Chapter 18 — The Wrong Memory

The attack in the woods should have been the beginning of my father's ruin.

I remembered it — or rather, I remembered its shadow, a similar attack from my first life, though not on this trail, not at this season, and not aimed at me at all. In the life I had died out of, it had been a Vale steward's son who was killed on the eastern road two years from now, an ordinary robbery, or so everyone had called it at the time, that my father had used as pretext to purge three households of guards he distrusted and replace them with men more loyal to himself alone. I had watched that purge from the edges of my own isolation and thought little of it. It had seemed, in the flat retrospect of a ruined life, like one more piece of my father's endless appetite for control, one more proof that he measured every decision by what it cost or gained him politically.

Now the attack had come two years early, aimed at me instead of a steward's son, and my father's response was nothing like what I remembered.

He did not purge the guard. He did not even replace the captain of the household watch, a broad, unremarkable man named Dressen who had, in my first memory, been one of the men quietly dismissed in the purge. Instead my father called Dressen into his study, alone, for nearly two hours, and when Dressen emerged his face was gray and his hands would not quite hold steady, and within the week he had resigned his post and left Vale territory entirely, taking his family with him under cover of night, as though fleeing something far more immediate than simple shame.

Nobody explained why. Nobody was permitted to ask.

I went to my father directly, three days after, and found him in his study staring at a letter he did not offer to show me, his face carrying the particular weariness of a man who had not slept properly in some time.

"Someone tried to kill me," I said, without preamble. "I'd like to know why Dressen was dismissed instead of the men who let it happen."

My father looked up at me for a long moment, and something in his face — old, tired, frightened in a way I had never once seen him frightened — made me falter, the careful speech I had rehearsed on the walk here evaporating entirely.

"Dressen wasn't dismissed for letting it happen," he said finally. "He was dismissed because he arranged it."

The floor seemed to shift very slightly beneath me. "What?"

"He's been passing information to someone outside this house for the better part of a year. Small things, at first — schedules, household movements, nothing anyone would have thought to guard. I don't know how far it went before it reached you." My father's hands, folded on the desk before him, were white at the knuckles, the tension in them betraying far more than his composed voice allowed. "I let him leave because the alternative was a trial that would tell the entire north that House Vale cannot secure its own daughters, and because—" He stopped.

"Because what?"

"Because he wept, Liora, when I confronted him. He wept, and he told me he had never intended for anyone to be hurt, only watched, and I believed him, because I am not entirely certain who frightened him badly enough to make an honest man into an informant in the first place." My father's eyes met mine, and for one raw, unguarded moment I saw in them something I had never once found there in my whole first life: fear for me, plain and unhidden, stripped of every careful political calculation I had learned to expect from him. "I don't know who wants you watched, child. I don't know why. But I intend to find out before I sleep easily again."

I stood very still, turning this over. In my first life, my father's every decision had seemed carved from ambition and little else. I had built a whole understanding of him on that single, flattened truth, a truth that had made it easy, in the loneliest months of my isolation, to stop expecting anything warmer from him at all. Now he sat before me frightened and honest and entirely unwilling to sacrifice a weeping man's dignity for the sake of appearances, and I did not know, any longer, whether that was who he had always been and I had simply never looked closely enough to see it, or whether the man himself had changed, quietly, the way everything else around me seemed to be changing in ways I could no longer predict.

"You never told me any of this," I said.

"You never asked," my father said, not unkindly, "and I have spent a great many years assuming you preferred it that way."

It was, I realized with a small, unpleasant jolt, exactly the sort of thing I might have said to Kael, in the glasshouse or across a candlelit table, about the careful distance grown between two people who had simply stopped expecting anything better of each other, each silence building on the last until the whole relationship had calcified into something neither party knew quite how to break. I had not thought, until this moment, to wonder whether my father had ever felt the same distance from his own side of it, whether his silence had ever cost him anything at all, or whether I had simply assumed, the way the lonely always assume, that only my own side of the silence carried any weight.

I did not know what to do with that thought. I put it away, carefully, beside the empty compartment and the scratched-out name and the second heartbeat in the stone, another piece of a picture I no longer trusted myself to assemble correctly, though I found myself, walking back through the quiet corridor afterward, looking at my father's closed study door with something gentler than I had carried into the room.