A tide, cold and prickling, seemed to be tugging at my limbs, pulling me under. I had wondered, in an idle, morose sort of way, who my mother was: a desperate camp follower, or a reckless village girl, or one of the Hinterlander guides that sold maps to the soldiers.
I had never, not once, wondered who my father was.
He had not looked away from me. I had the idea he was refusing to spare himself.
I said, like a child, “So you didn’t—you weren’t in love with her, or anything. My mother.”
“I never even met her. She was dead before we found her.” His voice matched his expression, hard and unflinching. “Just the one bullet, straight through the spine. It might have been any of ours, but I was always a dead shot.”
I thought:I must have gotten it from him,out of habit, before I realized I hadn’t gotten anything from him at all. The two of us had lived in that narrow gray row house not as father and son, but as two strangers, tied by nothing but bad luck and clumsy, unsober love.
He coughed, twice, phlegmily. “You were crying. I picked you up, patted you like I used to pat my baby brother, before he died, and you quieted right down. And it felt—it was like a miracle to me. That anything or anyone would still trust me, after what I—” He rubbed the back of his fingers beneath his nose. “I don’t think I set you down once over the next hundred miles of marching. When we reconnected with the main force, I told them I was through. I’d known it was wrong all along, begun to see that I was a tool of empire—one of the other boys had a copy ofThe Sin of Statehood—but I’d been too much a coward to do anything about it. Until you.”
“But you weren’t charged with desertion. I looked it up.” It was the second or third thing I’d done when I arrived at Cantford. It had been a small, secret comfort to me that he hadn’t been a true deserter, despite what people said. “You were relieved of duty and stripped of rank and benefits, following an injury.”
The man who was not my father made a small grimace of embarrassment. “They, ah, didn’t accept my resignation. Tried to keep me marching at gunpoint, so I shot myself right through the hip.” He rubbed his thigh, in a gesture so familiar it made my throat suddenly tight. “I was half cracked by then, like I said. But they couldn’t make me march on one leg.”
His eyes finally left mine, moving mistily around the little room. “All these years, I told myself I was sparing you. Giving you a good Dominion name, pretending you were my own flesh and blood. But really, I was just selfish. I wanted you to love me, or to forgive me, though I didn’t deserve either. I wanted to be—to you, if no one else—a good man. And I thought, if I made Dominion a better place—more just—less hateful…” He gestured, not without humor, at the red marks around his wrists. “Hell of a job I’ve done, eh?”
He sobered. He looked at me, his eyes damp and pink-rimmed and full of regret. “Should’ve told you the truth. I owed you that much. I owed you… everything.”
“Was it guilt, then?” My own voice sounded clinical, incurious. “Is that why you drank?”
“I drank because I was a shit father and my leg hurt like a bastard.” I watched him chewing the inside of his own cheek, jaw flexing hard enough to hurt. “And because I loved you, but before I loved you—before I even knew you existed—I’d hurt you badly. And there was no fixing it. No going back.”
Both of us let the silence stretch, after that.
I was sifting through the heaps and drifts of my memories, holding them up like flawed gems to the light of the truth: I was not my father’s true son, nor a true son of Dominion. I had no grand destiny or secret purpose. I was a mere byproduct of war, one of tens of thousands of orphans left by centuries of wars and crusades, and I had never been destined for anything except a shallow grave on the banks of the Crown River, which was once called the Marro.
But I had lived, because my mother loved me enough to take a bullet to the spine, and my father—yes, he was my father, though perhaps not my only one—had loved me enough to put a bullet in his own leg.
With this thought came a great clarity. Everything I had believed in and fought for—crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself—had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly; the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.
If I serve anything, let it be that. If I die for anything, let it be you.
A tear splashed on the back of my hand, and I realized I had been crying, steadily and quietly, for some time. My father was watching me with the stoic heartache of a man who had just broken something which he had always known he would break. I opened my mouth but couldn’t decide whether to saythank youorI’m sorryorI forgive you,so I covered his hands with mine. The knots of his knuckles trembled beneath my palms.
Eventually I said, “I hurt someone I love, too.” I had killed you, actually, over and over again, for all it hadn’t been my hand on the hilt. “But Icanchange it, Dad. I can go back.” I wondered for the first time what else I might change. If I saved you, would Dominion still invade the Hinterlands? Would my mother live, and my father walk without a limp? The chains of causation seemed to crack and reform, fractal, ineffable.
My father asked, “How?”
I felt myself smiling, lopsidedly. “By breaking into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion.”
My father looked at my face for a full minute. Then he leaned forward across the table and whispered a name in my ear.
I had anticipated a certain amount of difficulty. I had imagined unclimbable fences and unpickable locks, and perhaps an exchange of fire with twenty men in red coats shouting,Seize him!
But my father’s friend—an unamused woman who had worked in the capitol laundry room for ten years—had suggested dryly that I simply walk in the front door and ask to check something in the archives. Then, when everyone forgot about me, which they would do almost instantly, I could hide in a linen closet until nightfall and take the service elevator to the Chancellor’s bedroom. She added that my father was a good man and that, if I ever so much as thought her name in the presence of the authorities, she would put me through the mangle and dissolve my remains with lye.
Which is how I came to be sitting in the humid dark of the Chancellor’s bedroom, two hours after midnight. The air was thick and floral, sweetly familiar.
I rapped my knuckles smartly on her bedside table.
Vivian shot up, displaying the reflexes of a woman who had been surviving assassination attempts for a thousand years, and might continue for another thousand. One arm was already fumbling behind the headboard, reaching for whatever bell or button would summon help.
In the muffled bedroom, the doubled click of the hammer was loud. It was difficult to see anything but the spectral white of the Chancellor’s nightgown among the rich drapes and shadows of her bed, but I could tell she had gone very still.
I propped my service revolver casually on one knee and said, mildly, “I will not miss. As I think you know.”
