As if no one else were in the room, Gird spoke. “You know, Selamis, you reminded me of my brother from the day I first saw you. My favorite brother; he died in a wolf-hunt, years before the war started, but I never forgot him. I thought ‘Here’s Aris back again, and this time I’ll protect him as he protected me.’ There were some who didn’t like your ways from the first; I argued that they were unfair. When you told me you had lied, and what had been done to you, I wept—do you remember that?” Luap nodded; he could not speak. “I knew that any man could be driven to lie by enough pain; I never blamed you for it. But you lied afterward.”
I told the truth afterward too, Luap thought. More often than I lied. You might give me credit for that. Aloud, he said, “I’m sorry. I am not the man you would have me be. But since I am not, give your task to someone more fit to handle it, and let me go.”
“I wish I could.” Gird looked at him. “But you know why I cannot, if you will only face it. You are who you are, your father’s son—and you came to me. That old woman knows, and Arranha: I know they’ve told you.”
“And they’ve told me that my magery is part of it. That I must tap that power to do what you ask—yet you ask me to do it without. How? I have tried, and failed.” For the time, his bitterness had vanished, leaving him at peace, a still pool in the calm before a winter dawn. “Since it is my lies that made you distrust my people—” There. He had said my people blatantly, just as he saw it in Gird’s expression. “—rid yourself of me, and you and the others may be able to trust them.”
“I don’t want to trust them, you purblind fool! I want to trust you. I want you to deserve my trust.” He had never heard such anguish in Gird’s voice; it shook his certainty. “I want you to be the Selamis we all see you could be.”
“And not the luap you all see?” The moment it was out of his mouth, he could have bitten his tongue in two. It was like slapping the old man’s face; nothing would heal now. But Gird looked more sad than angry.
“No, not the luap. If you could think past your balls, Selamis, and past your own losses, you could see that not all fatherhood involves a woman, and not all kingship requires battle.”
“I’m sorry.” It seemed he was always saying that; it tasted of long chewing, its meaning leached away, its savor lost. Yet he meant it; he would say it until he died, if he must. He shivered, and made a warding sign; he hoped he would not need to be sorry so long.
“Well.” Gird shook his head, refusing further debate on that subject. “You’re not going; I need you. And your people are not going out to your mysterious land, wherever it is. We will work through this; if I can lead peasants to war, surely I can lead them into peace. Although I remember Arranha saying that would be harder.”
Luap found the look on Arranha’s face worse than anything he might have said. He wanted to scream back at it, he wanted to run from it, he wanted to be what all these people wanted him to be . . . that they expected him to be without explaining beforehand. He was supposed to guess, to figure it out from the hints that were enough for others but had never been enough for him. He could always see more than one direction behind each hint, always see more and more complicated patterns radiating from a simple one. Arranha would say more light would help, but more light simply revealed more complexity, more ways to go wrong.
“What is the one thing you truly want?” Arranha asked, after a silence that seemed very long to Luap.
Cascades of images flowed through his mind, each begetting a dozen more. Each made of dark and light, color and its absence, lines and spaces, textures. . . . “To be whole,” Luap whispered, into the hollow space of his dream, the secret chamber of his mind, to which no god’s voice had come. To have this space filled, this chamber habited, the voiceless voiced, the blind—but he was not blind; he had all Esea’s light he could tolerate, and what it revealed was emptiness. “To be whole,” he said a little louder, putting voice to something without a voice.
“To be something,” Arranha said. Nothing colored his voice, neither approval nor disapproval. “Or to do something? Or to have something?”
Luap sat silent, trying to keep his hands still. Arranha’s questions always had traps in them; that parallel series must mean more than it seemed, must be more than the reflection of his own words from Arranha’s mind. He had been, he thought, plain enough. He wanted to be whole, more than anything. But to be? Not do? What did he want to be whole for? Had he a purpose? Had he some other desire which this phrasing veiled?
He wanted . . . he wanted to hear that voice, the one he had not found in the chamber that lay in no visible mountain, the one no one could find but himself. He wanted to hear that voice say . . . but that was nonsense. Children hoped to hear adults praise them; children hoped for approval. He was grown, a man old enough to have his first grandchildren on his knee, if his children had lived. It came to him in a sudden storm that his son had been killed, not as a whim of the soldiers sent to command his mission to Gird, but because he was a son—a potential heir in time of rebellion. Why had he not seen this before? Because his grief for the boy had eased before the much harder grief of knowing how his wife and daughter suffered when he did not betray Gird?
In the memory of his children, his longing for something only children wanted ebbed, leaving him aware of nothing but exhaustion and the hollow he so desperately wanted filled. “To be whole,” he said finally to Arranha. In his own ears, his voice held conviction. “That’s all. And—and I don’t know what that would be. With magery, without . . . just whole.”
Arranha’s expression softened. “I wonder sometimes if any of us have understood what your boyhood was like. Did you have any feeling of being in a family?”
“No.” Luap swallowed. “Or I supposed I may have, very young, but not later. I never knew where I fit; I never knew exactly what they wanted, except that I wasn’t right.” He did not try to express the memories that flooded him now: other children had brothers and sisters, parents, a pattern into which they fit. All those patterns excluded him; he had been defined, he realized, by negatives. You’re not my brother, one boy had said, shoving him away when he would have made friends. He had learned not to ask the adult men if they were his father; he had learned not to ask women if they were his mother. When he had asked those questions, in his innocence, he had been thrust away: you are not my son, you are not my child. He had learned not to ask the most important questions that crowded his head, for that would risk the little he did have, the little he did know. And in the unknown spaces, he could make up his own answers, safe as long as he did not ask, did not seek the truth, which always told him what he was not. His dreams were not lies if he did not ask.
Arranha stared at his own hands as if they were new to him. “I have been an outcast most of my life—causing trouble, as Dorhaniya told you, even as a young man—but at least I always knew what I was an outcast from. I knew my father’s face, my mother’s hands; I scuffled with my brothers, teased my sister . . . and I cannot imagine what it would have been like without them. Would I have gone my own way, if I had not been sure what that was? What I was? Have I taken pride in being true to my own vision without realizing how lucky I was in having such a vision?”