A few tears finally leaked out, enough to blur my eyes.
"I am not Bernard," Piers said. "But I almost killed my own familiar. I don't think I'll ever see him again. I would like to find some way to repent for my sins and I wondered if you would hear my confession."
"Oh...that sounds very serious. I'm not sure I'm qualified to hear a confession!"
"I almost forgot that St. Augustine is about the most pious wizard town in the nation," Piers murmured. "But you don't need to be qualified in a religious way. I want you to hear it because the life of Bernard and your own and mine and Chester's...well, in both cases, the wizard has failed the familiar. If you can give me a shred of your forgiveness, I will try my best to help you, and even if I think you are charming, I will not get in the way of you and Bevan or anyone else. All I crave is penance."
Charming! I couldn't believe that all I had to do was set foot in the world outside and every man I met seemed to think I was...intriguing. I always thought I was plain, and in books, plain girls were always in despair. Then again, they do always end up having adventures and love stories after all…
No one had ever asked me something so serious before, and I felt rather important. "Yes," I said solemnly. "I'll hear your confession. After all, I might as well listen while I'm just laying here. I hope I don't fall asleep."
"Fall asleep if you need to," Piers said. "I'll just get out what I can." He poured some wine for himself and took a slow breath.
Chapter Five
Piers
"When I was a little boy, I was very close to my familiar, although those memories seem very far away..."
"And his name?" Jenny asked, drowsy but still interested enough to ask questions. Just taking in the barley vegetable soup had brought more color to her ghostly cheeks and made her look a little less like the heroine of a Victorian tragedy.
"Chester."
"That's a nice name."
Was it? I didn't think of names that way, and I didn't think of Chester that way. A name was what you made of it. My earliest memories were of the house I grew up in, an estate of fourteen rooms, not nearly as grand as that of my cousins, but just as gloomy. We lived farther up the Hudson River than the von Hapsburg branch of the family, which my uncle married into.
"I was the only child in the family. I always had the impression that my mother really didn't want any children at all, but of course, in those circles, you have to have children. At least, the one son. I had nannies and didn't see my mother very much."
"Were you naughty?" Jenny asked.
"Why do you ask?"
"It seems like in books, whenever there's a nanny, the children are also naughty, and it sounds like fun.”
“No, I was very obedient, really. I wanted to please my parents.”
“Were your parents very lovely people? Was your mother beautiful and your father stern but kind? I could imagine that.”
“No…neither of those things. I don’t think they were especially lovely. Just strict and unhappy and always complaining that they should be more rich than they were.”
“Oh…I do understand that,” Jenny said. “Mrs. Franch was always complaining…”
"I think I must have been alone a lot, before I reached the age for school," I said, reaching back to the forests of childhood, the particular rocks and ruins that became places for Chester and me to imagine ourselves as great sorcerers or pirates. "We had fifty acres, and we were five miles from the town, so it seemed like our own world. Chester was my companion, at that time. I didn't have any friends yet."
"You do sound like you were lonely," she said, her voice welling with sympathy. "But I loved playing with Bernard, just the two of us, when we were little."
"Chester must have liked my company too," I said, and for the first time in many years I was able to imagine Chester as he was to me then, just a playmate, like a brother. I didn't judge him on his scrawny, unremarkable appearance. "My parents tried to discourage us from getting too close, of course... They wanted me to play with other wizard children who lived in the town. I was sent to stay with my grandparents pretty often, because they lived right in town, but the town children had their own games and I didn't want to play with them."
I didn't tell Jenny all my weaknesses, and detail the precise feeling of cowering behind the gate in front of my grandparents' house, watching bigger boys run by, throwing a football around, and the terror of Grandfather throwing open the door and bellowing, in his thick Romanian accent, "Go and play with them!"
I had vowed not to indulge in any feelings for Jenny, but I still struggled to tell her just how pathetic I was as a child. When you're very young, you don't know when you're an inferior specimen, until you start being surrounded by strange children.
"When I reached school age, my parents sent me right to a boarding school, in the hope that I would lose interest in playing with Chester and make friends. They seemed to think I would be a leader if I just had a chance to be around other kids...but at the age of six, I was the third smallest boy in my class, and..."
"Why don't you just say what's troubling you?" Jenny said, almost dreamily, her head halfway sunk into a voluminous feather pillow.
"I am."
"You're skirting around it, really."
I took a deep breath, fidgeting in the chair. My left arm was starting to ache, since I'd shoved into my jacket for a while now, and my elbow needed to stretch. I finally pulled out the stump and massaged my elbow and shoulder, bringing back the circulation. My cuff mostly covered the stump, but the skin was shiny and mottled with scar tissue.
The feelings of shame and inferiority were already familiar to me. I didn't have to be crippled to know.
But as Jenny hung on my every word, her eyes gentle and free of any trace of disdain, I started to feel safer.
"Jenny," I whispered. "When I went to school, I realized that I was a born loser."
"What!" she scoffed.
"Well, I did realize it early on, and I wasn't about to succumb to it. I knew nothing would come easily to me. I wasn't a particularly attractive kid, or a strong one. I didn't have royal blood like my cousins."
"I bet you were smart."
"Smarts are useless in the game of life, on their own. You have to throw in determination and craftiness."
"So that's what you did?"
"Yes, but that's where all the trouble started. Once I realized that I'd have to fight hard for success, it never stopped. I did anything I could to get higher and higher, and any cruelty seemed like it was just necessary, the way we have to kill to eat or chop down trees to build a house. If I thought something was wrong, I just learned to shut out my feelings and get it done. Eventually I thought that I was responsible, in part, just for keeping the magical world safe, and nothing else mattered."
"I think Bernard is telling himself that same thing," Jenny said. "But maybe you do keep it safe, too."
"Are you actually giving me justification?"
"Well, I can't believe Bernard is all bad. I know what's in his heart too well. And I bet your parents were really hard on you. Your voice tightens up when you mention them."