Free Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God by Scott Duff Page B

three, maybe; I didn’t have anything to judge by. It
was a cute picture and I wondered how they’d done it. The pictures
with the puppets from children’s shows weren’t hard to figure out
for me, but Kieran still examined each one closely.
    We came to the last one in the album. A
single picture of me holding something that resembled a stuffed
teddy bear with Mom pointing to something off camera. The
background looked like some kind of waterfall of oils of different
colors. Kieran turned to page to find notes scrawled in Dad’s
handwriting, legibly but small, in a language I didn’t know, so it
wasn’t in Latin, English, or Spanish. I also knew enough of several
others to at least recognize them. The writing was small enough
that Kieran used a finger to keep his place on the page. When he’d
gotten through half a page, he asked me to get Ethan. When I got
back, he’d finished the first page of notes and was sitting
cross-legged with the album in his lap. We sat down in front of
him.
    He flipped back in the album to the picture
of the table and bottle. “Ethan, can you go back in Seth’s memory
to this day?” he asked.
    “I think so. Being that young, the memories
are distorted and difficult to sort and change the perspective on,”
he said.
    “What was he doing?” Kieran asked, glancing
over at me quickly.
    “Reaching for his bottle. His Mom and Dad
were busy,” he said, dispassionately, cocking his head slightly. He
didn’t know where this was going any more than I did.
    “Okay, wait here,” said Kieran, sighing and
looking around the room. He set the album on the floor with the
picture of me and the table showing, then got up. He went to the
window and pulled the table there over to Ethan’s side then left
the room. He came back a moment later with another table and
stacked it on top of the first. He left again and came back with a
glass from the kitchen and put it atop the two tables. He eyed the
height—Ethan would have to come up off his butt to reach it.
    “Get the glass like he got the bottle,”
ordered Kieran. Ethan reached both hands out and the glass raised
up slightly and flew into his hands. I just stared at my double
with my mouth open. Kieran took the glass back and slid the tables
back out of the way, leaving the glass on the top table.
    “Thank you,” Kieran said, sitting back down
in front of us and flipping a few pages to the puppets. “Can you
recreate this one?”
    Suddenly the room was filled with dancing
puppets with no strings. I laughed a little as they danced around
us rather aimlessly. Kieran ran his hand through one to show that
they weren’t really there, then lost interest in them. Ethan
dismissed them a few seconds after that and I felt kind of sad when
they disappeared.
    “He apparently did that one fairly often at
bedtime,” said Ethan, grinning slightly, turning to me. “Much to
his parent’s irritation.” I just looked back with a ‘Who Me?’ look
on my face. I had no recollection of this as I was just a baby at
the time. Kieran was grinning as he went back to reading the second
page of notes.
    “Would you mind telling me,” I said, “just
what the big deal is?”
    “You shouldn’t have been able to do that,”
said Kieran quietly, still reading. Ethan and I looked at each
other, then gave identical shrugs and looked back to Kieran,
waiting.
    When he finished the second page, he looked
up and said, “Magical ability usually doesn’t start showing itself
until the advent of puberty. It’s almost a hormonal effect on the
brain. Generally, you start out seeing auras and ley lines, that
sort of thing. Do you remember when you first started seeing
auras?”
    “Always,” I said, with Ethan nodding
agreement.
    “Huh. That’s very unusual,” he said. “At just
before your fifth birthday, Father and your mother took you to the
Guild to be tested. This is usually done at fourteen- or
fifteen-years old so I’m thinking Father made some arrangements to
do