Eighth love

The day it all changed doesn’t exist for me. It was a sound that built up over time. At its base it was near-silence, and at its core it was deafening. I remember being deafened by my father’s words and what that did to me. 

He called me into his room to have breakfast with him. Except I had already eaten, so I nibbled at the toast and sipped at the tea, waiting for him to get to the point. He never called me for social reasons, there was always a lesson to be learned or a scolding to be had.

The image of him sitting at the set table by the window, his heavy velvet blue-gray robe draped over his shoulders, the family crest embroidered in silver on his chest. 

My father and Lior’s are antonyms of one another, yet somehow they’ve been decades long friends. 

Lord Saëns took your mistakes and repurposed them, forged them into your natural curiosities, creating a path wide enough growth. My father was embarrassed of my mistakes and made it known. The only thing that embarrassed further were his own mistakes… and I think that’s what he views me as… a mistake of his making. 

In retrospect, we were similar in that neither of us were content with the role that had been assigned to us. 

He prefaced his monologue with a comment on my mismatching attire, followed by a quote by a dead philosopher. I was losing my patience when he pulled something out of his inner breast pocket and dropped it on the white table cloth.

The necklace I had gifted the boy.

“How did you—?”

No way it was a duplicate, it had been designed for my grandfather by my late grandmother. 

“It’s time you understand the gravity of your actions. It does not matter how well-intended you are, nor how small or harmless a gesture seems. The rules do not apply to you in the way they apply to others, the consequences for you will always be greater. You will never be simply a friend to anyone.” The lines at the corner of his mouth deepened, suppressing whatever comment he was cooking up until it was inarguable. 

In my seat I shifted, shaking my head horrified. “Is he—Is he—” I couldn’t get the words out. 

“I won’t ask why you would be so careless. It’s my fault for sheltering you from the reality of your situation. It was stupid of me to attempt to do so.” He wiped his large square hands in a dark maroon napkin that, for some reason, became the central focus of this core memory. “How would you ever learn to face your responsibilities if I’m aiding you in avoiding them.”

I don’t know what the fuck he wanted me to say to that. He didn’t answer my question either, and I wasn’t capable of asking again. 

He seemed to realize the fact.  “The boy is fine,” he said. “Disfigured. Likely for life, but he will survive.”

My throat seized up, and in my lap I was clutching my own napkin. 

“He tried to pawn your gift and the shop owner assumed it was stolen. He ran from the City Guard, and it escalated from there.” His dark eyes were waiting and watching, expecting me to argue to my defense. I always did so. There was a change in me that day. I would easily credit this incident if I felt it was the true root of everything, but to this day I cannot say for certain. 

“I don’t have a death wish,” the boy had said to me. 

“The consequences for him would’ve been greater,” Lior had also said.

“I’ll take a slap on the wrist over potentially ruining his life.”

My words, to my father, were worth less than the silence, so I opted for the latter. I am pretending I had a choice in the matter. 

“Well, do you have anything to say?” He demanded after a minute. 

I vehemently shook my head no. 

“Leave, then.”

I willed my legs into power. They carried me haphazardly, past the guard, and through the doors.

And in the hallway, I vomited. 

The bulbs never opened quite fully

In the boat’s private lounge, Canelle sat back, placing her clasped hands on her belly, musing over what Valkom shared with her. She was disoriented by his apparent mood while he told the story. He’d jump back and forth between frequencies, one serious, and one he tried to play off as whimsical to a questionable result.

Looking at him sitting in the other soft chair, the man needed to hear a joke, or something humorous that would give him the reassurance he craved. Valkom of all people…

“Your first wife was Rudian, right?” she asked cheekily, fairly confident in the answer. 

He grinned, the unease floating around him lifting. “And she was a great wife. I still talk to her. We’re on great terms.” 

“Uh huh,” Canelle was skeptical, although in truth she had no way of knowing. The extent of her knowledge ended there. She shifted back to the point of his story, matching his original tone, the serious one. “Do you think the boy was punished because you took a shortcut when the old woman told you not to?” 

He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in his own chair. “Obviously no. And it was stupid to try and tie the situation with the Rudian boy to that of the mine when they have nothing to do with each other. Younger me was young though, and it’s what young me believed.”

“And you tried to fix it?”

“Actually no. I didn’t. The boy must hate me, and he has every right to.” 

“It takes a lot of energy to hate someone, do you think he’d waste all of it on you?”

To that, he pretended not to be taken back. She’d been quick about it, too. She’d only ever tried that with Lior, whom she missed dearly now, resulting in her unintentionally going off on the prince. 

“I’ll admit that did make me feel slightly better,” he said. “I suppose it has been years.” 

“I’m not telling you to not feel bad about it, just feel bad a moderate amount.” She watched him reach under his shirt to pull out the necklace of the silver wolf and observe it. “Your views have clearly changed since then, and you recognized at a respectable age the flaws in your preconceptions. You’ve acknowledged that you made a mistake, and while you haven’t made amends, you haven’t continued to be awful in that avenue.”

Just other avenues, right?” he says, reminding Canelle of his other character flaws. Alcoholic, adulterer, chronic liar. 

“Self-destruction is different,” she clarified. 

“Self-destruction isn’t cute or attractive, though.” He let the chain around his neck drop, the silver wolf landing flat on his shirt. “Lady Nikase seems to have realized that, and that’s why she never wants to see me again.”

Across from him, Canelle squinted, and fought to urge to roll her eyes at him. “Okay, she never actually said that right? You said she gave you her journal. Implied that you should read it. Attached was this… this… note. What did the note say?” There was something he was keeping from her. 

It’s like he had been waiting for her to ask, he promptly pulled the note out of his pants pocket, and read it over. 

“I can’t follow you to Bevij. I hope this will help you understand why.”  

That didn’t explicitly say—”

It was Valkom’s turn to return the look of skepticism. 

“I’m serious, it sounds like she wants you to read her journal, yes. But it doesn’t sound like the end. And perhaps I’m projecting because I did leave a similar note for Lior… and I know what it meant from my perspective.” Canelle loved Liorit, and that’s why she had to leave. All the same, she hadn’t sworn to never see the woman again. She very much hoped to one day. 

“Even if you’re right, I don’t know if I can continue.”

“Because you know what comes next?” She thought about where he’d left off in his summary of the journal’s contents. And her heart fluttered when she briefly wondered how far into their journey to Dovec Nikase had documented. Although… what affected Canelle about the events that unfolded was undoubtedly different. 

He sighed, “Because I know what comes next.”  Backtracking, his brow twisted together. “Anyway, have you thought about writing to Lior? There’s a post office in Torelen, I’m sure she’d like that.” 

Canelle felt the heat in her cheeks, and suddenly she’d shrunk down to the version of herself she’d been a year ago. Someone with less of a spine. “I wouldn’t want to risk it… and it’s inappropriate.” 

What had been appropriate about anything that was going on?

Everyone’s love was in the wrong place, and everyone was a little bit broken about it. And at the end of the day, Valkom was presently married to Lior, Bevij’s acting regent. A role she would have as long as Valkom was indefinitely ‘missing’.