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

by P. J. Fox

  He wrestled himself under control. “The child should have been provided for,” he said calmly.

  Aleah shrugged.

  “You told me things were fine.”

  “And you took my word on that,” she countered. “You could have visited us and made that determination for yourself, but you never did. Because we were beneath your notice.”

  “So that’s what this is about.” All emotion left his voice. She’d been punishing his child out of hatred for him. That her pregnancy hadn’t been an accident, he’d known at the time. As young and stupid as he was. No woman with access to modern medical care, particularly one as mercenary as Aleah, conceived a child when she didn’t want to. Talin was her golden ticket to child support, which he’d paid. He’d thought he’d given her what she wanted, and had—right up until this moment—been too naïve to see that her wants had been more than financial. Talin was supposed to cement their bond and when he hadn’t, she’d taken her frustration out on him. A total innocent.

  “A woman needs security in her old age,” said Aleah.

  “You thought I’d come.” It wasn’t a question.

  “But you were too busy playing house with Ms. Perfect. How old is she, anyway? Sixteen?” There was a raw edge to Aleah’s voice. Kisten’s mouth thinned, and Aleah laughed. There was real pain in that noise, but he didn’t care. He wanted her to hurt. He hated her. “What,” she asked bitingly, “afraid that your little chickadee will be upset?” She’d chosen to cover her hurt and jealousy with venom. “I was surprised to find out that you’d married someone so…dull.”

  “Which is proof of how little you know me.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure she bakes a delicious scone and doesn’t make a peep when you come home at all hours.”

  “Leave Aria out of this,” he grated. He knew perfectly well that she’d gone after the boy; she was the kind of warm, loving, maternal person that Aleah wasn’t—that he, in his supreme foolishness, had assumed all women were at heart. Aleah had hardly been a flower of virtue when he’d known her, but neither had he been. And he’d assumed that, whatever their station in life, all mothers loved their children. His own mother certainly did, and Sabihah was devoted to her family. Several of Renta’s charges had children, and took excellent care of them. Aleah was right in that he’d made a mistake, but his mistake hadn’t been not visiting. His mistake had been trusting her to tell the truth—in trusting her to be a decent human being. He told her as much, and saw with satisfaction that the words stung.

  “I wasn’t meant to be a mother.”

  “You chose to have a child!”

  “So did you!” she cried, her voice raw.

  He stopped, stood, and began to pace. Broken china crunched under his boots as he traversed the carpet. “Why are you here?” he asked finally.

  “To congratulate you on becoming a parent.”

  “So you’re washing your hands of him. Just like that.”

  “Surely even you can see that it’s what’s best for the boy.”

  Kisten stared down at the cream and sugar spattering the carpet’s muted design. He didn’t know the first thing about raising children, and was not suited to the task. Aria was. If he’d had children with Aria—or Renta, for that matter—it would have been different. He could have been a part of the child’s life, knowing that the influence of his mother would counteract his own. Aria was all the things he wasn’t; she balanced him. But he and Aleah couldn’t have raised a child together; he’d known it then and he knew it now.

  Aria was no doubt comforting Talin, or some such, while all he wanted to do was thrash the living daylights out of the little monster for addressing him so rudely—even as he asked himself what kind of respect he should command. The situation made him feel hopeless, which was undoubtedly why he’d ignored it for so long. He’d always thought that sometime, his life would be more stable and he’d be a better man, the kind of man who enriched his son’s life with his presence. But months had turned into years and now Talin was thirteen years old and Kisten had no one to blame for his son’s distress except himself.

  Under Alliance law, Aleah had every right to do what she was doing. Although a child often remained with his mother after his parents separated, the law imposed no duty on her to care for him. Ultimately, the father bore sole responsibility for his child’s care. If Aleah wanted to leave Talin here and never see him again, then that was her choice.

  Kisten was torn between hatred for Aleah, disgust for himself, relief that his son was no longer being used as some overfed merchant’s catamite, and terror over the realization that—for the first time in his life—he had no idea what to do next.

  He had to discuss this situation with Aria. If she’d even consent to be in the same room with him, which he doubted. Renta’s words came back to him with horrible clarity, her bizarrely prophetic statement that Aria would find out. Even if he’d decided to act on Renta’s advice, which he had to admit he wouldn’t have, it still would have been too late. Aleah must have been arriving at the residence literally at the same time Kisten was lying in bed with his mistress.

  “You’ll remain here,” he told her, “until I decide you can leave.” Let her make of that what she would, the venomous bitch. If she thought she had a chance of renewing old acquaintances, then so much the better. She’d be less motivated to tax the guards by trying to slip out the minute he turned his back. He needed to keep an eye on her, until he decided what to do.

  Aleah seemed to relax, thinking she’d made a coup. “As you wish.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  He found her on the verandah, curled up in her favorite chair with a novel that she wasn’t reading. Rain poured down, sluicing through the gutters and dripping in huge fat drops from the overhanging roof. The air out here was cool, and smelled of moss and minerals and wet terra cotta. She looked so small, and so sad, a delicate little elf exiled from her garden.

  She was staring down at nothing, and hadn’t looked up when he stopped in front of her. She was calm now—too calm—but she’d been crying. Out here, alone, where no one could intrude on her pain. And where she wouldn’t embarrass herself. Or him. He hadn’t seen her so self-contained since they’d been aboard Atropos. Seeing her like this now, he felt a bewildering pain in his heart. He’d done the one thing he’d promised not to do, which was lie to her. A lie by omission, yes, but a lie all the same. He saw that now, too late.

  He sat down. He didn’t try to go to her, he didn’t want her to push him away. He waited, and after a few minutes she put her book down and looked up and waited for him to explain himself.

  “Things were different then,” he said slowly. “I was at school, then I was at war.” He paused, considering his words. “I’d just turned nineteen, and I’d been seeing Aleah off and on since I was about sixteen. She was the daughter of one of my father’s friends, but she…chose her own path. We did drugs together, and we screwed around. It was nothing serious.” At least, not for him. He met Aria’s solemn gaze. “I thought he’d be better off without me. A child…with someone like you as a parent, things would be fine. But with me, just me, he’d have no hope.” The last thing he wanted was to ruin anyone’s life by making them more like him—especially not his own child’s. In his heart of hearts, he’d truly believed that the best thing for Talin was for him to grow up as far away as possible.

  He’d grow up safe, Kisten had believed, without his father to poison him. Without the shadow of House Mara Sant looming over him. Kisten knew what he was: a womanizer and a murderer in thrall to his own vices who’d carried on an almost lifelong affair with his own brother. Incest was rampant in his family. That it was consensual didn’t matter; it disgusted him. The fact that he wanted to have sex with his own flesh and blood, that he was even capable of seeing them in that light, disgusted him.

  And now, because of his own self-absorption, his child had been condemned to a hellish existence. Had he ever been honest with himself about the kind of woman Aleah really
was? He shook his head at his own naiveté and wondered how he’d ever thought himself capable of raising children—with anyone.

  “Wouldn’t your parents have taken him in?” asked Aria.

  Kisten didn’t respond.

  “Was your childhood truly so terrible?” she probed.

  “Aria, you don’t—”

  “Yes I do,” she said firmly, her eyes on his. And of course she did know; what he hadn’t told her, she’d guessed. She wasn’t a stupid woman. “Are you really telling me that you and your brother ruined each other’s lives to such a grave extent, that you’d wish this—this nightmare on your own child?”

  And for the first time, he heard real anger in her voice. She knew all too well what Talin had experienced. She avoided discussing her own childhood, never refusing outright but gently turning away questions with such a practiced air that she managed to change the subject entirely without anyone noticing.

  But Kisten, too, wasn’t a stupid man. “No,” he said tiredly, “of course not.”

  “Do you think you would have been better off without your family?”

  “No!”

  “Then—”

  “The problem is me!” he hissed. “I don’t want him turning into me.”

  “He seems to have managed that quite well on his own,” Aria replied. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  He had, the minute he’d laid eyes on the boy. It took one to know one, and he had the same thousand yard stare that Keshav had been terrifying people with these thirty-odd years. His resemblance to Keshav, on the whole, was frightening. He held his cigarettes in the same offhand way, and looked as though he might just as easily stub them out in a saucer or on someone’s arm.

  It was tempting to blame all of Talin’s problems on his childhood, but Aria had suffered the same and she was the kindest, sweetest woman ever born. He wondered if he’d ever regain her trust. “I didn’t know,” he said quietly. “If I had….”

  “I know.”

  They shared the silence for a long time.

  “Are there others?” she asked.

  He tensed, and forced himself to relax. It was a fair question. “No,” he said, and then, “where is he?”

  “In the kitchen, having something to eat.”

  The silence returned.

  “I love you,” she said quietly, “and I don’t blame you for having made a mistake, although I consider your judgment to be appalling. But what I do blame you for is having lied to me.”

  He accepted the rebuke in silence. He was infuriated with her, for having the gall to be upset with him and for telling the truth. Aria was compliant by nature, and over the past few months had learned not to disagree with him in public or otherwise upset him, but she had a core of steel that no amount of chastisement would touch. This was part of what he loved about her, and also part of what made him itch to pull her down over his knee and beat her into submission.

  He restrained himself, because he didn’t want her to stop being honest with him. He worried, sometimes, in his better moments, that he’d forget himself and crush her like a bug. He didn’t deserve her, and it was a mark of his selfishness that he’d kept her when he should have let her go. That she’d learned to love him, or at least interpret whatever she felt as love, didn’t change the fact that she’d begun their life together as his virtual prisoner.

  “I didn’t want to lose you,” he said.

  “So this is my fault.” Her voice cracked slightly.

  If you weren’t such a judgmental shrew…. But that wasn’t fair. She was exactly the innocent, virtuous matron he’d wanted her to be. And very nearly a child, herself, at barely twenty-two. What experience did she have of the world?

  “No,” he said, wishing he sounded kinder. But he was so frustrated. Why didn’t she understand? “I worked hard to earn your good opinion and—”

  “All I wanted,” she said, the tears she was suppressing evident in her voice, “was for you not to embarrass me. With your mistresses and your one night stands and God knows what else. When my new chambermaid showed up,” she hissed, “I said nothing.”

  He considered pointing out that he hadn’t slept with Khalimah, and decided that doing so would serve no useful purpose. He’d broken his rule against fraternizing with the household help and slept with Garja; that was bad enough. Aria didn’t know.

  “It’s not fun for me,” she continued, “sitting at state dinners and wondering which of these women has slept with my husband.

  “But I tell myself that I’m different, that it doesn’t matter how many women you screw because what we have is different. Except it’s not different, because you lie to me, too!”

  “So I embarrass you,” he said coldly.

  “What embarrasses me is greeting a woman I didn’t know you still spoke with—I can’t believe you had a relationship with her, she’s so hateful—and meeting the son that, until this afternoon, I didn’t know you had! And you can believe that she enjoyed every minute of my discomfort, the witch. Did you know, she informed me that I reminded her of a stuffed animal and seemed almost as intelligent?”

  “She’s just jealous.”

  “She’s revolting.” Aria laughed a little, sniffing.

  “For what it’s worth, I can’t believe I ever got involved with her, either.” And he found himself telling her the story. Aleah had been Aria’s age when he was sixteen, and well into her twenties by the time their son was conceived. Kisten’s principal attractions, to her, had been money and innocence—although he hadn’t seen so then. He’d thought himself to be a man of the world, even at that tender age, and hadn’t realized until much later that a few dalliances did not a sophisticate make. Aleah was nothing more than a venal creature who’d amused herself by seducing a schoolboy. He’d been easy prey, just like her father’s overweight, stodgy friends had been easy prey: thrilled with the attention and flattered to believe that it meant they were desirable.

  Eventually he’d caught on, but by then he’d been at war. His parents had offered to take Talin, or to find a suitable situation for him—he wouldn’t have been the first ward to appear on someone’s doorstep, to be raised along with their own children—but Aleah had been insistent on keeping him. At the time, Kisten had foolishly supposed this to be evidence of maternal feeling.

  Years passed and by the time he’d escaped from Palawan and come home to Renta, he’d been almost thirty and Talin had been almost a young man. He’d left it too late, Kisten decided, so the best course was undoubtedly not to interfere. Talin had done well enough without him, at least according to Aleah’s letters. Filled with nothing but praise for the boy and other good news, they’d painted a far rosier picture than what he now understood to be the truth. Never had he dreamed that things were other than Aleah represented, or that she was capable of such an astonishing level of deceit—which galled him now.

  “She thought,” he said, considering the words as he spoke them, “that our having a child together would lead to some kind of relationship.” As he’d only learned, to his horror, over tea. “Evidently she wasn’t as content with her station in life as she’d led me to believe.”

  “She was twenty-six by then,” Aria said consideringly, “and that’s a point in most women’s lives when they start to think about the future.” She colored slightly. “At least, judging from the women I’ve spoken with. One has to admit that one’s no longer a child, you see, and consider one’s life direction. Whether one is married and, if so, whether that marriage is happy. Whether one wants children. Whether one wants a career, but that’s not an issue here. So if I had to guess, Aleah realized that doing nothing but lolling about with various men isn’t amusing forever and, moreover, is impossible to sustain. At some point she must have acknowledged, if only to herself, that she wasn’t getting any younger and decided to formulate a backup plan.” She shrugged. “That, and she might have loved you.”

  I love you, Kisten thought. “It appears,” he said in a measured tone, “that Tali
n is coming to live with us.”

  “I’ll speak with Ananda about making up a room.”

  She stood, and Kisten stood, too. He needed her and he couldn’t stand this distance between them and he refused to legitimize it by simply letting her walk out. This calm wasn’t acceptance, it was shock, and hurt. She hid her true feelings beneath a veneer of quiet, distancing herself from the world around her. From him. But he’d be damned if he’d let her, this time. She was his, and if she didn’t acknowledge the fact then he’d make her. Regardless of what she wanted.

  He grabbed her, preventing her escape and pulling her to him. She resisted, but he was much stronger than she was. Twisting in his arms, she turned her head as he bent to kiss her. “Don’t,” she whispered. Her heart was beating very fast. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, didn’t know why he was forcing himself on his own consort and after a revelation like this, but he dug his fingers into her hair and yanked her head back savagely. She gasped and he brought his mouth down on hers.

  She struggled for another minute and then gave in, sinking against him as he vented all of his frustrations on her slender form.

  He knew he was bruising her; he didn’t care. He wanted to hurt her. He dragged her across the verandah and into the library, where he all but carried her through the door into his office and threw the bolt. He pushed her back against the desk, unwrapping her sattika as he did so. Holding her with one hand, he fumbled his belt open with the other. She didn’t resist him but she didn’t help him, either. He pulled his pants open, freeing himself, pushed her underskirt up and climbed on top of her, sending a tablet and a pile of paper dispatches to the floor. Paper was antiquated, but more easily kept confidential. He thrust himself into her and she cried out in surprise and pain.

  But when he kissed her, she kissed him back.

  Her lips were hot and fevered as she clutched at him. He drove into her, pinning her to the desk, eliciting a whimper. There was nothing of love or tenderness in the act. He was enraged and he was upset and he needed her and she’d goddamn well give him what she wanted. He’d been tender with her and he’d been cruel, on occasion, but never like this. He’d never forced himself on her so completely, and some part of him knew that he might be doing her irreparable harm but he couldn’t stop himself. He’d never felt so lonely in his life, or so desperate, and he needed her.