27 - The feeling in the sword-hand of the blade going into flesh

The next day, Binchera peeked into my office and said, “Your shadow-mother and stepfather just wanted to let you know, they’re here,” as if I’d known they intended to come, which no doubt he thought I did. I was struck speechless for a moment. Denaina had gone back home the moment I was settled on the throne and never returned even for a visit, and Veraha, one might call the homebody of the family; he’d never even set foot out of northern Yeola-e in his life. To what could I owe such a pleasure? I had no idea.

In my next scrap of a break, I went to my mother’s room, guessing they’d be there. “Mama? Where are you hiding, and is it true you're hiding shadow-mama and stepdad, too?” They were indeed there, and we hugged and kissed.

As we made small-talk, I asked how well Skorsas was taking care of them, as if there could be any doubt, and that led naturally enough to an impression of him talking about ezethra, “You Yeolis, how can you drink so much of that stuff? What’s in it, Yeoli drugs?” I thought it was decently funny, and my blood-mother laughed, but neither Denaina or Veraha did. By their faces, I realized, there was something big on their minds. Bad news from home? But then my mother should look equally grim.

My stepfather took me by the shoulders, his thick hands firm. “Chevenga,” he said. “How are you?”

“Fine, stepdad,” I said, puzzled that he should be asking so emphatically, like a healer. “How are you?”

My shadow-mother stepped close, and put a hand on my shoulder as well. In her trying-to-be-gentle voice, she said, “Chevenga… we know.”

“Know what?”

“Esora-e told us.”

I froze, tingles spreading out from my centre down to my hands and feet. I had never sworn him to silence, I suddenly remembered.

“Lad,” said Veraha, in his trying-to-be-gentle voice, “he thought we should know. I am sure he has told no one else.”

“I have been wanting very badly to do this.” My shadow-mother grabbed me in her arms, hard. My stepfather did the same, the two of them hugging me between them, their hands seizing and stroking my hair, the way people do with someone they’ve come within finger-widths of losing.

I was suddenly light-headed, as if my heart didn’t know what else to feel. It was going to be interesting telling Surya this. The only words that came to me to were, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for.

“Sorry!” Denaina gasped. “Chevenga, no! Don’t apologize. We came to be with you… against this. You need us.”

“I… shadow-mama, I am so busy, I hardly think about it, except when Surya has me,” I said, even as I felt something piercing, like pain but not pain, in my deepest core, the place no one but Surya saw.

“Esora-e warned us you’d have only scraps of time away from work,” said Veraha. “We’ll stay out of your way. But we will be here.”

I tried to shift out of their embrace, but they tightened it. “You don’t need to comfort me, I’m all right.”

“No shitting us or yourself, Chevenga,” my blood-mother said. “You aren’t.” I felt that piercing again.

I know what Surya would tell me: breathe deep. I did, and must have relaxed, because Veraha pulled my head down onto his shoulder, making me lean my cheek into his neck like a baby. But I could only stay for moments longer; I had to get back to the office. The best pretext is a true one; they let me squirm free. I went there on shaky legs.

I could find no time until bath-time, as I contritely told them, so they joined me in the Greater Baths, lounging in silk robes while I had my usual fast scalding-hot soak. We all sat embraced in the beauty of ice-blue marble and glass and gold shaped into gleaming ripples and curlicues and waves, meant to portray the wonders of the sea in high Arkan style, along with the gentle metallic tinkling of the water-chimes and the scent of frankincense. Veraha had come here a bead early just to admire the stone-work.

Naturally one of my mothers, I can’t remember which, asked me if I’d eaten since dinner, as mothers do. To her eyes I looked thin, she told me when she saw me naked, though I couldn’t see how that could be when I was only exercising one in four days. It must have been Denaina, when I think about it, because Karani had already learned how many people had to be involved and how much trouble it was for me to eat.

“You can’t just go down to the kitchen and raid the stores while we keep you company?” said Veraha.

“Stepdad, this is the Marble Palace. You don’t just go down to the kitchen and raid the stores… especially if you’re the Imperator. I’m not even entirely sure where the kitchens are, and everyone would have conniptions—He Whose Kyash Is The World’s Delicacy, you know what I mean?”

“But I thought you had absolute power.”

I snorted with laughter. “I Whose Life Is Yeola-e’s Misconception.”

Two or three moons before, I had asked Kaninjer to put me on whatever diet would allow me to be the sharpest, get the most work out of myself and need the least rest possible in a day, so the cart came loaded with gold-leaf chocolate truffles, peach tarts and gossamer pastries for them, and one plate of raw asparagus spears, raw almonds and sesame-bran paste, all unseasoned, for me. After getting up off the floor, the food-taster took two mouthfuls of that and a sampling of everything else. In sympathy, my parents waited the half-bead with me, long enough for my hair to dry entirely, until he let us know it was safe.

“All-Spirit, Fourth Chevenga!” my shadow-mother said, taking me back ten or fifteen years, once we were eating. “Quit bolting! How many times did I tell you that when you were a child, and you’ve still never…” She trailed off. “Ehh… right.” Because the room is so vast, and the chimes and gentle splashing of the waterfalls can cover voices, the Great Baths are private if you speak quietly.

“Exactly,” I said. “I can only down so much food before I kick off, so…” All three of them stared at me, instead of laughing. “Em… bad joke. Sorry.”

We went through my life: my habit of hurrying, my jiltings by lovers, my shyness about it, my marrying a couple who were in love with each other so I would not have to tell them, my sweating over 21-1 and 21-5-7. “Our lips are sealed,” they promised me. “You’d be in a world of flying dung if it came out, love, we know.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I was a child,” I said. I might as well broach that subject, to spare them from fearing to. “I thought it was best…”

“He didn’t even tell me until a year later,” my blood-mother said.

“I wonder how we might have helped you with it, if you had,” my shadow-mother said.

“How? Wave your hands over my head and erase it from my mind? It didn’t hurt me—”

“No shitting us, Chevenga,” my mother said, in that quiet voice of hers that is immovable.

“Mama, I got used to it! Our lives are all finite and we count them so—you do—I do! And people have to get used to all sorts of hard things.”

“I just wish we could have been there… as well as Mama… when you needed someone to talk to.”

“But I was fine.” I ignored the ‘kyash’ gesture from my mother. “I didn’t want to hurt you. It hurts other people worse than it hurts me; I see that every time. That’s the worst pain for me: what it does to other people.”

“You were a child, Chevenga,” said my stepfather. “It was our responsibility to take care of you, not the other way round.”

“I just didn’t want to hurt you; isn’t that the responsibility everyone has towards everyone else? Curse it, I was going to die before thirty, so what? Lots of people do, especially warriors. I’ve outlived most of the friends I had when I was a child! But I knew that my parents would tear their hearts out over it, worse than anyone.” That got him; he clenched his eyes shut and tears squeezed out. I grabbed him in a hug. “See? This is why I didn’t tell.”

He grabbed me back, so hard it hurt. “I would have wanted to hold you like this when you were a boy and it might have done you some good!”

“You held me like this plenty when I was a boy! I remember, it felt just the same!”

“Chevenga... it’s regret we feel,” my shadow-mother said.

“For what? You did nothing wrong, you have nothing to regret! Tell you what: for everything you regret, or feel you ought to: I forgive you. All right? And I ask forgiveness for doing whatever I did wrong.”

“Part of me is angry, and none of me should be, I guess.”

“Shadow-mama, I’m sorry.”

“Not at you, love.”

“At Esora-e then; please don’t be… he’s with me now and he’s ripping his heart up about what happened years ago worse than anyone else.”

“At All-Spirit, then, if there is no one else and nothing I should be angry for…! It’s past and done and the stroke of the past is in the past. So I will swallow my anger… it’s not as if I haven’t had lots of practice.”

Surya had taught me a few things. “Shadow-mama... is it the anger that armours over fear?”

She pursed her lips. Her gaze could be very piercing; it was now. She did a terse chalk-sign. “Of losing me.” She kept the chalk sign out.

Veraha and I had let go by this time. I took her shoulders. “Shadow-mama…” Make this convincing, I told myself. “You’re not going to lose me. Not if Surya has his way... not if I have mine. I’m sworn.”

Denaina caressed my forelock back from my face. “You know… you are the same as you ever were. So bright, so happy and laughing, as if you didn’t have a single care, except when you were in a dark mood, but those weren’t that often… but this has always been there, for you.” There was that piercing again; it was as if gentleness, like that of her fingers on my hair, brought it on. “I look at you, and you are the son I had from your birth, who I know like the back of my hand as parents know their children… or so you look. But you are also a stranger, from a thousand days’ march away from us… and in that way, always were. It’s what we are going to have to get used to, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But… you’re not going to lose me. And then it won’t matter. That’s my plan, my intention; I usually succeed at them, do I not?”

That earned a quirk of a smile, at one corner of her lips. “Yes, you do.” But it faded and her eyes went piercing again. “Esora-e said that it wasn’t foreknowledge, but a feeling… a conviction, somewhere in you, that you… should die young.”

I felt my cheeks come up red. “That… I think I should get Surya to explain.”

My blood-mother had learned a few things from Surya, too. “No, Chevenga, you should,” she said. “We are your parents. You need to be honest enough with yourself about it to be open to us.” My cheeks got redder; they felt hot to bursting.

“I… I don’t deny it. I ask only… please… that you don’t ask me why.” Of course that was the question emblazoned on their faces: Why? How was it possible? How could you have come to think such a thing? “Because I don’t really know.” I thought Surya might have explained it several times, but if he had, it hadn’t stayed in my head.

My shadow-mother took my face between her hands, caressing my cheeks with her thumbs. That touch suddenly pulled at my own tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, and it came out barely more than a whisper. “I know… it’s madness. I know. That’s why I have a healer. I… when I first went to him… you want to know how it went?” As if they wouldn’t. I recounted it all, knowing they’d find it reassuring that I had relinquished my will to Surya, in matters of my life and death. Telling it was somewhat calming, at least.

“Now I am sworn to see it through,” I said. Of course then they were asking about how it would go and my odds and so forth. I referred all those questions to Surya. “Yes, he knows me better than myself, I cannot deny. Fessas quarter, 37 Bright St.—you’d better go with an escort, talk to Krero.”

“Chevenga,” Veraha said. “Do… any of the children know?”

“Yes,” I said, tripping over my tongue and barely hiding it. “Tawaen—I thought he was mature enough—and Vriah. You know... try to hide anything from Vriah.” I told them this was why I’d brought Tawaen to Arko with me to tell Artira I was looking to be reinstated, even though it had not really been safe. “When I told him, he was angry that I’d been away so much, and he made me swear an oath I wouldn't go away without him again. That was in the year between my terms, and I didn't think I was going to be semanakraseye again, so I swore. And so had to take him, or be forsworn.”

“But now it doesn’t matter; you’ll be here for him,” Veraha said.

I took a deep breath. “Yes. I haven’t told him about that, yet; I’m not sure how—”

My shadow-mother drew in a hissing-sharp breath. “What!? He still thinks you're going to die young?” All three of them stared at me. “Chevenga! You have to tell him now!”

“Both of them!” Veraha said. “You can’t leave them like that, a ten-year-old and a six-year-old!”

“Shadow-mama, stepdad, I… look, it’s my plan. But that doesn’t make it… certain…” Now I was caught out; I’d just promised her, very firmly. And everyone knew how it was my habit to have my plans certain in my mind until they were fulfilled. “In spite of what I told you… I know, I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t promise you and not him…” I looked down and gripped my forelock; I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the whole kyashin thing.”

“You told them thirty, right?” said Veraha. “And you’re twenty-eight and a half; Tawaen can subtract and even if Vriah can’t, you can bet that she’s gone to him and asked.”

The image of them slipping into some private corner and lowering their piping voices came into my mind before I could stop it. My eyes burned with tears, and that piercing feeling came, more intensely than ever, all but unbearable. “I know… I know, but I can’t…” I couldn’t speak, for pain in my throat.

“You don’t want to tell them until you're entirely confident of it yourself,” said my blood-mother. I stabbed my hand out chalk. “In case you don’t succeed—”

“And they remember me a liar forever! I’m sorry… shadow-mama, I’m sorry I’m not certain… it’s still new to me…” My voice broke, the tears coming harder than I could stop.

My three parents seized me, pressing in close around me, their arms tight around my shoulders, their fingers clenched in my hair. We will enwrap you, we will protect you, we will be your fortress, our child, of strength and love, that touch said. I lost it entirely, crying like a child, full-throated. Their voices were so close they seemed like thoughts in my own mind. My son, my child, my love, you can do it. You have your strength, you have our love, you have your own will, which never fails when you set it on something. You can do it, love. You will.

“I’ll do my best,” I whispered between sobs, when I could. “Always my best, that I can swear… and I swore to Surya, you know… always my best, second Fire come, I will do my best. I have to, Kahara, for so many I have to, for so many I have to, second Fire come I’ll do my best I’ll do my best…”

We were there a while. Surya would say: they needed to express it, and I to hear it. I was so spent afterwards I was asleep before I laid my head on Kall’s shoulder, because I couldn't remember doing it the next morning.

There was just one oddity that seemed almost outside it all, and so didn’t stay in my mind; it came back to me only later. My mother’s hand on my chest, on the right, and my stepfather’s chest against my back a little below the right shoulder-blade, somehow stood out vivid for me, the feeling of their touch somehow more intense, as if my skin was thinner there, or made slightly raw by some skin ailment. I had no idea why.

†

The next day I went to the roof to train, I was tight; Kall mentioned it right at the start, and I felt it across the top of my back, and couldn’t shake or flex or stretch it away, for all I tried, between sparring bouts. Earlier that morning my thoughts had wandered back to Surya’s quartz and obsidian, and how I’d had, instead of one clear feel for a decision so certain I’d have followed it without thought, two, equally certain, abjuring me to do two opposite things. That would be unsettling for anyone, I would think. But on my decisions, the fate of two nations rested.

The thought had been creeping into my mind all day. “How many of the decisions of the past have been influenced, as this one, by the death-in-me—and how many people have died for it?” Stroke of the past, I knew; I could imagine Surya saying, “You have done what you have done, working from what you had, and most would argue that it was far more good than ill.” Healer’s orders; in my mind I should say crisply, “A-e kras!” and forget it.

Sparring with true steel, of course, I had my mind only on that. There is no thought there, only the fast flow of strike and parry, give and take, momentary victory and defeat, shared joy and pain. I was sparring Idiesas Firnean—Tyirian, who was teaching, had just called us down for too much joking—when he began one of his lightning-fast and very powerful lunges.

There is a length of the line of time missing from my memory, as if one of the three women who spin out lives as yarn in the ancient story, the one with the scissors, snipped out a bit in error, but then, her pale brow perhaps furrowed with momentary self-reproach, joined the two ends. What I recall next, and I remember it like yesterday, is Idiesas’s face, a little less than an arm’s length from mine, staring at me transfixed in absolute astonishment and horror. The feeling in the sword-hand of the blade going into flesh belongs only in the darkness of the battlefield, never on the training ground—but here it was, in his hand.

I didn’t understand at first. I felt as if I had run into a wall so hard I could not move. Then I looked down, and saw his sword, standing in my chest what seemed like a fingerwidth away from my nose. I could see only a handspan and a half of blade between his hand and my skin, and it was a longsword; weapon-sense showed me the rest. I was run right through.

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