by T. A. Miles
He had learned through letting his father gradually plod over topics that his sisters had long ago left the house to marry—Korsten knew this regarding two of his sisters since all of them had been of marriageable age at the time he left for Haddowyn, but he didn’t interrupt Sethaniel’s rehashing of any information, whether or not it was new. Unfortunately, two of his three sisters had died, one of illness that likely had nothing to do with demons and the other of having relocated with her husband too far north. At the time, as far as Sethaniel knew, he had lost his second child to the war. Korsten’s third sister resided further inland and his cousin, who had been raised in the household as if a sister remained in Cenily. The house, by the sound of it, was beyond its days of being filled with children and social affairs. Political affairs occurred primarily just to the north—in Indhovan, as it happened—and Sethaniel’s participation seemed to be more advisory than authoritative. His authority appeared more domestic and mainly out of respect for his years. Cenily had seen two governors since Korsten’s leaving and the man currently holding power was one who respected Sethaniel’s years, but perhaps little more. It sounded, by Sethaniel’s account, as if he were Korsten’s age, which meant it likely that he had been one of the many children running wildly over the grounds of the Brierly home, back when Sethaniel’s role was as a friend and supporter of the governor. Sethaniel had been awarded land, title, and respect as a scholar and the grandson of a man who had been a military hero in his day. It had all settled to this, to a tired scholar waiting out his hours with too much presence to be ignored, but not enough vigor to be greatly valued outside of his home. Mention of such things made Korsten curious. He was decided that he would spend more time in the library before leaving, which he would certainly have to do. The war could spare these hours, though. These hours could well be the last and the best he would ever have with his father.
His father seemed content to talk. He repeated himself frequently and Korsten let him. More than once Sethaniel brought up the subject of Korsten’s mother. Each time it seemed only to revisit the fact that Korsten had asked about his age at the time of her death. Korsten had thus far failed to take it past that point, but tried once more anyway.
“I honestly couldn’t remember,” he said to Sethaniel, as if he hadn’t said it more than once already. “At times when I was away, I recalled my adolescence with her still present, but perhaps it was my idea of what may have been … ignoring what was. After a point, all that really crossed my mind was the fact that she had died. When or how escaped. I let it go, I suppose.”
Sethaniel nodded while he listened. This had been the point where his aged mind leapt to another topic that he may have been on once before, but Korsten worked a little harder to push onward this time, deciding to utilize subjects he had been deliberately avoiding.
“There was a letter, though,” Korsten said, “written to Fand, which more or less explained that I’d been disowned, and that you’d adopted an heir to replace me.”
“I wrote no such letter,” Sethaniel said in a matter-of-fact tone that erred on perturbed with the punctuated raising of his eyebrows.
Korsten also knew in that moment that he and his father had pulled out of the maelstrom of repeated memory their conversation had previously been caught up in. He continued to lead them away with his next words, simultaneously putting more confirmation onto his suspicions regarding the demon’s sway over not only him, but many in Haddowyn. “Fand received one nonetheless. I believe now that it may have been a forgery.”
Just as the letter from Renmyr’s father that day, the day leading to Korsten’s final hours in Haddowyn. It still chilled Korsten to think back on the impersonal fashion the letter had been written, though the handwriting appeared as if it could have belonged to no one other than Ithan Camirey. Fand must have been similarly fooled … similarly influenced throughout the years.
Sethaniel seemed somewhat puzzled by Korsten’s conclusion. And then he said, not quite irrelevantly, “I thought you were dead.”
Korsten felt immediately upset by those words, but he managed to smile at least a little. “I’m very much alive.”
“And a mage,” his father said. It was difficult to determine what the simplicity of the statement may have meant.
Korsten nodded once. “And a mage, yes.”
“How?” his father asked next, and Korsten committed the next hour, or however long it should take, to explaining things as much as he could in a way that Sethaniel would be able to digest, that they might come to a mutual point of understanding that the distance behind them may never be recovered, but also that it no longer mattered. What mattered between them now were these moments and any that were to follow. Such was the tone Korsten considered and maintained throughout their conversation, and yet he couldn’t help but to be aware of the fact that he avoided talk of Renmyr beyond the man’s betrayal against Edrinor, and that he stepped around what Merran may have been to him beyond a friend and ally. At the same time, he withheld expressing just how inspired he was by Ashwin. Closer to the topic of home, he stopped short of asking whether or not Sethaniel recalled just what had been the catalyst to sending Korsten away at all. Korsten knew that part wasn’t a lie. Dressing in a female disguise had been the culmination of countless rebellious acts which Korsten had no desire to recount, now that they were resurfacing. He remembered the moments all too clearly. And he remembered Firard Mortannis, his first lover, before the one who would twist his already distorted world, and make a dark and dismal fantasy out of a childish and selfish misery.
Korsten felt so ashamed. He’d as much as set a lure to bait the demon out of the shadows and into his life. Paranoia tapped at the back of his mind while he began to wonder just how long the demon may have been in the periphery of his senses, stalking. He would not go so far as to blame anything, not even a demon, for his poor judgment as a very young person. He’d known how his heart’s desires were leaning throughout his childhood. Taunting the other boys had in part stemmed of attractions he was too immature to make proper sense of; he knew that now. Sethaniel may have noticed this awkwardness, yes, but how much of the confrontation over the topic was initiated by Korsten himself? They both shared blame in a dire miscommunication, and Korsten didn’t know if he was more coward or compassionate for not laying the subject down in front of his father now.
What difference would it make? How much of it did Sethaniel even remember? Perhaps he recalled much and didn’t want to discuss it … because it angered him or maybe because it shamed him. Did Korsten want to know either way?
In the moment, Korsten was decided that he didn’t. If they could both be civil to each other in their silence on the topic, and in the meantime appreciate that they’d been granted some time in this very late hour of Sethaniel’s life … did exoneration or acceptance matter?
The question held tight to Korsten’s conscience. Its grip was as needles in his soul, but he would endure it in silence, for now.
Sethaniel had fallen asleep in his chair during some part of their conversation. When Korsten realized that, he let the elder be. For several moments he watched the Brierly patriarch appearing decidedly harmless. Korsten’s memory washed the gray and white hairs brown and smoothed the lines, barring those his natural frown of concentration created. The harsh disciplinarian and berating antagonist wasn’t there. There was only Sethaniel Brierly, parent and stranger.
Korsten smiled unhappily. Mixed feelings of remorse, resignation, and relief didn’t allow him to do much else. At its absolute barest, it was a strange circumstance. Fleshed out, it very nearly defied comprehension.
Stop thinking about it now, Korsten told himself. He lowered his gaze from his father’s face, to the book lying open on the table. Words were diligently penned across the pages. Korsten leaned close enough to see that it was a journal. Glancing over his own name, a pang of anxiety attacked his insides, but he overcame it quickly enough when he
gleaned words relating archaically to battle and recalled that he had been named after his grandfather. The man had died when Korsten was far too young to remember anything about him personally. The strongest detail memory would serve was Fand at one time telling him that Korsten had not been a name in their part of Edrinor, but rather some form of title. How his ancestor had earned it and what it meant….
Korsten imagined he could learn by reading the journal his father may have been reminiscing over. He decided it was best if he didn’t discover just what Sethaniel may have been hoping for in a son. Shortly afterward, he decided he may have been regarding the matter unfairly. It may have been a simple honor, with no expectations attached. Clearly it was going to take some time to fully shake the impressions and habits he’d formed over his entire adult life where his father was concerned.
He looked to Sethaniel once again, but his attention was pulled to a stirring elsewhere in the room. It was a subtle layering of creaks, brief and possibly only the settling of the house’s old bones. Korsten had been prepared for worse by his experience hunting with Merran, and by his experience before becoming a mage as well. Though he wasn’t interested in considering a demonic invasion into his childhood home, he stepped away from the table anyway.
Daylight had shifted from morning and the shadows had been lifted from one place and laid out elsewhere, vaguely altering the dimensions of the space. Korsten was reminded again that, while it was a good sized library, it was not as large as he had envisioned it when a child, nor were the shelves as tall. They still stood higher than a person, but to a small boy they were as great in height as the poplars of the far northern woods. Further than Haddowyn, these woods. The woods his mother had spoken of in bedtime stories existed beyond the borders of men in their world.
Korsten came to the aisle between the shelves nearest the table and braced his hand lightly against the aging wood. He looked to the opposite end at a space of wall housing scroll racks. The light from a wall sconce just above it wavered erratically, giving life to shadow that had nothing to do with demons, but Korsten’s mind had strayed to other curiosities than the movement of air and time within the library. Curiosities abounded in the tales his mother had told him, always of the sea or a forest. The sea, they had outside of their window. The forests of her mythical north….
Had she been referring to Morenne? Perhaps it was someplace even beyond the region of their northern enemies … or someplace entirely evolved of her imagination. It mystified him to consider how pristine his memory of her was. His own hair color and complexion were hers, it was true—even the depth of his eyes was attributed to his mother, though the color was Sethaniel’s—but even so, his memory retained more than her coloring or simply their shared aspects. He recalled her features, in such a way that if he’d had any skill at painting, he’d have been able to recreate her visage exactingly. He remembered the way she moved, delicate and precise as hummingbirds to flowers. Her voice, smooth as water whispering through sand, was still so clear to him.
And yet, somehow he’d forgotten not only when she had died, but how.
He must have blocked it deliberately when he was young, and just as determinedly held onto the memory of her presence. It must have been his refusal to let her go which offered the demon even more material to work with in shaping its lies. What lies had it told to Renmyr? He could only wonder.
If he’d truly meant to do so, the action was precluded by the abrupt dropping of a book onto the floor several steps from where he stood. His gaze went to the book first, and the minor cloud of dust that rolled over the tiles upon impact. The spine took the brunt of the fall, causing the book to collapse open in either direction. Korsten’s eyes traveled from the splayed pages to the space the book had come from, claimed now by a neighboring book that had fallen sideways as a result. Presumably, the master of the library had been careless filing the tome.
Korsten walked over to it and crouched down. He rotated the book so that the pages were upright, glancing over the words in the process of drawing it closed. The content belonged to a history book, one of several in Sethaniel’s vault of words. Standing with the book in both hands—it was no small account of the past—Korsten looked over his shoulder belatedly to see if the sound of it hitting the floor had stirred his father. If it had, Sethaniel wasn’t leaving his chair over it. Balancing the tome in one arm, Korsten freed a hand to move the smaller book that had fallen into its place on the shelf. He righted it, then set about hefting the larger volume back onto the shelf.
He hesitated when he felt a presence entering the room. His awareness of them preceded their opening the door. Korsten waited for them to close the door and followed their movement visually on the other side of the bookshelves before finishing the task of pushing the book back into its rightful place. The individual’s footsteps were not heavy, but were helplessly intrusive in the otherwise stillness of the library. When they came around the corner of the aisle, Korsten glanced at them sidelong. It was the man from the garden, who had been speaking with Lerissa, who was once again looking at Korsten with recognition that would not do. The advantage was entirely unfair.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize you in return,” Korsten said to the man before he had time to settle into comfortable—or rather, uncomfortable—staring.
“I don’t expect you to, I suppose,” was the reply, and Korsten had to stop himself considering this person an elder. In truth, they were likely very close to the same age. So, in reality, it was Korsten who held the less fair advantage.
Korsten turned to face him fully. He had a reasonably thick build, medium brown hair, and brown eyes. Many men in the southeast of Edrinor appeared as he did; medium in color and build with a height ranging slightly above many other parts of Edrinor. Only the northern areas matched height with the same frequency. The north tended lighter eyes on average as well.
Memories of his mother edged forward again. Her red hair, light eyes, and pale complexion were not common in Cenily. Her red hair, in fact, made her unusual … as it had Korsten. While there wasn’t an overabundance of redheads in Haddowyn, the notion of redder coloring had not been entirely foreign there.
“She was from the north,” Korsten murmured, mostly to himself.
The other man overheard. “Who was?”
“My mother,” Korsten replied, looking to the books beside him as a detail he’d long known, but lately forgotten slipped back into place. It felt strange that he had never forgotten his mother, but had misplaced so many specific details, such as when and how she died … where she had come from … what her name was?
And that was when the other man said, “Zerxa was a unique woman. As a child I felt somewhat intimidated by her. Her presence was….”
Korsten looked at him again. “Was what?”
“Magical,” the other man answered, his gaze moving over Korsten as if he were only just noticing the mage aspects. Or perhaps he was noting the similarities between Korsten and his mother.
Zerxa….
“What’s your name, if I may ask it?” Korsten said to his present company.
“Darlevan,” the man answered, and something more slipped into its proper place.
“Dar,” Korsten recalled with unexpected immediacy. He had been one of Sethaniel’s fosterlings.
Traces of a smile drew attention to the age lines on the other man’s face for a brief moment. And then a mutual unease slipped into the space between them as Korsten sorted out why Darlevan was still living in the house, and Darlevan became aware of such sorting.
“Your father believed you were dead,” Dar began to explain, but Korsten stopped him with a quickly upheld hand.
“I understand why he would have named you his heir.” Korsten lowered his hand, and his gaze briefly with it. Difficult and embarrassing as his skewed memory of the circumstances were, it did make sense and he understood with disarming clarity that it was
for the better. “Truth be told, I’m in no position to inherit, living or not. I’m glad that you’re here.”
Whatever Darlevan may have expected, his expression when Korsten looked at him again made it clear that acceptance and understanding had not been it.
“I have other responsibilities,” Korsten explained, and left it there. There were other matters on his mind now. “Did you have children?”
Darlevan nodded slowly, again as if caught off guard by either Korsten’s words or his behavior, possibly both. “Four sons.”
“Four? Where are they now?”
“Off to war,” Darlevan replied, nodding as if ‘the war’ were directly neighboring. Indhovan considered, it may have been.
Korsten left the topic alone for the moment. “And your wife?”
“Here, helping to look after Sethaniel … and me.”
That small bit of humor wasn’t lost on Korsten, but he couldn’t smile as much as he might have under different circumstances. It had nothing to do with Darlevan, and everything to do with the war’s impact on their home. Cenily had not been attacked, but it had been drained. The house was all but empty now, and maybe the city was as well … its vitality stolen drop by drop. The Vadryn were more thorough than anyone could have anticipated. Most people weren’t even fully aware of their involvement.
It was because the truth of demons had been administered with the stealth of disease. They’d been set loose, like beetles in a cellar. They found cracks to hide in, infesting gradually, unnoticed until their population had grown enough that they were competing for food and bolder in how and where they would acquire it. And now, how to be rid of them and the plague they carried? Was Edrinor lost, no matter the outcome with Morenne? It was overwhelming to think about sometimes.
