A Dictionary of Fools (The HouseOf Light And Shadow Book 2)

by P. J. Fox

  That this was Kisten’s son was undeniable.

  She’d seen pictures of her husband as a child, and the resemblance went beyond striking to preternaturally strange. He had his father’s bowed lips, slightly too long nose, and arched eyebrows. A combination of features that shouldn’t, perhaps, have added up to beauty but did. He had his father’s cold, calculating glare, too.

  He was already taller than Aria, and it was plain from his slightly too-thin build that he’d far from stopped growing and would inherit his father’s height as well. His arms were crossed over his chest, one thin hand resting on his forearm.

  “Hello,” said Aria, her own words sounding as though they came from some great distance, “welcome to our home.”

  “I’m Aleah,” the woman drawled. “I don’t suppose he’s mentioned me.”

  He had, just not the fact that he’d had a son with her. Her smile was condescending; she reveled in Aria’s ignorance, and in the shock and pain she undoubtedly saw on Aria’s face.

  “So you’re the current whore,” said the boy.

  “This,” said Aleah, gesturing, “is Talin.”

  “No,” Aria replied politely, “I’m his consort.”

  Aleah’s laugh was as studied as her eyeliner. “Oh, how quaint. I never pictured him as the marrying kind.” She managed to convey a wealth of meaning in just those few words, none of it kind. Her perusal of Aria made it clear that she found Kisten’s choice of bride as amusing as the fact that he was apparently married. She managed to make Aria feel both artless and parochial without saying a word. And Aria, unaccountably, felt inadequate. She was married to Kisten and this was her home, and yet a hateful little voice inside her whispered that she couldn’t compete. Not with this siren, whatever her mileage.

  “Indeed.” Aria paused, considering. “I think we’d better sit down.”

  FIFTY

  They faced each other across the coffee table. A more awkward interview Aria had never endured. If Mohana Himself had stepped from the fireplace and offered to magic her mother here instead for another lecture on licked cupcakes and the evils of premarital sex, Aria would have blessed Him for His generosity and agreed immediately.

  She picked her cup up, realized it was empty and put it down again.

  She’d learned, in the last hour or so, that Talin was in fact thirteen and had been conceived during a drug-fueled orgy when Kisten was nineteen and on shore leave. He’d had sex with four women and two men that night, if Aleah remembered correctly, and so had demanded a paternity test despite the overwhelming evidence that this was indeed his child. Aleah’s lip had curled again, this time in disgust, when she’d relayed that part.

  Aria, for her part, was beyond shocked that Aleah would discuss this in front of Talin.

  But Talin, far from appearing discomfited by the interchange, had produced a case of cigarettes and begun smoking. And he’d continued to smoke, looking coolly out the window, as his mother laid out the sordid précis of his life so far. Aria considered telling him not to, decided that anything that kept him busy was probably a good thing, and wished his father would come home.

  Talin having been conclusively proven to be Kisten’s—Aleah doubted that either of the other men had been candidates, although Kisten seemed to have considered this outcome almost as likely—Kisten had agreed to a sizeable child support settlement. Which had, to his credit, been paid promptly and in full these thirteen years.

  He hadn’t, however, met his son.

  Aria was completely taken aback by this revelation. Never met him? How was that even possible? Moreover, the behavior that Aleah was describing sounded nothing like the Kisten she knew. Kisten, who gave lectures on responsibility practically at the drop of a hat. Kisten, who gave every indication of loving children. Despite his inability to relate to them.

  Talin hadn’t even known who his father was until this very morning, when Aleah had announced—out of the blue—that they were going to meet him. Talin’s quirk of the eyebrow when his mother reached this point in her narrative was the first reaction that Aria had seen from him so far. She couldn’t tell what it meant, though; he might as easily be morbidly amused or repelled or both. All she knew was that this supposed thirteen year old was acting more like a man three times his age.

  Talin had known that he was related to someone in the royal house, but he hadn’t known who. He had, apparently, assumed that his parent must have been the by-blow of an aristocrat and a slave. “That my father was the prince,” he interjected unexpectedly, holding his cigarette with a casually practiced hand, “had never occurred to me.” His bark of laughter was an awful, mirthless sound. “Adopted children, bastards and other denizens of the great unwanted all fantasize about finding out that their birth father is a prince.” He leaned forward, flicked ash into a cup and leaned back again. “Searching for them all these years, et cetera.”

  Aria understood something of his anger. Finding out that your father was a prince was supposed to be a good thing. But while Kisten was doing as he pleased and denying himself nothing, Talin had grown up fatherless, the butt of cruel jokes, in a brothel. Aria wasn’t sure, at first, that she’d heard that part right. But evidently, after parting from Kisten, Aleah’s fortunes had taken a turn for the worse and she’d somehow ended up working in a brothel. No explanation was given as to how she’d spent the child support. Clearly not on Talin. Looking at her, at how thin she was and how nervous she was under her surface veneer of calm, Aria guessed some kind of addiction.

  She’d learned a lot about addiction, lately. Her other maid, Garja’s assistant and one of Kisten’s little pets, was a recovering opium addict. Resolutely, she poured herself another cup of coffee. She poured Talin another one, too. She hadn’t thought of children as drinking coffee but, then again, she hadn’t thought of them smoking either. Aleah nudged her cup forward, not bothering to ask, as though Aria were some tavern doxy. She put the coffee pot down. Aleah could starve.

  The faintest ghost of a smile crossed Talin’s face. The mask was back in place by the time she realized she’d seen it. He didn’t touch his coffee, though, only lit another cigarette and stared out the window.

  No one seemed too clear on what kind of education Talin had had. Aleah recalled vaguely that there had been some issue with truancy, somewhere, but her mind had been occupied with other matters. Talin had only escaped a criminal record by virtue of their home province not having terribly reliable police. He knew how to read, Aleah knew that much; one of the other whores at the brothel had taught him.

  From what Aria gathered—with absolutely no help from Talin himself, who flatly refused to answer questions and kept referring to her as a whore and the flavor of the week—he’d spent a good amount of his short and deprived life on the streets, mixing with other, equally fatherless urchins.

  Aleah had, until recently, been content to ignore him. She didn’t seem to care if he won the imperial prize for physics or rotted away in some gutter. But her fortunes had improved, recently, by the acquisition of a new man-friend. A new, wealthy man-friend who’d promised to support her. Talin, it seemed, had been an impediment.

  Aleah waved her hand airily. “He’s older now, and difficult. I can’t control him and, well, you see what he’s like.” What Aria saw was a child who’d suffered at the hands of a neglectful mother, but she kept her mouth shut. “Ishmael doesn’t care for him—”

  Talin laughed again. “Ishmael cared for me a little too much.”

  The meaning of that statement was all too clear. Aleah’s mouth thinned down in anger. She was, Aria adjudged, the kind who hit. Aria had grown up with one, a brittle, hysterical woman driven half mad by what she perceived as the injustice of life, and they were all the same. You only needed to see that face once, for it to be imprinted on your mind forever.

  Aria knew her husband well enough to know that of this dimension, at least, he was ignorant. She fantasized about putting Aleah’s eyes out with a fork.

  “So now,�
� Aleah purred in that slow, affected drawl, “he’s your problem.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Aria, confused more by Aleah’s reference to her own son as a problem than by the implication of her assertion. Talin’s head whipped around; he was as shocked by this announcement as she was. God damn that cunt to the netherest region of Hell.

  “Ishmael and I are going traveling.”

  Aria didn’t know what she would have done if, at that exact minute, Kisten hadn’t walked in.

  He froze in place.

  He’d turned as pale as a ghost, and for one horrifying moment Aria thought he was going to have heart failure. She’d never seen him so tense—or, for that matter, so upset. He glanced at Aleah, dismissed her, and stared at Talin as though watching the First Emperor rise from the dead. Talin stared challengingly back. Neither of them displayed what Aria would have called human emotion. She’d never seen two colder, more self-contained people in her life. No one spoke, and the silence stretched. Aria watched them, her heart in her throat, trying to figure out what was happening. She had no frame of reference for the scene unfolding in front of her and understood nothing except that it was bad.

  Was he angry? Shocked? Happy, even? She couldn’t tell; his face was a mask as he took his first look at the son he’d never seen. That he’d recognized Talin immediately went without saying. Kisten, too, could hardly have failed to see the resemblance. Aria wondered what it was like for him, looking at his younger self as though in a mirror.

  Aleah smiled at her former lover, the man she hadn’t seen in over a decade. “Hello,” she said.

  Kisten’s eyes flickered to her, but he said nothing.

  She lolled comfortably on the couch, like a lion sunning itself on a rock, making a point of how unaffected she was by these proceedings. “This is Talin,” she said, gesturing.

  “Talin?” he thundered, making Aria jump. “God, woman, that’s the worst name I’ve ever heard!”

  “I wrote and told you his name,” said Aleah, lighting a cigarette of her own. “Just like I wrote and told you that he was a pain in the ass. Like his father.” She exhaled, her eyes fixed on Kisten’s. And Aria learned something else she hadn’t known. She’d been married to her husband for the better part of a year and she’d had no idea that he was in regular contact with this woman. He’d mentioned Aleah only once, in the context of some story he’d been telling, describing her as a casual fling. She was, Aria remembered now, several years older than Kisten. She looked it.

  “Yes,” said Kisten, “but this is my first chance to tell you how ridiculous it is!”

  “Whose fault is that?” asked Aleah, still unmoved.

  Aria, who’d been forgotten, thought that Talin was a perfectly lovely name. But, then again, her standards were different. She’d been named for a piece of music and her sister was named for a mythical princess. Talin’s namesake was the hero of a book that had been popular with teenaged girls and was now an entertainment franchise, something about djinns and shapeshifters and forbidden love. Aria had read the books and loved them.

  Kisten needed to relax. Aria devoutly hoped he would, before there was violence. The fictional Talin was the stuff of girls’ fantasies, so he could do worse for associations; and besides, this was a wretched introduction for the boy. Talin thought so, too; the look he’d turned on his father was positively malevolent.

  “It’s not like you were there to name him,” Aleah continued, an edge to her voice, “you worthless sack of shit.”

  “I will not be spoken to like that in my own house,” said Kisten coldly.

  “If the shoe fits,” Talin muttered, staring into the depths of his coffee cup.

  “Excuse me?”

  Talin looked up. Real fire flashed in his eyes, for the first time. Apparently, he’d reached the end of his internal rope. Aria was relieved, in a way, to see the façade crack; maybe he was a child after all. And then he opened his mouth and she thought, oh, no.

  “Growing up in Achren, I met men half your age who, despite not having two bits to rub together and being illiterate besides, stepped up and took care of their children as best they could. But you, who have everything, never managed to so much as send me a card. What would it have cost you,” he demanded, “to see that I had food to eat and a roof over my head?

  “I don’t care how much you despise my mother, or if she’s such a witch that you can’t bear to be in the same room with her, or what she’s done to you at all, because this isn’t about you. You’re supposed to be an adult! You deal with horrid people every day, don’t you?” He paused, catching his breath. “Well, the difference between them and her is that you slept with her, you created a life with her, and that life is me and I hate you!”

  His thin chest heaved. The silence was sudden and complete. Underneath his studied indifference was rage, and underneath his rage was a little boy’s sorrow at being abandoned and confusion over why, despite his best efforts to make himself lovable, he still wasn’t wanted.

  Talin got up and stormed out, brushing past Setji. The financial commissioner had arrived for tea and now stood in the door, looking between Aleah, Aria and Kisten and trying to figure out what was going on. Aria wondered if she should go after Talin. He was very articulate for a teenager, she thought hopefully. She glanced over at Setji. She’d forgotten all about him. Setji, for his part, looked disinclined to move or otherwise draw attention.

  “His accent is atrocious,” said Kisten.

  “Really?” screeched Aleah. “That’s all you can come up with?”

  The financial commissioner cleared his throat. “I think,” he said delicately, “that I should call again at another time.”

  Kisten turned. “You can throw yourself down a well for all I care.”

  “Indeed. The sewer bonds,” Setji agreed placatingly, “can wait.”

  “Oh, fuck the sewer bonds!” Kisten shouted. He sank down onto the couch next to Aria and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as he rested his head in his hand.

  Setji wisely departed.

  No one spoke.

  Aleah lit another cigarette.

  If Aria hadn’t known better, she’d have thought that the old witch was enjoying the entertainment. She certainly wasn’t showing any concern for her son’s welfare—the son, Aria realized, who was now lost somewhere in the compound. Surrounded by weapons.

  Aria looked back and forth between Kisten and his former lover, and then stood. “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said firmly. “To talk.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Kisten listened in silence as Aleah admitted it all: the misspent funds, the men, the abuse. The drugs. The fact that his own son had been left to fend for himself in the slums of Achren, a hellhole on Charon III, while his so-called mother disported herself with strange men.

  And his father ignored his existence. Aria would never forgive him. Frankly, he didn’t expect her to. He doubted if he’d ever be able to forgive himself. He’d known as soon as he’d seen the boy that something was wrong. His tenure at Palawan had taught him to recognize certain things, in himself and others. And the agonizing, halting progress of his own recovery had taught him more. He understood when he was looking at someone who’d been tortured. Talin’s whole demeanor screamed tension and fear and the need to put up a fence between him and the world.

  How had this happened? And how was it that Kisten was only learning about his son’s problems now?

  Aleah had denied it all, at first, until he’d wrenched her off the couch and pinned her to the coffee table, threatening to wring her neck. He’d knocked the air out of her and it was a few minutes before she recovered her powers of speech, but then she’d been willing enough. He, for his part, had been proud of his restraint. He’d wanted to kill her as badly as he’d ever wanted to kill anyone, and he’d wanted to kill quite a few people. And had killed them. He didn’t know the exact number; he didn’t keep notches on his bedpost. But he still wasn’t entirely sure that Aleah wouldn’t end up
among them. She deserved to.

  Spilled liquid and broken china littered the floor, along with the upended coffee pot. The silver had dented when he’d stepped on it, but that at least could be repaired. He’d resumed his seat on the couch opposite, and watched Aleah without moving as she continued her recitation.

  Aleah’s latest punter had been using Talin as a plaything for some time before she either sobered up enough to notice or got jealous of the attention. While she’d been fine with the notion of her—their—son roaming the streets instead of attending school, she’d drawn the line at buggery. Or competition, as he thought more likely. I draw the line at buggery, he remembered that long ago master yelling, a stodgy old crust of a thing whose hatred for the practice disguised an unquenchable yearning to participate.

  Eventually, Aleah had decided that the right course of action was to deliver the unwanted parcel to his father. Casting off Ishmael hadn’t even crossed her mind. He was rich; she was almost forty. Whores aged faster than other women; forty might be two steps from the cradle to a respectable matron, but it was ancient for a woman who made her living by enticing men. He wondered, idly, how many men had had her since Talin was born.

  “Had you wished to retire and become a respectable woman,” he said acidly, “that could have been arranged.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “I could have put myself under the thumb of some man.”

  With what he paid in child support—more per month than some men earned in a year—she shouldn’t have been under anyone’s thumb. Renta received considerably less and wanted for nothing. And if, somehow, these vast sums hadn’t been enough to sustain them, he would have given her more. This was his child.