Druise chuckled. “No more than I do,” he said. “I would know. Tell Gwenna what Lena said, Sorley.”
“The same thing she has been saying for fourteen years,” I said, matching Druise’s grin. “And she was right, it turns out.”
Chapter 64
14 years earlier
It was only an hour or two till dawn. I was fighting sleep now. “Cillian,” I murmured. “I had best go back to my room. The guards should not see us together, not at this hour, and you have the baths to go to.”
“You are probably right,” he said. “For your sake, at the very least. Liam would not approve.”
“No.” I sat up, bending to pick up my clothes. Cillian watched me dress. “Do you need help?” I asked him.
“With the breeches, yes. I can manage the rest.” When he had, I leaned in for a last kiss.
“Breakfast with us,” he suggested.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing,” I said, “I need some sleep. So do you.”
“Mid-day, then. In our rooms.” His lips quirked. “Are you afraid to face Lena?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“You are shying at shadows, mo duíne gràhadh. Mid-day,” he said firmly.
I fell asleep as soon as I reached my bed, waking late in the morning to lie in a cloud of incredulous remembrance and joy. My bruised lips and my general languor told me it had not been a dream, but the sense of unreality did not go away as I washed and dressed in fresh clothes. Nor had it gone when I knocked on Cillian and Lena’s door.
Lena opened it. Reality returned in a rush. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. From across the room, Cillian said my name.
“Oh, gods,” Lena said. “Get in here, Sorley.” She tugged on my arm, closing the door behind me. “You cannot look at each other like that in public. Or anywhere you might be seen, and, kärestan,” she said, addressing Cillian, “that includes Apulo, and the nursemaid, and the kitchen staff.” She sounded both exasperated and amused, and nothing more.
Cillian laughed, and came over to drop a kiss on her head. She leaned into him for a moment, shaking her head slightly, smiling. “Is anyone here?” he asked, as she straightened.
“No.”
“Good,” he said, and reaching out an arm, pulled me to him to kiss my hair. I felt myself flush.
“I imagine,” Lena said drily, “you might be hungry, Sorley?” I still couldn’t find words. “Oh, gods,” she said again, and came to wrap her arms around me. “Foolish man,” she said. “Did I not try to tell you?” She kissed my cheek. “Come and eat.”
Chapter 65
15 years after the battle of the Taiva
“Do not look at each other like that,” I repeated. How many times had Lena said it, over the years? “Your mother always warned us that we would give ourselves away. It was the only thing that worried her, and the real reason she shows little affection to your father when you and Colm are there. She thought it would remind Cillian and me to do the same.”
“Well, she can stop being silly about being affectionate in front of me, and so can you,” Gwenna said. “You could have told me at least two years ago, and then I wouldn't have been worried all this past winter. And you lied to me, Sorley, and I had asked you a direct question.”
“When?”
“I asked if Apulo would have served my father, if he loved men, and you said he does not love men.”
I grinned. “Nor does he,” I said. “Only me, ever, Gwenna. You were not precise in your question.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorley, that was unfair.”
“A diplomat must learn to ask exactly what she wants to know.”
“Then,” she said, serious again, “answer this. We are not safe at the Ti’ach, are we? Not really?”
“In what way?
“There are still secrets, aren’t there? Athàir is planning something dangerous.”
“There are still secrets, yes,” I answered slowly. “I can’t tell you more, even if you were to ask me directly. I have been forbidden to.”
“By Athàir?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Am I wrong, about the danger?”
The breeze pushed her dark hair over her face. She swept it off with graceful fingers, waiting for my answer. You are as beautiful as your father, I thought, and perhaps as brilliant, and you are heir to Ésparias. I had sworn an oath. “You are not wrong.”
“But he vowed to shelter us, Mathàir and Colm and me. He’s breaking that vow.” Nothing she had heard at the White Fort, then. Her own mind, analysing, reaching conclusions.
“Shelter, Gwenna,” I answered gently. “He has not promised to keep you safe, or to always shield you. Only to give you shelter, as best he can.”
Her chin came up. She took a breath, and another, her eyes distant, unfocused, until she turned them back to me. “Is he making a mistake, Sorley?”
“I am a musician,” I said, “and not a good enough xache player to know.”
“Am I?” She had been no more than four when he had shown her how to set up the game, the pieces just the right size for her tiny hands. Fostering a skill.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m not saying you are a child, Gwenna. But you have much to learn still of tactics and strategy, and taking the long view.”
“Then,” she said, “should not Athàir teach me?”
“That is not all Lena said to you,” Druise commented, back in the privacy of our room.
“No. But I have told Gwenna the rest before, and she’ll realize that Cillian and I were lovers when I fled north, Druise.”
“Cillian never saw anything to forgive,” he recalled. “Lena raged, until he told her to stop. You would go to Gundarstorp, he told her, but you would come back. I asked, once, how he knew. It was how you had signed the letter, he said.”
“I broke a promise. One made three times, Druise, and that matters.” I picked up my ladhar, almost without thinking.
He rolled his eyes. “Linrathan men. Do you ever forgive yourselves? Vows and promises, so important to you.”
“These are hard lands,” I said. “Linrathe and Sorham, and Varsland too. Perhaps they demand hard oaths, to keep us strong.”
“You think? Of the three of you, amané, who is strongest? Who has not fled from responsibility, or love, or hidden behind a philosophy, all without these endless vows? One promise only, and always kept, yes?”
“Two,” I said, my fingers finding the right notes from the danta. “One to her Emperor, and one to Cillian. And yes, she’s kept them both.”
Chapter 66
14 years earlier
“Stay,” Lena had said, when the meal was over, and Cillian had reluctantly returned to work. “Today is a rest day for me. We could go riding?”
Away from the fort, where we could talk privately. “All right.”
Up on the high land east of Berge we reined our horses in. Neither of us spoke. I looked north, as I always did, into Linrathe and towards Sorham, far beyond. Lena’s eyes had been on the sea, but she turned to follow my gaze.
“Can I say a few things?” I nodded. “Cillian loves you. And not, as you must be sure now,” she grinned, “as a friend and brother. I believe he has loved you since you were sixteen. He also loves me. Being a woman of this land, I see no contradiction there, or competition.”
“He says you are his greatest love, and his greatest blessing.”
“As he is mine.” She glanced at me, her face serious. “But even on the river, and in Casil, I saw how different he was when he was with you. You were — you are — home for him, in a way I never will be, no matter how much we love each other. Just as Linrathe will always be home, for him and you, not my land.”
“Lena, no.”
“Yes. Have I never told you of the time he recited War in Winter for me, at the Kurzemë village? He was worrying about the boy who had given him music for his words, he told me.”
I blinked, several times. She chuckled. “Do
n’t cry. Once we’d met on the river, he told me more. He was honest about his attraction to you, but until the night before the Taiva, when he asked me if you could live with us, afterwards, I wasn’t sure.”
“And yet you welcomed me. More than welcomed.” I had to ask. “Lena — I didn’t understand at the time. But you said you were frightened of what might happen, if — ”
“If you became lovers?” she said. “I was, a little. We know, women of this land, that the men who father our children also partner with men, when they are not with us. But for us to live together as we do — it is unprecedented, like so much else now. But what a ridiculous fear, Sorley, compared with the others we have faced together, all of us, and will face, over the years to come.”
“It won’t be often, Lena. A grace note, he said, rarely played.”
“Will that be enough?”
“Enough? It is so much more than I thought there would ever be. Lena, thank you, if that doesn’t sound...absurd.” I would never fully comprehend her generosity, I knew.
“It is not all for you, you know,” she said drily. “And not all for Cillian, either. You said it in Casil: perhaps you and I need each other too. Because he is far from easy, Sorley. You have some idea of that now; you’ll have more, over the years.” Her eyes rested on me. I saw her lips twitch. “I vowed he would never wake alone again. I did not say it had to be with me.”
I laughed, a release of tension as much as anything. “How can you not be upset? You were so scared of wanting a woman’s touch in Casil. I told you then the betrayal was not in the desire, but in acting on that desire. Which Cillian and I have done, and yet — ”
“Idiot,” she said, grinning. “Two reasons. One is what I have just said.”
“And the other?”
She shrugged. “What I felt in Casil was casual, a response to a stimulus, in your words. To act on that, with no love behind it, just to escape my fears — that would have been a betrayal of what Cillian and I share.”
“Then is Druise a betrayal?” Evan certainly had been, if I judged by Lena’s measure.
“No! Gods, Sorley, is your mind completely befuddled by last night? You care for Druise, don’t you?”
“Not as I do Cillian.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I do. He is solid. Practical and comforting, and always cheerful.”
“And kind. We have all been lucky to have him with us, for different reasons.” She smiled, her hazel eyes creasing. We sat on the horses, looking north. A cloud obscured the sun, and the air was suddenly cold.
“You called him back from death,” Lena said, her eyes still focused beyond the Wall. “Gnaius says the gods allowed that for a purpose. You know what Cillian believes that purpose is, and we are all part of that, me, and Druise, and yes, perhaps Gwenna, someday. But you — I believe you are bound to him by what you did, and he to you.”
There was no amusement in her voice now. A shiver ran under my skin. “He told me once,” I said slowly, “that the gods might demand a price from me, for that.”
“They may,” she said. “They may ask one of us all.” I had no answer. Without speaking we turned the horses’ heads downhill.
“There is one thing, before we go back,” Lena said, before we began to ride. “An expectation you may have to adjust.”
“What?” She told me.
“Truly? Cillian, who is so good with words?”
“Nonetheless.”
Chapter 67
15 years after the battle of the Taiva
“What has made you smile?” Druise asked.
“Lena. We forget Gwenna is half her, because she looks so much like Cillian, and has his manner. But there’s a fierceness in her that comes from her mother.”
“Fierceness, yes. But compassion, too. All her concerns have been about her family, not herself.”
“Her question wasn’t what I expected. How could we have guessed what worried her?”
He grinned. “By remembering who taught her to play xache?”
“To think about the implications of actions, not just the actions themselves? You’re right, Druise. But I wish she had not carried that fear for a winter, secretly.”
“You think?” he asked. “Maybe easier to worry about that than other fears, yes? Will Cillian tell her his plans?”
“I believe he will tell her everything, one day. Someone must carry on after he’s gone, and she is the heir.” I began to wrap my ladhar in its oiled cloth.
“She will need strength,” he said. “All Lena has given her.”
“And the judgement her father has instilled in her, and your pragmatism, and my — ” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I’ve taught her, except a little skill on the ladhar.”
“How to love.”
“What?” The statement was completely out of character.
“Amané, everything in your life is about love. Cillian. Your music, your country, your lands. Your brother. The rest of us. Competing loves, sometimes. You find ways to hold them all, when most could not. I have seen that here. Gwenna has too.”
“Her parents have taught her that. And you.”
“In part. But you more so. So when Cillian tells her all the plans, the ones he does not share with us, she will understand more of why. That it is all to safeguard who and what he loves.”
I exhaled, a long breath. “When he betrayed Linrathe to prevent me from being shamed, he vowed to keep me safe. I think everything else — almost everything else — he’s done has sprung from that day and that vow.”
“He would do that,” Druise said simply. “You were his first love, yes?”
“He won’t say so.” Nor would he ever, I knew. In his silence was the same acknowledgment I made when I gave Lena the first cup of wine every evening. “Only a regret, sometimes, for the years apart. But I could never have been what Lena is to him. She isn’t part of the oath-breaking, and she is separate from his atonement, as I am not. She is...” I groped for words, “the music that frees him. I’m content to be a grace note.” Or a bell of remembrance, our rare times together both a joy and a reminder of the price paid.
Druise ran a hand down my arm. “As I am content with our duet. It does not bother you, that he does not say?”
“For all Cillian’s skill with words, Lena told me once that she could count on one hand the number of times he’s actually said he loves her. Endearments, and indirectly, but otherwise, no.”
Druise grinned. “That does not surprise me. Some things are too deep for words. Not to you either?”
I shook my head. “Never. Not directly. Little more than you have heard him say.”
“It is enough?”
Mo Somhairle gràhadh. “It is,” I said. I reached for Druise’s hand, turning it over in mine. A hand that wielded a sword for our safety, and made music, and held me close. “Partner,” I said. “Lover. Beloved friend. Shall we go home, Druise?”
The Vocabulary of Empire’s Reckoning
The languages spoken in Empire's Reckoning are my inventions, but they are based on existing or historic languages. Pronunciations and grammar may not follow the conventions of those languages. Roughly, Casilan is based on Latin; Linrathan primarily from Gaelic, both Scottish and Irish, and Marái'sta from Scandinavian languages. The dialect of Sorham is an analogue of Norse Gaelic.
Word: Meaning: Language
Amané: lover: Casilan
An dithës braithréan: The Two Brothers: Linrathan
Arnek: arnica: Linrathan
Athàir: father: Linrathan
Capori: corporal: Casilan
Castrati: castrate: Casilan
Channàdarra: gay (literally, not natural): Linrathan
Chióntach: innocent: Linrathan
Cianalas: homesickness, longing: Dialect of Sorham
Cithar: cithara: Casilan
Comiádh, comiádha: professor(s) Linrathan
Congruus: congruent, good together Casilan
<
br /> Consor: partner: Esparian
Dalta/daltai: student(s): Linrathan
Danta: saga: Linrathan
Duíne: man: Linrathan
Dùthcas: belonging, rootedness: Dialect of Sorham
Eirën/ Eirënnen: male landholder(s): Linrathan
Filus : son: Casilan
Fuádain: peregrine falcon: Linrathan
Fuisce: whisky: Linrathan
Gràhadh: beloved: Linrathan
Gratiás: thank you: Casilan
Gubbë: holy man: Dialect of Sorham
Harr, Härren: male landholder(s): Dialect of Sorham
Härra: female landholder: Dialect of Sorham
Idióta: idiot: Casilan
Imperium: emperor: Casilan
Ja: yes: Dialect of Sorham & Marai’ista
Käresta/kärestan: beloved (f)/(m): Linrathan
Kelika: sled: Dialect of Sorham
Konë: female landholder: Linrathan
Ladhar: stringed instrument: Linrathan
Leannan: dearest: Linrathan
Li’ítho: marriage bracelets: Dialect of Sorham
Líathró: game like football: Linrathan
Mathàir: mother: Linrathan
Meas: thank you: Linrathan
Mensores: surveyors: Casilan
Mo: my: Linrathan
Mo bhráithar: my brother: Linrathan
Mo charaidh: my friend: Linrathan
Mo charaidh gràhadh: my beloved friend: Linrathan
Mo duíne: my man: Linrathan
Mo duíne gràhadh: my beloved man: Linrathan
Mo nihéan: my daughter: Linrathan
Mo nihéan gràhadh: my beloved daughter: Linrathan
Mo Somhairle gràhadh: my beloved Sorley: Linrathan
Na: no: Dialect of Sorham
Na (as in Ti’ach na Perras) : of: Linrathan
Philomela: nightingale: Casilan
Pitëog: derogatory word for gay: Dialect of Sorham
Princip(e) : leader, prince, princess: Casilan, into Ésparian
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