they dredged icarus up from the sea today; wings bedraggled, tangled in the nets of those who tried to raise his body before. but he would not ascend; he learned his lesson.
She asks if I have children and I think that the truth buried there (a parasite, a dormant creature waiting to kill, to drain) is better left a lie. That is what our agreement is; that is what we are privy to, with one another. (As if I do not lie to everyone I meet, in some capacity). Perhaps it is our agreement that wrenches my vulnerability and transforms it into a strength. Perhaps it is our agreement that allows the truth to slip frankly from my mouth. “Yes, I do. A son.” With a woman who did not love, and knew only because--only because my father had arranged it. Only because Cillian looked as close to Boudika as possible, without becoming her.
If anything, I had hated her; everything about her, and who she was not. My mouth is dry with my admission. “Khier, is his name. He looks nothing like me.”
No, I think. He looked like my father. Khier was born black where I was white, white where I was black. Silver, where I was gold, and striped where I was spotted. His bore antlers like a prince’s crown. I wonder, briefly, what he is doing now. He is old enough to be a man; he is old enough to be a lieutenant, sailing ships, conquering foreign lands.
Or maybe he is dead.
I have seen men abandon their children for duty. I have seen them given second chances, only to leave again. My daughter will not be left.
My smile is quiet, and knowing. I understand her logic; parts of me wish it was a logic all women shared and for a moment, furious and unexpected, I am angry with her. I blame my mother for much more of my suffering than I blame my father, I think. And I blame Boudika for even more--
What could we have been, I have asked many nights. If only she had not been a woman?
What might I have been, had my mother fled one evening with me on a white-sailed ship? There were legends of Oreszian women fleeing their husbands, taking children into the sea. All of the myths say they drown; but now I wonder if that were only a way to control them. But the truth? I hate my mother for her cowardice. And I hate Boudika for hers, too.
I wonder if I will grow to hate Elena for the same.
“From the sounds of it, he also abandoned his shadows and worship to conceive her.” I only mean to imply, nothing is as black and white. “But you are right. When placed in a similar situation, I chose duty. My son may as well be a bastard, and that’s simply the way of it.” I do not say that part of the reason I could not claim responsibility for him was because I had known (oh, how I had known) that I would have been exactly like my own father.
That is one sin I am not willing to commit.
I am quiet, for a moment; I watch her pinched expression, the tension held firmly between her teeth. She is angry; I do not know if it was me, or the father, or both. “Perhaps you should raise her like a boy.” I say it lightly enough that it isn’t a real suggestion. In fact, it is almost a bone that I offer: a flag of surrender. The world, I seem to agree. Does not give girls a fair lot in a realm of men.
Something about it makes me remember the beach, and her admission, and how she had lied to me. I love you. It makes my mouth taste like salt.
It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
S
he had watched her father walk out onto the battlefield, and she had watched when he came back to her. Not all children were so lucky, and eventually, she became one of those unlucky ones too. But when he left her, she knew he chose it not from duty, but from love. Elena can remember a conversation she had with Lilli in a time that feels long enough ago, under a Hyaline sky. Love is fickle, duty is reliable. But one warms your bed and the other is a cold shoulder. Love will turn back for you, duty pushes ahead.
He says he has a son, and Elena still cannot picture him as a father. “That’s a good name,” she says. “A shame, but in the end, unimportant,” she says because people say all the time how much Elliana looks like her, but she can still see so many pieces of her father, and that aches, but children are not just a combination of parents, but of entire pasts stretched far, far, far back. Elliana has no idea how much she looks like her great-great-grandmother, Fawn, and how it frightens Elena, because sometime Elli wakes in the night screaming she cannot breathe, she cannot breathe beneath the water. And she tells her ‘Granny Fawn sounds scared. Is it true we cant breathe under water? What happens then?’
His anger feels not like fire, but ice, and it imbeds itself in her heart and grows, leaving nothing but that cold in the place of other emotions. “Yes,” she admits. “It is how I know he will not do it again.” She concludes. Tenebrae had chosen her, for one night, her, over everything, everyone else, and he had not loved her enough to keep her as his choice. It would have been better if they could live in the what could have been, then to ever have pretended it could be in the first place. “That is a poor excuse, and you know it, and your child knows it,” she whispers to him.
“And maybe you should have been raised as a girl,” she says with tension. Elena is tired of him, he is exhausting. “And learn that duty extends to more than just battles and wars,” she finishes. “Though I have seen women just as eager as men to don their armor and head off into the fight,” she says, remembering Ruth, and remembering the way Marcelo still ached for his mother despite the crown that her and Val’s absence placed on his head. “You do not tell me how to parent my child, when you neither parented your own, nor are you part of her life.” She says, believing her daughter and this man would never meet, when all she does is drive them closer to the day Elliana will stare up at him, with eyes like her mother, and say her name, as if he did not already know so much about her.
they dredged icarus up from the sea today; wings bedraggled, tangled in the nets of those who tried to raise his body before. but he would not ascend; he learned his lesson.
I am growing frayed at the ends by this conversation; it wears on me, quite unexpectedly. It seems frivolous; perhaps even meaningless. I nearly regret approaching her, but being a man unaccustomed to regret, I cannot bring myself to do so. Not yet. Even as she compliments my son’s name (should I tell her, I wonder, that I did not decide it?) and remarks on what a shame it is he does not look like me.
Truly, I cannot imagine him in adulthood; I do not know if he stands straight and as tall as I, or if he inherited his mother’s slighter build. I will never know, and this is one of the burdens of my life I have long-since come to terms with.
(Of course, it might have been different. And that possible “other” is the thing that haunts me the most, the what-ifs and the could-have-beens. Some days I hate all that Boudika had been, but know that hatred stems not just from the truth of her, but from her betrayal, and from what she broke within me. It might have been different, I know, if she had been the mother of my child--if somehow we had changed Oresziah, if we had made it our mission to shed light on her truth in a way that was favourable rather than damning, if, if, if--)
If I had not betrayed her so, as she had betrayed me.
(And that child, that what-if-child, that child of love and comradeship and never-have-beens… that is a child of bones in my heart, with red eyes and gold skin and the uncrackable potential of all that I had ever loved, and lost, and wanted--)
“No,” I correct. It is the first edge of hardness that has entered my voice tonight. “It is not a good excuse. But some children are better off without their fathers.” The implication is clear: mine is better off without me, a father who would detest it, a father who would look at him and see everything that he was not instead of all that he could be.
I listen to her raptly--more raptly than I think she deserves. But there is something transfixing about the furious undercurrent to her words; the defensive way she dons them, as if it is I who is offending her. My mouth curls a wry line. “Elena, I had only been joking. I’ll admit to my faults, and if what you need of me is to blame me for your lover’s transgressions, so be it.” I shrug, and glance over her shoulder. The night is still young, and I thought I had caught a glimpse of Adonai. My eyes return to hers, a brow arched. “I’ve already told you, I care nothing for your daughter. Parent her however you please.”
Her anger already reeks of desperation, and the girl is not even grown. “My excuse is the same excuse you give your daughter’s father, and claim it is for the better. The difference, Elena? I’ve never claimed to be good. I won’t waste my breath on it. I never lied to the mother about love, or forevers. I didn’t want anything from her.” She had known. She had known, because our intimacy was not intimate; and “love” was a word I reserved for those who--
In a moment of sudden transparency, I recognise that I have never confessed love to anyone, not truly. The realisation shocks me. I stare at Elena, almost dumbfounded. “I--no. I never told her anything at all.”
I am not sure who he is speaking of, now. If it is Cillian, or Boudika, or Bondike, or--
Acknowledging it--the fact I had never admitted my feelings… I say aloud, “No. I never told the person who means more to me than anyone that I loved them.” It is clear I am not talking about the mother of my child. I ask myself: why and cannot answer. The anger I had felt, the exhaustion--it tapers off into no feeling at all, a coin tossed into a well that sinks and then, abruptly, is gone.
No feeling is worth it. To delve any deeper would be a tearing of sutures, a removal of something vital. A heart, I think.
It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
S
he is thankful for sending Elli away. She doesn't trust him, doesn't trust what he would say, what he would do. Maybe there is a selfish part of her, he is a secret that only she knows, she has never shared their meeting, that night on the beach, and now this party. Though they talk in front of an audience this time, no one watches them, no one will remember them together because they will carve their own paths at this part, Torix with a prince and Elena with a girl who could be her mirror. This is only the beginning, there is so much to come.
“I will not argue with you,” she says with a roll of her shoulder. She looks to him, and though there is something she does not trust, that she does not even like about him, she thinks he might have been a good father, in the right place, with the right partner. But she bites the compliment into her cheek for fear of either giving him too much satisfaction in saying such a thing, or not enough.
Golden ears wish to fold back into her flaxen mane, but Elena keeps them tipped forward, intending to catch every single word he says. “I’m not—” she wants to argue with him, but thinks better of it. He was a mountain she did not wish to climb, so why does she keep approaching him with ice pick and rope in hand and a look of challenge in her winter eyes? “Well, it was not a funny joke,” she says brushing off his comment as if it were so easy to do so. “Thank you.” And it tastes like wet sand.
His anger punches her in the gut with the force of a rapid dog. Elena ties a leash around its neck and tries with her might to take it away, to not let it bite on her skin and cause her mouth to foam as well. “You did not claim to be good because no one would have believed you,” she says with gritted teeth. “He has no excuse, I did not give him the choice, because he would make the wrong one,” she says, spells out. “Elli has a father who loves her, if even it is not by blood.” By blood and bond we are bound. The phrase echoes in her head. No one ever said though that the blood had to be the same. It was just blood after all.
His words come as a surprise to her, she listens, listens as dutiful as he did that night on the beach. She listens to not just his words, but his silences, she paints them green and blue and pink because she thinks silences this loud must too have a color, if it cannot have words. “I cannot help you right that mistake, Torrin,” she says. “If you consider it a mistake at all.” She adds looking away from him, realizing Elliana has entirely strayed from her sight. She has a moment of panic and a moment of guilt wondering how long she had been gone so far from her. She turns back to him, stares up at him and there is no more winter in her eyes, but summer skies. The storm had passed. “But for tonight, try to enjoy the party?” She asks him, kisses each of his cheeks lightly. And she slips away into the crowd, only to find not her daughter, but a mirror—Bexley Briar.
they dredged icarus up from the sea today; wings bedraggled, tangled in the nets of those who tried to raise his body before. but he would not ascend; he learned his lesson.
I wonder what it will take for the world to ruin her.
It is not a matter of “if.” It is a matter of when. It is a matter of shattering the sky-blue optimism of “believing in the best.” No, she might not argue with me; but I see the belief in her eyes, the desire that is fire-bright to say, you are wrong. She does not believe me, and that is what marks her as a fool. If only I were lying; if only I were fulfilling our sacred promise, exposing my worst attributes in a too-harsh light.
But I am not. I have stared at my reflection in too may mirrors, in too many panes of languid water; I have traced my own scars with my eyes, and repeated my worst sins a thousand times in perfect detail.
As a boy, confiding in Bondike, I had sworn away ever becoming my father. I had said, with confidence and conviction, I will be patient, unlike him. Even when anger is the easier choice, I will opt first for kindness. I will never drink as he does, and I will choose empathy over hatred.
I had sworn I would never lead as he led; that I would return each night to a warm hearth, and exhibit love instead of hate.
Now, I know, I am everything I ever hated about my father.
When I look at her, her softness, the fury with which she guards her daughter: I wonder, how long will it take, Elena, for you to begin to hate yourself?
It always comes with sins, I think, and lies. The foundation for self deprecation has already been laid: so how long, Elena, before that resolved belief in better wanes, as all things do?
You do not claim to be good because no one would have believed you.
I laugh aloud; the gesture is truly full of amusement, of wry humour. I had been the best of them; the favoured son. That is what truly damns me; that is what truly ensures I am unredeemable. They had loved me, my people. They had showered me with adoration and awards, with medals and stars, and said, you are so brave, to betray one you love so.
I cannot help the edge of cruelty I take on. I think it an act of mercy, when I say (like the killing of a thing half dead), “But you do not love this ‘father’ as you did the other.” My mouth is a weapon. My mouth is salt, seawater, bitterness. “No,” I say, with eyes dark as a storm. “No, you loved the other so much you carved away a piece of yourself to give him. You can lie to me, Elena. That is the deal we made--you can hate me, even, if that is what you need. But I cannot help but wonder, what kind of woman does it make you, to lay with a man in love and conceive his child and go to another to raise her? What do you tell her father, not-of-blood but of commitment? Do you say you love him?”
Yes, this is my father speaking.
Yes, this is a heritage of hate.
She kisses my cheek even after the words rush out, but inside I convince myself, none of it was a mistake, none of it, not a damn thing. In the twisting of her story, the regurgitation of her own words, I find an answer to my own regrets: love as a word has never meant anything, and never will.
In that moment, I hate her for her summer-sky eyes, the way she sheds her bitterness and discomfort as if it has no permeance. I turn away from her, with none of the softness, and feel something dark and desperate begin to roil within me. I know it wrong (and perhaps that is why I dance with this devil of mine so leisurely) but the contempt is what drives me to Adonai; it is what forces me across the marble floors of the Ieshan estate, in search of some relief for the pressure, a cathartic purging of the man I am.
I breathe out and steel myself. I pretend I am a different man: for just a moment, I am not Vercingtorix Stark.
I am just a man looking for in a garden of statues for another, for an answer to my aching.
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