“After what we’ve been through, that shouldn’t be any surprise,” Mari mumbled.
“I believe these dreams have less to do with recent history than with things you will not speak of.”
There he went again. Bringing up her family. “Not a good time, Alain.”
“It is never a good time. Some nights you awaken in my arms, distressed, unhappy, and yet you will not ever speak of what haunts your dreams.”
Mari had been leaning against Alain. Now she sat up straighter, looking directly ahead. “You know why I have nightmares sometimes. It’s happened ever since I had to shoot those barbarians in Marandur.”
“Those nightmares are different,” Alain said. “You react differently in them. There is another reason you have nightmares.”
“Who made you such an expert on me?” Mari turned her most intimidating look on Alain. “This is my problem. I’ll figure it out. I’ll deal with it.”
“You are not alone.”
She almost snapped at him once more in response, then realized the statement had more than one meaning. By closing him out of her problems, she was closing him out of her life.
Mari took a few long, slow breaths. “It’s… guilt, I guess. And that’s probably because of my mother. It’s got to be her fault.”
“You blame your mother for your nightmares?”
“Why not? That’s what mothers are for. Daughters blame them for their problems.”
“Why does this stand between us?” Alain asked.
That took several more breaths, while Mari nerved herself enough to answer. “Because I want you so bad. Physically, I mean, as well as loving you. And I know I must feel guilty about that. Because having sex is how you have children, even if you’re taking measures not to have children, and if we have children…”
He waited, not saying anything.
“If we have children,” Mari said in a whisper, “I might do to them what my mother did to me.” She shuddered as the words finally left her, closing her eyes against the world around her.
Alain’s arm came around her, gently offering reassurance. “You do miss them.”
“No, I don’t! If I wasn’t good enough for them, then they’re not good enough for me!”
“Anger will only—”
“I’m not getting angry!”
There was a moment of silence before Alain spoke again with the tone of a man walking into a pit full of lions. “Since neither one of us is angry, may I mention something?”
This was going too far, too fast. Why couldn’t he just leave it alone? “As long as it has absolutely nothing to do with my parents, sure.”
“May I speak of mine?”
Mari glared down at the bottom of the boat. “All right,” she grumbled.
“The last words I heard my mother say were ‘remember us.’” Alain said. “I never could forget those words or my parents, and I feel certain that my parents never forgot me.”
Tears mingled with her rage this time. “That makes me feel so much better, hearing about how your parents never forgot you.” It came out sounding vicious, making Mari feel even worse.
“Mari, you gave me back the ability to feel, to stop denying my emotions. Why do you fight so hard to deny your own feelings?”
She just stared downward. “She abandoned me, Alain. Her own daughter, forgotten, tossed aside. My mother did that, and her blood flows in me.” Mari raised her gaze, meeting Alain’s eyes. “I can’t imagine ever doing that to a child of mine, but my mother did it, and her blood is in me, and so maybe someday I would. And I will not risk that, Alain. As long as there is any chance that I might cast a child of mine aside because I inherited such a dark legacy, then I will not have a child. Why is it so hard for you to understand how horrible that is for me to think about?”
“Because you have never told me of it,” he said.
Mari pretended to be concentrating on moving the tiller so that the boat was on just the right course. “All right, you have a point there,” she finally admitted. “But now you know, and I hope you will respect that this is not something to do with you. It’s me. I have to get through what happened.”
Alain nodded, his voice calm. “What do you believe happened, Mari?”
“With my parents? I don’t believe anything. I know.” Her voice was shaking with anger. “I went off to the Mechanics Guild and I never got a single letter from them. Not one, not ever. For a few years I kept hoping they would least send something on my birthday, but no, nothing, nothing at all, and I wrote so many letters to them, Alain, so many letters, and I was still a little girl and I poured my heart into those letters and I begged them to please write and they never did.” The tears were coming again, blast it. Mari watched them fall into the bottom of the boat and mingle with the small puddles of sea water there.
“You know that they never wrote?”
“I checked. For years I checked often with the retired Mechanic who served as the mail clerk for the Guild Hall, and he never had anything for me!” Mari had been only ten years old the last time she had asked about mail from her parents, but she could still see his face, the old man kindly and regretful. Commons are like that. They get jealous. They cut you off. I’m really sorry, Mari. But you have the Guild now.
“Mari,” Alain said in a soft voice that barely carried, “did he tell you that no letters had been received, or that he had none for you?”
“What difference does it make how he said it?”
“Do you remember speaking with your friend Mechanic Calu about the letters he sent from the Guild Hall in Caer Lyn to you at the Mechanics Guild Academy, and the ones you sent to him and Mechanic Alli? At least some of those letters did not arrive, even though they were sent between Mechanics. Does this happen often?”
“No! I’ve never heard of any Mechanic complaining about it. I’m guessing now that I was being watched closer than I thought even then and that the Guild’s Senior Mechanics must have been intercepting some of my mail to see if I was being treasonous. But that’s not—” Something registered then, something too terrible to confront. “No. Oh, no, no, no.”
“My Guild never made any secret that we were to cut all ties to our parents,” Alain continued. “They taught us to believe our parents were nothing. The elders did this openly, because our training as Mages was believed to require it and because it ensured our loyalty to the Mage Guild. As I watched the Senior Mechanic on that ship taunt you, it came to me that your Guild took a different path, convincing you to deny your parents by making you believe that your parents had denied you. You know for a fact that some letters you sent were never delivered, and some sent to you were never received. This between Mechanics. What of letters to and from commons?” He paused, then spoke gently. “Your Guild elders lied to you about so much. I believe they lied about that as well.”
Mari was staring at him, feeling the tears streaming down her face again, but not in anger. No, what she was feeling now was a sense of dismay so deep it threatened to swallow her. “They lied to me and who knows how many others. We were just kids. We had no idea someone would do something like that. They cut us off from our families, and let us believe it was our families’ fault.”
“I think this may have happened, yes, Mari,” Alain said, his voice soft.
“No!” It was more a howl of despair than a word, and Mari hurled herself against Alain to clasp him and cry in great, trembling sobs. “Then my parents didn’t leave me. They never got my letters, did they? The Guild just burned their letters, probably, and told me, and told my friends, that our parents hated us now, and we believed them, and we believed that the Guild was the only family we had. Oh, no.” She couldn’t stop crying, wracked with more pain than she had ever let out, and Alain held her, saying nothing else for a long time.