“Don’t mind her,” Val said a little while later. The two had returned to the staircase and seated themselves, side by side with the biscuits and tea between them, one long pair of legs and one short dangling over the rocky slopes below them. “She’s worried that you shouldn’t eat laborer’s food.”
Dariel held a biscuit between his fingers, contemplating it with no actual interest in putting it near his mouth, tasteless and brittle as it was. “I like it all right,” he said. “It’s hard to bite,” he added, as if this was an understandable compliment.
“Sure you like it. That’s what I tell her, but some folks are funny.”
Dariel had certainly found that to be true. “Why does she not like me?”
“Her people have cooked for yours for generations now. She and I, we’re servants, got no business associating with royalty. She’s got a point, but I’ve my own way of thinking. You’re a good lad. And, anyway, in a year’s time or so you’ll not bother with me. You’ll stop coming around. I’m not meaning to offend. I just mean you’ll have better things to do. You’ll have your training. You’ll have the whole business of becoming a prince. Now, Karan, she thinks you’ll be the death of me somehow. Said she dreamed as much; to which I said she must’ve been eating her own cooking too close to bedtime. But she does have a way of making one think. So let me ask you…What’s this all about then?” Dariel looked suitably perplexed enough for Val to go on. He leaned close to the boy and squeezed his brows into one large central knot between his eyes. “Why are you down here with me, eating my rock biscuits, sharing my black tea? You’re a prince, Dariel, this food must be like eating dirt to you, not to mention the matter of my low company.”
Dariel looked away from him. It was not so much the question itself that made him uncomfortable as it was the tone of the large man’s voice when he asked it. There was something unnatural in it, as if he spoke it from something other than his true emotion. Dariel was able enough at hearing the deception. Deciphering it was something else. He had explained before how he had found his way into the workers’ quarters. He had said before that he liked adventure, liked danger, liked people not so stuffy and formal as those at court. Val had heard all this before, but every so often he posed the same question again, as if none of Dariel’s previous answers satisfied him. To fill the silence Dariel said the first thing that came to mind.
“The old woman that watches over me takes a drink that puts her to sleep.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, so it’s boring just sitting there.”
Val shoved a biscuit in his mouth and talked while chewing. “Who wants to watch an old lady sleep?”
Again, Dariel heard something ironic in the man’s voice, but he ignored it. He saw a rare invitation to speak about the things that troubled him. He explained that his older siblings were not always nice to him. Immediately afterward he corrected himself: Mena was pretty much always nice, but Corinn thought he was stupid and Aliver did not like him. Aliver had once shouted at him to leave him in peace, and Corinn had told him to stop breathing on her and said she wished he had been born a girl. None of them made time for him. None seemed to care that he had no one to play with, ever. He painted a sad picture of daily abandonment, hours in solitude, lifetimes of loneliness.
Val listened to all of this without interrupting. He just grunted every now and then, ate his lunch, and seemed to follow the movement of ships on the sea. Glancing up at him, Dariel stared for a moment at the flaring of his nostrils as he breathed, the hairs inside heavy with coal dust. For some reason he thought of how his father sometimes came into his room at night and kissed him on the cheek and forehead and mouth. Dariel never let on that he was awake, although he was a light sleeper and often opened his eyes just from the ruffle of movement as his father stepped into his room. Sometimes he had felt the man’s tears fall on his skin.
And then he felt bad for all the things he had just said. Why had he spoken any of those things? The truth was, he loved all his family so much it frightened him. His siblings were each in their own way versions of perfection that he adored. He feared the day that his father stopped lavishing him with affection, even though he also feared the unfathomable sadness that seemed to bring it on. He knew his mother had died, and he had no memory of her. If this could have happened already, something just as awful could happen again. He could lose somebody else, too terrible a thought. To change the subject he asked his friend to talk about when he used to be a raider.
Val seemed unsure if he should, but a moment later his memories got the best of him. He said that he had been born into a raiding family, the Verspines. Since his earliest memories he had lived a wandering life, mostly aboard the swift ships of their trade, sometimes camped on one of the Outer Isles, where they hid after successful raids. They raided up and down the ocean coast, from northern Candovia far down into Talay. They always struck at night, sneaking into cities or towns and waking the citizens into terror. They took what they liked and dealt harshly with any who opposed them. They traded their booty for any supplies they needed, and then they retired to the islands to live for months in tranquillity, fishing and lying about near the beach, drinking, fighting, enjoying life until the time came to raid again.
Dariel had started to really feel the cold now, the wind pressing at them from the northwest, but he did not want to admit it to Val. “Why are you not still a raider?”
Val shrugged. He mumbled that he had better get back to work and rose stiffly to his feet. Once at his full height he paused and took in the view of the sea for a little longer. “The truth is that I lost the heart for raiding,” he said. “Too many that I knew died the wrong way. When I was young, that didn’t bother me so. I believed that I deserved to have whatever I could take and that whoever I killed or hurt to get what I wanted was just in the way. You’ve got to understand that the world’s full of men who are little better than animals. I may joke about it now; you and I may sit here thinking on them times; but an animal is what I was for thirty odd years of my life. Problem is that a man is different from an animal. In the quiet afterward we know when we’ve done wrong. When I left them ways behind I came here to serve your father. You just think of me as Val, the feeder, who used to be a dead-hearted killer in some time long ago. Can you picture that?”
Dariel looked at the man’s craggy features, so large and wide spaced and blackened; his head perched atop a width of shoulders that might as well have been a mountain range for all the largeness of the shadow they cast over him. Despite all that Dariel could not imagine him as any sort of killer. As terrible and vivid as the man’s tales were and as eager as his boy’s mind was to hear them, he still could not believe that Val had ever done any man any harm. He was simply a laborer from the world beneath the palace, a sympathetic giant who had probably inherited his position from his father and who may never have ventured off the island, one who knew exactly the type of tales to tell a boy like Dariel and did so as a kindness.
CHAPTER
Leodan Akaran was a man at war with himself. He carried on silent conflicts inside his head, struggles that raged one day into the next without resolution. He knew it was a weakness in him, the fault of having a dreamer’s nature, a bit of the poet in him, a scholar, a humanist: hardly traits fit for a king. He enveloped his family in the luxurious culture of Acacia, even as he hid from them the abhorrent trade that funded it. He planned for his children never to experience violence firsthand, even though this privilege was bought with a blade at others’ necks. He hated that countless numbers throughout his lands were chained to a drug thatguaranteed their labor and submission, and yet he indulged in the same vice himself. He loved his children with a breathless passion that sometimes woke him in terror from dreams of some misfortune befalling them. But he knew that agents working in his name ripped other parents’ children from their arms, never to be seen again. It was monstrous, and in many ways he felt it was his fault.