Aelyn Meah folded her hands together in her lap. ‘Did you ever meet Kaqua?’ she asked me.
Once, I told her.
There was a tone in my voice and she smiled knowingly at it. ‘You did well to ensure that he did not return. I was not so lucky. I thought I knew better,’ she said, melancholy in her voice. ‘I told myself I would never allow myself to be used. I told Eidan he was foolish to suggest I might be. I drove him away with those words. He came back, but he circled, and never landed. It is only later, much later, that I berated myself. I should have known, I told myself. I should have.
‘Kaqua worked with another’s desires, mostly. Not sexual ones, though he could, if he wished. But not with me. He saw what I feared, what I was enticed by, and what my intellectual compulsions were. He wove a web of them around me.
‘I am sure, if he was here, he would defend himself. He would tell us both that I had to provide him with the strands for him to work with, but that was part of his trick, part of the way he made you responsible for what he had done. He did not see that an emotion, however fleeting, was not automatically something you wanted to act upon. He refused to acknowledge that he could be responsible for the thoughts he found. He had no desire to take responsibility for what he did.
‘I never wanted to kill my brother. I knew what a folly that would be. But Kaqua did not know that. He did not know what I did.
‘He did not realize what my brother’s death would mean.’
—Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029