Chương 29: Reunion

The guards led me out of my wing and through corridors I had walked a thousand times, and then through a set I had walked perhaps twice, and then through one I had never walked at all. We turned at a stairwell I had not known existed, climbed half a flight, and stopped at a door I did not recognize.

"Please enter, Young Lord. You are asked to wait inside." The lead guard bowed and stepped back, and nobody moved to open the door for me. So I swallowed, put my hand on the iron ring, and pushed it open. The room inside was round and white, and the white was not the pale grey stone of the rest of the estate but something cleaner, a paint or a finish I did not recognize.

A round table sat in the centre, large enough to seat eight or nine people, and the top of it had been carved with the gryphon of House Aridis in a single continuous line, wings spread across the whole surface. Tall-backed chairs stood around it in a loose ring. Mana orbs hung from the ceiling in a circle above the table and lit the room in a soft, even light that did not throw shadows anywhere I could see. There was nobody else inside, so I stepped in and the door clicked shut behind me.

I stood for a second trying to decide which chair I was meant to take, and then I decided it did not matter and sat in the one directly across from the door, so I could see who came in first. I pressed my palms flat against the tabletop to stop them from shaking, and I looked at the gryphon carved under them, and I counted. Mother, father, three siblings. Five people. That made six of us, including me.

I tried to imagine each of them, their reactions, how the meeting would go, if they would like me, if I would like them, and found it made me even more anxious at meeting them. Alright, in for four, hold for two, out for six. That helped. I got to ten breaths, lost count, and was about to start again when suddenly, the door opened.

"... Oh!" I gasped despite my previous steadiness, and stood up before I had thought about whether doing so was appropriate, and my heart was loud enough in my throat that I was not sure I would be able to speak when whichever of them walked through it stepped into the room. The first, and for now only person that walked in, was a man. He was tall. Taller than Bellos, or any other adult I knew, with broad shoulders, dark hair cut short, a few streaks of white at the temples and running through the beard.

He had grey eyes, the same as mine.

"... Father?" I tried. He looked at me across the table, gaze of such intensity that I nearly looked away first. But then he smiled.

"Hello, son." He said, with a deep, unusually soothing voice. …So this was my father? My knees remembered what to do before the rest of me did. I dropped toward the floor on instinct, because he was an elder of the house and that was how you greeted an elder. I was halfway down when I realized he was already beside me. I had not seen him cross the room. One second he had been in the doorway and the next his hand was under my elbow, firmly holding me up before my knee had touched the stone.

"There is no need for that, Howl. Not here. Not between us."

"It's…" he was touching me. His hands were firm, and strong.

"Yes, yes! Of course." He smelled nice, too. I wish I could smell just like him.

"Thank you, Father. I, uh hello, Father, I—" what am I doing"—Rowan a-and Calla and Dorin, I mean, you and Mother, I—" god above, what am I doing?!

"—hello, I am Howl, Father, it is… it is nice to finally meet… you." … Fuuuck. I wanted to punch myself, then to crawl under the round table or better yet, grow wings and fly out a window and never be heard from again. And I ended up saying finally! My face was burning, my ears were probably red, and I shut my mouth promising myself I would never open it again. He looked at me for a second with an expression I could not quite place.

Then, much to my surprise, he laughed so loudly that it echoed a little in the round room, and I had not known until that second what my father's laugh sounded like. My own mouth moved before my head caught up, and I laughed too. Though, not because anything was funny. It just felt safer to follow whatever he was doing than to try to have a reaction of my own.

"Rowan, Calla and Dorin, is it?"

"I— no, I-I-I meant—" Noooo. Why am I stuttering? I am not a stutterer. Why now, of all days, mouth?

"I know what you meant, son. It is alright. You are nervous."

"... Yes." Admitting it should have been embarrassing. Yet somehow, the way he said it made it easy instead.

"I can see that." He tapped my shoulder twice, taking me once again by surprise, and chuckled when I gasped involuntarily. Again. I'd been imagining this meeting for years, since as early as I understood what a father even was. Dozens of versions, built and rebuilt in my head, and none of them had me flinching at a tap on the shoulder or tripping over my own name. I didn't want the first thing he learned about me to be that I was easily rattled. But he only smiled, like none of that had bothered him at all.

"Why don't we sit down?" He said.

"Yes," I said, trying to regain my composure.

"Yes, of course. Sorry." So we sat. He took the chair to my left, close enough that the edge of his sleeve almost touched mine on the tabletop, and he settled into it. Before we could start talking, I noticed the door was shut, so I looked at it, waiting for it to open again, but it did not. I turned my head back toward him and tried to make the question sound like a simple question.

"Erm… where are the others? My siblings and… and my mother." His smile stayed where it was, but the shape of it changed a fraction.

"I am sorry, son. They will not be joining us today."

"... What?" It came out faster and louder than I intended it to be, and I was about to apologize for that when he spoke again.

"The head of the house has decided against it." I heard the words but I did not, for a full second, understand them.

"But why?" I said instead.

"The guards at the shrine. When they came to fetch you back to the estate, you sent them away with a message and remained on the mountain for the rest of the week, against the timing the council had set for your return. Your grandfather has chosen to treat that choice as a matter that requires an answer, and the answer he settled on is that the wish he granted you has been reduced by four. You will see me, but you will not see the others. Not today."

The room had gone quiet around us for a moment, as I worked on how to phrase my next thoughts.

"But… that… I was training, I—""I know, son." If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I learned things up there. Things I couldn't have learned in a week at the estate. If he had just—""I know."

"It's not fair!" There was a heavy silence then, and m y face went hot as I realized what I'd just done.

"I'm sorry." I told my father, face down.

"I did not mean to raise my voice." My father did not correct me, though. He did not frown, or tell me to watch my tone, or look disappointed. He waited for me to be finished, and when I was, he tipped his head a little to the side, speaking in the same warm voice he had used since the moment he had stepped through the door.

"I would like you to understand one thing, Howl. Your grandfather set a timing, you set a different one. A wish granted comes with an understanding that the person who was granted it will return it with the respect it was given in, and you did not. So he has corrected the scale. That is how he does these things." He leaned forward a fraction, enough to hold my eyes.

"Remember this for next time. When a wish is granted in this house, it is granted on the shape you were standing in when you received it. Change the shape, and the wish changes with you. Do you understand?"

"... Yes, Father." I still thought it was unfair and cruel. I had been looking forward to this. Vehemently so.

"It is not a punishment I would have chosen, if that helps. I argued for the full meeting but I did not win the argument. Still, you are here, so am I, and we have this hour between us. I do not want to spend it grieving what we did not get. I have wanted to sit across a table from you for a long time, son. Longer than you know. I would rather we made the hour worth having, what say you?" He smiled again, and some small part of me that had been trying very hard to stay angry loosened without my permission.

"... Alright, Father."

"Good." I was disappointed. I could not help it. The whole week on the mountain had been anchored around this afternoon, and the afternoon had shrunk to a single chair. But at least that chair wasn't empty. My father was here, he was looking at me, and my disappointment settled into a smaller sentiment when I looked back at him. I noticed that we… we did not look as alike as I had expected. The hair and the eyes were the same.

The beard was the sort my face might grow one day, if my face ever got around to the beard question. But his features were heavier than mine, more serious in a way mine had not yet decided to be, and the line of his jaw was square where mine was still narrow. The more I looked at him, the more I realized he looked closer to my brother Rowan than to me.

"What is it?" He asked, probably having noticed my staring.

"Don't be shy, tell me."

"I… I was just thinking that we do not look that much alike, Father." He smiled.

"You have your mother in you. The softer parts of the face. The eyes are mine, and the hair, and the temper if it ever comes for you, but the rest of you is hers." The word mother triggered a great curiosity in me.

"... What is she like? I mean, who is she? Nana told me her name years ago, Meredys, but she never told me anything else, and the instructors would change the subject if I asked, and I—""Meredys of House Verral." Oh, new information.

"Verral?"

"She is the niece of His Majesty King Aelric."

"... What?" My father laughed again.

"Your mother is the niece of the king. On his sister's side. And your cousin twice removed, if we are being precise about the table, is a girl roughly your age. Princess Aeris. You will meet her before your third term at Sartheon, if my guess is worth anything. The Crown tends to arrange a banquet for the students from the three main schools, and she will be there."

"I have a cousin who's a princess?" There were a lot of princesses in the books I read. To think I was related to one…

"You have several cousins, son. Some of them are indeed related to the Crown."

"... I did not know any of this."

"No, you would not have…" he seemed a bit pensive for a moment.

"But yes," he resumed, "your mother is close to the royal family, and so are you. It is one of the reasons the council has been managing your education so carefully for sixteen years, and it is one of the reasons, among many, that the Crown has been watching you since you were born." He leaned back slightly in the chair, and the grin on his face deepened a fraction.

"Princess Aeris is, I am told, extremely pretty." I was unsure why he was telling me that. I knew princesses were pretty. All the ones from the books I read were, but the way he said it…

"I am simply telling you what I have heard. You are to be betrothed to her one day, to unite once again our houses." My father continued, chuckling. How… odd. Me? Betrothed? I knew from the books, and from Nana, that this wasn't a small thing. You married someone and then you were tied to them for the rest of your life, no matter what came after. Nana always said a person ought to have a say in that, if it was ever going to happen to them. Nobody had asked me for mine, and I found it bothered me quite a bit.

"I have very little interest in any of that."

"That will change, I think."

"I do not think it will." I almost said the rest of it. What Nana told me, about a person getting a say, but I didn't. My first impression of my father was that he was warm. Warmer than I'd braced for all this time, imagining this. But there was something underneath the warmth I couldn't place yet. Oddly enough, I'd say it looked closest to the first time Rael had smiled at me across that evaluation floor. Warm on the surface, but something else running underneath it that the warmth wasn't quite covering.

I didn't know my father. Not enough to know what bothered me so much at the moment, or what happened if I went looking for it. Was he kind to me because he wanted something, or was I imagining this?

"Something on my face?" he said. I hadn't realized I was staring.

"No. Nothing at all." Better to let it go for now. We could talk about it another time, when I'd had more than an hour to learn what kind of man he actually was. I didn't want to spend today finding out the hard way.

"About girls, I said the same thing to my own father when I was your age. He laughed at me for about a year and a half, and then I met your mother, and I stopped saying it. These things come with age. Do not worry about them now. But when the day comes that you find yourself thinking rather a lot about a girl with particular eyes, try to remember that I told you so." I laughed a small laugh, because I did not know what else to do with the teasing.

He laughed with me for a moment, then let it settle into a quieter smile, and he reached across the table to tap the back of my hand once with two fingers.

"What else, son? You came in here with a head full of questions. Ask them." I swallowed.

"... Why was I separated from the rest of you? All this time. Sixteen years. I… I'm sitting across from you now, and talking to you, and you are… you are not at all what I thought you'd be like, and I keep trying to understand what the reason was for all of it, because sitting here with you, it does not hold together for me anymore. Why, Father? Why could we not have had afternoons like this one before today?"

My father was quiet for a moment, and one of his hands came to rest flat on the gryphon carved into the tabletop between us.

"There were many reasons, son. The truth is you may still be a bit too young for most of them. But the short version, the one that matters most, is that it was for your security. And for the security of everyone within these walls."

"I… I don't understand."

"Axioms are special, Howl. More special than any other being in this world. And yet, you are even more special." He turned his palm over on the table, studying it a moment before he went on.

"Every Axiom before you grew into what they were, slowly, over years. You were born already carrying the whole of it. That has never happened before. Not once, in a thousand years of this house."

"... What does that mean?"

"It means the house has spent sixteen years fighting to be allowed to keep you inside these walls at all. Justifying it. Protecting you."

"Protect me from what?"

"The others." He said it simply, like the answer should have already been obvious to me.

"Anyone who isn't us is a potential enemy, Howl. I want you to remember that, always." I did not know what to do with a sentence like that, so I said nothing, and he continued.

"You will bring about a new world, when you are grown. Not every house that sits above the others today will still be sitting there once you have. Some of them know that already. Some of them would rather hurt you than let it happen. Others would rather bend you to their side of the board before it does." He held my eyes.

"That is why Gowyn was given to you. We are required to send you to Sartheon, by law older than either of us, and we cannot keep you behind these walls forever. So we send someone with you instead."

"But how does that relate to me being isolated? W-what did I do?" My father was quiet for a moment.

"Every answer comes with a price, Howl. This one, I think, you are not yet ready for. On an emotional standpoint." I looked down at the tabletop, at the gryphon under both our hands. Despite all the smiles and tolerant warmth, he'd been judging my clumsiness, after all.

"Look at me, son." I raised my head.

"Your emotional maturity, or lack thereof, is not your fault. Do you understand that? We tried, when you were young, to shape certain things in you. Guide you. It is no different from what any house does with a child who will one day carry its name." He paused.

"It might have gone more smoothly, I think, had that woman not spent so many years filling your head with her own notions first. Serre. We have been correcting for that ever since." Something in my chest went tight.

"Nana didn't fill my head with anything. She just—""I see her poison still persists in you." His smile had vanished out of nowhere as he stared at me.

"That's not…" was he annoyed? He looked annoyed.

"It's not like that, I—" My father suddenly stood.

"I had something prepared for you today. You have been training, yes? Up on the mountain, all that time?" How confusing. Was he changing the subject? His smile was back on his face, as if the previous coldness had been a fever dream of mine. Had I perhaps exaggerated it? Yes… that must have been the case.

"... Yes?" I answered to his question.

"Good. Then I would like you to show me." He moved toward the door.

"Not only me. The estate. Thousands of us, Howl; disciples, elders, every branch of this house standing under one roof. It is time they saw what you can do." He glanced back at me, and the warmth was now fully back.

"And perhaps it is time you saw, in turn, exactly what it is you are meant to inherit."