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Entry tags:
in admiration of Cause
Characters: Zenos yae Galvus, Varis yae Galvus, assorted members of the Garlean royal family
Warnings: Child abuse through neglect
Summary:
To Zenos’ left is his cousin, Minerva, followed by the rest of the noble children, all seated in a row down this side of the table. They are each of lower status than him: his own father, after all, shall be the next emperor. To Zenos’ right is one empty seat. His own father, after all, is absent.
“‘Tis just a little shame,” remarks Laura wir Galvus. Zenos remembers two things about her: she married into the family, and she tries to sound appealing to everybody. “Would it not have been lovely to have Lord Calixtus joining us this evening?”
Zenos cannot recall who Lord Calixtus is or how they are related, but there are a few murmurs of agreement. Then another woman, whose name Zenos does not remember, says, “Lord Varis as well. Our schedules never quite seem to align—I’ve not seen the dear man in half an age.”
Somebody laughs. “Clearly not. He’s not so dear these days. A right grump.”
“Wine,” says the emperor—loud, and nasal so it carries. His cupbearer steps forward to address it.
The conversation halts. Then it picks back up again like a brisk wind at winter’s unwelcome edge, before the frost hits hard—as if in clumsy denial of the tension, of the season.
“But that is why we gather thus, is it not?” someone says. Not Laura, but someone with a similar timbre. Zenos looks up from his plate to find the speaker. All he notices about the person are the beads of anxious sweat about their brow, like an unpleasant, pathetic crown. “His Radiance sees our labors in his name. He knows that the diligence he has instilled in all of us could see us running ourselves ragged for love of the empire, but he would never want us to drift apart sheerly via lack of…time.”
Murmurs all around again, more or less in agreement. Zenos doesn’t murmur with them; he doesn’t understand why they agree. Some members of the family are sent to various places, that they might tend to those places and see them prosper. Some members of the family are sent to places that are very far away. If Zenos recalls, his own father’s mother lives across one such great length. She makes few appearances in the capital.
Then the emperor calls for more wine, so quickly after his last cup that the cupbearer stumbles in surprise when attending to him.
“Well,” says one of the older children. By the sound of him, he’ll be a man quite soon, but for now he’s in the children’s row, two seats away from Zenos. “Next time might be the one. I recall that Lord Calixtus shall return in another fortnight—” Zenos realizes here that the boy wants to impress the adults with his knowledge of their campaigns. The thought of it is as flavorless as snow, but Zenos keeps at the meal on his plate. “—and Lord Varis is expected to return by noon tomorrow.”
—Zenos lifts his head again. He looks over to this kin of his, who doesn’t notice until Zenos says, “He’ll be gone another three months.” It’s the first time he has spoken this evening.
Everyone looks at him.
“Hmm,” someone says.
“It appears that no one had notified the boy,” says someone else. Their voice is thin and pointed like a serpent’s tooth, and as much a vessel for venom. Zenos cannot tell who it is the venom-voice would gladly bite. He wants to know.
Everyone is looking at him.
The emperor sets down his cutlery and speaks. He sounds exquisitely bothered to be doing so, as if electing to share his feelings with those gathered to his table makes a martyr of him—and not a martyr who perishes with joy. “Is no one minding the child?”
Everyone is looking at Zenos, and he can tell now what’s in their eyes: resentment, even anger, at having been chastened. He cannot find what bridges himself and the emperor, but the many eyes around the table tell him that the bridge is there—that the fault, the displeasures and discomfort, are his. Zenos waits for someone to explain this to him, but nobody does; so he puts his spoon to his food and starts to eat again.
“Who tends you, child?” says the emperor.
“My servants.” Zenos says it with his mouth full. It occurs to him, and he swallows properly. “The ones that are assigned to me.” He thinks, then remembers the other important thing. “Your Radiance.” And he watches how the emperor watches him. He feels like a dog, and he feels like the emperor is another dog. He has seen this before: two dogs, each leashed, passing by each other while their masters take them through the courtyard.
The suspicion. The affront. The beast at bay. No sudden movements.
With leisure, the emperor leans toward the man sitting closest to him, who Zenos knows is his son. “She’s an eyesore,” he mutters.
“I’m a boy,” Zenos reminds him.
The emperor settles back into his seat. His eyes are on Zenos throughout, but he squints them hard, scrutinizing. “That’s fine,” he says. “Well, A Boy, once we are finished here with dinner, you shall present yourself to your servants that they may apprise you of your father’s circumstances. Yes…?”
Zenos has watched his cousins play tricks on one another. He knows goading. He knows the shape of people’s shoulders when they want to see another person punished for falling prey. He knows what it sounds like, and it sounds like this—like the emperor. “Yes, Your Radiance,” Zenos says obediently.
The emperor’s beard moves. He must be making a smile. The type, Zenos believes, that’s called a smirk. “There we are, then. Settled nice and tidy.”
People start to use their cutlery again. The dining hall sheds its silence as the dead air around the emperor regains its beating heart. Someone toward the middle of the table is brave enough to make a flutter of an unrelated joke, earning some flutters in response when a few relatives laugh quietly. But the man sitting closest to the emperor—the one whom Zenos knows is his son—is cutting through a slab of meat when he shakes his head and says,
“’Tis a travesty, the sort of father he has become. He shames what came before him.”
“Shut your mouth, Titus,” says the emperor at once. “Or stuff it with flesh; I care not. But another word shall not come out of it. Not a one.”
—The emperor’s voice sounded like a knife dragging down through an animal’s gut. Zenos had stared while he was hearing it and he still stares now in the wake of it. He knows his eyes are big and shining like the bowl of the spoon he grips in his hand. “Stop gawking,” Minerva whispers in his ear. “Don’t look at him like you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” says Zenos. He continues to gawk. But it doesn’t matter anyway: the emperor looks only at his plate for the remainder of the meal.
After that, everyone is gathered in the vestibule to the emperor’s dining hall, except for the emperor himself, who retired before dessert, and the empress, who followed him once she’d had a bit of cake. Zenos stands among them while they collect themselves and their things and say good-bye to one another; most do not live or have chambers in the palace. They all move about him like they are water, and he a stone. If he were bigger, he could perhaps be a proper island.
Then, like a kayak slipping through the waters, the woman Laura comes over to him. Nobody is looking at him until she does that. She has a husband and a couple of children, who stand nearby. Laura comes until she’s but a few fulms from Zenos, and she bends slightly at the knees and waist to speak to him. He’s seen adults do this, but his own attendants have never bothered.
“Lord Zenos,” she says, in a quiet, cushioned way which he only knows to compare to light snowfall. He hadn’t thought of it, but she must be far below him in station even within the family, to address him this way. “Your lord father is expected to remain occupied once he returns—so I was told. What would you think of coming to stay in our home for a little while?”
“That’s too far, Laura,” says her husband. His voice sounds like trousers that are too small. “Our house isn’t appropriate.”
Laura looks over her shoulder to her husband. “The boy is being minded by just servants. Surely we are suitable to substitute for that much. Look at him. He needs to be held and petted now and again.”
This is the first Zenos has heard of it, or anything like it. “Why do you think I need that?” he asks. Laura looks at him.
Everyone is looking at him.
Laura straightens. Her face and her neck and her chest all turn a color that’s very close to blood. “I’m, I am terribly sorry, my lord, I’m, I surely, I do beg your forgiveness…” But her husband—himself having become the color and texture of thunderheads—sweeps her away, and everyone is saying good-bye to one another—everyone is leaving. Everyone has left. The last people to depart were saying among themselves, “Let’s go and fetch the little ones.” Probably too small to attend. Probably waiting to be fetched. Zenos, then, waits a while in the otherwise empty vestibule, because people have people to go to; people have people to be with. He waits a while to see if he has any, too.
No one fetches him. So he goes to his suite that his servants might dress him for bed.
Someone is pulling his nightgown down over his head by the time he remembers that he has something to ask. “Is my father returning tomorrow?” he says.
The servant who is dressing him gives pause. “Oh, milord, did no one let you know? Begging your pardon, milord. Begging a thousand of them.”
“So he is?”
“So he is. Ehm, ’tis a circumstance, milord.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Zenos says. He’s growing hot, and he can feel that his eyebrows are knitting toward each other, maybe the way his father’s do.
The servant clears her throat. As she is knelt before him, Zenos can see that her forehead is wrinkling, too. He also believes that she’s gritting her teeth. She mutters in old Garlean, like it’s a mantra: “Damnatio ad bestias.” He wonders if she’s aware that he can understand her. Then she says to him, “Milord, I’m sorry to tell you, but, you see, Lord Varis, he was injured on the warfront. He was hurt, milord.”
“He’s not dead?” Zenos asks.
“No, no, milord. No, milord. Lord Varis is alive, milord, and surely just needs a spot of rest.”
Her voice isn’t new. Zenos hears the servants speaking among themselves often enough, but the wealth of their words is shared only among one another, and Zenos has few coins familiar to him. The way she speaks to him now sounds unlike anything he has heard in the emperor’s dining hall or through the drone of a day spent at Court.
“How come you don’t talk to me?” he asks. “Usually, you don’t.”
The servant grows very still. She grows so still that Zenos wonders if she is trying to still even her heart. It’s making her face turn a color. It’s making her start to sweat.
He didn’t know that he could do that to somebody. He didn’t know he could do a thing like that. But perhaps it’s similar to Laura—the way she became a color like blood. “It doesn’t matter,” says Zenos. “Put me into bed.” So she does that, lifting him up onto his high mattress and then covering him to his shoulders. Her hands feel hotter through her gloves than before, and the fabric is a little damp. Zenos doesn’t like the way it feels. He wriggles away from her quickly. Now her touch is gone and he can lie on his side with his back to her and think.
Yes, Laura and the servant—they might have happened in similar ways. It might have been that Zenos didn’t say what what it was they needed in order to understand. And there might be another way to try it now.
“I have a question,” he says. That is what he has wanted them to understand. He doesn’t know, and he wants to know. So he asks: “Do I need to be held?”
But she has already gone. After a while, Zenos turns to look over his shoulder and sees the empty room. The servant must have departed in a hurry; she’s left the light on. Zenos scoots out from underneath his blankets and slides down from the bed onto his feet. He crosses the room to shut off the light. He goes to his bed, only to feel through the darkness and find that the bed is still too tall for him to climb. He crosses back to the light, switches it on, and goes about the room to find his footstool. There it is. He puts it to the side of the bed and climbs up. He sits.
The light is still on.
If he thought about it, Zenos would see that he only needs to cross once more to the light and back again. But he doesn’t want to do any more thinking: he lies down and goes to sleep.
—
A servant wakes him in the morning and helps him ready for the day. He has breakfast and his lessons. Classical Garlean is his last lesson before lunch. His tutor asks if he can give an example of an “adage”.
Zenos considers it, then says, “Damnatio ad bestias.”
“Indeed?” says his tutor.
It’s not until Zenos is on his way to lunch, chaperoned by one of the servants, that he remembers. He looks up at the servant’s face. He doesn’t think of any name when he beholds her, but the face itself is familiar enough. She must be around most mornings. “Oh,” he tells her. “My father, Lord Varis, is returning today.”
“He sure is,” says the servant. Suddenly her face looks alert—more present—and Zenos tries to figure out what it means while she pats around the folds of her apron. He doesn’t manage before she brings out a pocket watch and checks it. “He’s in fact already arrived, milord.”
“Already?”
“Yea, milord.”
Zenos watches his own feet moving down the hall. “I didn’t think he was, yet. He did not call on me for an audience.”
The servant doesn’t say anything until he looks back up at her. Then she replies, as if undertaking an act of great labor, “I reckon ’twill be sometime this evening, milord.”
“Maybe,” Zenos says.
She was right. Well after his lessons are done for the day, when he otherwise has hour after quiet hour to pass by looking at books he can barely understand, he is summoned by his father. A servant gets him ready and takes him most of the way. He’s to enter his father’s suite on his own, and he’s to trot down the corridor to his father’s study. He shall knock and present himself.
He knocks.
While he waits, he thinks. He thinks more about the things he’s heard and watched recently than about what he’s read, which is unusual—but he is thinking about them. He thinks, ‘An eyesore.’ He thinks, ‘Damnatio ad bestias.’ He thinks of Laura going red and going away from him, instead of telling him why he needs to be held. He thinks of the silence of an empty room at night. He thinks, then, that he will tell it to his father. ‘I need to be held,’ he will declare. He thinks…
He thinks so much that he realizes he hasn’t had an answer. He knocks again—four times instead of three, and louder. This time, his father calls him in. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos enters the room. Then he stands still and silent.
“There you are,” his father says. One side of his face is bandaged, most heavily over the eye, and at the slope of his cheek, there are flecks of blood blotting through. Even so, he has no remarks to make regarding his own condition. Instead he appraises Zenos with the same tilt to his head that he has when he’s looking at a show dog—but not for as long as he would a dog he particularly likes. “What is it?”
Zenos shakes his head quickly, but his brow pinches tight and he is deeply aware of how his own teeth feel inside his mouth. What he finally says is, “May I approach you?”
They look at each other. It doesn’t feel the way it did to stare back and forth with the emperor. And if the emperor’s voice sounded like a knife through the gut, then his father’s one visible eye by contrast looks like an animal’s belly. Things are held fast and vital in its contour—but just the same they could come spilling out. They’re vulnerable to a blade.
For now, the innards stay in, well-protected. “You may,” says Varis.
Whatever is between them—perhaps it is a mouth, an eyelid, a wound, a gulf in a great sea—sews up and cinches shut. Zenos crosses over to his father. He even rounds the desk—his father even lets him. His father even—he moves. He turns his chair to the side, to face Zenos; he moves for his son. Zenos makes his father move.
He didn’t know he could do a thing like that.
“They said you were injured,” says Zenos.
“The matter is not grave,” his father tells him.
Laura said, ‘He needs to be petted.’ Zenos had intended to say, ‘I need to be held.’ In the end, he’s reaching toward his father’s face—toward the gauze, the flecks of blood, the injury—but Varis jerks back in his seat, away from his son’s hand, before he can make contact. The sound from his chair scraping against the floor is sudden and unpleasant. It’s a surprise.
Zenos puts his hand back at his side. He steps back and back, then turns and leaves to stand where he stood before, yalms away from his father’s desk. His father’s hand is on the edge of it, gripping the trim tightly, and his flesh looks like leather because of it—a pair of leather riding boots, one that doesn’t fit the way it should. Zenos didn’t know that he could do anything to his father, and now, with just one hand, he has made his father into no more than a pair of boots, suddenness, and unpleasant sounds. He has made his father move.
“Nevermind,” he says.
Warnings: Child abuse through neglect
Summary:
The servant grows very still. She grows so still that Zenos wonders if she is trying to still even her heart. It’s making her face turn a color. It’s making her start to sweat.
He didn’t know that he could do that to somebody. He didn’t know he could do a thing like that.
in admiration of Cause
To Zenos’ left is his cousin, Minerva, followed by the rest of the noble children, all seated in a row down this side of the table. They are each of lower status than him: his own father, after all, shall be the next emperor. To Zenos’ right is one empty seat. His own father, after all, is absent.
“‘Tis just a little shame,” remarks Laura wir Galvus. Zenos remembers two things about her: she married into the family, and she tries to sound appealing to everybody. “Would it not have been lovely to have Lord Calixtus joining us this evening?”
Zenos cannot recall who Lord Calixtus is or how they are related, but there are a few murmurs of agreement. Then another woman, whose name Zenos does not remember, says, “Lord Varis as well. Our schedules never quite seem to align—I’ve not seen the dear man in half an age.”
Somebody laughs. “Clearly not. He’s not so dear these days. A right grump.”
“Wine,” says the emperor—loud, and nasal so it carries. His cupbearer steps forward to address it.
The conversation halts. Then it picks back up again like a brisk wind at winter’s unwelcome edge, before the frost hits hard—as if in clumsy denial of the tension, of the season.
“But that is why we gather thus, is it not?” someone says. Not Laura, but someone with a similar timbre. Zenos looks up from his plate to find the speaker. All he notices about the person are the beads of anxious sweat about their brow, like an unpleasant, pathetic crown. “His Radiance sees our labors in his name. He knows that the diligence he has instilled in all of us could see us running ourselves ragged for love of the empire, but he would never want us to drift apart sheerly via lack of…time.”
Murmurs all around again, more or less in agreement. Zenos doesn’t murmur with them; he doesn’t understand why they agree. Some members of the family are sent to various places, that they might tend to those places and see them prosper. Some members of the family are sent to places that are very far away. If Zenos recalls, his own father’s mother lives across one such great length. She makes few appearances in the capital.
Then the emperor calls for more wine, so quickly after his last cup that the cupbearer stumbles in surprise when attending to him.
“Well,” says one of the older children. By the sound of him, he’ll be a man quite soon, but for now he’s in the children’s row, two seats away from Zenos. “Next time might be the one. I recall that Lord Calixtus shall return in another fortnight—” Zenos realizes here that the boy wants to impress the adults with his knowledge of their campaigns. The thought of it is as flavorless as snow, but Zenos keeps at the meal on his plate. “—and Lord Varis is expected to return by noon tomorrow.”
—Zenos lifts his head again. He looks over to this kin of his, who doesn’t notice until Zenos says, “He’ll be gone another three months.” It’s the first time he has spoken this evening.
Everyone looks at him.
“Hmm,” someone says.
“It appears that no one had notified the boy,” says someone else. Their voice is thin and pointed like a serpent’s tooth, and as much a vessel for venom. Zenos cannot tell who it is the venom-voice would gladly bite. He wants to know.
Everyone is looking at him.
The emperor sets down his cutlery and speaks. He sounds exquisitely bothered to be doing so, as if electing to share his feelings with those gathered to his table makes a martyr of him—and not a martyr who perishes with joy. “Is no one minding the child?”
Everyone is looking at Zenos, and he can tell now what’s in their eyes: resentment, even anger, at having been chastened. He cannot find what bridges himself and the emperor, but the many eyes around the table tell him that the bridge is there—that the fault, the displeasures and discomfort, are his. Zenos waits for someone to explain this to him, but nobody does; so he puts his spoon to his food and starts to eat again.
“Who tends you, child?” says the emperor.
“My servants.” Zenos says it with his mouth full. It occurs to him, and he swallows properly. “The ones that are assigned to me.” He thinks, then remembers the other important thing. “Your Radiance.” And he watches how the emperor watches him. He feels like a dog, and he feels like the emperor is another dog. He has seen this before: two dogs, each leashed, passing by each other while their masters take them through the courtyard.
The suspicion. The affront. The beast at bay. No sudden movements.
With leisure, the emperor leans toward the man sitting closest to him, who Zenos knows is his son. “She’s an eyesore,” he mutters.
“I’m a boy,” Zenos reminds him.
The emperor settles back into his seat. His eyes are on Zenos throughout, but he squints them hard, scrutinizing. “That’s fine,” he says. “Well, A Boy, once we are finished here with dinner, you shall present yourself to your servants that they may apprise you of your father’s circumstances. Yes…?”
Zenos has watched his cousins play tricks on one another. He knows goading. He knows the shape of people’s shoulders when they want to see another person punished for falling prey. He knows what it sounds like, and it sounds like this—like the emperor. “Yes, Your Radiance,” Zenos says obediently.
The emperor’s beard moves. He must be making a smile. The type, Zenos believes, that’s called a smirk. “There we are, then. Settled nice and tidy.”
People start to use their cutlery again. The dining hall sheds its silence as the dead air around the emperor regains its beating heart. Someone toward the middle of the table is brave enough to make a flutter of an unrelated joke, earning some flutters in response when a few relatives laugh quietly. But the man sitting closest to the emperor—the one whom Zenos knows is his son—is cutting through a slab of meat when he shakes his head and says,
“’Tis a travesty, the sort of father he has become. He shames what came before him.”
“Shut your mouth, Titus,” says the emperor at once. “Or stuff it with flesh; I care not. But another word shall not come out of it. Not a one.”
—The emperor’s voice sounded like a knife dragging down through an animal’s gut. Zenos had stared while he was hearing it and he still stares now in the wake of it. He knows his eyes are big and shining like the bowl of the spoon he grips in his hand. “Stop gawking,” Minerva whispers in his ear. “Don’t look at him like you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” says Zenos. He continues to gawk. But it doesn’t matter anyway: the emperor looks only at his plate for the remainder of the meal.
After that, everyone is gathered in the vestibule to the emperor’s dining hall, except for the emperor himself, who retired before dessert, and the empress, who followed him once she’d had a bit of cake. Zenos stands among them while they collect themselves and their things and say good-bye to one another; most do not live or have chambers in the palace. They all move about him like they are water, and he a stone. If he were bigger, he could perhaps be a proper island.
Then, like a kayak slipping through the waters, the woman Laura comes over to him. Nobody is looking at him until she does that. She has a husband and a couple of children, who stand nearby. Laura comes until she’s but a few fulms from Zenos, and she bends slightly at the knees and waist to speak to him. He’s seen adults do this, but his own attendants have never bothered.
“Lord Zenos,” she says, in a quiet, cushioned way which he only knows to compare to light snowfall. He hadn’t thought of it, but she must be far below him in station even within the family, to address him this way. “Your lord father is expected to remain occupied once he returns—so I was told. What would you think of coming to stay in our home for a little while?”
“That’s too far, Laura,” says her husband. His voice sounds like trousers that are too small. “Our house isn’t appropriate.”
Laura looks over her shoulder to her husband. “The boy is being minded by just servants. Surely we are suitable to substitute for that much. Look at him. He needs to be held and petted now and again.”
This is the first Zenos has heard of it, or anything like it. “Why do you think I need that?” he asks. Laura looks at him.
Everyone is looking at him.
Laura straightens. Her face and her neck and her chest all turn a color that’s very close to blood. “I’m, I am terribly sorry, my lord, I’m, I surely, I do beg your forgiveness…” But her husband—himself having become the color and texture of thunderheads—sweeps her away, and everyone is saying good-bye to one another—everyone is leaving. Everyone has left. The last people to depart were saying among themselves, “Let’s go and fetch the little ones.” Probably too small to attend. Probably waiting to be fetched. Zenos, then, waits a while in the otherwise empty vestibule, because people have people to go to; people have people to be with. He waits a while to see if he has any, too.
No one fetches him. So he goes to his suite that his servants might dress him for bed.
Someone is pulling his nightgown down over his head by the time he remembers that he has something to ask. “Is my father returning tomorrow?” he says.
The servant who is dressing him gives pause. “Oh, milord, did no one let you know? Begging your pardon, milord. Begging a thousand of them.”
“So he is?”
“So he is. Ehm, ’tis a circumstance, milord.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Zenos says. He’s growing hot, and he can feel that his eyebrows are knitting toward each other, maybe the way his father’s do.
The servant clears her throat. As she is knelt before him, Zenos can see that her forehead is wrinkling, too. He also believes that she’s gritting her teeth. She mutters in old Garlean, like it’s a mantra: “Damnatio ad bestias.” He wonders if she’s aware that he can understand her. Then she says to him, “Milord, I’m sorry to tell you, but, you see, Lord Varis, he was injured on the warfront. He was hurt, milord.”
“He’s not dead?” Zenos asks.
“No, no, milord. No, milord. Lord Varis is alive, milord, and surely just needs a spot of rest.”
Her voice isn’t new. Zenos hears the servants speaking among themselves often enough, but the wealth of their words is shared only among one another, and Zenos has few coins familiar to him. The way she speaks to him now sounds unlike anything he has heard in the emperor’s dining hall or through the drone of a day spent at Court.
“How come you don’t talk to me?” he asks. “Usually, you don’t.”
The servant grows very still. She grows so still that Zenos wonders if she is trying to still even her heart. It’s making her face turn a color. It’s making her start to sweat.
He didn’t know that he could do that to somebody. He didn’t know he could do a thing like that. But perhaps it’s similar to Laura—the way she became a color like blood. “It doesn’t matter,” says Zenos. “Put me into bed.” So she does that, lifting him up onto his high mattress and then covering him to his shoulders. Her hands feel hotter through her gloves than before, and the fabric is a little damp. Zenos doesn’t like the way it feels. He wriggles away from her quickly. Now her touch is gone and he can lie on his side with his back to her and think.
Yes, Laura and the servant—they might have happened in similar ways. It might have been that Zenos didn’t say what what it was they needed in order to understand. And there might be another way to try it now.
“I have a question,” he says. That is what he has wanted them to understand. He doesn’t know, and he wants to know. So he asks: “Do I need to be held?”
But she has already gone. After a while, Zenos turns to look over his shoulder and sees the empty room. The servant must have departed in a hurry; she’s left the light on. Zenos scoots out from underneath his blankets and slides down from the bed onto his feet. He crosses the room to shut off the light. He goes to his bed, only to feel through the darkness and find that the bed is still too tall for him to climb. He crosses back to the light, switches it on, and goes about the room to find his footstool. There it is. He puts it to the side of the bed and climbs up. He sits.
The light is still on.
If he thought about it, Zenos would see that he only needs to cross once more to the light and back again. But he doesn’t want to do any more thinking: he lies down and goes to sleep.
—
A servant wakes him in the morning and helps him ready for the day. He has breakfast and his lessons. Classical Garlean is his last lesson before lunch. His tutor asks if he can give an example of an “adage”.
Zenos considers it, then says, “Damnatio ad bestias.”
“Indeed?” says his tutor.
It’s not until Zenos is on his way to lunch, chaperoned by one of the servants, that he remembers. He looks up at the servant’s face. He doesn’t think of any name when he beholds her, but the face itself is familiar enough. She must be around most mornings. “Oh,” he tells her. “My father, Lord Varis, is returning today.”
“He sure is,” says the servant. Suddenly her face looks alert—more present—and Zenos tries to figure out what it means while she pats around the folds of her apron. He doesn’t manage before she brings out a pocket watch and checks it. “He’s in fact already arrived, milord.”
“Already?”
“Yea, milord.”
Zenos watches his own feet moving down the hall. “I didn’t think he was, yet. He did not call on me for an audience.”
The servant doesn’t say anything until he looks back up at her. Then she replies, as if undertaking an act of great labor, “I reckon ’twill be sometime this evening, milord.”
“Maybe,” Zenos says.
She was right. Well after his lessons are done for the day, when he otherwise has hour after quiet hour to pass by looking at books he can barely understand, he is summoned by his father. A servant gets him ready and takes him most of the way. He’s to enter his father’s suite on his own, and he’s to trot down the corridor to his father’s study. He shall knock and present himself.
He knocks.
While he waits, he thinks. He thinks more about the things he’s heard and watched recently than about what he’s read, which is unusual—but he is thinking about them. He thinks, ‘An eyesore.’ He thinks, ‘Damnatio ad bestias.’ He thinks of Laura going red and going away from him, instead of telling him why he needs to be held. He thinks of the silence of an empty room at night. He thinks, then, that he will tell it to his father. ‘I need to be held,’ he will declare. He thinks…
He thinks so much that he realizes he hasn’t had an answer. He knocks again—four times instead of three, and louder. This time, his father calls him in. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos is going to enter the room and tell his father about his thoughts. Zenos enters the room. Then he stands still and silent.
“There you are,” his father says. One side of his face is bandaged, most heavily over the eye, and at the slope of his cheek, there are flecks of blood blotting through. Even so, he has no remarks to make regarding his own condition. Instead he appraises Zenos with the same tilt to his head that he has when he’s looking at a show dog—but not for as long as he would a dog he particularly likes. “What is it?”
Zenos shakes his head quickly, but his brow pinches tight and he is deeply aware of how his own teeth feel inside his mouth. What he finally says is, “May I approach you?”
They look at each other. It doesn’t feel the way it did to stare back and forth with the emperor. And if the emperor’s voice sounded like a knife through the gut, then his father’s one visible eye by contrast looks like an animal’s belly. Things are held fast and vital in its contour—but just the same they could come spilling out. They’re vulnerable to a blade.
For now, the innards stay in, well-protected. “You may,” says Varis.
Whatever is between them—perhaps it is a mouth, an eyelid, a wound, a gulf in a great sea—sews up and cinches shut. Zenos crosses over to his father. He even rounds the desk—his father even lets him. His father even—he moves. He turns his chair to the side, to face Zenos; he moves for his son. Zenos makes his father move.
He didn’t know he could do a thing like that.
“They said you were injured,” says Zenos.
“The matter is not grave,” his father tells him.
Laura said, ‘He needs to be petted.’ Zenos had intended to say, ‘I need to be held.’ In the end, he’s reaching toward his father’s face—toward the gauze, the flecks of blood, the injury—but Varis jerks back in his seat, away from his son’s hand, before he can make contact. The sound from his chair scraping against the floor is sudden and unpleasant. It’s a surprise.
Zenos puts his hand back at his side. He steps back and back, then turns and leaves to stand where he stood before, yalms away from his father’s desk. His father’s hand is on the edge of it, gripping the trim tightly, and his flesh looks like leather because of it—a pair of leather riding boots, one that doesn’t fit the way it should. Zenos didn’t know that he could do anything to his father, and now, with just one hand, he has made his father into no more than a pair of boots, suddenness, and unpleasant sounds. He has made his father move.
“Nevermind,” he says.