by T. A. Miles
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 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 priest 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 priest aspects. Or perhaps he was noting the similarities between Korsten and his mother.
“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.
“It’s time for supper,” Darlevan said, pulling Korsten from his thoughts.
Korsten went reluctantly, his gaze moving to the windows and the shaded glow seeping through them. “It seems early.”
Darlevan smiled somewhat wryly. “The years can make the hours shift,” he said.
Though the man had been referencing Sethaniel’s age and likely not considering a priest’s potential lifetime, his words were alarmingly accurate. Unfortunately, regarding Korsten and his father, the hours shifted in opposite directions.
Four
THE DINING ROOM WAS an interior space of the house. There were multiple entryways, but no windows. The walls were occupied with portraits. Korsten tried to overlook the one of a certain red-haired young person, but couldn’t help that his eye continually caught on it. The painting wasn’t garish, but it was eerily pristine. The artist had projected maturity onto the face of a child, as if to capture adulthood in advance—perhaps on the chance that the child might pass from the world prematurely, that the parents might comfort themselves with both the memory of the child and the vision of an adult. Whatever the purpose, the complexion was a bit too pearlescent and the eyes too dark and aloof.
Korsten felt as if he were looking at a doll of himself and, in his opinion, it was ghastly. On the contrary, he wasn’t bothered at all by the abundance of grace an artist had crafted into the portrait of his mother. Large red curls stacked on her delicate shoulders, an illusion of backlight tracing them with an almost fire-like glow. Her eyes were blue and brilliant, challenging the luster of gemstones. Fair skin glowed with a faint blush that complimented the intense shade of her lips. She looked entirely of another world, untouchable to the mundane aspects of this one. She had never been untouchable to Korsten…until she died.
He still couldn’t remember any actual details to the occasion of her death. He wondered if he had omitted them from memory deliberately. Worse, he wondered if he had tried to insist that she was still alive, even if somehow only privately for him. How unfair to his father. He was fortunate that Sethaniel hadn’t learned to despise him after all, for reasons entirely different than the excuse a demon had given him. How quickly and how selfishly he’d taken that excuse and fit it neatly into place. He was free to despise his only parent. Fand became his sole ally and with Fand’s death, he had only Renmyr. He had played directly into a trap that he was too ignorant to see.
Korsten’s eyes passed over the portrait of Sethaniel, done in stern and sturdy form…the unchallenged head of a household. Portraits of his sisters—dark-haired avatars of elegance and innocence—sat in line ahead of their brother. Elsewhere in the room was a portrait of his parents with all of their children, but Korsten was too ashamed to look at it currently. He looked to Sethaniel instead, sat at the head of a table with empty chairs and the tables that had once accommodated guests and extended family pushed along the walls in disuse. He imagined Sethaniel and others in the house had grown used to it, but it felt gloomy against Korsten’s memory of much more lively and populated meals.
His father’s dark eyes lifted while the elder ate. Sethaniel stopped, making use of a napkin while his gaze toured the same portraits Korsten had been studying over eating. Sethaniel made note of that latter detail by eyeing Korsten’s scarcely touched plate while he dabbed one last time at his beard.
“Priests do require food,” the elder said, managing to draw the attention of all three priests at his table, rather than only his son. Before anyone could reply, Sethaniel continued. “I’ve noticed the girls eating in their time here. There seems no reason why you can’t do the same.”
The dinner table had always been the place for scolding. Airing complaint publicly was an excellent way at shaming. Korsten had always refused to show how ashamed he was by a certain age. He also had refused to actually speak with his father much at all, so it seemed to make sense that a frustrated parent would take full advantage of one of the few places sure to keep a child for at least a short while. It made sense that most of their conversations had been used to issue complaint. They had been lashing out at each other, each in their own way.
Korsten had not been equipped to understand that as a child. He understood now, and while he thought it might bring upset—however unintentional—he managed to nearly smile at his father.
“My mind is somewhat preoccupied,” he said to the elder. “I apologize.”
While his eating requirements were likely different than that of two priests who had been very long absent from Vassenleigh, he made a point to eat some of what was on his plate anyway.
If Sethaniel was in any way surprised or suspicious of what would have appeared a very passive answer from his once-rebellious child, he did not demonstrate it. He simply placed his napkin down beside his plate and continued with his own food. What little attention the moment had drawn from the others at the table—which included Darlevan and his wife—quickly dissipated. The room settled into sile
nce. When Sethaniel had finished his meal, he sat for a short while, not saying much of anything, and then Darlevan’s wife offered to bring him up to his bed.
Korsten found it helplessly uncomfortable to witness his father being treated as the very old man he happened to be. He fully expected Sethaniel to protest this treatment and when he didn’t, when he agreed that he was tired and proceeded to rise from his chair with some difficulty, Korsten found himself mentally stifled.
“Thank you, Lannile,” Darlevan said to his wife discreetly while she perhaps took her turn at caring after the parent they shared through marriage.
Lannile was a stout woman with darker hair than her husband and a soft, friendly-seeming face. She smiled easily and the light quickly reached long-lashed hazel eyes. Age may have strengthened her features somewhat, but it was the smile that defied her years. Korsten could easily imagine what she had been like in her youth, and if Cenily had always been her home, it may have been that he’d seen her in passing at some time during his childhood. Whether or not she recognized him at all, she gave no indication.
“He’s developed some contempt for night,” Darlevan said after Lannile and Sethaniel had departed.
Presuming the man was speaking of Sethaniel, Korsten simply nodded. He was still digesting what he’d witnessed, and the small amount of food he’d eaten. It wasn’t terrible, but felt heavy compared to the dishes served at Vassenleigh, or what he and Merran typically carried with them when hunting.
Thought of Merran inspired a small, antagonized sigh. He would not have anticipated this situation and being in it made him want for someone familiar. Merran had become more familiar to him than family…more familiar than home.
The thought felt odd and while it wasn’t an adverse sort of odd, it was nothing he wanted to dwell on just now. It would lead him to worry over his partner’s safety and perhaps even to leaving Cenily prematurely. He reminded himself that he had Reached here, or at least near enough to be carried here by sea or by spirits. He could not afford to stay long, but he at least needed to gain more perspective on Sharlotte and Lerissa’s plans.