[He bites his bottom lip again, and looks down at his lap. He's never spoken about her so plainly with anyone before. Even with Hiro he only admitted he was hallucinating her and wanting her to be there, and that there might be some question of where the body was. Never an acknowledgment of much else.]

Thank you.

[It seems the most appropriate thing to say. He doesn't say it often enough, being the recalcitrant young man that he is. He's too proud, too scared, too... everything. But this time, he's grateful, really grateful, that Cole isn't the type to make fun of him or-- even worse-- place some misguided sympathy in his direction for pity points with friends later.

Nobility is a particularly awful sort.]

I don't remember my parents very well. They died when I was only a few years old, and Caspa raised me... alone, after that. [Belth tends to pretend his older brother doesn't exist, since he ran off just a year or so before his parents were slain.] There was a painting in the main room so I knew what they looked like.

[Mother. Hair like softly spun white-gold, falling down past her shoulders in gentle waves to match her soft smile. Father. Tall, stately and stern despite his middling status, with thick black hair he always kept in a braid, and a neatly-cropped goatee.

Caspa's face is much more organic in his mind since it doesn't come from a painting. Mother's curls and smile, and the same dark hair all the siblings had. Belthazar had smiled then, too, right up until the day Caspa was killed. Eight-- no, nine years ago, now.]

Caspa was a priestess. A healer. I never had the talent for it.