14 #2
"I'm saying it because it's true, not because I'm asking you for anything.
" Something dry entered his voice, almost amused.
"Though I'll admit, since we're being direct with each other, that I find it interesting how thoroughly this city still believes my family and yours have unfinished business from fifteen years ago.
People still bring it up to me, you know.
The Antonov situation. As if I personally benefit from a story that makes every careful man in this city watch his back around me for a crime my own father always swore we had nothing to do with. "
I sat with that longer than the comment probably warranted, something in his particular phrasing catching on an edge I hadn't expected to feel that evening. "You don't think your father was involved."
"I think my father was a great many things I didn't always admire.
I don't think he was a liar about this, specifically, because he had nothing to gain by lying to me about it once I was old enough to actually run things myself.
" Pyotr's voice had gone quieter, more deliberate, the sound of a man choosing each word with more care than the conversation strictly required.
"He told me, the year before he died, that he'd taken the blame publicly because it was useful — because a rumor that makes you look dangerous costs you nothing if you're already going to be feared regardless, and it kept certain other people from ever being asked the question properly. "
"What people."
"He never said. I asked him directly, more than once, in his last year, and he'd always find a way to turn the conversation somewhere else before answering.
I used to think it was simply pride — an old man unwilling to admit he'd let a lie about his own family stand for thirty years out of nothing but convenience.
I've started to wonder lately whether it was something closer to fear instead.
Whether there was someone specific he didn't want to name even from a deathbed, because the habit of protecting that name had outlasted every other instinct he had left.
" He let that sit for a moment, the silence stretching just slightly too long to be casual.
"I've never had a reason to push harder on what he meant by certain other people.
I'm telling you this now mostly because I find myself, lately, with an unusual amount of free time to wonder about old stories nobody's bothered examining in fifteen years, and because my nephew's stupidity this week has put the whole subject back in front of me whether I wanted it there or not. "
"Why tell me this. Specifically. Tonight."
"Because you came to my nephew yourself instead of sending a soldier, and a man who handles his own business directly is a man I'd rather have an honest conversation with than a careful one.
" Pyotr's voice had gone quieter still, almost speculative.
"And because I've watched you, Rurik, since you took your chair.
You've never once needed the Antonov story to make yourself look dangerous, the way some men in your position might have been tempted to use it.
I respect that, oddly, coming from a man whose family's name has been quietly attached to my own family's supposed crime for fifteen years without either of us ever discussing it directly until tonight. "
"Make sure Stas understands the lesson," I said, because it needed saying regardless of how the rest of the conversation had wandered. "I won't have a third version of this conversation with anyone in your family."
"He'll understand it. I'll make certain of that myself, this time.
" A pause, the ice shifting again in his glass.
"And Rurik — if you ever find yourself actually curious about that old story, rather than simply inheriting it the way the rest of us did, I wouldn't mind hearing what you turn up.
I've carried my father's supposed sins for thirty years without ever once getting to ask anyone whether they were actually his.
It would be a strange kind of relief, at this point, to simply know. "
He hung up before I could decide what to make of the offer, and I sat in my study for a long while afterward, turning over a conversation that had started as a routine territorial correction and ended somewhere considerably stranger — a rival admitting, almost idly, that the story everyone in this city had built half their understanding of the world around might not be the whole of it after all.
I thought, briefly, about the ledger entry in the archive container, about the fragment of Bogdan's call outside his study, about a note Darina had mentioned her father leaving behind, unread by anyone but Gleb.
I held all three pieces in my mind for a moment, turning them like stones in a palm, looking for an edge where they might fit together.
I didn't find one that night. The pieces simply sat there, separate, unconnected, three small uneases I'd catalogued across two months without yet understanding they were fragments of the same broken thing.
I came closer to putting it together that evening than I'd like to admit, sitting alone with Pyotr's strange, unburdened honesty still ringing in my ears — and was still, somehow, nowhere close to actually doing it.
A more suspicious man, I think, might have made the connection that night, sitting with a rival's deathbed confession about certain other people still fresh in his ears and a half-remembered hallway conversation about old paperwork that needed to stay buried sitting one room over in his own memory.
I was not, that evening, a suspicious man.
I was a man newly, thoroughly happy, for the first time in longer than I could measure, and happiness, I would come to understand, has its own particular gravity — it pulls a man's attention toward the version of the world that lets him keep feeling it, and away from the version that might cost him the feeling altogether.
I went to bed instead thinking about Darina, the way I went to bed thinking about her most nights now, and let the rest of it wait for a day that would, eventually, demand it considerably more loudly than this one had.
I did call her before I slept, briefly, just to hear her voice — told her about Stas, in the careful, edited way I'd learned to tell her about my world without burdening her with more of its weight than she needed, and she laughed at the part about the bravado-shifting friend in a way that settled something in my chest that the entire rest of the day had left unsettled.
"You handled an entire territorial dispute and then called me to tell me about it before you even ate dinner," she said. "I find that oddly romantic, in a way that probably says something concerning about both of us."
"I find I want to tell you about my days now.
All of them, even the tedious parts with cigar lounges and twenty-six-year-olds who haven't yet learned the difference between confidence and competence.
" I meant it more than the lightness of the conversation let on.
"I've never once wanted that with anyone else.
I'm not certain what to do with how much I want it with you. "
"You don't have to do anything with it. You can just have it." Her voice had gone warm, unhurried, the particular register she used when she'd decided to stop being clever for a moment and simply be honest instead. "Goodnight, Rurik."
"Goodnight, zvezda."
I fell asleep not long after, considerably lighter than the day's events should have left me, and didn't think again that night about ledgers, or buried paperwork, or a rival's strange, unburdened confession about a story neither of us had yet found the courage to fully examine.