When we meet my father, the king, on the pier, he places his palm on Roshar’s cheek, and Roshar does the same: the traditional Herrani greeting between men who are friends or family. I cannot look away from this gesture, this closeness between them. I am filled with envy.
My father’s hair turned silver, they say, at my birth, so frightened was he to lose my mother, who had bled too much and was close to death. He lowers his gray eyes to meet mine. I have some of his height, but not nearly enough. He towers above people, his arms stony with muscle. His skin, a few shades darker than mine, the same light brown as Nirrim’s, is weathered by sun and wind and age, save for the shine of a long scar that cuts down from his brow and into the hollow of his left cheek. He does not wait to let me speak. He pulls me to him.
“God of life,” he says. “I thought I would lose you, too.” He holds me as if I were a child. Despite what Roshar advised, I instantly apologize, my face pressed against my father’s chest. Water seeps from my eyes into his linen tunic. “Etta,” I say, “forgive me.”
He tells me there is nothing to forgive, that I am here now. “My girl. I was so worried. Why did you leave us?”
I cannot answer. I don’t want to blame my mother, whom he loves so fiercely. I don’t want to blame him for not protecting me from her schemes, and ignoring them. I want, for once, to be a good daughter. So I give him my silence. It is the best I can offer. He accepts it, as I knew he would. He, who was enslaved from the time he was a child until he was a young man, never likes to force an answer.
What could I say? You expected too much from me. I chose to put my pleasure first. You are an apple, Sidarine.
What I’m truly sorry for, what makes the tears still come, is that choosing myself meant hurting him, and I did it anyway. I cannot promise I won’t do it again. I am sorry for my guilt—and my anger. When I saw my father greet Roshar, anger rushed into me like a wind-fed flame, because my father will never place his hand on my cheek like that. He will never greet me the way Herrani men do. I am his only child, his beloved daughter—a girl, not his equal. I am not a man.
My father doesn’t like the trappings of his stature. Arin the Plain King, people call him with pride. They love him and his simple clothes, his quiet manner. My mother, with her hive of spies, is fully aware that the way he presents himself to Herran only encourages the other name people call him: Death’s Child. Death, after all, needs no velvet or silk to remind you of his strength. He announces his presence with a mere tap on the shoulder.
My mother told me, People believe that your father survived the war because he was born in the year of the god of death. He is god-touched, they say. The god of death loves him.
What do you believe? I asked. My father worships the gods. He lights candles in their temple. My mother, whose features are practically a song for the fallen Valorian Empire and its many crimes, her skin honey-colored, her hair woven gold, has no religion. The Valorians believed in no god but their own strength. Infidels, the Herrani call them. Murderers. The Valorians deserved their destruction, they say.
I, for one, agree.
My mother said carefully, I believe it is important for the people to believe Arin is Death’s Child.
Because it makes it easier for you to rule them, I said, my tone rude.
My mother’s light brown eyes narrowed. No, she said. Because it makes them hopeful, and fear the future less.
As I follow my father and Roshar on horseback through the city, which still bears the scars of the last war before my birth, when Herran overthrew the Valorians and my mother murdered her emperor, I remember how I had wanted to point out that the Herrani’s love for my father exempted my mother from their long-held hate against anything Valorian. How could they even stand to look at her, when her people had enslaved this country, when three decades before my birth, Kestrel’s own father had brutally crushed the Herrani? How convenient for you, I wanted to say, that they adore Etta.
How convenient for you, she might have replied, leveling me with one of her perfectly aimed comments that I have seen strike home in other people.
There is no hiding that I look like her. I used to hope my blond hair would darken with age. I searched my face for traces of my father, but nothing will change my Valorian features. Still, I don’t like to be reminded, and I definitely did not need to be reminded by my mother. She is too keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of others, and on that day we discussed my father, chosen by Death, I feared saying something that would make her be cruel to me. While not a cruel person, she has a gift for knowing what hurts most. She used to show her love by never turning that gift against me.
My home is no palace, despite our royal titles, but rather an elegant villa, smaller than many of the enormous, marble-columned Valorian mansions from the decade-long colonial era. Sunlight splashes through trees that canopy horse paths leading out of the city’s center. The three of us, my father and Roshar side by side, and I behind, ride into the green tunnels created by trees and bushes, cicadas whirring in the branches, to the house that was his as a child, before it was stolen by the Empire. He reclaimed it during the Firstwinter Rebellion, when Herrani slaves rose up against their masters. He once even kept my Valorian mother prisoner within the villa’s east wing.
I ran to my mother on small, bare feet when I learned this, the marble tiles slick and cool against my soles. Even then, I hated pinching lady slippers. In a shocked voice, I announced, Etta captured you.
She frowned. Where did you hear that? she asked.
He locked you up.
Who told you?
Worried I’d get my nurse in trouble, but more worried I’d get myself in trouble, I confessed: Emmah.
Emmah cannot know the whole story, my mother said.
What is the whole story?
Emmah has no right to chatter gossip to my child. It is not her tale to tell.
Tell me.
When you are older. It is not a tale for little ones.
I am old enough for Needles, I said, referring to the set of deadly knives she was training me to wield. Though she had no natural gift for weapons, she had worked for years to be skilled at Needles.
She smoothed flyaway hair off my brow. Yes, he imprisoned me, but I imprisoned him first. Do not worry, tadpole. He is mine, and I am his. Always.
The grounds surrounding my home are still green with summer’s end, pomegranates heavy and dark fists on their low trees. My father’s orange grove has been harvested.
“Did you eat them all?” Roshar asks my father, nodding at the grove. My father’s love for the fruit is legendary. Really, everything about my parents is.
My father allows Roshar a small smile. “Almost.”
“And left none for your dearest, most charming friend, I bet. Well, Arin. You know what this means. Not a drop of my finest Dacran liquor for you later when we listen to young Sid regale us with all the fun she has had breaking foreign hearts.”
My father shifts uncomfortably in his saddle.
“She did run through all the ladies here,” Roshar says.
And there we have it: my third skill.
Roshar smiles at me over his shoulder. “A rake after my own heart.”
I tip my head to him, every bit the arrogant wastrel my father has cautioned me not to be. It is bad behavior in one so recently and easily forgiven, but I simultaneously do not like my father’s silence, and want to prove that it does not bother me.