Chapter LIX
LIX
MY FATHER.
Black hair and sun-dark skin. Tall and powerful and graceful, commanding and kind, a deep love in his eyes. The very image of a king. And so, so much more to me.
It is him. It is him.
I am too stunned to do anything but watch as he strides the few steps toward me, careless of the fact I still hold a weapon. Wraps me in an embrace that is as comforting as it is fierce. The feel familiar. His scent, familiar. I just stand there for an extra second. Held.
Then I am dropping my spear and curling my arm around him and burying my head in his shoulder, shedding great tears of disbelieving, unbridled joy.
“How?” I get it out between sobs and laughter.
The physicality of him is impossible. All else is forgotten, in that moment.
“How? Everyone said you were dead. Fadrique said he saw you die!” My voice cracks.
Something released in me that I didn’t even know had built up, all these years.
“I should have looked anyway. All this time. Gods. I’m so sorry, Father.
” The name makes it real. I can barely choke it out.
He laughs. A joyous sound, thick with emotion. He strokes my hair. “I think perhaps in this, Diago, I can forgive you,” he whispers. He tightens his embrace. “I have missed you, Son.”
We stand like that, surrounded by night, the crackling fire carving us a small, warm hollow.
And for the first time in almost five years, I feel safe, and loved, and that maybe—just maybe—everything is going to be alright.
FINALLY THE OVERJOYED SHOCK RECEDES ENOUGH FOR me to reluctantly release my grip, wipe my nose and step back.
Still barely daring to believe it. My smile feels as though it will never leave my face.
My father’s expression is the same as he drinks in the sight of me.
He motions me onto a seat atop a boulder, then sits opposite.
Assesses me. “Trying to decide which questions come first?”
I bark a laugh. Still dazed. “Yes.” A deep breath. Two. My elation filled now with a need for answers. “Fadrique said you were hanged.”
His gaze never leaves mine, but something sad bleeds into it.
“I was. There is a power that the Catenan Military have discovered. An aspect of Will that few in our world are able to use. It can raise the dead.” He says it so simply, so unadorned, that I’m sure I’ve misunderstood.
“You were actually dead?”
“I am dead, Diago. My heart no longer beats. When I breathe it is through habit, not necessity.” He says it carefully, pushing back his sleeve and showing me a medallion wrapped tight around it, the image of a scarab engraved on the thin stone disc.
“This is a Vitaerium—a powerful one. It’s what’s letting me be here like this, but it still only lends life, not restores it. Without it, I am a corpse.”
Silence as I struggle with it. Anyone else, I would be outraged at the audacity of the claim. “Oh.”
He sees my doubt. Comes over and crouches in front of me. Grabs my hand and presses it to his chest.
He is warm but there is no movement, no faint thud beneath my palm no matter how long I wait.
After several seconds I take my hand away again. Watch him as he resumes his seat. There’s a moment in which I’m suddenly uncertain, don’t know how to feel, but then he smiles again. The way his eyes crinkle is my lost childhood and there is life in them, no matter what afflicts him.
“They first woke me not long after the invasion. A month, maybe. I don’t know the exact timing. And no,” he adds gently. “They wanted to question me, but I don’t think they did the same for … to your mother or Ysa.” His voice wavers, just slightly. A scar as deep and unhealed as my own.
I nod. Heartbroken and unsurprised and understanding that he had to dash the hope before it could form. And I realise there are things he may not yet have heard. “Cari … Cari and I tried to get out, but she …”
I can’t finish. Tears welling again, and then a sob as I lean forward and it all rushes back. My little sister drifting from that hellish underwater tunnel, tied to me, hair ghostly in the silver light. I promised her we could make it. She was so small in death.
“I know.” He’s at my side. On his knees. His arms around me, his forehead against mine as we weep together. “I know.”
We stay like that for a long time.
Finally I draw a shaking breath. “So they questioned you.” I have had years to grieve, and all that time I have wondered why I needed to.
Why the Hierarchy did what they did. “About what?” My father is—was—a king, but our little island nation should barely have been of interest to the Republic.
At the naumachia, Estevan implied that their attack was about the weapon he was going to use, but that vague hint is the most I learned in years of searching.
“The Cataclysm. The Gate. The three worlds. All of it.” He sees my frown. “How much do you know?”
“Not much, clearly.”
He chuckles. Nods.
Begins.
My father was always a good instructor, always clear and careful with how he laid out his information.
Tonight is no different. He starts from the start.
Methodical and objective. Tells me how years before the Hierarchy invaded, a Suusian trading ship was blown off course by a violent storm while travelling to Nyripk, and the men aboard made harbour at an unmapped island far to the east. How they found ruins there, and inside, a sealed trove of items and documents which they brought back to Suus and presented to my father.
It was this collection that, after he found scholars to translate the writings, first alerted him to the truth behind the Cataclysms. Cataclysms, plural. That they were a cycle of destruction stemming from an ancient war, and seemed to be tied somehow to the Aurora Columnae.
And—worse still—that they seemed to occur roughly once every few hundred years.
I listen in silent horror, the dark a curtain at the edges of our fire, as he explains how he immediately tasked our scholars with finding a solution, and our agents with discovering exactly what the Hierarchy knew about it.
Then how many of the latter mysteriously vanished over the next few years, and how one woman finally sent word that the Princeps and at least some Dimidii were, indeed, already aware of the threat.
It was her last communique. Three months later, the Hierarchy were on our shores.
I stir as he pauses there. “Why not just tell everyone of the danger as soon as you found out? Make the proof public?”
“Why didn’t I?” He leans forward. Intent. Smiling slightly as he says it.
I hesitate, then can’t help but grin back. An interaction we have had a thousand times. He is no longer a king and I no longer a prince, but that doesn’t mean everything has changed.
“I suppose it would have been pointless.” I say it slowly, working through the consequences.
Casting my mind back to the political climate of my youth.
“You make the claim, you’re a foreign king trying to slander the Republic’s good name.
You say you have evidence, and the Hierarchy demands to examine it.
Discredits it and refuses to return it, once you hand it over.
Or—if you refuse to give it up—points to that as proof you can’t be trusted.
And maybe uses the whole thing as an excuse for invasion, too.
” I chew my lip. Seeing the bind my father found himself in.
“Spreading it anonymously would never work; most people would laugh it off, and even if they didn’t, the Hierarchy’s influence and propaganda would see it ridiculed before it ever gained traction.
I can barely believe it, and that’s coming from you. ”
“When you have lived your whole life within the greatest empire of your time, it is hard to believe it will end. You think it is a thing of permanence, of immutability. Its existence contested but never truly threatened. And even if they did believe?” My father’s eyes shine in the firelight as he watches my analysis.
A pride there that warms me. “If enough of the Hierarchy truly believed that in order to save the world, they had to stop using what let them rule it?”
I think. Slowly, reluctantly shake my head.
“Some would agree to sacrifice.” I think of Callidus. Emissa and Eidhin and Aequa. “But not most, and not the ones who matter. The Catenan Republic is Will. To take it away from them … to them, that is the Cataclysm.”
“The oldest argument for doing something wrong is that everyone is doing it. To dismantle what they have built would have required the agreement of every man who had spent his life building it,” agrees my father softly.
“It would have required them to give up all they have striven their entire lives to gain. And they would have needed to do it, largely, for the benefit of those at whose expense it originally came.”
“So they found out you knew,” I say eventually. “That’s why they attacked.”
“In part.” He gives me a sad smile. “But mostly, I suspect, because the information we found contained instructions for a weapon. Something we might have been able to threaten even the Republic with, had we worked it out in time.” He exhales heavily. “It was what Estevan used at the naumachia.”
Silence.
“You know about that?” I ask it quietly.
“I know enough. And you made the right decision, Son. I loved Estevan. But what he did was monstrous.”
A relief I didn’t know I needed suddenly loosens my chest. There’s no doubt in my father’s words.
No hesitation. I have told myself countless times that I did the right thing, and even believed it.
But to hear it from him … I craved it, more than I realised.
“He seemed to think it was the only way forward.”
“A society cannot make a man a monster, Diago. But it can give him the excuse to become one.”
“You weren’t tempted to use it, then? To stop them from invading? Even to stop a Cataclysm?”
“I would have threatened, given the chance. And if it had been completed and working in time? Against invading soldiers?” He holds my gaze and even now I can see the hesitation, the struggle, but he nods slowly.
“Yes, Diago. I would have used it, and then I would have threatened to burn the Republic to the ground unless they destroyed the Aurora Columnae.”
I swallow. The screams of the naumachia in the whisper of the wind through the hills. “And if they hadn’t?”
He pauses. Thinks for a long time.
“When Ysa was born, I was terrified, you know. I knew exactly what I had to do to be a king, but to be a father … I was so sure I would fail her. That being a good ruler and a good parent were incompatible. And then your mother said something.” He smiles.
Eyes warm and glistening with fond, sad recollection.
“She told me that a child needs to hear and truly understand only three phrases from their father as they grow up. ‘I love you.’ ‘I will help.’ And, ‘I don’t know.’ The two of us were only just getting to that last one, Diago.
You were only just beginning to see that sometimes, I had no answers.
No simple way forward. It’s the hidden truth of how we eventually have to face the world—of being an adult.
None of us know.” He meets my gaze. “So I don’t know what I would have done.
And I don’t know whether it would have been the right choice.
Sometimes I’m glad I didn’t have to find out, but most of the time …
” He sighs. Leans forward and briefly tousles my hair, the way he used to.
“Most of the time I just want you all back.”
“Mother said that?”
“She was always the one who knew what to say. You remind me so much of her. I know you listened more to me because I spoke less. But when I spoke, it was always with her words.”
I smile fondly at the love in his voice. Then hesitate. “You told Mother all this. And Ysa.” It’s not a question. Those last few months before the invasion, the weight on their shoulders, the tiredness in their eyes—I’ve wondered about it so many times. “Why not me? I could have handled it.”
“I know you could have, Diago. But you were fourteen. The foreknowledge of the end of the world was not a burden you needed to carry.”
The answer I knew he would give, I suppose. “How did they take it?”
“Their strength was what got me through to the end.”
Neither of us speak, for a while.
“I wish I could have borne it with you. I wish we could have borne it together.” I say it softly. Not a remonstrance. Just wistful observation.
He nods slowly. “Part of me does too, Diago. Part of me would take any moment that would have given us more time together. But I am also glad I did not. I am glad that I was able to allow you three more months of happiness and security and childhood. Even if you deserved more.” He smiles.
Grips my shoulder. My heart aches at the familiar, long-forgotten gesture.
“But I suppose that time is over. So let me tell you everything I know.”