When I was five years old, my brother lifted me onto my first pony. I’d been longing to ride since I saw him at lessons, but of course, there’s a proper way to do everything when you’re one of us, and I had to wait my turn.
How I coveted that pony. Jahir’s was sable, a very dignified color for such a stump-legged nag. Our horses were already substandard, though we no longer remembered how they could look because all the good ones had died long ago. But ponies we had even fewer of, and a good quality pony was the punchline of a joke about once in a lifetime chances.
Jahir’s was a miracle.
The one he found me was even finer.
God and Lady, that pony. Where did he even find it? I never learned. He must have turned over every rock. Too short to delight a proper romantic, of course, but not round-bellied or sway-backed, and the short legs looked strong rather than thick. And black, with black mane and tail, and a single white coronet. Front right, that ring.
I thanked him. Enthusiastically. I loved Jahir. Wanted to be him. My memories of my father were hazy; he’d been distant while alive, and often away on the breakneck rides that finally killed him. The only other male in my life, constant as the sun, had been my brother. I vaguely remember, prior to Father’s death, that Jahir had laughed more. But after it, he’d been… something else. Solicitous gives the wrong impression. Saying he watched over me makes it sound too clinical. The truth, baldly, is that he let it show that he loved me. Which isn’t something we do.
My memories of that day are as clear as the spring sunlight that had lit it. The smell of sun-warmed leather. My brother’s gloved hands around my waist, fearlessly touching me despite all the warnings against it. The somber look in his light eyes. He’d graduated out of the nursery and stopped shearing his hair, and it was strange to see it past his shoulders. He looked like a man already, to my boy’s eyes.
I loved him, and looked up to him, wanted to be him.
I also envied him.
Maybe that was inevitable, when he was so much that I wanted to be, and never would, because I’d been born the second son.
Jahir also bought me my first horse. Like the pony, it was better than his. I learned how hard he’d worked to acquire this one from the servants, because he’d had to arrange with Jisiensire for its purchase during the winter court. Another black, with black mane. No socks on this one, but a white snip on the muzzle. I don’t know how he found out I preferred the darker horses. Or maybe he just assumed, because bold colors are no longer common. Most of our horses are some shade of brown or dirty gray.
He sought the best for me.
He didn’t teach me to ride, because that was someone else’s job. But he shared every trick he’d learned on how to ride better, without hesitation.
He loved me, and I threw it all away.
I was impatient for my debut at court. Every year after Jahir reached his majority I had to watch my small family ride away twice a year, and to be left at home while they made their bows to the Queen frenzied me. We were so closely knit that being parted from them hurt, and we didn’t have enough staff to prevent the halls of the the Seni manor from echoing. I wanted to be where they were. Do what they were doing. I wanted to look as dignified and splendid as my brother did in his finery, all the long sweeps of velvet, dyed light to deepest blue, with the Seni sword at his hip. He expressed no interest in the courting boards they brought home from the capital, but I never tired of staring at the little painted portraits in their slots. So many mysterious women… I had known only the same people all my life. It didn’t matter if my brother wasn’t interested; I was interested. I was rich and well-favored and of a good family. And when my presentation approached, and the tailor came for me… I could barely contain myself. At last, I would join my mother and brother in society. At last, the world beyond our manor would be open to me, and with it, my future.
Looking back on it now, I can see my family’s worries, the ones a youth could so easily overlook. They were good at hiding those worries, having carried them all their lives. All I knew was how much care they took fitting me for my presentation to the Queen. I wanted to make them proud of me. I planned to be proud of myself.
That was the year I discovered I was a curiosity.
“A second son!” they said to my mother, as if she had done something gauche. Animals are supposed to be fruitful. Eldritch, being in command of their baser instincts, limit themselves to the one heir. “How fortunate you are!” they said, meaning the opposite. Or, possibly, they were envious. I couldn’t tell because I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I didn’t. I was the spare. And spares are only welcome if they’re conformable. No one wants a second son with a spine. No one wants a man with a spine, but an heir could be excused many tiresome qualities.
Jahir found me in our suite, sitting on the window seat and staring out at the horizon, and what a pitiable sight I must have been. What a pitiable sight we both must have been: the awkward boy, freshly freed from the shears, and the teenaged youth to serve as his meager comfort. I remember everything about that conversation, despite all the other memories that have crowded into my head in the years since, even the sound his coat skirts made when they brushed the chair leg, a whisper like the ones that followed me in the halls. No tinkle from the sword belt’s chains, though; he hated that sword, and took it off the moment he crossed the threshold.
I would have worn it for him. I would have worn it for myself, and been proud. But as I had so abruptly realized, like most of the things I had longed for, it was not for me. The future I had assumed would be full of joy and meaning? Would exist only at home. Like a fairy table where the food would vanish if I dared walk away.
Nothing I’d been promised was real… except, I knew, looking at his face. This. Just this. My brother. And my mother. His eyes had been so grave, as they had been all our life. He had begun hurting for me long before I’d known I would take the wound.
“You are more than what the court thinks of you. And to us, you are everything.”
My knuckles ached beneath my gloves from the constant clenching. “Will it ever be any different?”
That hesitation had been every answer I’d needed. Both about how much he cared, and that it would never save me.
The following years were a kind of hell. At home I knew every honor and privilege; more, I knew love, because my family never feared to express it, and together the three of us were happy. But twice a year, I rode south to the capital, and there suffered every indignity a catty, snobbish court could contrive to fling at my heart. The worst of it came, as it must, from my peers, and that was the most crushing. Knowing that I would age and that the men and women who could have, and should have, been friends and allies had had their opinions of me entrenched decades ago. The second son… what woman would be carnal enough to seek another? Did that lusty streak run in the family? Oh, and what of his brother? Did they hate one another? Because brothers must. What secret animosity were they nourishing in their breasts? Surely, given time and opportunity, they would reveal it. Everywhere I went, I was an object of ridicule and salacious gossip, and I had to pretend that it didn’t matter.
But it did. Of course it did.
Having come into my adulthood, I began the martial training expected of all men of my class. I quit it two years later, when I discovered that I could not step into the dueling square to avenge my insult… no, it was my brother the heir who was expected to defend the honor of our family name. My brother, who hated the sword. I couldn’t take even that burden from him.
“You might learn,” he told me at home, “for the exercise. And in case something befalls me.”
“Nothing will befall you,” I said, because the idea infuriated me. That he could be taken from me, along with everything else? No. “And there’s no point. I don’t like wasting time. I’ll find something else to do with myself.”
“So long as you do?” he’d said. “I hate to see you at such loose ends, Tai.”
“I’ll find something,” I promised, to ease the worry in his eyes, and if nothing ever made that worry go away completely, still, I could console myself that I had some small power to mitigate his sorrows.
I did find something. Two somethings, in fact. Archery—
—and Bethsaida.
I met her, in fact, on the archery range.
Oh, I’d seen her at court. Unavoidably because she had a reputation as a coquette, deservedly so. Her circle of male admirers followed her everywhere and she flirted with them endlessly. She’d flirted with me, but I’d known better than to believe in it. She was beautiful and powerful, so when she finally chose a man—if she did—it would be one who knew his place. If she smiled at me, it was habit. Or practice.
She wasn’t interested in me. No woman was, not even as second servings. I refused to let any of them in.
But that day on the archery range…
“I find you here, at a woman’s sport,” she’d said, the words puffing out in the cold. “Are you shirking your duties as a man?”
“If I was allowed any, you would find me at them,” I’d answered, already sighting at the target. “Since I’m not, I will take my pleasures where I find them.”
“At a peasant’s sport.”
“Or a woman’s,” I reminded her, caustic. I loosed, hit the target’s exact center, and she started.
“You’re good at this.”
“Why not?” I said. “I practice.”
She’d come with only servants for chaperones to the outdoor range at a time no one should have been using it; and she’d dressed to shoot, in a gown only slightly more ornate than those worn by the mere nobles who flattered her. Stepping past me, she aimed, loosed, and struck the target’s outermost ring. “I… am not so practiced. As you see.”
“You have other responsibilities.”
“Or less talent.”
“Not talent. Skill. Skill can be learned.”
“Then… you could teach me?”
I snorted. “Flirt with someone who wants your attention, princess.”
“I’m not flirting,” she’d said, stepping closer. Her eyes… her eyes looked serious, for once. “I’m supposed to be good at everything, and I’m not. But I need to be. I have to be the best.”
“Or?” I asked, skeptical.
“Or I’ll lose the coronet. No, don’t make that face at me. Do you really know Liolesa? The way I do? If I’m not suitable, she will set me aside. And if she does, I’ll go back to being…”
“Nobody?” I said, voice sharp.
She looked away. At the time I’d thought her cheeks pink from embarrassment. Now, I think it must have been the cold, and the little flinch had been her way of turning it to advantage. She could barely shoot, but how practiced she was in that particular skill.
But perhaps I wrong her. Maybe in that moment, she was being honest. I can’t tell anymore.
“Teach me,” she said. “Please.”
It probably meant nothing, but the chance to be good at something—to be acknowledged for it—was impossible to resist. Even knowing that she was almost certainly manipulating me, for pleasure, or practice, or because I was no one she cared to be honest with… the semblance of candor was sufficient. I couldn’t continue living on my family’s affection. I needed some proof that I had meaning outside the tiny world of the Seni estate… or I would suffocate in its boundaries.
“All right,” I said, and began the downward slide that would lead to the blood on my hands.
I wonder now what she was thinking when the Chatcaava took her. For those few weeks, did she repent of her behavior, think of us and realize we were more than mirrors for her own vanity? Did she regret not being more honest? Or was it all a game, one in which she was the exhilarating victor, time after time…until she lost?
The one time Jahir made a mistake… I remember that too.
The manse was large enough for him to have chosen his own study, but he used our father’s anyway. Since I couldn’t recall our father in it, I associated that book-lined room with Jahir, and felt he looked right in it. He belongs to peace, and books, and quiet.
By then we were both adults, and I could now look for, and find, the concern in his eyes when he told me to be careful before my long rides alone. We talked—or at least, I remember them as talks, but more accurately I would rant and he would listen. Everything about our society chafed, and I railed against it, good and bad. He would wait through my storms with unfailing patience, and at the end I would apologize and he would reach for and clasp my hand and give, through it, his love. He deserved a better brother, but he adamantly disagreed that I wasn’t everything he could have wanted in one. When he said so, for a while, I believed it… until society wore down the halo of the words, and left me confronting again the futility of my existence.
He’d been sitting in a shaft of autumn sunlight when he’d said it, looking so much the lord of the manor that I didn’t understand the words, at first, because no such lord would have said them. Then I exploded. “You’re leaving?!”
“To see the Alliance,” he said. “Yes.”
“But why?”
“Because… I must.”
There. That was the moment. That flicker of expression… the bleakness of it. And then it was gone, and he was still talking. “Our mother will have the estate’s management for many years yet. I can afford to go, perhaps earn something with my own efforts. Learn something I can bring home.”
“What could you possibly learn there that anyone will let you use here?” I exclaimed. “No one lets anyone do anything here. And… you’re the heir! How can you leave!”
I couldn’t say the words I really wanted to say because… I didn’t know what they were. ‘How could you leave us?’ and ‘how could you leave me’… or ‘why you, but not me?’
Because it had never occurred to me that I might leave. That I could put this world behind me and make a life somewhere no one cared I was a second son. The thought was dizzying. To go. To be free.
The instant I grasped that, I knew my brother was suffering. Because had he been able to think straight he would have offered me the chance, rather than taking it for himself. I couldn’t fathom what had put that look in his eyes. I’d assumed he was happy. I would have been happy, had I been heir.
But he wasn’t happy, and there was something he needed so badly he hadn’t realized I needed it too. And oh, God and Lady, how I needed it.
“Will you watch over Mother while I’m away?” Jahir asked. “I hate to leave her.”
Don’t go! Something shouted in me. And How could you! and Take me with you! And all of that scattered before the realization that at last, after all he’d done for me… I could do something for him. I could free him, so he could lose that look in his eyes. I could be the man of the house; I could take care of our mother. He would lean on me, and I would help, and it would mean something.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
“Are you sure? Tai…”
This time, I reached for his hand. It wasn’t warm, despite the glove. I remember fretting about that. “Brother. If you need to go, go. We’ll be here.” I smiled. “Come back soon, though. We’ll miss you.”
He exhaled, eyes closing. Just that. But his voice shook. “Thank you.”
And I would have stayed until he returned, except that my mother cut me loose a few years later. None of us had thought of leaving until Jahir did. But once he had… she began looking at me speculatively, until one day, she said, “Go, love.” And I went. I went, and Bethsaida followed, and I don’t know why.
I’ll never know why. If she missed me. If she was curious. If I was just a convenient excuse. If she had something to prove…
How could I blame her for that.
I thought her experiences, her capture… I thought they’d changed her.
They did. They made her more of the worst of her. Which is fair. They changed me too, and I’m not proud of that either.
“Do you know,” she said to me during one of those lessons—in summer, this time, and she was letting me stand too close to her and I was ignoring it—“Do you know, you’re the only person who’s honest with me.”
“You mean I’m the only one who doesn’t talk to you like you have something they want?”
“Yes.” She’d cocked her head. “Why is that?”
“Because I can’t have you,” I said. “So wanting you is useless, and courting you would be a lie.”
“But our society is built on lies. Polite ones.”
“That,” I said, “doesn’t make them less lies.” I thought of how I could be everything at home, and nothing everywhere else. “It doesn’t make them hurt less.”
She ran her gloved hand along my forearm, shocking me. “I think you are a truer man than any I’ve met.”
“Then you haven’t met my brother.”
“Ah,” she’d said. “But your brother didn’t offer to teach me archery.” She’d flirted her eyes at me, sweet and smoldering. “I think your heart might be worth winning, Sernataila Seni.”
“Life isn’t a game,” I said. “Try again.”
She’d dropped the fake look. “And if I say rather that I am tired of being flattered, and long for someone to treat me like a woman, rather than the heir to the throne? And that I have given up seeking such a person, because I am what I am?”
And fool that I was, I’d glanced at her, and believed her. Because if I could be special to one, single person outside Seni, then… that would make me real, wouldn’t it? That would give me a future. “Then I’d say… I’m at your service. But you haven’t said, and so… neither have I.”
“I suppose… we will see.”
And we did see. Didn’t we. What became of her. What became of me. And what I did because of it. I once wished to be free of our world: now I am, because I can never go back. Not to face my family; not to be lord of Seni. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be fit company. Not for anyone I cared about.
Not that I would be able to make restitution. Not for this. They would have to execute me. Or at least, I can’t imagine a world where they didn’t. Best to run. Far, far away.
I don’t know why I’m writing this down. Maybe I’ll erase it. But I wanted to say… that I remember. The pony. The horse. The love. That mattered, and it was real. And I’m sorry.
—SSG