[P] holy water cannot help you drown

[Adonai]

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P

ilate says my name back to me and a shiver trails cold down my spine. I cannot tell whether it is out of late-blooming fear or self-disgust, at the surety I feel when I think: I hate my own brother.

But it is too late for fear, and I have never really learned how to feel it. Even now. 

It is likely the latter.

I walk stiffly to my seat and try not to pay Pilate any more mind, but it is a task he is determined to make impossible. Pomegranate seeds crunch between his teeth like cartilage, and his robe spills carelessly over a dark shoulder. He is slumped halfway down in his seat like he is already drunk, though I know he isn't, and the golden bowl before him rings like a bell with every gram added to its weight.

If this had been in the time before, I would have bared my teeth and snapped at him to act with an ounce of decency. If I had done the same, I would say, Mother or one of my thousand thousand tutors would have had my head on a plate before the first husk could find its way past my lips.

And when the wine accompanying our meals like water softened me to him, I would launch into a wry, gesturing retelling of how the Hajakhas disciplined their ungratefuls. Luthien Hajakha had sworn to me, once, how certain he had been of his early death when Lord Senna had caught him passed out in the wine cellar.

I used to try and gauge Pilate’s reactions to my stories of the other houses. He disliked them I knew, and while I myself held no love for them save the fake kind, as the firstborn my parent’s stories of Zolin’s reign had pressed like weights upon my shoulders. My position as Head of House entailed creating peace, and seeing that it held. The Great Houses could not nurture their hatred like they spoiled their heirs.

To feed hate with hate, I preached, was like cutting off the hydra’s head to let two more sprout in its stead. 

My love of righteous aphorisms has not, it seems, aged well.

The courses are presented and taken away again with dizzying efficiency. The table had already been bursting when I arrived, but it has been so long since I have sat at dinner that I have forgotten what a prince’s meal should look like. Still, it is uncomfortably silent with only Pilate and I in attendance. The servants know better than to speak, and I don’t think I have ever, in my life, seen the cook. In the months I had not come down—I wonder how many nights Pilate had eaten alone.

But the image and the taste of something sickeningly close to sympathy are both mercilessly forgotten when Pilate rises unhurried and languid to pour me my drink.

"Drink, then. Brother."

Wine sloshes into my cup and I am furious when the ease with which he pours it deprives me of all my satisfaction. Briefly I consider dashing my glass against the wall—no one would blame me, it would be so easily explained as a symptom of my condition, the trauma of what I have lost—

But I am still a prince. I am still Adonai.

I will never sink so low as my snake-maned brother.

So I make no reply save to tilt the goblet to my lips and drink. The possibility of it being poisoned does not even strike me until I have downed half my wine, but then I find (there is my satisfaction) that I hardly care. He cannot kill me here, in front of so many. He could not even kill me then, in front of none but my gray-eyed fury.

“Where are the others?” I ask instead, my voice echoing through the cavernous room. I lean back in my chair, cup floating hazily in the air. "It's funny. When I would take my meals in my room I would imagine you all down here, toasting until the dawn." I laugh, dry, low, my eyes wrinkling in fondness.

"Or—don't tell me. You tired of their company." I place a slice of tart into my mouth and chew thoughtfully. "Except for Miriam, our sisters often pretend like they know very little about everything."

@Pilate

♢