brother that I had it
wrong.” Tristamil sighed. “Sweetheart, you know this. You