The bushes parted.
A boy stumbled out.
He was dirty. Not the ordinary dirt of a child who had been playing in the mud, but the deep, layered grime of someone who had been living in the wild for days. His clothes were torn and stained...fine clothes? Kaelen noticed, or what remained of them. Silk that had once been white, now brown with mud and stiff with dried sweat. His hair was a tangled nest of brown and gold. His feet were bare and cut and bleeding.
But his eyes.
His eyes were blue.
Not the blue of the sky. Not the blue of the sea. Not the blue of any flower or gem or dye that Kaelen had ever seen. It was a blue that was older than the world. A blue that was deeper than the ocean. A blue that seemed to hold light without reflecting it, as if the color came not from pigment but from something inside the boy himself.
It was a blue that no magic could replicate.
Kaelen knew this blue all to well he slept surrounded by it at night.He had seen it in Lysander and in Alistair.
