Chapter 9 #4
Now it was their turn to sit in awkward silence. Fotia glared at me furiously.
“You’ve not decided on a date?” I suggested.
“No!” said Fotia, irritated. “And it is something of a sore subject!”
I looked back at Ippeas. “Are you leading my sister on?”
“Din!” said Fotia. “Damn it all!”
“No,” said Ippeas. “But…”
“But?”
“Well—Signum Kol, I’d not wish her to marry me with my circumstances being as they are!
” said Ippeas. “I’m not a prime son. I’m hardly more than a drover here.
I serve a family that seems cursed to many.
And even if we were not cursed, we’d still be in a murderous feud with the Buravs, with many openly wishing for war.
I…I wish to wait, to try to better my position.
” He looked to me. “I don’t think it such an unreasonable thing.
Could you ask someone to anchor themself to you, with your future so dismal and uncertain? ”
I studied them: Ippeas, so nakedly earnest and conflicted; Fotia, so anguished and distraught. How odd it was, to hear a gentryman speak of his circumstances the way so many common folk did of their own.
“I…don’t know, to be honest,” I said finally. “I hadn’t considered it. Imperial Sublimes do not marry.”
“No?” said Ippeas.
“Usually no. We do not engender children, and we do not live long lives. Few would desire such a union.”
At that, the discomfort about the table twisted again, like the wind changing directions. Ippeas and Fotia both shifted in their seats.
“I, ah, see,” said Ippeas. He opened his mouth to say more but coughed and fell silent.
I stood. “I’ll take your leave,” I said stiffly.
“Your friend has befallen a tragedy, and I’m an interloping presence.
This day has been difficult enough.” I raised my hand as Fotia stood and opened her mouth to speak.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, of course, Fo. But I warn you—I’ll likely come with my superior.
And though I may seem strange to you now, she’ll be far stranger. ”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. “But will I get to see you again after? I’ll not let you become a ghost to me again, goddamn it!”
I attempted to smile. “I shall haunt you plenty. Let us hope it’s the only haunting that happens in this place.”
It was a weak joke and died as it met air. I put down a few talints for the wine, then left to return to my inn.
—
I trudged back through the mud, the rain thrumming on my shoulders, my skull pounding with memories attempting to beat their way in.
Yet unlike my engraved memories, these were not perfect, preserved seconds floating in my skull: these were sweaty and half remembered, yet heavy with nuance and feeling, for they were from before I’d ever been altered.
The smell of spiced tea in the mornings.
The laughter and whisper of my sisters in the next room.
The family of foxes that had lived under the wood shack, the little kits peering out at my sisters and me with their bright green eyes.
And the lighting of the lanterns on the Eve of the March, these great, ornate, copper things that my grandmother had cherished, and insisted be hung just so before their lighting.
I want them hung high, she’d tell our servants. Hung high so they can be seen from a distance! If we are to be lavish, I wish for others to know it, damn it all!
The pale orange of her robes. The plummy twinkle of the amethysts in her ring. The smell of the reagents she’d mixed into her hair to make it part so precisely. How strange it was to have so much of my grandmother return to me now, in this distant place.
Yet most of all, I remembered how she’d stood over me as I did my letters.
I would kneel on the pad of carpet before the parchment, ink brush trembling in my fingers before I attempted—for perhaps the dozenth time—to carefully form the imperial standard characters with an ink brush.
My reading and writing skills had been abysmal then, and no matter how I’d focused and gritted my teeth, each stroke of the brush had been awkward, clumsy, unreadable.
My grandmother had stood over me, eyes bright and furious as she boomed—Do you know how your fingers work, boy?
Do your eyes see the paper? Why can’t you do this?
I confess, I cannot comprehend it! What weakness lives in your head?
She would relent—eventually. Then—after I’d put away the brushes and burned the parchments I’d written in the fireplace—then came the retreat to the chambers upstairs, and the scrape as I slid open the closet door.
The comforting, musty darkness. The caress of my mother’s forgotten hanging clothes on my neck as I hugged my knees to my chest. And then, finally, the saline sting of tears.
Once, I recalled, as I had huddled in the closet, there’d come a knock at the door, and a voice—Din? Din, are you there? Are you all right?
Fotia. How small her voice had been in those days. She’d asked if I was there, if I needed help. Yet I’d not answered, and had instead hid away deeper in the clothes. When my sister opened the door and peered inside, I’d waited, not daring to breathe, until she’d left without a word.
I wondered as I stood in the rain—why had I hid from her? Why had I disdained being seen? Even now, years later, I did not know.
No, I said to myself as I walked. No, no, you will not think of such things. Not now.
I made my world small then: there was the road, and I was upon it. All the rest could be locked away, put away, forgotten in some dusty shelf of my soul.