Interlude: Stoneface

From the high window of Obissian Castle, Lachesis Aveea watched his daughter cross the courtyard.

He stood a pace left of the frame, the lamp behind him. From below, the window showed only light. He had found the angle years ago. Whether it was wisdom or cowardice no longer interested him.

She limped. She was hiding it, which meant it was worse than it looked. The right shoulder rode high. Three days in the ground and she had come out damaged and alive.

Damaged and alive. That is the whole of what I have permitted her.

The threads went with her across the yard. He no longer had to look.

There is no closing a door you have opened for love.

Halfway across the yard she stopped and looked up.

He did not move. She could not see him. She stood with her face raised to the window as if she expected something to happen there.

Nothing happened. She went toward the east entrance.

Go to her.

The thought was old and it had never once been useful. He knew the thread behind it. Down the stairs. Her name. The three things he had been keeping for thirteen years. And past that the darkness, or worse than the darkness, her smile from a place he could not follow.

One thread held. On it she grew up hard, and alone, and nobody told her why.

A king who does not govern. A law two lines long, so that no one in Kraeta would ever again be made into anything by another man’s hand. Thirteen years spent making his daughter into something. He had no illusions about the sum. He had only failed to find a thread where the sum came out different.

There were days he failed.

She was eight. He had come around the atrium stair and found her on the steps, doing an impression of Aris for a kitchen boy. The throat clearing before the correction. Exact. He laughed before he could stop it. She looked up. For a moment her whole face opened, the way it had when she was three. Then she remembered who he was, and it closed.

That night the thread that held was thinner. He watched it thin.

His penance was nine days of stone. He passed her in halls and did not see her. She spoke to him twice and he answered a servant. Nine days, until the thread was as it had been. He counted them. He assumed she did.

He laid both hands flat on the desk until the shaking stopped. It took longer than it used to.

The trunk. Under papers that did not matter, the box.

I open this to remember why. Not to feel. Remember, then close it.

Her first doll. A carved stick she had called a sword. A drawing at four, wobbling lines: him, her, Rhen, three stick figures holding hands under a sun. Beneath it, letters. One for each birthday since. Sealed. Unsent.

She drew us happy. She has not drawn us since.

Ahead of her a thread ran east, and there was a man with a sword on it. Whether it was hers or only near hers, he could not tell. It would not have mattered. He could tell her nothing either way.

He put the letters back. The drawing, the stick, the doll, in the order they had come out. The papers over the top. The lid.

Then he returned to the window, a pace left of the frame, and looked down at the empty yard until the lamp burned low.