“So you looked up to my mother because she was there for you when you needed someone, she gave you good advice, and she listened.  But, Arthur,” I deliberately met his eyes, “you only know the barest bit about her.  You spent half a day with her, maybe, three times, and a handful of hours some other times.  That’s not long enough to really know someone.”

His brows furrowed.  “That’s true,” he agreed slowly, “but sometimes you don’t really need a long time to know someone’s character.”

“And it was like that with Mama, yeah, yeah.”  I waved him off.  “Look, it doesn’t bother me that you looked up to my mother, or that you even saw her in a motherly fashion.  I mean, I’d think you were weird if you really wanted her to step in as your mother, but it doesn’t sound quite like that.  What does bother me is that you believe you know her so well that you’re willing to dismiss what I say.  You knew her for a few hours over several years.  Time in which she could have put on a false face – not saying she did, just that it’s possible when you only see someone for short periods like that.  I, on the other hand, have lived with her for over a decade and a half.  Yes, I’m her child.  And that means she didn’t hide things from me.  She didn’t pretend with me, she told me the truth.”

“People tend to hide some of the harsher realities of life from their children,” Arthur started to say.

“My mother didn’t.”  I raised an eyebrow when it was clear he didn’t believe me.  Yet again.  “People parent in different ways, Arthur.  My mother didn’t believe in hiding the truth.  She had no reason to.  I was – I was a complication in her life.”

I crossed my feet at the ankles, leaning back a bit on the bench.  “My mother spent most of her early years not having the option to make choices.  Everything was decided for her.  She was okay with it, because she thought that was just how her life was – that it was the best thing for everyone.  She went along with it.  Until she met my father.  Their relationship was complicated, more than I can easily describe, but she loved him deeply, and for the first time, she made a choice solely on her own.  A choice that would throw away everything she had grown up with, and she knew it, but it was her choice.  And she wanted it.  So, she married my father.”

Arthur was startled with this tidbit, clearly expecting, like Genevieve did, that my parents hadn’t been married.

“Her marriage made a mess of things in her homeland.  I won’t get into why, it’s not really important, but some people were mad, and some people thought it was great.  There were plans for my father to move to her homeland, though my mother had also considered other options – disappearing somewhere where no one knew either of them, or going to his homeland instead.  Choices that she had for once.  For the first time in her life, she had genuine decisions to make.  She loved it, even if it made things complicated.  They planned to live together, and they weren’t able to entirely yet because of their situations.  And then – and then everything got more complicated.”

The cat patted my leg with one paw, upset I wasn’t petting it, so I started slowly stroking it again, my eyes unseeing on the sky above.

“I was conceived.  It wasn’t supposed to be possible, supposedly, and the uproar was even more than when my parents married to begin with.”  For reasons I couldn’t explain to a human.  Well, wouldn’t.  I could, but it would be such a mess to do so.  “Suddenly, my mother was again faced with something she didn’t choose.  She didn’t choose to have a child.  It was a choice made for her, in a way.  And she felt she couldn’t raise me in my father’s homeland, or in her own.  So she took me elsewhere, where I wouldn’t be affected by either side of the argument, and made sure that I had the one thing that she was denied for so much of her life – the freedom to choose.”

I dropped my eyes to look at him.  “My mother technically had a choice with me – she could have chosen to hand me over to someone else and not to raise me, but she chose not to.  She felt it wasn’t a real choice, however, because the alternative was terrible.”  For many reasons.  “It was a choice, and not a choice.  So to an extent, her goal with me was to have me capable of living on my own.  That way, she was free to go back to the life she actually chose – a life with my father.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth, but I held up a finger.

“Questions later,” I ordered.  “Let me finish.”

He obediently fell silent and let me continue.

“But she also wanted me to have the freedom to do what she hadn’t been able to do for most of her life.”  Centuries of life, far more than Arthur realized.  My mother had been trapped in a life she hadn’t chosen and had never felt free to challenge it until she met my father.

“Don’t misunderstand, she loved me in her way.  But I also represented yet another choice she hadn’t made, and an obstacle to reach the choice she had made and the life she wanted – one with my father.  She raised me well, but she raised me with the point of me being able to stand on my own as early as possible.  She made no secret of that to me.  She told me the story early, told me her goal, told me that she wanted me to be independent.  Something not so uncommon for animals, you know.  Their goal is often the same – raise the children until they are capable of living alone, then kick them out of the den or nest or whatever.  In many ways, that was my mother’s plan, only she was the one to leave, not me.  But she made sure before she left that she not only left me capable of surviving on my own, but that she left me with all the tools I would need to make choices in my life.  To choose my own path, not have one chosen for me.”

Arthur was quieter now, his expression serious.  “Until I took that choice away by bringing you here.”

I nearly shrugged and told him I’d still had a choice in that – as in, not to kill him and his knights – but maybe it was better to keep that silent for now.  “True enough.  But I still have some choices here.  I could have chosen to fight Genevieve, to stay in my room, to run away, even.  But I chose to make the best of it.  To take advantage of your library, of the professions here that I didn’t have access to, things like that.”

He wasn’t really looking at me, thinking hard.  “What about your father?  Why didn’t he live with you?”

“Let’s just say it’s complicated.”  When it was clear that wasn’t going to be enough, I sighed a bit.  “When my mother found out I was conceived, some of the people who were against their union to begin with attempted to kill her and my father.  He was badly injured.”  Well, technically basically killed.  Mostly dead.  Barely alive?  “He had to go somewhere safe to heal, but because of the concerns that the attack might be followed up, my mother didn’t go with him.  They thought it was safest this way.  But,” I added, trying to impress this last bit on him, “my mother has gone to where he is now.  And for all practical purposes, you should consider her dead.”

His brows flew up.

“She won’t come back, Arthur,” I told him bluntly.  “Where they are now, it’s safe, they’re happy.  But it’s far beyond the reach of any ship or horse or any other method of transport.  She won’t come back here, she won’t visit any country you know.  You won’t see her again.  She’s not actually dead, and she is happy now that she has the life she chose, but you can’t ever think you’ll see her again.  And no,” I cut him off when he opened his mouth, “there’s no possibility she’ll come back to see me.  Trust me.  Yes, she loves me in her way, but I know she’s not coming back.”

Truth was, she couldn’t.  There was no coming back from Avalon.  It was a one-way trip.

Arthur seemed to struggle with this part quite a bit.  “Not…at all?  You can’t even write to her?”

I shrugged.  “What for?  To update her on my life?  She wants to live her own life, and I’m free to live mine.  I don’t need to run things by her or have her run things by me.  We don’t have the same kind of relationship h – you and your mother had, for instance,” I barely caught myself from saying “humans.”  “She’s satisfied knowing that I am capable and free.  And I am satisfied knowing that she is happy and can make her choices.  And we don’t need to update each other.”

This was clearly something he couldn’t really comprehend, but at least he seemed to try to accept this.  “I – okay.”  His forehead furrowed.  “I guess your relationship wasn’t what I was picturing.”

“You thought because she was kind and mothering to you, that she was always like that?  And that she couldn’t possibly abandon her child?”  I shrugged.  “She didn’t abandon me, Arthur.  She did what she set out to do – make me able to stand alone.  She achieved her goal with me, and then moved on with her life.  That’s not abandoning me.  She was done with her duties, and I didn’t need her anymore.  So we parted ways.  Mutually, I would add.  She asked me if I wanted her to stay longer.  She would have stayed if I wasn’t comfortable, but I was.  I knew I’d be fine, and I didn’t need her anymore.  So it made no sense for her to stay, especially when her own life was on hold for as long as she was with me.”  I eyed him while he still seemed to struggle with this concept.  “You don’t need to understand, Arthur.  You just need to recognize that our relationship was different, and thus it had different rules.  It wasn’t a bad thing that she left – it was good.  It meant her job was done, and staying longer actually would have been weird, let alone potentially a stumbling block in me being independent.  Leaving was good for both of us.  You don’t need to understand, you just need to accept that under our relationship, this was how things were meant to be.  This was good for us.  And it doesn’t mean you need to think any less of my mother.”

That was part of it for him, wasn’t it?  He admired my mother so much that he couldn’t comprehend a woman like her abandoning her own child.  To him, believing me meant betraying the image he had of my mother.

“For what it’s worth, my mother did have a good opinion of you.  She told me she thought you had the potential to be a great king.”

He blinked really fast again, running a hand over his face and close-cropped beard.  “She – she said that about me?”

I nodded.  “She didn’t talk about you a lot, but you were, to her, an uncomplicated relationship and someone she had chosen to help.  She could have chosen to ignore you, but instead she chose to help a teenage boy who had lost his mother, and then a young man who needed some advice.  She chose to listen and give you that advice, and to hope that her words might help you someday when you took the throne.  She knew you didn’t have a lot of good advice from your father – he might have been a good king in some ways, I suppose, but he ruled on fear and anger, and my mother hoped that her words would remind you that there are other options.  She wouldn’t have become your advisor,” I added, remembering that he’d wanted to ask that, “because it would have held her back from joining my father – he couldn’t travel here because of his injuries,” which had forced him to go to Avalon if he was going to survive, so, uh, yeah, he couldn’t travel here, “but she would have been glad to know that you haven’t forgotten what she did tell you.  She thought you had potential.  If you want to honor her memory – her words – then live up to the potential.  Become a great king.”

Arthur was clearly feeling a bit of emotion about this, so I focused on the cat to give him some time to process.