My hands started shaking and I clasped them together. I hadn’t cried in years, and yet again today I felt that sting in my eyes. Maybe it was just bone-deep exhaustion. Or maybe nobody had ever before asked me if I was afraid. It was sort of taken for granted on Alaxak. We all had to face it, so why talk about it?
What he asked next was even more shattering. “Why do you put yourself through this, then, day after day?”
“I don’t have a choice,” I said, my voice small.
“No choice…” His smile was bitter when I glanced over at him through my hair, trying to surreptitiously wipe my eyes. “Now that, I can understand all too well.” I wanted to ask him what he meant, but then he continued, “But what do you want, Qole? If you could choose?”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t even know what that means. I want to live long enough to do what would have made my parents proud. To do right by my ancestors. And that’s what I’m trying to do now.”
“Let’s assume you’re at rights with your ancestors.” Before I could get irritated with him for casually brushing them aside, he said, “And I know your parents would be proud of you.” He had no way of knowing that, actually, but the words still made my throat too tight to speak. “And let’s say you don’t need to work, to Shadow fish, for the purposes of this exercise. So what would you want to do with yourself?? First thing that comes to mind?”
Honestly, I’d never really thought about it. That was a luxury, as much as dwelling on my parents’ deaths, that I didn’t really have. But this was in a hypothetical universe. I could try to use my imagination…though I’d have to dust it off first.
I swallowed. “Um…let me think. I would…” I closed my eyes, tried to put myself somewhere other than the Kaitan. Where would that even be?
I felt a breeze. A warm breeze, on my face. And maybe the sun. I smelled flowers.
My voice came out hesitantly. “I would want…to be in a field. With grass. And sunlight. Lying on my back and looking at the sky…doing nothing. Nothing but laughing.”
I almost felt the imaginary touch of a hand on mine. Laughing with someone.
As soon as I said it, I expected him to laugh at me. It was such a stupidly unsophisticated, selfish desire for me to have, when he was trying to change the systems for the greater good, and all that. I should want to do something much more amazing, especially if money were no object in this hypothetical universe. My eyes fluttered open and I glanced at him.
He wasn’t laughing. He looked sadder than I’d ever seen him. I must be so pathetic he felt bad for me.
I scrubbed my face and cleared my throat. “Okay, enough imagining things in imaginary worlds. Especially since my imagination is rusty.” Before he could try to claim that it wasn’t, I said, “Besides, you said you have no choice in what you do, either. Why? Tell me about your life, Nev.”
Not only was I happy for a change in subject, I was also genuinely curious.
He flinched. “I’m not sure if you want to hear about that.”
He was probably remembering my reaction in my quarters, the last time he’d tried. “Really, tell me. I’m…I’m sorry about earlier.” Finally, I could say it. “I was tired and stressed and angry, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
“I…” He looked mildly surprised. “Apology accepted. What would you like to know?”
“Tell me about your family—they’re a good place to start. I’m probably going to meet them, after all.” At the thought, my stomach tipped a little on the perfectly level bench.
“Okay.” Nev took a deep breath. “My father…he’s the most duty-driven man I’ve ever known. He lives for Dracorva first. He expects a great deal from me, but he gives me the tools I need to excel. He’s a good man, and I…well, I would be happy to think I’ll become half the ruler he is.” He sighed as if he was somehow failing. After pausing for a moment, lost in thought, he smiled. “And Mother, she’s as duty driven as my father, and yet, just as any moral fiber I have comes from him, any sense of decency I have comes from her.” He chuckled. “To you coming from me, that probably doesn’t speak well of her. But she’s a good person.”
Maybe he believed it, but it might also be a lie he’d been fed his entire life as a royal, and he didn’t know how else to see his parents.
As if he knew what I was thinking, Nev nearly groaned. “I’m sorry. I’m talking like we’re at a dinner, or an event, or…” He looked away, as if embarrassed. In front of me. “The truth of the matter is, I don’t think we are anything like what you understand as family. We don’t spend our days and hours together, we don’t share hopes and fears. We see one another at set times, by appointments and it’s all”—he moved his fingers in a funny motion—“all a pantomime. A sort of play. Sometimes I love it, but I think what I love best is when I accidentally spend time with one of them and we talk about something that doesn’t matter at all.”
I supposed I could understand that. Those were my favorite times with Arjan, when we weren’t focused only on fishing. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Two, a sister a year younger, and a brother nine years my junior. Both have strong personalities—if quite different from each other—that sometimes chafe against the strict mold we’re all forced into as our parents’ children.”
“What kind of mold? You mentioned training, I think, before I went off on you in my quarters.” I smiled feebly and nudged his shoulder in an attempt at another apology. “Training in what?”
At my playful gesture, he smiled back crookedly, sleepily. It was a smile to get the wearer anything they wanted, and I briefly wondered if he’d trained at that. He tried to lean back against the wall before he remembered his injuries. The change in direction brought his arm back into contact with mine, and he left it there. “Oh, training in everything. History, as you’ve already noticed, but also governance, debate, finance, politics, war tactics, hand-to-hand combat, fencing, piloting, astronomy, poetry…the list goes on.”
“Wow.” A whole galaxy of knowledge lay between our worlds, not just an actual galaxy. I only managed a second word. “Poetry?”
A giggle burst out of me, in spite of myself.
Nev’s odd silver eyes seemed to light up at the sound, which made me swallow it self-consciously. Great Collapse, when was the last time I’d actually giggled? “Like I said, no choice. I’m no good at composing, but I can recite the Eminents with the best of them.”
I didn’t even know who or what “the Eminents” were supposed to be. Eminent, apparently. “Poetry sounds really rough,” I said, softening my sarcasm with a smile.