Zelgadis glanced up from his morning coffee as Amelia clattered down the stairs. She seemed slightly nervous but otherwise none the worse for yesterday's adventure.
"Good morning," he said gravely.
"Good morning, Zelgadis-sama," she returned cheerfully, sitting down across from him.
The waitress brought her a plate of pancakes and a pitcher of syrup. They sat in silence while Amelia ate her breakfast and Zel sipped his coffee.
At length Amelia asked, "What is the most powerful fire spell you know?"
Zelgadis put his mug down and eyed her warily. "Why?"
"It will take us all day to burn down the forest using only fireballs."
"...burn down...the forest?" Zelgadis repeated blankly. "Amelia, we are not going to burn down the forest."
"But, we can't let them get away with what they did to us! We must punish them with the full weight of Justice!"
This was not a situation that Zelgadis had been prepared for. He wracked his brains for an argument that would make her see sanity.
Amelia was puzzled by his silence. "Zelgadis-sama?"
"But...what about...all the innocent people who live in the forest?"
"What innocent people? They're all monsters who watched and laughed as we were tormented. Those are the kind of people I call evil!"
"Evil monsters," Zelgadis repeated. "Is that how you see me?"
"No," Amelia replied quickly. There was something in her voice that was not quite right, a slight catch that reminded Zelgadis of the subtle nervousness that he had noticed earlier. Nevertheless, he couldn't doubt her sincerity.
"Maybe some of the inhabitants weren't at the stadium that day," Zelgadis argued weakly. He realized how pathetic that sounded and pulled himself together. "Amelia, we cannot burn down an entire forest, especially one that's inhabited. If we caused that much destruction and death just because our feelings were hurt, we would be the evil ones."
"But, Zelgadis-sama..."
"No. There are few enough places in this world where a chimera can feel accepted. I refuse to destroy this one."
Amelia's eyes softened and filled with unshed tears. She clasped her hands under her chin. "What a noble speech! Of course I'll spare them if you feel that way." She thought guiltily of the little boy she'd met. She had completely forgotten him until now. "Thank you for preventing me from doing something so wrong!"
"Uh, that's alright," Zelgadis said awkwardly.
To his relief, Amelia returned to quietly eating, although she continued to glance up at him with shining, passionate eyes from time to time.
As she dug her fork into her last pancake, Amelia asked with reassuring normality, "Are we still going to see that chimera maker, Diol, next? Did you find out anything more about him yesterday?"
Zelgadis' lips tightened at the mention of yesterday, but he answered civilly, "Yes and yes. A few of the sentient chimeras and most of the non-sentient ones I saw yesterday were his work. He isn't as good as Eris was. He isn't even as good as Demia, that sorcerer we worked for briefly in Atlas City."
"I remember." Amelia frowned at the memories Eris' and Demia's names called up.
"Diol's chimeras look like they were glued together out of spare parts. I hope he will be helpful. Even if his chimeras aren't very well constructed, he certainly has made a lot of them."
Amelia wiped up the last drops of syrup with her last fragment of pancake and stuffed it into her mouth.
"Are you ready to go?" Zel asked.
"I just have to wash my hands. Wait here, Zelgadis-sama."
Zelgadis nodded and looked around for the innkeeper so he could pay the bill.
Wait. Did she say "Zelgadis-sama"?
Once they were safely out of town and away from prying ears and gossiping tongues, he confronted her. "Did you call me 'Zelgadis-sama' back at the inn?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Well, we are married now so..."
Zel tried to be cool and logical despite the blood burning in his cheeks. "We are not married! That thing yesterday was obviously meaningless. Don't you see that?"
"No."
Amelia had spent hours last night trying to figure out what the course of justice was in this situation. Was she married to Zelgadis or not? If so, what should she do about it? If not, what should she do about it? She had spent half the night pacing but she still hadn't come to any conclusions. Uncertainty -- a rare emotion for her -- worried her deeply.
She spoke earnestly, "I've been thinking about it a lot and I think Wolf-san was right. It did have all the important elements of a wedding. You agreed, I agreed and Wolf-san pronounced us married. There was even a speech on the duties of marriage, sort of."
"When did I agree?"
"When you stood up after Wolf-san asked who wanted to marry me. I agreed by choosing you."
"That wasn't a wedding. It was just a sick joke. A troll held your chained body and a half-breed wolfman mocked you. Do you call that a wedding?"
Amelia did not look convinced. Obviously he would have no peace until he talked her out of this foolish idea.
"Let's look at this logically. The heart of a wedding is the vows that the bride and groom swear to love, honor and protect each other. We didn't swear any such vows."
"As part of a princess' education, I studied the laws and customs of other countries, including marriage laws and customs. In many places the bride and groom have to swear oaths, but in other places they just listen to what is expected of them and agree to follow it. You agreed not to kill, eat or abandon me."
"But what about the hand-binding at the end?"
"Or the kiss or shared cup or other symbolic joining?" Amelia confirmed. "You come from somewhere where they bind hands? Where?"
Zelgadis was silent.
Amelia considered his question. "Well, you threw me over your shoulder and ran off at the end. That's the way weddings end in one of the northern countries, I think. Symbolically anyway."
Zelgadis glared at the ground in thought. She had to be wrong. The 'wedding' had just been a brief amusement for a pack of monsters. The whole thing took less than five minutes. Ranu had made up the rules on the spot.
On the other hand, if someone other than Zelgadis had taken her, that mock-ceremony would have given him some sort of ownership of Amelia that the other monsters would probably have respected.
No, it couldn't mean anything! Zelgadis had had no intention of marrying Amelia. He had just been pretending to go along with it in order to save her from death or worse. He said as much.
"I thought about that too," Amelia replied, her brow wrinkling. "I know that contracts made 'under duress' aren't supposed to be valid -- it's unjust to force people to honour a deal that they made because their lives were threatened -- but I also know girls who only married the men they did because their fathers would have disowned them otherwise. Without money or support they would probably have suffered 'fates worse than death'." She didn't know what such a fate would consist of but that was the way the court ladies had described it. "My daddy prevents that from happening whenever he finds out about it, but when he doesn't find out in time -- even my Daddy can't catch everything -- the marriages seem to be valid anyway. Some of the girls are even mothers now. I really don't know what the law is about that. I wish I did."
Zelgadis thought hard. When the solution came to him, it was so obvious that he couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it sooner.
"The only people who know about that farce yesterday are a forestful of monsters and us. I doubt the monsters will ever leave that forest, judging by the ones I talked to, so if we don't tell anyone, then in effect it never happened." He smiled in satisfaction.
"I can not accept that." Amelia stopped walking and looked her companion in the eye. "That 'marriage' yesterday was unjust and probably incomplete, but until I am certain that I am not married to you I cannot marry anyone else."
"Why not? I wouldn't protest and no one else would know!"
"It would be wrong, Zelgadis-san, and a wrong thing is still wrong even if no one else knows about it."
They glared at each other and started walking again, hostility crackling between them.
"Fine, don't get married then."
"But I have to! Now that my sister is missing and my cousin is dead I'm the only member of my generation left. If I don't have children who can inherit the throne there will be a war of succession among all my distant cousins. Hundreds of people would die. I will not allow that to happen and, if you are the righteous person I believe you to be, neither will you."
Zelgadis considered pointing out that marriage was not a necessary precondition of parenthood, but immediately thought better of it. "I really don't see what you are so upset about. Just decide that we are not married and the whole problem is solved."
Amelia screamed in frustration and ran off.
Zelgadis grumbled under his breath about idiot princesses, moral scruples and life in general.
By the time Zelgadis caught up with Amelia more than an hour later, both their tempers had cooled. The blasted and charred bushes along both sides of the road might have had something to do with that. Amelia had picked up stress relief techniques from Lina. Zelgadis was deeply amused at such a childish display of temper.
Amelia was sitting on a grassy bank beside the road. Zelgadis sat down beside her.
"Would you like a sandwich?" she offered.
"Thank you," he replied.
It was the closest they would come to apologizing.
"Where will we be sleeping tonight, in a town or in the woods?"
Zelgadis pulled out the map. "We should reach a town called Littleton tonight." The name sounded somehow familiar but he couldn't place it. It was probably just a common name. "Then we should reach the chimera maker a day or two after that."
Littleton looked exactly like every other small town they had passed through, except for one thing. Right in the middle of the town square stood the largest statue of Rezo the Red Priest either had ever seen (and that was saying something). Strangely, the statue wore very simple robes and carried a plain staff without any rings, although in every other respect it looked exactly like Rezo.
Zelgadis was used to the world treating the man who had destroyed his life as a hero. He just gave the statue a long, disgusted look before walking into the inn.
After arranging for dinner and rooms for himself and Amelia, he seated himself in a shadowy corner with his back to the fire so his face would be in shadow. Amelia sat in the light across from him. An old man wandered over from another table and seated himself next to Amelia. "Hello, strangers," he said.
"Hello," Amelia replied, "Could you tell me, sir, why this town has such a large statue of Rezo?"
"Ah, you recognize our local hero!" the old man responded with delight.
"All the world has heard of Rezo the Red Priest," Amelia said politely, carefully not looking at Zelgadis.
"Yes, just think of it. One of the five great sages, and possibly the greatest of all five, was born in this very town."
Zelgadis was startled into speech, "Rezo was born here?"
"Yes, he was. And he grew up here too and married here," the old man chortled, "I didn't know him too well since he was more my father's generation than mine, but I saw him many a time. He fixed this right leg of mine after I broke it falling out of an apple tree. I never saw a better healer, or a gentler man. He had a soft voice like your friend there and a wonderful smile."
"Why did Rezo live here?" Amelia asked.
"Oh, his family had been here for generations. Not as long as some families in the region, mind you. I get the feeling that family moves around a fair bit. They were an odd bunch, and powerful. But I was talking about Rezo. I could tell you more about him if you have the patience to listen."
Amelia risked a glance at Zelgadis. His expression was unreadable but he didn't seem about to explode.
"Yes, please tell me about what Rezo was like when he was young," Amelia requested cutely.
The old man didn't need any more encouragement. "Rezo was born in a house just on the other side of this square. The house is still there if you want to look at it tomorrow. No one has lived in it since Rezo left more than fifty years ago. We keep it preserved for tourists, but tourists don't seem to know about this place." He sighed.
"As I was saying, Rezo was born here in town and Mina was born in the house next door around the same time. You have to know about Mina if you want to understand Rezo. The two were inseparable from infancy. As you probably know, Rezo was blind from birth. That meant that he couldn't play most of the games the other children played. Instead, he played with Mina. Mina didn't care that he was blind, or rather she accepted it as a part of him like the colour of his hair or the sound of his voice. She considered guiding Rezo's steps and telling him about the things around them a natural part of her life.
"Rezo, on the other hand, cared very much that he was blind. As soon as he was old enough to realize that other people could sense things he couldn't, he devoted his life to searching for a cure."
Amelia glanced at Zelgadis. His expression was stony.
"Rezo and Mina started studying white magic at a very early age. Her mother was a healer and his family...well, as I said, they were odd folk. It isn't easy to learn magic when you can't read spellbooks or see the diagrams you're drawing, but with Mina's help Rezo did it. My mother told me that when she was a child the other children used to go to Mina and Rezo for healing because even then they were better healers than Mina's mother, and they didn't tell parents.
"They can't have been more than ten years old when they started touring the nearby villages seeking out people to heal. They cured everything from sprained fingers to broken bones to curses to life-threatening illnesses. There was one man I knew who had been crippled for years because of a broken leg that had healed crooked. After they healed him it was as if it had never been broken. He told me that they were just like two little angels of mercy.
"Their real focus, though, was blindness. They cured near-sightedness, far-sightedness, cataracts and all those other sight problems. They were twelve, I think, when they first cured someone who was completely blind. They held a big celebration in honor of that event, I can tell you.
"They entered the priesthood together at the age of fourteen. It was the logical next step for them. It offered them more white magic spells and more opportunities to practice healing.
"After that they spent more time on the road than they did at home. They would be gone for weeks at a time and return for only a few days. They became a legend throughout the kingdom: the blind priest and the gentle priestess, both little more than children, whose touch brought miraculous cures. When they were at their peak I don't believe there was a blind person in the kingdom, other then Rezo himself. You see, his blindness was the one sort they couldn't cure. Most blindness is the result of some problem with the eyeball but Rezo's wasn't like that. He couldn't open his eyes at all. The eyelids were sealed together or something. Strange, eh?"
Amelia nodded.
The old man resumed his story, "Rezo and Mina got married of course, although not as soon as you'd think. I suspect that Rezo was waiting until he was cured to propose but Mina got tired of waiting, and matters took their course. Anyway, they were married here in a field just outside of town. People came from all over the kingdom to see it. They had touched a lot of lives.
"Their son was born two years later. They adored him and took him with them everywhere they went. They were still travelling and healing of course. The little boy, by the way, had perfect vision."
"What was his name?" Zelgadis asked with more intensity than such a simple question seemed to merit.
"Ursus. Why?"
"That answers a question I've been wondering about for years." Zelgadis sounded thoughtful and very satisfied.
The old man wondered why the young man would spend years wondering about the name of Rezo's son, but he shrugged it off and continued. "There isn't too much to tell about the next several years. Rezo and Mina traveled far and wide and their reputations grew apace with their son. Having learned pretty much everything they could from white magic without finding a cure for Rezo's blindness, they started studying shamanism. They probably knew some before, what with all that travelling alone along dangerous roads, but this would be when they started studying it. Those were also the years of my childhood. They were good years.
"Then, while trying to stop a minor plague, Mina caught the illness herself and died. Her last words were, 'I'm glad I'll never have to live without you. Take care of our son.' Rezo was shattered, as you can imagine. He and Ursus returned to this village and for more than a year Rezo traveled no further than the next village over. He rarely even left his house.
"Ursus was an active, impatient boy of thirteen who had developed a wanderlust from all his years on the road. He rebelled against being his father's eyes, as his mother never had. He rebelled against being stuck in one small town. He rebelled against everything about his new life. In the end, he ran away from home. I didn't really like him since he was bad tempered and he hated the town I love, but I pitied him. I was only a child then but I could see that he didn't belong here.
"Then Rezo was entirely alone. The women of the village spoke about him in pitying whispers and made sure he got food and clean clothes. All of us kids were slightly awestruck at having such a figure of tragedy in our village.
"Then one day he was gone, along with a wagon (which he left payment for) and most of his clothes, books and other personal possessions. I never saw him again.
"After a few years, rumours of him started trickling back to us. He was healing again. Some rumours said that he had learned to see without eyes. Some said that he now knew black magic as well as white and shamanism. Some said even more amazing things, which were probably false. Eventually the rumours started speaking of him as one of the five great wisemen of our age. I haven't heard anything new about him in a dozen years, so he may be dead now, despite all those rumours of eternal youth. That's all I know."
Amelia was weeping openly. "What a sad story!" she bawled.
Zelgadis gave her a disgusted look although privately he was deeply moved too. It really was a sad story, despite the old man's heavy-handed attempt at pathos. "Do you know what happened to Ursus?" he asked.
"No, I don't. If I had to guess I'd say that he headed south toward Sairaag and Atlas City. He always used to say that life was more exciting down there."
Zelgadis unconsciously nodded. That confirmed his suspicions.
"Are there any of Rezo's relatives left in this town?" Amelia asked. Wouldn't it be exciting if Zelgadis discovered long-lost cousins!
"No, there are no Greywords left here. That was Rezo's family name, Greywords. Most people don't know that because he just called himself 'Rezo the Red Priest'."
"What do you know about the Greywords family?" Zelgadis asked.
"Well, like I said earlier, they were odd folks, magical types mostly, and powerful with it. Rezo's father was peaceful enough, but you hear some odd stories about his grandfather. I heard tell that the family name comes from their unusual tendency to be very good at both black and white magic. Mix white and black spells and you get grey words, see?"
Zelgadis nodded. He had heard that too.
"Rezo was one of the good ones," (Amelia and Zelgadis chose not to correct him), "but the Greywords family produced its share of evil sorcerers too."
"More great black mages than any other ten families combined," Zelgadis muttered. Amelia gave him a funny look.
"You've heard of them?" the Littletonian inquired in surprise.
"...yes, I know a few things about them," Zelgadis admitted.
"Ursus always claimed that they were descended from Lei Magnus, the man who had Shabranigdo resurrected inside his body during the Mazoku war a thousand years ago."
"And the creator of the Dragon Slave, the highest spell in black magic. Yes, I would say the Greywords family is definitely descended from him, and possibly from Shabranigdo himself," Zelgadis agreed, "In any case, the family definitely has tainted blood."
"Don't be too hard on them. There have been a lot of good Greywords mages too. Actually, I don't think they tend to fit the classic model of black or white mages. Don't they tend to be more morally ambiguous?"
Zelgadis considered that. "Yes, they tend to be the sort of people who use evil methods to achieve good ends and good methods to achieve evil ends. They are heroes who almost destroy the world or tyrants who free hundreds of people from slavery, healers who deform people in their experiments and black mages who teach demons how to love. They are the sort of people who would use a Mazoku as a librarian, or enter a black dragon in a pet show. They tend to be highly intelligent, dangerously powerful mages or warlords with obsessive personalities and a strong, twisted sense of humour."
The other two blinked at him in shock. Zelgadis sipped his wine.
"I hadn't heard that much," the old man muttered.
"Zelgadis-sama, you say that about your own family?" Amelia protested.
"What? 'Your own family'?" the old man repeated.
"Yes, my name is Zelgadis Greywords," Zel confessed grumpily.
"This is amazing! I'll have to take you to see Rezo's house as soon as it's light enough to see tomorrow! Are you closely related to the Red Priest?"
"Rezo was his grandfather," Amelia explained excitedly.
"Great-grandfather," Zelgadis corrected coolly, "This Ursus must have been my grandfather."
"This is amazing!" the Littletonian repeated. He would have hugged Zelgadis but the young man left the table before he could be touched. "Excuse me," he said, heading for his room.
"See you tomorrow and thank you for the story," Amelia called, flashing the old man a smile before she hurried after Zelgadis.
"She even looks a bit like Mina," the old man murmured to himself.
Amelia reached the first bedroom door right on Zelgadis' heels. To her surprise, he didn't shut the door in her face. Instead he offered, "Come in. Let's talk."
She knew that it wasn't strictly proper for her to be alone with a man in his bedroom, but she was long past worrying about that.
"What do you want to talk about?" she asked.
"First, is there anything you want to talk to me about?"
"Not really." She tried to decipher the impulse that had prompted her to follow him. "I just didn't want to leave you alone after so many revelations. As Lina-san would say, you tend to brood about things."
Zel ignored that last comment. "There is something I want to say to you. I was trying to tell you out there but I think I need to say it more bluntly."
"What's that?" Amelia asked nervously.
"You don't want to be part of my family, Amelia. Rezo was a good person once if half of what that man said is true, but he was still evil enough to turn me into a chimera and unleash Shabranigdo upon the world and...other things he did while I was working for him which you don't need to know about. My father is extremely eccentric, if not downright insane, too. My family really are all knowledge-obsessed black and white sorcerers of questionable sanity and even more questionable morality. Rezo isn't the only Greywords to make it into the history books with his family name hidden by a descriptor like 'the Great', 'the Terrible' or 'the Red Priest'.
"I always tried to avoid family tendencies. I trained to be primarily a swordsman and secondarily a shamanist. I don't use black magic unless I'm facing an enemy I can't defeat with shamanism alone. I don't use white magic beyond basic Recovery spells. I still fall into family traps. I wouldn't be a chimera now if I hadn't."
"Why are you telling me this? You never talk about your family."
"Because...because of the discussion we had this morning." Zelgadis turned away from her to hide his embarrassment. "Somehow I feel you need to know."
Amelia nodded bravely, "Go on."
"There's something else I found out last year while I was going through Rezo's papers. My family bonds extremely well with demons. That's not because we are all evil, but because there is something about our bloodline that makes it easier for demons to live in our bodies than in most other people's." Zelgadis clenched his fists. "That's why Rezo used me to test his chimera spell. That's why Kopii Rezo merged so quickly and perfectly with the Demon Beast Zanaffar. That's why Shabranigdo chose Rezo's eyes to possess. Rezo wasn't the first person to be born with his eyes sealed shut. He was just the first to open them. The others were probably all my direct ancestors too. I'm not entirely sure why, but ever since Lei Magnus' time, and probably centuries earlier, my family has attracted pieces of Shabranigdo the way Lina attracts Mazoku.
"Amelia," he concluded, "you do not want to marry me. Even if I was human, my blood is tainted. You love your family. Don't do that to them."
"It doesn't matter whether I want to marry you. The question is whether I am married to you."
Zelgadis snorted softly. He had noticed that what Amelia wanted to do had a huge impact on her definition of 'the path of Justice'.
"Besides, Zelgadis-sama," Amelia continued, "my family is already a lot like yours. We are very magically talented. We're all supposed to be white mages but, actually, my family has produced a lot of...people who were tempted away from the path of virtue...black mages...too." It was very painful for her to talk about this but she couldn't be less honest than Zelgadis had been. "You know that my Uncle Randy tried to assassinate Daddy." She paused at the memory, then forced herself to go on, "but what you may not know is that he did it by summoning monsters. They weren't strong enough to hurt my Daddy -- Uncle Randy always was kind of incompetent -- but summoning monsters is powerful black magic." She drew a deep breath, "I suspect my sister may have become a black sorceress too. I'm not sure, but I think that's what she was hinting at before she left. And you know about my Cousin Alfred.
"The way to deal with families like ours is not to refuse to marry anyone from a family that has produced evil sorcerers. It is to follow an absolute standard of Justice! We must teach our children to use their powers only for good!" Amelia leapt onto the footboard of the bed, a pointing finger thrust up towards the ceiling. "With determination and perseverance we can overcome all innate evil tendencies in our families! There is no power, not even black magic, that cannot be a force of good when it is used to promote Justice!"
"That didn't work in your family," Zelgadis remarked.
Amelia fell off the footboard and landed face first on the floor. She picked herself up with tears in her eyes. "How can you say that?"
"Because it's true." Zelgadis tried not to feel bad about hurting her feelings. The facts of the situation were obvious. "Lectures about justice didn't stop your uncle, sister or cousin from going bad. You're just lucky that the bad members of your family have all been incompetent."
Amelia turned her back on him. "I'll be in my room if you want to talk to me about anything else," she said stiffly. Zel's sensitive ears detected her mumble, "Not all of them," just before she left.
Zelgadis sighed and started pulling off his boots. Why did Amelia always have to make things so difficult?
That night he dreamed about Rezo.
When Zelgadis wandered into the common room the next morning, everything but one eye and a thick lock of hair completely concealed by the folds of his cloak, Amelia was already finishing her breakfast and chatting with the old man from last night. The old man scrambled to his feet.
"Greywords-san!" The man clasped Zelgadis' hand before Zel could react. "Now that you're awake you must come meet everyone."
"Everyone?" Zelgadis repeated blankly.
Amelia pressed a mug of coffee into his hands and yanked the covering off the lower half of his face. After a few sips, Zel felt slightly better prepared to deal with the morning.
"Yes," Amelia enthused, "the whole town came to meet you. Isn't it exciting?"
'Exciting' was not the word.
"Come on!" Amelia and the old man dragged Zelgadis, still clutching his coffee, out the door.
Three dozen curious eyes arranged in a ring around the door stared at Zelgadis. He stared back.
"This is Zel-di-gas Greywords, great-grandson of our illustrious Rezo!" the old man announced, gesturing dramatically at the statue.
"That's Zelgadis," the owner of the name corrected irritably.
"What's wrong with him, Mommy?" a small child asked anxiously.
"Hush, dear," the mother replied.
Zelgadis' cheeks reddened.
"Greywords will always be welcome here," said a grey-haired woman, keeping to the script.
"I'm a chimera." They stared at him in confusion. "That's what's wrong with me; I'm a chimera. See?" He threw back his hood. They recoiled. "Your precious Rezo did this to me."
Zelgadis stormed forward. Villagers jumped out of his way.
"Zelgadis-sama, wait!" Amelia cried.
"Will you stop calling me that!"
Tears trembled in Amelia's eyes. "I'm sorry, Zelgadis-s...san, but don't you want to see Rezo's house? There might be something there that would help you find your cure."
Zelgadis hated it when Amelia cried, especially when he was the cause. He felt like he had just kicked a puppy.
"Alright, where's the house?" he asked the old man brusquely.
The old man pulled himself together. "F-follow me." He led Zelgadis and Amelia to a house on the far side of the square.
As he stepped up onto the porch, Zel realized that he still held a coffee cup in one hand. He gulped down the contents and left the empty cup on the porch railing.
Inside, the house was dark and dusty. Zelgadis silently wandered through the rooms with Amelia and the old man following nervously behind. The house was still fully furnished down to the doilies on the chair backs, but an air of disuse and despair hung over it.
"Some woman loved this house very much," Amelia murmured, tracing the floral design embroidered on one of the cushions and glancing at the faded curtains.
"Mina made that," the old man explained hesitantly, "She was very good with a needle, whether for surgery or embroidery. She used to joke that if she ever ruined her eyesight doing such fine stitching, her husband could always fix it for her. The women of the village fixed up this place with all these womanly touches after Rezo left. Mina kept it like this, but it was much barer when only Rezo and Ursus lived here."
Zelgadis searched all the cupboards and drawers but all the papers and spell books were gone. He found a few books of poetry and a dusty pair of flutes, but those were of no use to him.
"Look here," the old man called.
The other two hurried over. It was a painting. In it a tall, burgundy-haired man and a smiling, black-haired woman sat on a bench with a small, bright-eyed boy between them. Both the parents wore simple, red, priestly robes.
"So Rezo really did look like that. I always wondered whether he improved himself a little when he used that anti-aging spell," Zelgadis remarked. Despite his words, the picture had touched him deeply.
"And this is your great-grandmother," Amelia sighed, "Does she look like you...did?"
Zelgadis studied the sweet face. "A little," he admitted.
Amelia smiled in response to the painted smile. "I like her. She looks like a very nice person."
Zelgadis silently agreed. He gazed at the picture. The family looked so happy. There was no hint of the loss and destruction that lay in their future, except for the father's closed eyes. They also looked very young. There was a sincere warmth and happiness in this Rezo's face that Zelgadis had never seen in the embittered and ruthless hypocrite he had known. Maybe the Rezo the world admired had once existed. If so, how far he had fallen!
Finally, Zelgadis turned away from the portrait. "Let's go, or we won't reach the next town before dark."
Author's Note: Chapters like this one are the real reason why I have author's notes at the end of each chapter. I hate it when I read some plausible background detail that a fanfic author made up and believe that it's cannon. On the other hand, if it is genuine I'd like to know about it. Therefore, every time I make up a huge amount of backstory, I'll tell you where it came from.
I made up Rezo's background here from whole cloth. For all I know, he grew up in the slums of Seyruun or is the scion of an aristocratic family affiliated with the Sairaag Sorcerer's Guild. For all I know, Zel's parent/grandparent may have been the product of a brief affair with a grateful village girl Rezo cured, or of a one night stand with a maternally-inclined black sorceress. I gave Rezo a small-town-in-the-middle-of-nowhere origin because it seemed likely to me and fit the story. I put Mina in for the sake of shameless, tear-jerking romance -- in other words, because I felt like it.
I do have some support for the family tree I made up to connect Rezo and Zel. I once saw a quote from an interview with Mr. Kanzaka, the author of Slayers, which went something like this. "The exact relationship between Rezo and Zelgadis? Grandfather. No, great-uncle. Second cousin thrice removed. Great-grandfather. Yeah, great-grandfather." In other words, great-grandfather is the most official version, but feel free to use whatever works for you. However, the whole incest thing is just a dirty rumor. Zel's line which is sometimes mistranslated as, "He's both my grandfather and my great-grandfather" should be "He's either my grandfather or my great-grandfather," which implies something quite different about their relationship (more on that later). In another quoted interview, Mr. Kanzaka mentioned that Rezo's last name was Greywords. That implies an all-male line of descent, so that's what I made it. Besides, it's much more fun to talk about an insanely powerful Greywords family stretching back centuries than to assume Zel got the name from the other side of his family. I have no evidence for them being descended from Lei Magnus, but it's the best (meaning most dramatic potential) explanation I could come up with for why Rezo ended up with Shabranigdo in his eyes. Let me know how you like my version of history.
(You can find the quoted interviews at http://isweb13.infoseek.co.jp/play/qpdiana/Q&A/others.html )
This author's note is getting very long, but I just have to say thank you to all the people who have reviewed this story so far. Your reviews made me dance around my room with joy. I will try to take your suggestions into consideration in future chapters.