7. Isadora
CHAPTER SEVEN
ISADORA
Adrian wakes me at seven.
He knocks at my door and speaks through the wood, with the courtesy he has used since the first night.
“Isadora. The cousins have called a council at eight. Konstantine has asked me to come up and tell you, in case you would like to attend.”
In case I would like to attend?
“He hasn’t made the decision for you,” Adrian says, to the silence, because he has read the silence correctly.
I am the daughter of the man my host will speak about at eight in the morning, and I am being asked whether I would care to be present at the council where my fate is on the agenda. In my father’s house, my fate was decided down corridors, by voices that stopped when I passed.
“I will attend,” I say.
I dress in the black dress I arrived in. The wardrobe in this room is full of clothes that are not mine, cut to my body by people who learned me before I came, but I will not wear them to a meeting at which I am the matter. A woman should own at least one thing she stands up in.
Adrian is in the corridor when I open the door. He is courteous, the nod he has given me at every dinner, and walks me down through the house. At the foot of the stairs he slows half a step.
“One thing, koritsáki.” Girl. He says it lightly, which I have learned means he is being serious. “In that room, whoever speaks to you first wants something. Whoever speaks to you last wanted it more. Watch the ones who don’t speak at all.”
“Which are you, Adrian?”
“I’m the one who walks you in.” He smiles, all warmth. “That has its own price. I haven’t decided yet what it is.”
The council chamber is in the office wing of the main villa. A long table, dark wood, three windows onto the courtyard with the morning heat already standing off the stones. I count the exits out of years of habit. One door.
The cousins are seated. Theron is there, and beside him the young wife I have not been introduced to formally, Calliope, in linen, with a small gold dragon at her throat.
Theron looks at me the way an older brother looks at a younger sister.
In my father’s files he was marked do not negotiate.
The file did not say his eyes were kind. Files never say the one thing you need.
Stavros is at the head. Adrian takes the chair at his right.
Konstantine sits in the middle of one long side, and Nikos is absent, at his estate on the mainland.
My father kept a file on every man at this table.
I read them all, for years, in a locked room in Patras.
Not one of those files could have told me that when I entered, Konstantine would stand.
He stands.
The other cousins stand with him.
I am twenty-two, the daughter of the man who killed two of their wives, and I am being stood up for at a council of the Drakos.
I sit. They sit.
“Isadora Kallis,” Stavros says. “Thank you for joining us. Your brothers in Patras have requested a video conference at eleven this morning, and a council vote on your status. Their position is that you be returned to Patras within five days, in exchange for a non-aggression undertaking with this house and the surrender of three docks at Piraeus. Konstantine has informed me that this is unacceptable.”
“It is unacceptable,” Konstantine confirms.
“The cousins are divided. Theron and I will support whichever decision Konstantine makes. Adrian’s stated position is that you be formally claimed by Konstantine and the matter ended.
The Patriarch, who is not present this morning, has instructed that the family be guided in this matter by Konstantine alone.
And Konstantine has informed me that he will not put your name on a paper until you have made the choice. ”
Claimed. Returned. Undertaking. I have heard my future discussed in this vocabulary all my life. It is the first time I have been in the room for it.
“Isadora,” Theron says. “You may speak in this council if you would like to. It is not customary, but the cousins are not opposed.”
I look at Konstantine.
He looks back at me. He does not nod. He does not blink. For the space of one breath he gives me the look he gave me on the rug last night, cheek against my thigh, lamplight, the look that says he has decided what he is keeping, and then it is gone, back behind the courtyard face.
I stand, and I speak in the formal mode of my mother’s house.
“Cousins of the Drakos. I sit in your council by choice and not against my will. My brothers delivered me to you as the price of a peace I did not negotiate, and I am told the price is now in question.”
I look at Stavros. “I am not a price.”
I look at Adrian. “I am not a claim.”
I look at Theron. “I am not a ward.”
I look at Konstantine last, and hold there. “Konstantine Drakos. I am told you have informed your cousin that you will not marry me until I have made the choice. Is that true?”
“It is true.”
“Then write a letter to my brothers in Patras. Tell them their sister is alive. Tell them she is well, that she is on Kalydon, that she is neither returning nor being claimed. She will make her own decision in the matter, she will inform them when she has made it, but she has not yet made it.”
I sit.
The cousins look at one another. Something passes around the table, unhurried.
“Stavros,” Adrian says, in the dry voice he keeps for councils, “the lady has solved your morning for you.”
Stavros looks at me and nods. In this family, it is a form of respect.
No one at the table treats the moment as remarkable, which is how I know that it is.
The video conference is at eleven. Stavros chairs.
Theron speaks. Konstantine does not speak, does not lean, does not once look at the screen with anything a stranger could read.
I sit at the table and watch my older brother’s face pixelate across the sea, Vassilios, head of the Kallis house for six weeks and aged ten years by it, his collar too loose at his neck because grief takes men differently. It has taken him thin.
When I am addressed, I answer. I tell my brother what I stated earlier, that I am alive, that I am well, that I am on Kalydon. That I am neither returning nor being claimed. That I will inform him when I have decided my fate.
My brother does not answer at once. He looks past the camera at someone else in his room, and I file that, because a head of house who checks another face before he speaks to his own sister is not the leader here.
Then he says the only formal sentence he has spoken to me since our father’s funeral.
“I see, sister.”
The call ends. The chamber is quiet.
“Adrian,” Stavros says, dry as the hills in August. “Open a bottle. The Drakos house has bought itself more time.”
Adrian opens a bottle, but I do not drink.
I look across the table at Konstantine, and he looks at me.
He does not speak; he does not need to. Somewhere between the courtyard and this chamber we have built the smaller language, the one that moves under the vocabulary of prices and claims. In that language, everything necessary has already been said.