Seduced By My God-Father

chapter nine

TOO CLOSE

The box opened with a sound like a small held breath releasing.

We sat across from each other at the study table, the open box between us, and the contents were not what I had imagined. No dramatic revelations in obvious form. Just objects, carefully chosen and arranged: a photograph, a folded document, a piece of carved bone, and a sealed letter with my name on it in my mother's handwriting.

I touched the envelope but did not pick it up. Not yet.

The document was a record of lineage, my mother's family going back five generations, each name annotated in her careful hand with notes I couldn't fully interpret. Beside several names was a small symbol I didn't recognise.

Roger looked at it for a long time.

"I've seen that mark," he said. "In the old treaty documents. The ones Ashvale is now trying to invalidate." He looked up at me. "This doesn't just prove the bloodline. This proves the legitimacy of the original treaty."

"Because her family was part of it."

"Because her family anchored it. Literally. The mark means they were witness-bound, their power tied the agreement." He set the paper down carefully. "If Ashvale goes to council with their claim, this document invalidates it. Completely."

"My mother knew this would be needed," I said.

"She was smarter than everyone gave her credit for," he said, and there was something raw in it, a grief that was old and well-worn but still present.

I picked up the envelope.

I did not open it immediately. I held it and looked at my mother's handwriting and thought about her steady hands and the way rooms settled when she walked into them and the fact that she had known, at least in some form, what was coming.

"I'm going to read this alone," I said.

"Of course," he said immediately.

I started to rise, and then stopped, because I was suddenly aware that in the hour we had been sitting here the space between us had gradually reduced in the unconscious way of two people absorbed in a task and leaning closer and not noticing until they notice. We were close. Closer than I had intended. Close enough that I could see the specific grey of his eyes clearly and the line of his jaw and the way the lamplight sat in the angles of his face.

He had noticed too. I could tell by the stillness.

Neither of us moved.

"I should...." I said.

"Yes," he said.

Still neither of us moved.

The pull was so loud in that moment it was almost sound. I had given up pretending it wasn't what it was. I had given up several days ago, quietly, in the way you give up on pretenses that have become too expensive to maintain. I knew what it was. I suspected he knew what it was. We had simply, by unspoken agreement, continued to move around it like people navigating a room in the dark.

"Roger," I said.

"Don't," he said.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"I know what you're going to say."

"Do you."

"Sera." He said my name in a way that should have been a closing but felt like an opening. Like a door someone says they're shutting and then doesn't shut. "There are a thousand reasons....."

"I know the reasons," I said.

"Then you know...."

"I know the reasons," I said again, more quietly. "I'm not asking you to ignore them. I'm asking you to acknowledge what's happening."

He looked at me.

For once, all the control, all the careful management, was just absent. He looked exhausted and certain and frightened in a way that I had not seen before, and it was the fear that got me, because Roger Stormclaw was not afraid of anything I had ever seen and the fact that he was afraid of this told me exactly how seriously he was taking it.

"I know what's happening," he said. "I have known for...." he stopped. "For longer than I'm going to tell you right now."

My heart moved.

"Okay," I said.

"It doesn't change ....."

"Okay," I said again. "Tonight it doesn't have to change anything. Tonight I'm going to go read my mother's letter and you're going to do whatever it is you do when you're not carrying everything you carry in front of people, and tomorrow we'll still have all the same problems."

He looked at me for one long, exposed moment.

"You're very...." he started.

"What?"

A pause. The ghost of something that in another life, in a less complicated moment, would have been a smile.

"Relentless," he said.

"I learned from someone," I said.

I picked up my mother's letter and I left the room, and at the door I paused with my hand on the frame, not turning around.

"Roger," I said.

"Yes."

"You've been protecting me since I was seventeen. Whatever's in this letter, whatever she left me, I'm not seventeen anymore."

I heard him breathe.

"No," he said quietly. "You're not."

I went to my room.