by A. E. Shaw
Finally, finally, he can bear it no longer. He takes a deep inhalation, and bangs the table with an awkwardly-formed fist, interrupting his father magnificently.
“Why,” he demands, enjoying immediately the way his voice echoes amidst the glass, “should I be interested in inheriting your playground, Father?” The tone of address has His Excellency’s hackles raised, but Aiden’s forcefulness prevails.
“Why would I want this world? Everything about it reeks of you and your ideas, yet all you have done, all that I can see is that you have ruined our chance to be held as great by all by reducing our numbers to few, you have killed our audience - what ruler does that? What greatness can you hope to achieve when you place yourself instantly in the gallery of horrors of all ages, the tyrants, the nightmare truth of every man who sees excellence in murder? What did you dream you would gain from standing amongst - no, in front of - them?”
Even Selina is impressed, and awed by Aiden’s wordy confidence. He’s given little indication that he might be against anything at all here. But he does go on to spoil his apparent morality. Just a little.
“What did you think I would feel of this? How did you think I would like inheriting this nonsensical little village, with few opportunities and fewer people, a pointlessness of existence, a fallacy of power. Where will I demonstrate my greatness to those who understand that I have been built to be the ultimate leader, how I will I show them anything when you have already indoctrinated them to believe that it is you who have given them everything? Their memories will be long, such is the reverie with which they view you, and I cannot compete with this, and you have set it so that if I attempt any great gesture of my own, then they will see it as a betrayal of all you gave them.”
Because, as we must never forget, everything is about Aiden, all the time. It isn’t the loss of the people for their own sake, it’s the loss of the audience for his.
And yet, does it matter why Aiden rejects this world, this inheritance? As long as he does so at all, then does it not mean that something about him has been built correctly? Or…are we now dealing with a nation in which the idea of what is correct has been skewed so far that it will take a thousand generations to resurface, if ever it does so at all? (Don’t spend too long considering that. It doesn’t matter, or rather, it won’t, in a moment.)
His Excellency rises, and spreads his arms wide, so his robes fall, shimmering, from his arms, making him tower, grand, over all.
“Had you shown a little more of this side to me before, perhaps I would not have found you so inconsequential, dear child.”
Aiden shudders, and his jaw drops at the condescension. He hackles, but says nothing.
His Excellency continues, “It is fortunate, we are fortunate, for your uselessness had preyed upon my mind, and I had been wringing my excellent mind to pieces for a solution, pushing myself to accept the idea that my suitable heir would take a new generation and a vast and terrible effort of science to cultivate. But, it seems, my blood is stronger than I knew, and my excellence has, of course, already provided the solution for even this least expected of crises. Even I was surprised by this solution’s ready and timely appearance.”
Selina takes some initiative, appreciating the love of drama the man shares with his son, but tired of the constant lack of explanation. “And what, Your Excellency, was it that surprised you so?”
He smiles a sickly, oozing smile, and drains his wine glass. Through red-stained teeth, he turns his gaze not to Selina, but to Eliza, at whom he carefully enunciates, “My daughter.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Truth
Aiden bites his lip deep and hard and the taste of blood on his tongue is no comfort to him. After all, his blood is not unique, is it? This is what he takes from that moment. There is another. And it is her. His mind is a blank wall, but the blankness is created from a million questions, questions so densely written as to blur into nothing at all. They start with Did she know? and they come to a close, if not to an end, for there is no end to the amount of questions Aiden has now, around am I supposed to share?
What it is Aiden imagines they have to share, well, we can only assume that it is the everything which Aiden had assumed was only for him. Those things that, yes, he just now declared he did not even want. But Eliza is immediately rent over every single thing in the universe, and even if his inheritance was tainted and confused, even if his father was misled and so very wrong about so many things, nonetheless, those things were all and only for him. They were. Weren’t they?
He does not speak. It’s hard to call whether that’s an example of how far he’s come, or how far he hasn’t - whether he thinks it’s best to keep quiet, or whether he is determined that, given enough time, this will still, somehow, find a way to be all to the best for him.
Selina looks at him there, all the colour drained right out of his face. She’s caught up by the twist and a pull somewhere just in front of her spine, right the way up and down her body, a feeling that rolls into the yanking sensation of falling, wrapped up in the chill blanket of dread spiked with confusion.
“My daughter,” His Excellency repeats, spreading his arms wide as if to welcome her into a loving embrace, “you can’t begin to imagine how I’ve missed you. How grateful I am to see you again.”
Eliza’s eyes are hazel-cold, flickering with a lightning that isn’t coming out anywhere else.
His Excellency looks around, sees the confusion on Selina and Aiden’s faces, and it isn’t as fun when not everyone knows everything. He simply isn’t used to people not being…well, him. Or, perhaps, Juan.
And Aiden did not know that he had a sister, that much is clear. That despite their physical semblances, he had not worked this much out for himself. Did Eliza know? He knows better than to look too deeply into her eyes. Her mother would catch him out that way too, and he’d lose track of his thoughts, he’d wonder so deeply what she might be thinking, what she thought of him…her impressions were his everything.
The reflection of himself in his daughter’s eyes is not, perhaps, one he is keen to see, not just now.
“Know,” he says to Eliza, and yet closing his eyes, as if to make for a more beatific stance, “that I truly hoped with all my heart that you were alive, somewhere. I never dreamt that you would find your way back to me. I believed everyone gone, not least you, and your good mother. Your mother too, Aiden.”
Aiden suppresses an unexpected urge to vomit, a wave of contractions about his body at the very idea that he has ever had a mother, that there was someone else responsible for this terrible state of affairs that was his absolute inability to be everything that he was born to be. His lips part, and a breath escapes, but it doesn’t form the protest, nor the question, that he wants to ask. But Eliza doesn’t struggle with the same problem.
“I know,” she says, the lightning crackling out so forcefully, so suddenly, “I know what you did. I know what you ordered. And you started the cull with us. I know that.”
“Now, Eliza,” His Excellency starts, “what you think you know, and the truth, they may be-”
“Or, they may not be.”
Selina tries to catch Eliza’s eye, because she wants to hear, she needs to hear, she needs to understand, if there is anything to understand about all this, what it is that’s brought them here. Like everything else about Eliza, though, her eye will not be caught.
She speaks with such a grating, painful tone it’s difficult to hear her. “What you did to us, what you did…those tests, I was a child, I was in pain, and that was you. Did you want to know how strong I was? Did I fail your precious tests, is that why I didn’t get to live in the castle, is that why I wasn’t the chosen one? Or was it because I was born a girl? After generations of Kings and Queens, was the equality of the old ages too much for you?”
Eliza grasps her wine cup, drains it, and throws the empty vessel across the room. It hits the ground, hard, with a terrible sound, but doesn’t so much as crack.
<
br /> Den Huo grips the table, preventing his anger from leaving him in some other way. Eliza is fixed right, right on him, and the sense of her rage coats him, surrounds him, cagelike and equally gratifying and disturbing.
“Or was it,” she is continuing, “because somewhere in there, you knew what you had planned was wrong. You knew your goals were beyond reproach, and did you rightly assume your strong, capable daughter would see beyond your grandeur, learn from what happened to her mother, would see that you are a weak and terrible being, lower than the lowest, but with access to this terrible weapon?” She stops, here, her face screwed into the most disgusted of contortions.
This is beyond reproach, Den Huo is thinking, and yet his daughter is so very much everything that Aiden is not, and look at her, there, she could lead, she could have been a leader, if only she were right. If only his father hadn’t…
“Please,” he says, and that word does not fall naturally from his lips, “please. Let me tell you about your mother.”
“I knew my mother,” Eliza spits, “I saw what you had done to her. Did you see it? Did you see her, laid out in the Southlands with a thousand people with less than nothing queuing up to kiss the cold dead hand of their princess? Did you see her there?”
Aiden is fascinated. His mother has never particularly occurred to him. The picture Eliza paints of her, laid out, to kiss the hand, that’s beautiful and sad and fitting, surely, for she must have been quite a woman, of course she must have been - his own greatness clearly did not come from his father, who cannot match even this Eliza’s accusing words without crumbling into someone who looks as if he might at any point be consumed by his robes.
“I did not,” his father is saying. “I didn’t see her. I wasn’t allowed into the Southlands.”
That nips Eliza’s rage sharp. She says nothing.
“That’s right. Not allowed. You don’t understand what happened to us when we took our turn to come down from the castle.”
“Our turn? We were dragged.”
“I saw you.”
“It was good of you to try to protect us.”
“But still, you remember with the eyes of a child.” His Excellency speaks with an earnestness that feels false, but looks real, untried. “I told you to go, told your mother to take you both…I wonder, Eliza, how much you truly remember of that time?”
Eliza shakes her head, just a little, despite herself.
“You were snatched up by my father’s soldiers - far from my imagining, even if your mother had been able to run for it, and Aiden, he was taken by another, and if you remember being dragged, it is only because of your tenacity, the way you would not be carried, the way you would not even be wrapped in a blanket, the way you fought, and fought, and would not for anything be separated from me and your mother…”
His Excellency’s voice cracks; he stops and clears his throat, takes another swallow of wine. His guests sit in silence, waiting for him to continue, as he does, a conscious effort to sound more himself firmly notable.
“Your mother was once more with child on that day. A fact even I did not know, but as they took Aiden from her arms, and began to parry her protests, she yelled this at them, and they saw the shock on my face, and that was my error, that was the split, that was the moment that set things in motion.”
“There was a third?” Selina asks, involuntarily. Aiden was one thing, Eliza another: she cannot imagine what a third sibling might be like.
His Excellency nods.
“Perhaps it is a shame that the final member of our curiously-joined family is not here. If he has, despite…reports,” (he looks at Aiden) “inherited one single shred of his father’s brilliance, I am sure we can find a place for him.”
Selina swallows. She looks at Eliza, at Aiden, and she tries to think…does he mean…can it be that…a third sibling…
“It was not your child, though,” she says.
His Excellency gives her a look, suggesting he doesn’t appreciate her commentary.
“Indeed. I had an heir, and a back-up. Two children seemed enough. But Anni was wise, and she knew Juan had values that must be extracted. So she executed her own plan.”
“And her third child was…” Selina pushes, knowing the answer.
His Excellency nods, a single, slow, ingratiating dip of his head, followed with a run of long fingers through lank, waving dark hair.
“Alej.”
“I don’t understand,” Selina says, her mind physically sore with these revelations, her body starting to demand further rest and recuperation. She takes water, gulps down half the glass but it catches in her throat: its taste seems stronger than that of the wine.
“You do not need to understand.”
“But I do,” Aiden says, unexpected. “I think you left some chapters out of your Book.”
For he knows full well that stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and thus far he has heard less than half of each, all out of sync at that.
“My son, my impudent, undeserving son, you did not receive that Book with any of the good grace you ought to have. You are not anything of the person I had hoped you would be.”
“I want to hear of my mother. Did you kill her, too?”
“He did so much worse than that!” Eliza interjects, back in her seat now, her legs weaker than she would concede. “He did so much worse than that.”
“I want to hear what he did. And who the woman was. If you were truly of my blood, you would wish to hear a story, and judge it only at its end.” Aiden’s voice is laced with the cruelty that has been lacking all this time, and Eliza is silenced by its thin, instructive demands. She is silenced not least because if the whole story is to be told, she will have to say something that will leave here with nowhere to hide.
His Excellency, too, retakes his seat, and folds his fingers together before him. Aiden helps himself, conspicuously, to a plate of rapidly-cooling meat and grains, for stories and food are natural partners, and he is exceptionally hungry at this point.
So His Excellency begins.
“Anni was my Selina. Our Selina. She was a scientist: the things she knew about the smallest and most intricate parts of our world were incredible. And she was beautiful, a Farnorthlander with the coldest skin and yellowest hair I have ever to see. My father brought a hundred Farnorthlanders here, into the complex, to help us with the genetic spread, and she came with that influx, born on the journey. In those days it was possible to walk from the Northland, before the greatest of the rumbles and deluges buried the paths beneath the sea itself.”
The sea, Aiden thinks, oh, for that space and peace once more.
At the phrase, ‘our Selina’, Selina wonders what she was, is, what she was for, she sees where he is going, and was she…for…genetic spread…it would make sense, but, truly? Was that all she was? It was never mentioned to her, not once.
“She was chosen for the castle immediately, but I did not meet her until she was a woman grown. She had had excellent tutorage from my mother, who doted upon her already as if she were her own daughter. She was the perfect companion, and I could not have imagined a better mother for my children.”
“Then wh-”
“Please. Let me finish.”
The level of sincerity in his voice is rising by the moment. His eyes have misted over with recollection.
“When my father discovered the baby Anni was carrying was not mine, he did not understand. He was furious she had disrupted our lineage. I convinced him to allow the child to be born, to be kept for…for testing, although I meant for that never to take place, please know, even though Alej was not my son, Juan is as close to me as it is possible to be, and I would have valued his son as my own.”
You’ll note this comment meshes perfectly with the way Den Huo was all but willing to disown Aiden and Alej, given their failure to comply with his wishes. Being valued as his might well mean little. But, the way he’s looking now, the story he’s telling, you’d be forgiven for believing that
he did have a humanity to him after all.
“When Alej was born, he was taken from her immediately. And then, it was then that…”
Eliza cannot hold quiet: “They said you were a madman. They said you had her executed because I did not pass the tests.”
His Excellency shakes his head, gravely, concern widening his eyes. “Lies, lies from my father, trying to poison me, to punish me further, as if killing the mother of my children were not enough. I had nothing to do with it, nothing at all. They told me you were both sent South for testing. My father kept Anni away from us all until the earliest time at which the boy could be removed from her. I wanted to keep you here, I desperately wanted to keep you safe, to spare you what we had endured, but at the same time, I thought that once you’d been through the procedures then you would be allowed into the castle once more, that you would at least be able to go there, where you would be treasured as you should always have been. And I thought if your mother was with you, then you would both be safe.”