I draw a low breath, trying to steady both the anger and the confusion because we both know what part he played in my ‘happenstance’. We know it very well.
“Why are you here?” I ask. I keep it in the soft range like a prayer, but the question still sits like sweat under silk.
“Because your father is dead, and your mother is…” He pauses, adjusting his mouth around the word that has lived for too long in rumour and is now a location, a sentence, a place under a place.
“In Oblivion,” I say, wondering if he feels the knife twists as much as I do.
His eyes right now are not kind and not unkind; they are unnervingly attentive, studying my face, as if he expects me to start crying and begging him for mercy. As if I’d ever play that part. “Yes. Because through no fault of your own, you have been left without any protection.”
Protection. He says it so carefully it’s hard not to scoff. Afterall, am I not a pig they’re all fattening up in time for slaughter?
“I do not need protection.” I tell him.
“Of course you do,” he says, as if he is telling me that of course I need to breathe. “It merely offends you to accept it. Pride is the only garment no one takes from you here.”
Perhaps he is right. He speaks such pretty words, such pretty sentences and I’m certain that to him this is all some amusing game. That he sees me simply as some silly little girl with no thoughts in her head, and no family left to protect her. I want to lash out, to bite back some clever retort, but the words aren’t there and that makes me feel like I really am that silly girl after all.
“What does the Kingmaker want with me?” I sigh. Whatever it is I’m certain he’ll get it, one way or another. The world has never said no to him. The world has always bent to his will.
He looks amused at the title. “It is so operatic, isn’t it? I prefer Antonio. And what I want is perhaps unfashionable to say: I want to look at you and be reminded that this world still produces anomalies. That despite the Brethren’s careful engineering, unpredictable things still grow. Would you allow me that small vanity?”
“Depends on whether you do so as an observer, or as an instigator.”
“You have a way with words.” He murmurs as if this is now our secret, that we’re allies in this. “I have been both,” he adds. And then, softer, with the sincerity that men learn when they are lying about intentions but not about feeling. “But to your mother, I was simply a friend.”
Something in the room changes temperature.
He says it like an admission, and something in his face loses rehearsal as all that false charm seems to slip. I could say nothing; I could ask the question he is aching for me to ask. Instead, I choose to tilt it.
“Everyone was a friend to my mother,” I say lightly. “She was a cathedral that allowed many pilgrims.”
“She was a bell,” he says, not offended, only winnowing. “She called things to her and made them ring. She had this way of listening to you that made you think you were a discovery you had made yourself.” He says it as if he is placing one hand on a door he is not allowed to open and feeling for the breath on the other side. “You have her eyes.”
I do not. My eyes are my father’s, a dirty brown that looks like a muddy puddle at a distance. I know this because people told me enough times that I could recite it like a mantra. But I understand what he is telling me: not that there is a resemblance that can be measured, but that he intends to see one, and make me carry it.
“Do I?” I ask and keep the anger out of my voice. “I hope I have her hands.” Hands are more useful than eyes. They cook, clean, and lift and when necessary, they strike hard enough to draw blood.
“They are very beautiful hands,” he says, looking at them with the courtesy of not letting his gaze linger on skin. Clearly, he is a man who knows the difference between a look that is a caress and a look that is an assessment.
I do not know yet which one he will choose, but my heart hammers in my chest all the same.
He reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and brings out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with twine that looks like a kindness from a more honest century. He lays it on the white coverlet between us, like an offering. “Alittle something to occupy your mind,” he says. “If your jailers complain, tell them I intend to handle it.”
Right. He willintendeverything, and other people will take his intentions and turn it into a new world for us all to live in.
I suppress the surge of anger and untie the twine, folding the paper back with neatness, as if the act of it can make me safe. Inside is a book, the leather dark and worn, and it smells of a whole world that exists outside my stark prison walls. The title is pressed into the spine, gold thinning to suggestion. Poems. Not the kind young men quote when they want to appear literate; the kind old men carry like a talisman against cynicism.
Something in my chest shifts; small, relieved, and definitely suspicious.
“My mother liked poetry,” I say, unable to look him the eyes right now because it feels like I might just cry, and I won’t do that. I won’t. “But I am monitored. They will say I can hide things in the pages.”
I go to hand it back ,and he places his hand very precisely to not touch me but to ensure I cannot do so.
“You will be surprised by what can be hidden in the plainest pages.”
That makes me frown. What exactly is this scheming man trying to say here? I open to the front and see something I know is his handwriting ‘To Grace. In rooms built of other people’s fear, words can make their own oxygen. Read as if someone has tried to stop you. A.’
My name looks very young there. It is the first time in weeks it’s been used without the weight of its usefulness.
