Celeste
Joshua led two cloaked figures in.
They walked to the center of the room and turned to face Darien.
The first lifted his hood.
My breath caught.
He was an old man. Very old. Skin the pale of vellum. White hair under the hood. Eyes the color of rain-wet stone. He looked around the room, and he took in Alec, and he smiled, gentle and tired.
"It has been a long time, Your Majesty. The boy I saw last is now a king."
"Barnabus." Alec's voice cracked.
"Barnabus." A name. A name I had heard in the stories of my own birth. A name my father spoke with a mix of reverence and fear. The seer who had held me in the minutes after I was born and named me. The man who had vanished from the world twenty-five years ago.
He had come back.
His gaze moved past Alec.
It found me.
"Step aside
