“But what do they matter?” Mena asked the room. They were small-minded women that treated the younger children like they were…well, like they were children. Mena had always known that she was older than her years. She understood things they did not. This was something she shared in common with her father. She knew that he was far from weak-minded. He was sane and kind and intelligent in a way few others ever managed, and he knew that she was no child to be spoken down to. Sometimes-when they were alone and the mood was upon him-he spoke to her as if she were an adult. She knew this to be something unusual between them, an understanding that they had and that they gave into only in private.
Thus he had spoken plainly, meditatively, when he sat in this very tree with her and declared that he did not care if the nobles or the servants or anybody else thought him mad. When had this been? Early in last spring? In the first weeks of summer? He had said that in truth the world itself was mad. It was full of spite, of malice and greed and duplicity. These things were the components of the world just as the letters in her notebooks were the keys that unlocked the language they spoke. It had taken him some time to learn this, but he knew it to be true now.
“When I was young,” he had said, leaning against the branch below her, running his hands across the smooth grain of the wood, “I thought I could change the world. I believed that when I became king I would write decrees and laws to take away the people’s suffering. I did not think I could make a perfect world. Not exactly. But I would make one as close to perfect as a human can imagine.”
She asked him if he had done that. Her father looked up at her with a pained expression of pity and love. It took him a few moments to answer. He thanked her for asking, for the implication that she might think he was as great a man as that and for suggesting that her life had thus far been blessed enough that she still imagined such things possible. But, no, he had not achieved any of the dreams he had had as a boy. He could not pinpoint why or how, but each of his grand notions had evaporated right before his eyes. He felt, thinking back, that the words with which he described such things were no more lasting than the vapor that escapes with one’s breath on a winter day. He spoke, but his words had no lasting substance. They faded almost from the moment they left his mouth. Thus he had sat at council and been met by polite patient faces. He had proposed reforms even in the great chamber at Alecia to the governors, who all pledged fealty to him. His words were heard, the truth of them acknowledged, his wisdom praised. He would leave these meetings feeling the world was about to change, and yet year after year passed and the world remained as it had been, no better a place, unaffected by any of his heart’s desires. Nobody ever denied him, but nothing ever happened either. He realized then how truly powerless he was. Between him and the workings of the world were thousands of other hands. Each of them feigned loyalty to him, yet none of them did his bidding. Perhaps, he admitted, that was why he had lowered his ambitions and found meaning in the love of a woman and in the wonder of the children they produced.
“Mena, my wise daughter, I am not so strong a man as you may think.” He reached up and tugged on her chin. “I could not change the world. I could not stop others from committing crimes-terrible crimes-in my name. I could not stop your mother from leaving us when illness took her. But I love my children. So you are my work now, all four of you. I thought, ‘Why not build within my house the world as I would have it?’ If I can raise you to adulthood in bliss unusual to the world, I will have accomplished something. You will see what foulness men do to one another eventually, but before then, why not know joy? You want to be a child for whom dreams come true, don’t you?”
Dariel had come into the room then. Her father had called out to him and the brief intimacy between them was suspended until chance allowed for it again. Remembering this now made her tears flow again. She had not answered him. She had not asked just what these horrors of the world were. She had never seen them and knew only of the old struggles written of in the triumphant eloquence of her history books. But she wished she had answered him. She did want-very badly-to be a child for whom dreams come true.
She was sure she would not be able to sleep, but at some point she drifted off, still perched high in the tree, leaning back against wood sculpted to comfort. She dreamed of something that even as she experienced it she thought of as a memory, although she would not later be sure whether it was a recollection of an earlier event or of an earlier dream. She and a girl whose name she did not recall crawled over the rocks of the northern shoreline and out onto the stone pier that jutted into the sea. The girl carried a fishing net with the childish notion that they would bring in the evening’s dinner. They knew they should not be down there on the jagged rocks, with the sea heaving below them, billowing with fronds of seaweed, crawling with blue-shelled crabs, and bristling with mussels. But all would be right if they brought home a living treasure in their net.
As they neared the end of the pier Mena saw a strange commotion in the water. Just below the surface swam a teeming school of fish. They moved past in a great mass, so many that she could neither see the beginning of the school nor where it might end. They were side by side and stacked many deep, each fish perhaps two or three feet long. The upper ones were so near that sometimes their tails sliced through the air. She could see between them far down into the depths. She had not known the sea was so deep here, but it was fathomless and teeming with fish.
The princess called for the net from the other girl, grasped it, and bent in preparation to cast it. The girl whispered that they should not catch these fish. “They journey to the sea god,” she said. “It would curse us to eat of them.” Mena did not care. What sea god, anyway? Nonsense. She splashed the net down into the water, bracing herself for the impact of writhing life that she expected to fill it. A moment later she pulled up the net, empty. The fish swam on, teeming just as before, but not one of them had entered the trap. She swung the net in from another angle, pulled it up, dripping: nothing. No matter how she moved her net below the surface-side to side, thrusting down deep into the water, jerking it up-she could not catch even a single fish. They just hurtled by, so close that she could see the minute adjustments of their fins and the flexion of their large scales as they slipped over one another. She watched their eyes roll up to study her in passing, sorrow in them. Something about those eyes drew her. She set the net aside and tumbled forward into the water, sure that this way, at least, she would manage to touch the fish, sure that they wanted her to do so. If they went at the call of some sea god, they did not do so willingly. She could help. This seemed a very important thing as she punched through the water and plunged downward…
Mena started awake. Her arms jerked out, and she almost fell from the tree. For a few moments the world hung around her without context. She felt the dream fade and knew that there was something more important to remember, but it was only through staring and waiting that the evening’s events came back to her. Looking up through a narrow, high window she saw the sky had brightened with the coming dawn. Thin clouds tiled the sky with touches of salmon pink. It was a new day, she thought. How much of yesterday’s damage will now be mended? How much would be shown in the bright light of morning as nothing more than tricks of shadows and nighttime gloom?