RE: Monarch

“Do you ever wonder what love is?” Lillian whispered. My eyes had grown heavy from sleep, the dim warm light of the inn’s shuttered lantern radiating softly. There was music from elsewhere, likely the tavern next door, and even through what had to be several sets of thick wooden walls, I could hear the muffled sound of a female-sung serenade, propped up by the low-vibration of barely audible strings.

She was fond of these late night ruminations and always asked the hardest questions just as I was about to drift off to nothingness. And it was a hard question. Chiefly because she wouldn’t be satisfied with an off-the-cuff response. “I know it’s what I feel for you,” or, “You taught me what it was,” would likely earn little more than an eye-roll or a chuckle. If she was anyone else, I might have found it annoying based on timing alone.

But because it was her, I found it endearing.

I rolled over and took her in. She was propped up on one shoulder, and her dark eyes drank me in. She was light of hair. Lighter these days, from all the time we spent in the sun. The tiny brown marks of freckles dotted her nose. They’d only seemed to grow more numerous as of late, to my delight—and her chagrin. In something of a tragedy, the edge of the blanket was pulled high, providing too much coverage for my taste.

I reached over and plucked at the top of her blanket playfully. “If you need a refresher, I could find a way to remind you.”

That earned me a palm placed over my face, and a playful shove.

“Lech. You’re going to wear me down to nothing.”

“Can’t blame a man for trying.”

I settled back down on the pillow, allowing the playful moment to pass. She looked serious about her question. More serious than usual. But she was meek, and if I let the moment lapse, she would likely disregard it and never speak of it again. Abiding the conversation would likely take us into the late hours of the morning, but to hell with it. We had nothing but a day’s travel back to Whitefall ahead of us, and given my noble status, if I looked exhausted, anyone who saw me that mattered would just assume I was hungover.

With that in mind, I blew air through my lips, laid back on the pillow, placed my arms behind my head, and settled in. “Considering how many centuries an endless number of philosophers, poets, and bards have spent attempting to find an answer to that very question and still not come up with anything conclusive, it may help to narrow the scope.”

Lillian snorted. “My apologies, professor.”

“Ooh, what am I a professor of? A professor of—”

“If you speak the words ‘professor of love,’ I’ll pluck your chest hairs out, one by one.”

I held a protective hand over my chest. “But there’s hardly any to speak of. They’re endangered.”

“Best conserve them, then.” Lillian stared into the darkness of the inn, her expression growing serious. “I guess, what’s stuck in my mind lately is love’s connection to hate.”

Wherever I’d thought she was going, it wasn’t here. I sat up, pushing my back against the headboard.

“Do you hate me?” I knew, almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she didn’t. But it was the shadow that would stick with me, if I left the subtext where it laid. Which is why I felt a great deal of relief when the question itself seemed to startle her.

She reached up and ran her fingers through my hair with a gentle smile. “Never. I can’t even imagine hating you. Which I suppose is why, I find the connection your philosophers, poets, and bards so often draw so unsettling.”

Now that the doubt was quenched, I tried to lock in to what was troubling her. “Love and hate as two sides of the same banner.”

“Yes.” Her gaze was far away, thoughtful. “And it’s not like it’s something I’ve only heard of in theory. We see examples of it every day. Jilted lovers who can’t be in the same room as each other. Families torn apart by parents who can’t stand the thought of their children being in the same room as the person they once cherished above all others. It makes sense if they married for status, or security. But I have to imagine that some of them—maybe many of them, loved each other as surely as I love you.”

I blinked several times, ruminating on that before I formed an answer. As a dyed-in-the wool romantic, I could pontificate about love until Ragnarok. But placing it on the dissection table of rational thought didn’t come naturally.

“It’s complicated. But… I think the hatred you’re describing is born from the void of a stolen future.”

“Stolen?” Lillian cocked her head.

“Think about it.” I held my hand up, one finger extended. “We begin life more or less alone. There’s family and friends of course, people to accompany and—ideally—guide us along our way, but in terms of our personal journey? No matter if it’s an adventure sprawling the continents, or a life confined to a single-city, we are all alone.” I extended a second finger. “Then along comes someone. A lover who could be more, a friend who holds a spark. An apothecary girl who rescues you from an alley. Maybe it’s short-lived, doesn’t pan out. Or maybe, it turns out to be more.” I pressed my fingers together, overlapping them. “In which case, two journeys become one. You plan your lives together, rather than separate. Eventually your dreams for the future herald them in a starring role, and they graduate from surprise accompaniment to pre-requisite.”

“And when it falls apart?”

“Those dreams are shattered. That hope for the future is ground into dust. That’s where the hate stems from.”

“So, like so much else, its selfishness disguised as hate.” Lillian said, sounding disappointed with the conclusion.

“Not… necessarily. Though that’s part of it.” I hesitated. “I think what it depends on, when the dust settles, is which did you love more. The person you cared for? Or the future you lost?”

A shadow flickered over her expression. There was something more she wanted to ask, something she thought she probably shouldn’t. It was something of a quirk, one she was entirely self-aware of and had described to me in detail. Because all too often it was the last question that got her in trouble.

Which sometimes placed us at odds. Because I wanted to know her. All of her.

“Ask.” I prompted.

She slowly turned to look at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “What of us? If something… happened… to drive us apart.”

Would you hate me?

I swallowed. I’d been prepared for something like this, but even that didn’t soften the blow of imagining my life without her. “Something definitive?”

“Final, yes.”

“And when you say final, you mean completely insurmountable despite my considerable resources?” I probed, looking for a loophole, anything I could use to avoid playing this out in my mind.

“Cairn—”

“—I’d need some time.” I interjected, rubbing my face. “A year—perhaps less or more, I’m uncertain.”

“Time away from me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “Because only with distance would the dream fade. If I stuck around and just… lingered on the fringes as you moved on with your life, I’d probably get it in my head I could win you back. With the right words, the right grand gesture, sheer determination—whatever. But relationships aren’t like how they’re portrayed in the stories. You can’t just stick the djinn back in the bottle. When it’s out, it’s out. And clinging onto someone after it’s over is the shortest route to resentment.”

Lillian’s smile was small, barely visible in the dim light. She crossed her arms. “I like that you’ve automatically cast me as the villain in this little hypothetical.”

“Did not.”

“Did too. ‘Lingering on the fringes while I move on with my life’ sure makes it sound like I’m the wayward woman.”

Because that’s the only way I can imagine it. You’d have to be the one to twist the dagger. Because I’d throw away everything I had, my birthright, my status, and all the gold to my name before I ever left you.

It was an embarrassing thought, one I couldn’t bring myself to voice.

Aloud, I said. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“It’s fine.” Lillian shook her head, looking curious now, rather than morose. “What would you do when the year was over?”

“Linger on the fringes, of course.” I quipped. She laughed, and I waited for the laughter to fade. “I would though. Catch-up, reminisce a little, all-the-while trying to figure where I fit in your life, if it all. If possible, I’d hope we could be friends. Friendly, lacking that. And even if there wasn’t room for me, I think… I’d watch over you.”

“It’s a close leap, from lech to stalker.”

I flicked her nose, and she made an aggrieved noise, glaring over the hand that covered it. “Not like that. More like… I’d pass by every so often. Make sure the business was still doing well and you and your father were comfortable. Be there, if either of you were ever in any sort of trouble.”

Lillian drew close to me and rested her chin on my bare shoulder. “Like a guardian angel?”

“Well. A drunk, sad-looking guardian angel. But yes. That’s the idea.”

She nestled in, her breathing growing more steady with sleep. “You’d keep me safe?”

“Always.”

/////

Everything was simultaneously too loud and too silent, whispered conversations a block away magnified to the point I could barely hear myself think, while closer by, Maya’s repeated apologies were so silent I couldn’t make out the words at all. The raw detail came into focus slowly, clashing with my long-held memories until they took over and became all I could see. Even factoring in the time it’d been abandoned, the wood seemed darker than it should have been, damaged.

There’d been a fire.

I’m not sure how long I stood there. It could have been hours, or days. When I came back to myself, my legs ached, and Maya tugged at my arm, trying to pull me away.

I freed myself gently, pulling her fingers loose. When I spoke my voice still held the same distant quality, as if it was never mine at all. “When… did this happen?”

“I don’t know.” Maya answered. The lie was heavy in her voice.

“Maya.”

The drunk passed out on the ground stirred, murmured something unintelligible as he pushed himself up, back braced against the cobbled brick of the nearby wall and stared at us with the bewilderment of a man regaining consciousness.

I fished around in my purse for a silver rod, came up with a gold one, and tossed it into the cup at his feet before he could start. He stayed mercifully silent, transfixed at the sight.

“No one could tell me anything specific…” Maya hesitated. “But I asked around, and eventually found a guard who was on the Topside patrol route for a while. According to him… it was…”

“Five years ago.” I finished. Placing the series of events shortly after Thoth had made the threat.

Maya nodded, her lips pursed.

I’ll let you live. But in return, I’m going to take something from you. And you will wish that you had died.

A shudder ran through me. “He remember what happened to the people who lived here?”

It felt so impersonal, referring to them like that. And as questions went, it was unnecessary. Almost going through the motions. This was Thoth. Beyond toying with me, her methods were as brutal as they were efficient. Lillian and her father were gone.

But I needed to know.

Maya’s lip trembled. “Only that someone died.”

I felt like an echo of myself, reciting words I might have said with no meaning behind them. “Someone. Singular?”

“That’s what he said. But the way he talked about it—”

“‘Shit like this happens in Topside all the time, right?’” I said, unable to blunt the irony in my voice.

Maya wiped tears from her cheeks, her expression hardening. “We’ll figure it out. Someone has to know something, there just wasn’t time to look into it properly.”

Why bother, when we both know where this ends?

The voice of surrender gnawed at me from the inside. Even if it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, they wouldn’t talk to us. The denizens of Topside were happy to gossip about almost anything, but if they’d clam up hard at the first sign of any sort of official investigation. They didn’t trust the guard, much less the nobility. And who could blame them?

She’s gone.

If I was the same person from my previous life, I might have cracked completely. Repressed the memory or broken entirely.

“I’m not… sure where to start.”

A heavy footprint sounded, echoing along the stretch of road as Sevran stepped around the corner. His mouth was set in an even line, and he was holding two untouched pints of ale. Behind him, Mari’s disturbed expression said everything. My banner lieutenants had come looking for me, and they’d been listening for some time.

“You do what all great leaders do when they reach an impasse. Delegate.” Sevran looked up and down the building and frowned. “Missing person?”

“Persons.” Maya corrected quietly.

“I’m not sure you can help here.” I mumbled. “Nothing will still the tongues of these folk faster than armed guards, cresting their doorsteps.”

“An armed inquisition, perhaps.” Sevran nodded in agreement. “But friends and family members will be greeted on far more open terms. You underestimate how many of our number come from this very stock.”

I hesitated.

Sevran, mercifully, shoved a mug in my hand. I stared down at the beckoning golden liquid, upturning and guzzling it down as he spoke.

“I cannot profess to know you, but judging from preceding events and secondary accounts, you are not the sort of person who asks for help empty-handed. Nor are you the sort to make decisions lightly. Both qualities are respectable in a leader.”

“To a point.” Mari added.

Sevran pointed at her, then took a step forward. “I can also see that you are in pain. Whoever lived here meant something to you, yes?”

I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

Sevran continued, nailing me to the wall with every word. “You’re worried that utilizing your regiment on a personal errand will fritter away the goodwill you just fought through fire to secure, and worse, that it will all be for naught.”

Was that why I didn’t want his help? Why I wanted him to leave?

Had I really grown that cold?

That calculated?

“If so, you’re a feckin’ fool.” Mari scowled, her loud tenor startling me. “It’d be one thing if you started ordering us around, settling scores with nobles on your account. This, though? There isn’t a man or woman in the regiment who can’t relate. Hells, most of the demis know someone who’s gone missing in the last few years on account of the disappearances personally. Not a damn one of them would look down on you for this.”

Maya slipped beneath my arm, supporting me just as I thought I would topple from the onslaught.

Sevran smiled apologetically. “While brash, my colleague is correct. We’ll gather the regiment locals, forgo the armor and begin canvassing in the morning, sticking in small groups so we don’t set the gossip mill ablaze.” I opened my mouth, but he cut me off with a gentle hand. “This is my initiative, as your lieutenant. You didn’t ask. I volunteered.”

“Okay.” I relented.