by T. A. Miles
Korsten had failed to recreate this hideaway in Haddowyn, though he had certainly tried.
Taking steps further into the room, past two more rows of bookcases set equidistantly from one another in the center of the room—taking up the whole of the middle of it, actually—Korsten reached out randomly to caress the spines of the tomes occupying the shelves on the flanking walls. He felt comforted by the aged leather beneath his skin and considered the many places among the books that he might have curled up as a child and immersed himself in some text or another while trying to escape his father.
Sethaniel had disapproved of him constantly, as he recalled it, wanting to know why he refused to be outside with the other boys, why he refused to practice with a blade other than to mock the others.
Again, the spirit of his childhood dashed across his memory, heedless of the fact that he was neither half-awake nor dreaming this time. The apparition took the form of shadows on the other side of the library windows. The voices of children accompanied.
“I’m not going to train, because I’m never going to be a soldier,” the most familiar of them said. It was too familiar, in fact, but his own voice had always been the most prominent in memory. “Neither are any of you. You’re all clumsy as legless frogs.”
“You don’t know,” another boy said. “You wouldn’t know because you’re weak, like a girl.”
“You’re stupid,” Korsten heard his childhood self say with astounding ease and surety. It had not been flung as a simple insult, but delivered as a legitimate critique of their character. In fact, his tone on the whole was entirely too confident for the dejected outcast of memory. “I’m not a girl. You’re jealous because I’m smarter than you.”
“Come off it. If you weren’t a weak girl, you’d train with us. But you won’t because you don’t want to get bested.”
“I don’t care what you say.” The words preceded a clear memory of Korsten in his early adolescence, walking directly to the other boy with his hand out for the training sword, as if he were in actuality reclaiming something that had belonged to him all along.
He remembered well, the ready and mocking look on his would-be opponent’s face, as if he was finally going to get what he wanted; proof that Korsten was nothing more than a spoiled brat. He got his proof, when Korsten took the blade offered to him and promptly smacked the other boy on the upper leg in an entirely unfair advance. Unprepared for it, his opponent flinched, and in the moment it took him and the two others in audience to sort out what had happened, Korsten fled the scene with their practice weapon in hand.
A chase ensued that carried him over and around obstacles in the garden in a way that could only appear as if it were intended to humiliate his pursuers. Once he’d exhausted the other boys, Korsten climbed onto a wall out of their reach. At that point, they only wanted the weapon back. On the chance that they may also have wanted to strike him with it, Korsten slung it away then jumped off the wall and ran in the opposite direction.
Korsten recalled more incidents having played out very similarly. He recalled also times when he’d retreated to the house into the safe company of his sisters in their sitting room, where he preceded to read, to sometimes get his hair absently played with while his sisters conversed, and to otherwise make obscene faces at the boys who would have liked to extract some revenge, but who didn’t dare impede disruptively on the space of ladies.
Sethaniel sometimes noticed these antics that Korsten had somehow hidden away from his adult memory. He scolded his only male child and…now Korsten could hear his sisters chiding their father for doing what was very clearly his duty as a father. At times, they were humored and at times they were overridden by the master of the house. Korsten cried quickly over it regardless—that much remained true to memory—and over the years Sethaniel was not as quick to comfort him as he had been when Korsten was very small.
It startled Korsten to think that he may have preferred it that way, as he grew into the antisocial young person that seemed more familiar to him. He was erring on desperate to have some of his memories here align more precisely with what he recalled while at Haddowyn, and since. He had indeed been very convinced about his childhood. As convinced as he once had been that Renmyr was innocent of conspiring with a demon?
Korsten felt cold inside, as sensations of guilt returned stronger than before. He didn’t want to finish out where his thoughts were going. He didn’t want to realize what was surfacing before him; it felt like a corpse rising in the water, after years weighed down by chains he envisioned demons having put in place.
One of those demons should have had red hair. Surely, he had become one of his own antagonists by falling as he had for the lies that met him at Haddowyn. He wondered if it had all truly been so easy for Renmyr—for the demon using his lover.
He came to the present, finding himself stopped at the corner of the final row of library shelves. Sethaniel was in view, seated at a thick-topped table with scrolled edges. His hair had gone so much lighter, catching the morning rays as they slipped over the top of his high-backed chair. His hands still looked strong, but his skin appeared looser, folded and cracked in places. They were not quite as steady as they once had been, creating a slight hitch in the turning of pages.
Sethaniel continued to give attention to the book propped on the table before him. It had been so long. His father was an old man, with years behind him that Korsten was entirely ignorant of.
Korsten had wondered often if Sethaniel were dead in the years they’d been separated. What if he had died? What if Korsten had returned to this place bereft of his father and felt the memories align themselves properly, realized that he was in actuality a spoiled tyrant of a child, who teased the other boys first—not the other way around—who refused more often than any child had a right to, who crafted an existence of spiting a father who could only have been beside himself…
And he had done it all because…
It was all because of Mother’s death.
The realization struck him so harshly, he felt as if it literally raked over his skin in that moment. It sent a spasm across his shoulders and forced him to blink suddenly, which sent tears he’d not been aware of down his cheeks.
He looked over his shoulder involuntarily, half expecting to see some physical manifestation of the revelation—the sudden awareness of the grief both he and Sethaniel had been mired in since his mother’s unexpected death. It had led them both to lashing out and to antisocial behavior, because they were too alike. They were both sensitive and they had both been disarmed and felt abandoned by his mother’s death. That was the driving force behind their clash…not anything else. It was all that a demon required.
Korsten blinked once more to clear his eyes, then looked toward his father again.
“How old was I?” he asked, ignoring the fact that Sethaniel was not privy to the thoughts that had just passed across his mind. His father didn’t look at him, but he was still enough now that Korsten knew he had heard. He asked again, “How old was I when she died?”
Still, Sethaniel remained silent. Korsten was beginning to panic internally when the elder finally said, “You don’t remember?”
Korsten’s voice faltered. “I…don’t feel as if I remember correctly.”
Sethaniel looked at him now, and though there was the stern frown Korsten did, in fact, recall correctly, his father’s dark eyes were rimmed with red. “You were eight,” he said.
Because his father’s voice wasn’t as steady as he tried to make it, Korsten smiled with decades of relief behind the expression. At the same time, he felt fresh tears forming. “I’m sorry, Father.”
Sethaniel looked at him as if he disapproved, but Korsten could see behind that now. He may have never seen anything so clearly in all of his years, and he smiled again when his father said, “So am I.”
Sethaniel laid the book flat and sat back in his chair. He looked at the book now as if it were the culprit, a physical token to represent too man
y years gone by, experienced at a forced distance and askew.
Korsten crossed the space between the bookcases and the table. He crouched down beside Sethaniel’s chair, hesitating to let his hand fall over the elder’s, though Sethaniel took hold of it immediately, and held it tightly. Korsten had a brief moment to look upon his father’s sharp profile before Sethaniel looked down at him directly, features softening while he carefully set his free hand to Korsten’s cheek and then over his hair. While false memories may have once had him shying away, Korsten held still, albeit somewhat rigidly. The contact was still foreign, made so by too many years of distance. Perhaps in his extreme age, Sethaniel resided closer to the past now. His next words seemed to confirm that notion.
“You look too much like her,” Sethaniel said, barely above a whisper.
Korsten had been all too easily convinced that his father despised him for that very reason, but now he understood that he’d been a fool to a demon’s ploys. So very accurate in their aim, the Vadryn. So cuttingly on the mark. They were such dark souls and yet not as unlike people as Korsten would have preferred to believe. They knew how to manipulate the human spirit, too well. Renmyr and Serawe both had certainly showed him that.
Thoughts of Indhovan’s demon reminded him… “I dreamed about her,” he said quietly. “I dreamed of her while I believed I was drowning.”
Sethaniel’s hand moved away after a brief pause and a look came to his eyes that seemed both resigned and contemplative. “Drowning…is how your mother died.”
Sethaniel had indeed become an ancient authority in Cenily—ancient, by the standards of ordinary people. He was well into his eighth decade. In spite of familial stress, he was healthy as men of a more intellectual lifestyle tended to be along Edrinor’s eastern edge. His mind was still his own and his body had maintained its strength for the most part. Fand had not been so lucky, nor had he been so aged at the time of his passing.
For Sethaniel’s brother, illness had claimed his mind first and his body followed swiftly. It had been the disease the Vadryn manifested among people just with their presence. And the beast torturing the Camirey family had been such a longtime present. It might have gradually swallowed the minds and souls of all of Haddowyn’s inhabitants, if not for Merran’s arrival. Anyone who had survived beyond the day of the Camirey family’s slaughter had Merran to thank. And Korsten might have sent him away without a second thought, so enrapt had he been in a dream world created by a demon. He was grateful for Merran’s stubbornness, a better version of it than Renmyr’s had proven to be.
And now Korsten stood in the same room as his father, each of them strained in their way, but neither of them overly taxed or incensed by the presence of the other. This was not a reunion Korsten would have hoped for—even had he realized the whole of the untruth behind his memories. He had been slowly at work over the last three decades coming to terms with the likeliness that Sethaniel would have died and that their differences—which were really not true differences after all—would remain forever unreconciled.
Reconciliation had not been instantly or fully achieved, however; Korsten still felt intensely answerable for having made conditions so ideal for the demon to plant its seed of lies and Sethaniel, he suspected, was really too tired in this late hour of life to be overly distressed by what had gone by, maybe even to remember all of it clearly anymore. Korsten understood that he would be alone in that and was undecided on whether or not it was boon or punishment. Regardless, he took advantage of these moments while he had them, to speak to his father as the adult he had become—however arduous the journey getting there had been—and to otherwise be in the presence of his blood family.
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. 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. He understood that he could not stay long. 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 priest,” his father said. It was difficult to determine what the simplicity of the statement may have meant.
Korsten nodded once. “And a priest, yes.”
“How?” his father asked next.
&
nbsp; 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 Renmyr, 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.