Chapter Twenty-Two #2
The water and food facilities looked like they had been revitalised in recent years, their cold exteriors matching the other new buildings.
A few old and vibrant buildings remained, attesting to the Halcin’s beautiful past, but they were suffocated by tarps and other drudgery.
The Halcin history of being lawyers and artists did nothing to reinforce their current image and the Halcin rather liked their current image.
So they covered it up, pretending it had never existed.
Shadach kept his eyes focused on the road as he led Aoife down the sterile streets.
His arm around her waist, he held her close.
With every step he took, the talk, the laughter, the businesses of the city seemed to die as people stopped to stare.
To glare. To whisper. His Halcin may not have been what it once was, but he still understood every insult with painful clarity.
Navigating streets that Shadach was certain had changed since he’d last been here, he led Aoife down a few wrong turns and back again before finally remembering where his mother’s house was.
His feet slowed. Dread at coming back as well as the memory of the bitterness in which he’d left came pooling to the surface.
The house was one of the oldest in the compound, once built with stones and clay containing exquisite murals carved into the walls.
Now, the old structure had mostly been covered with fresh stone slabs, but bits of the old still peaked through.
A small, desert garden of night shrub and thorn trees sat behind the house with a wooden fence that came up to Shadach’s waist ringing off the front from the street.
“This is it,” Shadach said. Half to himself, half to Aoife. “It might be better if I do the initial confrontation alone.” Shadach turned to Aoife, seeing a sliver of hurt in her eyes.
“You think I’ll make things worse?”
“No. I think if they insult me, I can handle it. If they start insulting you, I might not be able to deal so well.”
The hurt in Aoife’s eyes softened. “Okay. But …” She looked around.
“You can wait in the garden, no one will bother you there. And it’s nicer than it looks. Sort of.” Shadach led Aoife around to the side of the house, leaving her on a garden bench amongst the night shrubs. They weren’t much to look at, but they had a pleasant smell at least.
Rounding back to the front of the house, Shadach stood outside the plain wooden door. No doubt someone had run ahead to tell Mother he was here. Shadach took a deep, nervous breath and knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again.
No answer.
He knocked ag—
The door swung open. In the doorway stood the woman herself. Lady DaFira. Head of the Halcin council. Mother.
She had grown older but no less fierce. Her dark hair pulled back in a bun had begun to grey, the skin around her hard eyes creased with wrinkles. The long, blue dress she wore looked new, but the knitted shawl around her shoulders was from Shadach’s childhood.
“Mother,” he worked up the nerve to say, “I—”
She slammed the door in his face.
~*~
Shadach sat at Mother’s long dining table, himself at one end, Mother at the other.
His younger sister, Petra, had finally let him inside after he’d knocked on the door for nearly an hour.
She now sat at the table too, along with his eight younger siblings on either side, and his step-father sitting to the right side of Mother.
Shadach nearly felt outside of himself, sitting there with this family he felt he no longer knew.
Shadach’s siblings had grown so much more than his imagination had allowed him to believe.
Petra was a young woman now. His youngest brother, Kaiden, had been a mere toddler when he’d left.
The others, he barely recognised. Guilt for all the years he’d missed, all the big brother advice he hadn’t given, all the memories he didn’t share clawed at his chest.
His family wasn’t the only thing that had changed.
Shadach noted they had extended the dining area.
It was bigger and more spacious, but the room had never felt more suffocating.
The drab paintings were uninspired, with sharp, brutal edges to every stroke.
The stark grey of the walls brought out the darkness of the floorboards, and despite the rug beneath his feet undoubtedly costing more than the Knitting Widow would ever make, Shadach couldn’t help thinking of puke when he looked at it.
That seemed to be the way with everything in this room, in this house.
Expensive, gaudy, and without any soul. It was one of the reasons the Halcin didn’t garner much sympathy among the general public.
They were far wealthier than most honest citizens.
“So.” Mother broke the interminable silence, settling into her high-backed chair and setting her arms on the armrests. She trilled the table with her right hand. “What have you to say for yourself?”
Here we go. “I’m sorry for the way I left.”
Shadach barely remembered what he’d said when he’d gone, but he knew there’d been an awful lot of anger and an awful lot of shouting. From both him and Mother.
“For the way you left.” Mother’s lips were tight, her voice hard.
“Yes.”
“Not that you left.”
“No.” Shadach kept his voice gentle, but firm.
“Well.” Mother stood, pushing the chair from the table. “Then we’re done here, aren’t we?”
Everyone else stood. Shadach didn’t. Despite the tightness in his chest, an almost euphoric boldness poured through him. The child in him told him to stand, to run, to obey. But the emperor in him, the one chosen by the God, told him to stay right where he was.
“No.” Shadach’s voice was surprisingly steady. “I’m afraid we’re not done.”
Silence. It stretched for an age. Shadach kept his gaze steady on Mother. She stared him down, willing him to break. But there were more important things at stake than an age-old power play between mother and son. Shadach would not break.
“Well.” Mother cracked a thin, shrewd smile. “Look who grew a pair out there with the soulless scum.” Mother sat with perfect grace, settling herself back in her chair. “What, pray tell, do we still have to discuss?”
“Us. The Halcin,” Shadach said, the tightness in his chest not easing in the least. “Aristen, when he becomes Emperor, he’s thinking about bringing back the Dark Times. If enough people support him, he’ll decimate us. And we’re not exactly well liked.”
Mother laughed, as did everyone else at the table.
“Please,” she flicked her hand as if swatting away Shadach’s words, “every new emperor talks a big game. None of them do shit. And what concern is it of yours? You left. You speak the language like a three-year-old and you probably don’t even remember how to pick a pocket. You’re not Halcin anymore.”
“Maybe I’m just an older type of Halcin.” Shadach made a conscious effort to fix his accent and make himself be more fluent than he felt.
“Oh. Yes.” Mother flicked her hand again. “Tattoos and art and an honest existence. How lovely.”
“It’s what we used to be.”
“Centuries ago, before they threw us in cages. We also used to believe in forest gnomes. That doesn’t mean we should start believing in those again.”
Shadach ground his teeth, remembering why him leaving had been so full of fight. “Look, other emperors may have been all talk, but Aristen is serious.”
“Spare me your scaremongering.” Mother reached over the side of her chair, grabbing a bundle of knitting off the ground.
She’d taken it up after his father had died, as a way to help calm her nerves.
That’s when Shadach saw it. The chair sitting in the corner behind Mother. Father’s chair. It was still there.
Halcin tradition dictated that families leave the deceased a chair at the table for a year after their death.
Thereafter, some families burned the chair in a final good-bye.
Others repurposed the chair. Some, like Shadach’s family, removed it from the table, but kept it in the room.
It had been sitting there for twenty years, a testament to a memory that would never be forgotten and to a goodbye that would never be said.
Old feelings of anger, of sadness, of emotions Shadach still could not describe welled in his stomach.
Unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome. Suddenly, he was eight years old again, vowing to never trust, to never be betrayed, all the while screaming on the inside, if not on the outside, that this was not real.
This was not his life. Father was not gone.
Shadach pulled his gaze from the chair, trying to set his mind right.
Father was gone. He was not eight years old.
Those feelings needed to go back into the past. Or, at least, they needed to quiet down.
He didn’t have time to get lost in a sorrow that could be as bitter as wishing he himself were dead or as comforting as an illicit drug. He needed to protect his people.
“You don’t know how badly Aristen needs to be adored,” Shadach said. The words felt thick and jagged in his throat at first, but then they softened, becoming easier to say as he fully returned to the present. “And if his ploy also draws me out then all the better.”
“Aren’t we feeling very important, my truer-than-thou Halcin son?
We heard you couldn’t resist offing a Selat.
” Mother shrugged, watching her chunky needles weave in and out of whatever she was making.
A scarf? A jumper? “Not that I blame you. Living with them all the time, I’d want to do the same.
But the Messenger. Honestly. That’s a bit overboard, don’t you think? ”
Shadach clenched his fist beneath the table. “I didn’t kill anyone. The person I ‘killed’ is right there.” Shadach motioned to the back garden.
Silence.
“Why,” Shadach’s younger sister Petra piped up, leaning into the table and closer to Shadach, “are you wanted for her murder if she’s alive?”
“Because I was framed.” Shadach loosened his fist as everyone exchanged glances, nodding. The Halcin accounted for about sixty percent of crime in the Kingdom, but they were blamed for ninety-eight percent of it. Which meant being accused of something they didn’t do was a familiar Halcin plight.
“I thought you and Aristen were friends,” Mother said. Her voice had lost a bit of its edge, but was still as hard as steel. “Why is he letting someone frame you?”
“He’s not letting someone frame me, he is framing me.
And we were friends until …” Shadach’s throat felt raw.
He didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want to know how absurd it was going to sound.
But it had to be said. “Until the God chose me as Emperor over Aristen. That’s why he’s coming after me and going to come after you. ”
Silence. And then, uproarious laughter. Shadach took a deep breath, letting the mocking jeers roll over him like water. But as the laughter crashed against him, Shadach realised there was one voice he didn’t hear.
Mother. She wasn’t laughing. Not even smiling. She was staring right at him, her eyes unreadable. Once everyone else noticed Mother wasn’t amused they ceased to be, too, and the room grew sombre once more.
“What’s that got to do with us, then?” Mother looked away from Shadach, back to her knitting. “You want us to hide you? Protect you?”
“Not exactly.” Shadach rested his arms on the table, trying to catch Mother’s gaze.
She didn’t let him. “I want your help smuggling myself and Aoife into the Emperor’s City.
Once there, she can attest to my being chosen as Emperor.
Half the city saw her chosen, even Aristen can’t lie his way out of that one.
Once Aristen is identified as a fraud and a blasphemer, I’ll become Emperor.
And any plans against the Halcin that Aristen had will be void. ”
Mother sat silently for a solid minute. Her face was placid, but he could see in her eyes that she was working away at some thought, some calculation. Something rather more complex than her knitting.
“A Halcin Emperor.” Mother gave a light laugh, glancing at Shadach.
“That’s rich.” Her smile faded. “Let me get this straight. You want us to waste our time, our resources, and to risk our necks, smuggling you and that soulless into the city because of some delusion you have about being Emperor and Aristen’s diabolical intentions? ”
“They aren’t delusions, but yes.” Based on her tone, Shadach felt lost as to whether or not he was making headway.
Mother sat for another minute. Thinking. Watching him. “You know,” she said, “if you were one of us, I would say ‘yes.’ That’s who we are. We help each other, even the ones of us that are a bit mad. But I’m not convinced you’re still one of us.”
Shadach sighed, exhausted. “Bloody gods of our enemies, Mother, what do I have to do to convince you I’m—”
“We’ll put it to a test.” She nodded as if this idea were pure brilliance. “If you pass, you’re still a Halcin and we’ll help you. If not, you and the soulless whore get out of my sight.”
Shadach bit his tongue against Mother’s latest insult for Aoife. Lashing out would make things worse and something told him things were about to get bad enough as it was.
“What kind of test?” Shadach said.
Mother laughed, the smiles of a thousand devils in her eyes.