21 - In which I tell two more parents

Dear Papa:

Takes something like this, to make me do the stupid thing I did as a child, and write a letter that will never be sent to a person who doesn’t exist, just to comfort my lousy heart by spewing out words on paper. Must be thirty years since I last did this.

I wonder if Mama has ever read through the stack of them I left? That would provide her vindication, I suppose, in all her opinions of me. Good cause not to talk to me for thirty years.

I still think about her sometimes. In the dark of night, sleeping alone as I always do now. Her in that fortress of a house and war-school in Chavinel, terrorizing and torturing her third generation now of students into warriors. I wonder what her face looks like now? If she’s hunched at all or still spear-straight? Maybe her hair is white? I wonder if she wonders what I look like?

Anyway—he has four parents, even if only three are in one house. Two know. The other two should. If the ex-husband they kicked out of the four is the person who tells them, well, so it goes.

He didn’t swear me to silence. I thought of asking Karani while I was still in Arko, where she’s staying, but thought again. She’d say I should ask him, and of course he’d say no.

Easier to gain forgiveness than permission.

Bless Karani, though, always. When I said to her, “You were right all along, I was too hard on him, I should have listened, I am sorry,” she didn’t jump all over me and say “I told you so, shit-brain,” like most would, but just, “Esora-e… you couldn’t know.”

So once I was home, I asked Denaina and Veraha up to the Hearthstone Independent. Had to be careful how I worded the note, to make sure Denaina wouldn’t think it was just me coming after her again, trying to get her to love me again. Just “something you have to know about our shadow-stepson.”

I guess I’ve never described his all-but-palace to you, with the Arkan glass all over and the water running through and the glow-globes from those spookers? If you are anything approaching decent, you don’t want to know.

I took them into the library. Quiet and calm in there. Served them tea, in cups that he got as a gift from some gilded Brahvnikian fop. All the way home, floating on air, I was trying to plan how I’d tell them, come up with the words. I never settled on a way. How do you say something like that?

It kind of stumbled and dribbled out of me in the end. Kevyala, I understand to my bones the feeling I saw on their faces. Not believing at first, asking the same question a couple of ways, “all his life he’s thought he’d die before thirty?” I guess people keep asking because they want to hear “no” so the world will go back like it should be.

“No wonder he wanted to grow up so fast.” “No wonder he’s always in a hurry.” “It explains a lot of things.” I told them he told me when I was in Arko just now, and told Karani twenty years ago. Yes, she was keeping it from them, too. I got out the Saekrberk. Naina said no, Vera said yes. I said yes.

Veraha is the soul of tact. “You must feel like a shit, for being so down on him for trying to grow up too soon, as you’d say.” Ha ha! Thanks, my dear ex-step-husband.

Their jaws dropped when I told them he’s going asa kraiya. Same thing everyone in the entire world is going to say. “Him!?”

Yes, him. I think I’m starting to practice defending him for it. But I still can’t imagine it myself. When I look at him, think of him, remember his whole life, it is not in me to see an asakraiyaseyel.

“I am still trying to understand this,” Denaina says. Papa, I wrote you many times, thirty years ago, how beautiful she is. She still is. It hasn’t changed, at all. “All his life… from seven… right under our noses.”

I think it might have been Naingini who once said to me, you never really know the lives your children lead, unless they get around to telling you, and maybe they never will.

I told them about the girlfriends who ditched him when he told them. “Kahara, that’s why,” says Veraha. “So handsome, so eligible, he should have had girls, and some boys, flocking around him. And he did—he was randy almost beyond belief when he was twelve—but it seemed to stop when he was fifteen, sixteen… he should have had a dozen marriage offers. Instead he was running all over the country, trying to find a couple… I always thought that was strange.”

Everything about my mysterious shadow-son becomes clear. “So when he died, they’d still have each other and they’d be losing a friend only,” says Denaina. “But he’d still have done his duty and made heirs.”

“I just want to take him in my arms!” Veraha said. He had tears in his eyes, and even Naina’s were a little red. I can’t tell you how much, Papa, I wanted to take her into my arms. I had to stand back and let Vera do it.

“That’s why he loves Niku so much,” she whispers. “Why he seems so grateful to her.” Why he puts up with so much kyash from her, I think but don’t say. “Esora-e, you must feel like such an asshole,” says Vera, the picture of tactful discretion again, remembering how I got into a fight with Niku during the war, and thrown out of the Demarchic Guard, albeit temporarily, for my trouble. I tell myself, because it's true, that he's in fact being sympathetic.

I told them that I went to Arko because the healer asked me to, and next thing I know they’re both saying, “We’ve got to go… never mind writing ahead and asking him if he needs us, we should just go.” Plans are all made before they even leave the Hearthstone. And Naina is telling me, as she always did, don’t be down on yourself. As if I’ll listen.

“No wonder he could get in such dark moods sometimes,” she says. “You didn’t see it, Vera, because you came along later, but when he was very little, before Tennunga died, he was the most cheerful kid in the world… always smiling and laughing, giving little gifts to everyone, rescuing birds with broken wings.” Before I made a leather-souled and steel-hearted warrior out of him, yes. “Now, having that hanging over him…”

“No wonder he felt… drawn to it,” says Vera. “Death. How many times he tried to… you know…” I couldn’t handle this without throwing back most of my cup of Saekrberk. “Oh right,” Veraha says, and throws back most of his.

Maybe you buggered off, Papa, because you had an idea how shitty being a parent can be?

“It’s going to be short anyway, so why not end it now instead of bearing, whatever it was, that particular time…” I said.

That got Naina. She buried her face in her hands. I almost touched her before I stopped myself. Vera wrapped his arms around her, hard.

Of course they asked me his odds, as if I know. “If it happens it will be like Tennunga all over again, but worse.” Naina’s thinking of the people, not just herself. “But worse. Tennunga never brought Yeola-e back from such a place.”

When the greatest warrior in the world goes, he leaves a big hole.

“He has this healer,” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “And he has us.”

“I guess I am going up in one of those things after all,” Veraha says resignedly. I try to tell him how wonderful it feels. How free. How alive.

We go through Chevenga’s life, picking through every bit like buzzards on a battlefield. This sign, that clue. There is so much. We are thinking, we were blind. But it’s like a riddle, only the answer makes the question make sense.

We sit there thinking, silent, except for the occasional gulping of Saekrberk.

Then Denaina says, “Esora-e, I can’t puzzle this out… just because someone thinks he’s going to die doesn’t mean he is. I mean… you can persuade yourself easily on a battlefield, sure. But it’s peacetime now. It’s not like he’s looking at spears all the time any more. Why is it that he’s in real danger… at all?”

I guess I’ve dodged around the key bit. Now I can't. They both look at me, these people who were two thirds of the warp and woof of my life for all that time. In some way this news has made us all strangers to each other.

I take a deep breath and another belt of Saekrberk. I should be getting drunk, why am I not? I lick my lips.

“What Surya told me… it’s that, in his heart of hearts… he thinks he ought to die young. That it’s right. He didn’t know it himself, because it was deep in him, like the things we don’t know we think until someone points it out. But it’s there… Surya saw it, with his gift.”

It’s like we’re all dead, the silence, the frozen breath, except we’re all standing and staring at each other.

“But…” Naina says. “But that’s… madness.”

“Yes,” I said. “So he’s seeing a healer.”

“He’s semanakraseye and he thinks that…” Vera trails off, not wanting to follow the thought.

“This is why he’s been so secretive, and why we have to be as well. He’d be in a world of shit if it somehow got out.” Did he realize that, even as a kid? Apparently. That’s my brilliant boy.

I tell them what I know. “If you think you ought to die, you’ll find a way. It’s peacetime, but he does dangerous things, things in which he could have accidents. Anyone can have an accident. And there are still people around who would love to kill him, lots of them, for all sorts of reasons, and all it takes is one, and for him to go outside his own security, which would be easy enough. The only way you could totally protect him is lock him in a cushioned box. But we’re hardly going to do that.”

“Kyash, Esa…” The way she says my name short is just like she said it a thousand thousand times while we were still married, my non-existent Papa. She said it by accident, for sure. “Is he safe?”

“The healer isn’t saying he should be locked in a box.”

“Maybe that’s because of his position.”

I find myself grinning, at the thought of Surya letting himself be thrown by such a little thing as that. I tell them how the healer has the Imperator-semanakraseye-scourge-of-Arko-greatest-warrior-most-powerful-human-alive so thoroughly under his thumb. They heave sighs of relief.

And then it’s why, why, why, how could he think such a thing; what could convince a child of seven that he should die before thirty, that it’s some sort of obligation?

I did a good enough job of answering their questions up to that point, I guess, Papa, that maybe they thought I had an answer for that one.

This is the thing I can’t look at. My mind shies away from even thinking about it. I should do chiravesa. But I can’t even begin to imagine.

All those years, behind those dark eyes, even when they were still cute, the big eyes of a sweet-faced little boy, was happening something I can’t even bear to imagine. Boot-leather soul though I have now I’m middle-aged, I can’t bear even to imagine it. And he lived it, for twenty-one years.

Maybe I should have stayed in Arko. Naina and Veraha took off on double-wings to Arko this morning. They go carrying their love for him. They get to see him. As I write, I’m getting the urge to grab him again. And never let the little shit out of my sight as long as I live.

I’m sorry, Papa. I confess, I’m drunk again, as I write. I haven’t been eating, and Azaila fills me with beer, of all things. I realize it’s to get nourishment into me in a way that I won’t refuse. Maybe you could tell by my writing. If you were real. I love you and would die in an eye-blink to save you, my shadow-son, my commander, my semanakraseye. Curse you, I love you, curse you, I love you.

Your ever-faithful son,
Esora-e.