The Truth Over The Wall

Chapter 29(Part 2)

Hanalea was smiling as she wiped at her face, and made her way to him. "So Daphne and Calliope are like your mother too?"

Alistair nodded. She still had not run away or shouted at him, so far so good. "The twins of course have their own brand of power, but we all take after our mother, yes."

Hanalea's entire face lifted up, astonished, "Does your father know?"

Alistair threw his head back and laughed, "My father was – and still is - in love with my mother. There was very little he didn't know about her."

Pausing, he looked at her as though gauging her reaction as he said, "Your parents knew."

"About your mother?" Hanalea gasped. "About you?"

Alistair nodded again, "They knew everything. My parents took your father into confidence and then, of course, they told Claire when your parents got married."

"Why didn't they say anything to me?" Hanalea felt her shoulders sag. This seemed to be something her parents ought to have told her.

"They were trying to protect us," Alistair defended her parents, "Your father said no one could know my father had knowingly married a witch or worse that he had witch children. Until your parents made peace with the witch – or came to some sort of a truce – there was always a danger of someone attacking."

A fear that had come true regardless, Hanalea thought but she did not say it.

Misreading her ominous expression, he leaned his own face down so she could look at him, "I was going to tell you, before your parents were killed; but first I needed to make sure I could control it. Your father was helping me with it."

"My father?" Hanalea asked at a loss and raised a hand to her temple. This was too much to process all at once.

Alistair nodded and looked off in another direction as he explained, "It was... it was very hard at first. My father covered up the exact circumstances of my mother's death and gave it out that we'd been attacked and that she had died defending us. He was terrified someone might figure it out and come for his children.

"So I started to bottle it all up. All the magic, the hurt and the anger into one large store. Which proved very useful for a time as I didn't have to deal with it on a daily basis.

"But I couldn't feel any of it either, Hanna," he told her shaking his head, disapprovingly. "And of course as these things usually go my...feelings? They found a channel to escape.

"One night I woke up from a nightmare and near burned the house down. I scared my aunts – my mother's sisters – who had come to look after me and the twins."

"Allis!" Hanalea hissed, grabbing his sleeve and turning him to face her, "You never told me this."

"I couldn't tell anyone," he shrugged and he seemed, ashamed, "I didn't know what to do. But your father did.

"Your father was the main reason I started training as early as I did," Alistair sighed, "He said I needed to have something to do at all times. And when I wasn't training and I just wanted to step away from people to be by myself; he'd stop me. And he'd take me away on some ridiculously long ride or seemingly endless walk.

"You see, Hanna," Alistair's eyes softened with remembered gratitude, "Your father understood better than anyone else. He knew what it meant to lock away different pieces of yourself just so you wouldn't have to feel them. He scolded me about it, even," Alistair chuckled, "Told me that he expected me to have better sense.