The villa glows under the rising sun, the windows winking. Its set of peaked roofs rise and fall, sloping down to the west. The glass atrium is a pointed jewel. As my boots crunch gravel covering the walk, the front door opens, and a tall, gray-and-black-haired woman stands on the threshold. Sarsine, my father’s cousin and chief counselor, looks much like him. Same steely hair, same gray eyes. Bold brow and large hands. Her craggy face hardens with disapproval as she appraises me.
I brush imaginary dust from the shoulders of my jacket, a man’s garment I had made for me in Ethin. I tug at the cuffs. My boots are less than shiny. Still, I can play my part. Ne’er-do-well, Sarsine silently calls me. Bad apple.
Fine. I am.
I grin at her behind my father’s back as he and Roshar enter the villa. “Better late than never,” I whisper sideways.
“Better never, or so some have said in your absence.” Sarsine holds my gaze as I hear the men’s footfalls diminish into the villa’s interior. “You wasted countless resources in our search for you. Your parents grieved each day you were gone. Yet here you stand, smiling cheerfully, without a care in the world. Arin let you off easy, I see.”
“No one can hold anything against me for long. I am too adorable. It is my handsome face. My winning charm. All the ladies say so.”
Sarsine looks as though she would like to slap me. “May the heart you break one day be your own.”
I do not give Sarsine the satisfaction of knowing her curse has already come to pass.
I linger in the salon where my mother’s piano hulks, its shining black shape as big as the boulder of guilt that rests on my chest. I touch the keys lightly, soundlessly, remembering my awe as a child to see my mother play, the simple harmonies I initially produced, how I grew in skill only to realize that I would never be more than merely good. For a few moments, I do not know how long, I believe the disquiet in my belly is shame, but then I realize it is more than that. It is fear of seeing her. Frustrated with myself, annoyed with the salon’s stillness, how it now seems like a smug, knowing witness to my cowardice, I bound up the stairs to the east wing, boots loud on polished oak.
On the outermost door to my mother’s suite, the kestrel carved into its wood peers down at me with narrow-eyed reproach, its expression dangerous though its body is small, its wingspan dainty, its tailfeathers spread in a dark-patterned fan. The door is not locked. My heart raps against my ribs. The indigo flowered rug of the empty greeting room deadens the sound of my boots. The quiet reminds me that my mother might be sleeping. I must not wake her. I walk softly but swiftly through her suite, hoping I can make everything right, that the queen’s forgiveness will be as easy to receive as the king’s. Nothing has been done that cannot be undone, surely. My mother will be well again. She will recover from this sickness. It is a matter of time. She is Queen Kestrel, master of spies. She survived so much. She is daunted by no one. Nothing.
I lift a vow to the god of souls, in whom I half believe. The god, who rules love, brokers deals for what mortals want most. Save her, I plead, and I will marry to please my parents.
As I move through each gray-and-pearl-colored room of the suite, I imagine telling my mother my vow. She will smile, and love me like she once did.
I pause before her bedchamber. The door is ajar. Beyond it, the tiny form of my mother rests under mounds of blankets though it is not so cold; autumn is not here yet. She has the body of a child. I shot up past her years ago. Towering over her used to give me some satisfaction, but now she looks too small, like she will dwindle away. Her loose hair, undulled by age, is a fire against the bedsheets. Her dagger, normally worn at her hip as I do mine, hangs from its hook on the bedpost. My father kneels next to the bed, his back to me, his hand on hers, his shoulders bowed. My mother doesn’t see me standing at the door. She sees only him. Her whisper reaches me: “I don’t want to die.”
“Little Fists.” My father’s voice is rough. “You won’t die.”
“I don’t want you to grieve. I don’t want to leave you alone in this world.”
My father is silent. I know without seeing his face what is there: his devastation. His large fingers trace the thin gold ring on her smallest finger. He made it for me, my mother told me, her face luminous with memory.
My mother says, “Who will protect you when I’m gone?”
My father, all muscle and strength, gently presses his face into her palm.
“I worry,” she says.
His shoulders lift and fall. Hurt burns my throat. I am like my father and mother: full of grief. And I am me, too: so jealous. I know it is wrong. Selfish. But I wish my mother worried about me, that it was me she wanted to protect, for me that she wished to live.
I know I am second best. I cannot measure up to their love for each other. Yet I want to be at least enough.
“Sid has returned,” my father says.
“She has?”
“You must not worry. You will live. And I have her.”
My mother sighs. “No,” she whispers, “you don’t.”
When I enter my rooms, which were my father’s rooms when he was a child, before the invasion, when Valorian soldiers forced their way into this house and murdered his family, I find Emmah going through my wardrobe, unwrapping my clothes from their tissue paper shrouds. The paper rustles as she catches sight of me and grips the clothes. Her deeply wrinkled face splits into a smile. “Sid! You sneak. How dare you skulk away for months on end!” She offers her cheek. “Come and give your nurse a kiss.”
I do, grateful that if she sees anything wrong in my expression, if she can sense how my mother’s words stamped down into my chest, heavy as a war horse’s hoof, she makes no mention of it. She still wears the little gold earrings I made for her when I was a child. My father refused to teach me how to blacksmith, saying he did not like to remember how he’d been forced to learn the skill, and no child of his would be made to work. I argued that this was not smithing, it was jewelry making, and if he had made my mother’s ring, surely he could help me. I want to make something Emmah loves, I said, and he smiled, and said, All right. Emmah cried when she unfolded the velvet I had wrapped around her Ninarrith gift.
She holds my face between her palms, green eyes shining. They are pretty, and make me wonder, as I often have, how she looked before the war. Her wrinkles were not caused by age—she is no older than my parents—but by fire or acid. Once, when I was little, I asked my parents what happened to Emmah. You must never ask her, my mother ordered, appalled. More gently, my father explained that we could not expect to know all that the Herrani had suffered during the invasion, when General Trajan, my Valorian grandfather, conquered this country and enslaved its people, or during the decade of colonization that followed.
You love Emmah, don’t you? my father said.
I nodded.
Then don’t pry.
But Roshar has scars on his face, I said. And I love him, and I asked him, and he told me.
What did he say?
That Arin did it, I answered. When I saw my parents’ startled expressions, I hastily added, I mean, Arin the tiger. Not you, Etta. Roshar said his tiger did it, that bad boy.
Dear one, my mother said, Roshar lied.
My father touched my cheek. He explained, Some truths are too hard to say.