It Is Dawn, All Gold, And The Water Is Still.

[Duarchist 345]

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

The cove below the citadel is wine-dark — the gods’ dark, like a bird’s eye. The color of it has changed only a little with nightfall so that the sunset now is a pitcher pouring pink into the ocean’s blue bowl. Calaedon's white buildings glow golden in the dusk. It is the last time she will see it, Ithwen thinks, and feels her chest ache with the thought. She watches through the wide open windows as a strong wave breaks against the sea-wall and a salt-chewed wedge of stone crumbles free, swallowed up by the surf.

 

She will remember this moment: Saren’s hands are on her face and the smell of the room is the seawater breeze.

 

“You love me, Ithwen. I know you do. So why do you want to leave me?”

 

Ithwen pulls her face away and her lover sits back, fierce and frowning at her.

 

“You want me to be your dog,” Ithwen says, voice low and deceptively flat. Somewhere beneath is the quake of angry emotion — but she does not want to raise her voice to this woman, who, yes, she loves. This woman, the passion for whom hangs around Ithwen’s neck, heavy as a cairn. “You have just told me that the basileia has named my brother heir, your future husband. You expect me to live in his shadow, after everything I have done for our people? For you?!”

 

It is a hard, dark accusation. It is also true.

 

Ithwen cannot entitle Saren to Calaedon. Cannot appease her family and the duty that she has to them. Thalren can do this — but he cannot make Saren happy. This hard choice, between duty and freedom, duty and truth, duty and happiness, Ithwen has faced before. She made her choice the night of the kinslaying. Shorn her braids and brandished her spear and let the people see her as she truly was. And what now? She will go back? Back into the secret dark, full of pretending, that had smothered her for the first sixty years of her life?

 

When she swings her legs over the bed and rises, it is to pace the floor like an angry panther. Back and forth she paces, all legs and shoulders and long arms, sliding her own big hands through her hair, slicking it back from her face, tightening her grip enough to sting her own scalp. She is thinking — and introspection, to Ithwen, always comes with an edge of pain.

 

“I lived that way once. I will not do it again.”

 

Ithwen hates the unhappiness on Saren’s face when she turns back to face her. She hates her own unhappiness, lodged like panic inside her chest. But what other choice is there, for either of them? The love of another is not the only part of life, no matter what the old poets of Almenor scribed. There is more. The love of oneself. The love of one's people. The love of the act of life itself. The love of one's brother, her mind hisses, but Ithwen ignores it. She cannot go back, and if the hard choice is here again, she will do the dishonorable thing, again, and let the fire choke itself out on what peace she has built in her life since then.

 

As she speaks, Ithwen drives her fingers into the center of her own sternum, indicating the choice that Saren now has to make, the gesture hard enough to bruise.  “I do love you. And you love me. Calaedon will never please you half so well as I will please you. None of those citizens and statesmen will ever do for you what I will do,” somewhere in all her arguing, Ithwen has grown grave. The words are heavy, like a threat. Her bright eyes blaze in the low light of the night, silver and glossy with determination. Challenging Saren to deny her. “You know I speak the truth.”

 

Ithwen crosses the room in two long strides and takes Saren’s face in her broad hands. Almost roughly, Saren's dark hair tangled between her fingers. She turns her lover's face up to her own. In her voice there is just a flash of the kind of impassioned madness to which she has always been prone.  “You love me, yes? You say want me? Then marry me instead. Break your oath to my brother, or send us both away.”

 

𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃

 

 

It is their third night sleeping on the gallows steps, where the merchants and ferriers launch their little boats to take people across the water to the docks. Not many have moved — and those that have have not returned for want of permitted passengers. Water laps at the weathered old stones and Ithwen comes down to sit beside her brother, both their feet in the water, ankles and flimsy shoes submerged. Boots sold for passage in Calaedon's port, on the other side of the sea.

 

The boatmen and dockworkers scurry inside to wait out the rising heat with their lunches and the washerwomen with their children will not come to work and bathe and gossip until dusk, when the air is not so thick. They are the only ones here braving the sun on the dock. Behind them, against the portculis, their aunt is sleeping, covered in the scratchy blankets they had managed to trade her husband’s steel helmet for. Marawen is a ways away, swimming in the shadow of the walls, her laughter bouncing off the water, maybe audible far above, in the red-stone streets of the city.

 

It is dawn, all gold, and the water is still. The whole of the world before them is fiercely yellow, the molten cut of the sky reflected seamlessly on the surface of the quiet inlet sea. Across the mist is the faint shadowy outline of an Aevosian kingdom. Too far to swim — though she’s considered it. In the distance, a ship’s bell tolls.

 

Ithwen leans back on her elbows, stretching her legs, and the hard edge of the stone step digs into her spine. She looks at her brother, at his long, dark hair, obscuring his face from her. He cannot sleep in the cresting light however badly he wishes to. She reaches for his hand on the step between them. Rather than take it in her own, Ithwen taps the back of it with two fingers in a gesture from childhood, a gentle way of stirring him, as if to say hello.

 

“What do you think of it, Thal? There is our promised land.”

 

Thalren lifts his head and looks over the rising silhouette of stone towers against the sky. He winces, murmurs again, “We do not belong here, Ithwen. This place is not for us.”

 

Ithwen is not sure she agrees. There are places. Places to go and not to go. Hospitable, or harsh. Livable or unsurvivable. But it is only amongst people that they can feel they belong, and it is only by people that they can be outcast. She does not say this — because she knows it is not what he wants to hear.

 

“You have wisdom, little brother,” Ithwen says, interested. For one so young almost falls off her tongue, but then she is not so old, either. Not so old as she feels. But Thalren is virulent and eager in a way she has never been. Some people are this way regardless of their age. Ithwen, by comparison, feels as tentative as an old woman. Aged by her caution. “But with you, there is always one more thing before you are willing to trust. That is not the strength you think it is.”

 

“Oh, what do you know of strength, nette?” Thalren huffs. “You speak to me like we are years apart, mothering me, but you are not yet grown.” Heat does not usually put him in a bad temper — but eight months of travel have worn him thin.

 

Far from disturbing her, Thalren’s barb makes Ithwen smile. There is something bittersweet in the acknowledgment — she remembers that same moment for herself, standing in front of the great red door with her spear in her hands and the weightlessness of her cut hair. The crushing sense of the immutability of the form she was soon to take. No returning back from that to girlhood again. No going back to the same city made of sand and stone, the streets that she’d loved, the arms of her mother, the comfort of prayer. From that point forward, all the unclaimed potential of her life had seemed snuffed, as quickly as the light of an unwanted lamp is put out. She no longer looks at her life so damningly, but despair throws darkness over everything. Ithwen hopes it will be different for her brother, that his vision is clearer, his sight keener.

 

“You speak as though you’ve been to war yourself. Let me tell you what it means to be a soldier: you go out to fight, you are wounded, but not killed. Then you come back, are healed, and go out again. It is a brutal occupation, and not one I wish for either of us.” Ithwen hesitates, a bit of a secret smile turning her mouth. “Saren taught me to use a knife in private, while the rest of the basileia was sleeping. But we had other interests… and I don’t think I learned very well.”

 

“I will tell you a secret as your elder, hanna. We are none of us entirely grown. Not in feeling. All the wisest people I have known still carried the child of themselves inside. The child reminds us to be tender — to play, and laugh. To be curious. To weep when we are hurt, and seek comfort when we are lonely. For others, the child is anxious or angry. Great men with wild tempers are often only great men being ruled by the frightened child inside them.”

 

“Is that why our grandfathers started the war?” Thalren glances aside at his sister. She takes on an unhappy expression, brow knotted.

 

“Yes, sweet boy.” Ithwen’s mouth turns down. She moves to sit behind Thalren and takes his dark hair between her fingers, combing it through, beginning the intricate dance of weaving plaits strong enough to last through their next few days of travel. “You were away with Marawen, chasing the stars at sea.”

 

“When Tethas raided the inner-city, I was in the citadel with ette, pouring over the summer’s ledgers. His soldiers went door to door. They spared the elders and children, and let those unarmed or unwilling to fight find safety on the beach. He burned the homes of his brother’s loyalists but let them keep their lives so that they might support him, instead.”

 

“He rounded up members of the council and herded us into the basileia. Our grandfather saw the damage done by their mother’s reign and argued in favor of more benevolent laws, but Tethas had long been warped by her cruelty. He thought Thalwe a lesser man, and he threatened his newly-born nephew, saying that he should not be suffered to live with a father so weak-minded.”

 

“Thalwe drew his blade. I remember the silence that fell over the hall, the ripple of shock. Tethas shook with fury and began to yell, but before he could get any words out, he was impaled.”

Thalwen looks over his shoulder at his sister, his violet eyes wide. Ithwen nods once. 

 

“The council chamber became a battlefield — I watched as the people we knew and loved began to draw their swords and spears, and shouts filled the air. Many of the basileia rushed to our grandfather’s aid, but other had long harbored grudges, and they seized the opportunity to settle old scores. Alliances crumbled in that room. I am glad you were not there to see it,” Ithwen adds, intensely thoughtful.

 

“They say that you took up a spear and began to fight, too.”

 

“I did. And when all seemed lost, Thalwe’s wife, Lilia, swept through the room toward Tethas. He was sneering, his hands dark and slick with our grandfather's blood, and we watched in shock as she sunk her blade into his neck. Then, she stood alone. Iellwen’s dynasty at her feet. The basileia’s advisors swayed where they’d halted, torn between allegiance and fear. Our grandmother declared that the time for unreliable rulers was over, and for a time, our people listened. They elected her to rule, and after a time she abdicated to our mother.”

 

“And then the council chose me as her heir,” Thalren mumbles. “I know you are angry with me because of it.”

 

“That is not —,” Ithwen's response unravels quickly, until nothing more than an unhappy knot between her brows remains.

 

She doesn't know how to explain. To explain that she is not like Thalren, who has had no shortage of love in his life, and for no reason other than that he is kind. Ithwen has only been loved because she is her mother's child, destined to lead with no lands and no people to care for. She is loved because she is pretty — beautiful, but not as a matter of compliment. Beautiful in the way she’d make a good price in Calaedon had she not been born into fortune. Beautiful in the way people loved to exploit. She is not like her brother, who answers any question easily, sometimes with nothing more than a chuckle. Thalren — who does not agonize, or dwell. Ithwen wants to explain that she cannot explain but does not want to sound stupid. She wants...

 

She wants her family to think well of her. If she cannot have that, then at least she does not want to lose the easiness they have managed to settle into.

 

“I am not angry with you, hanna. You need never worry about that.”