“Often father and daughter look down on mother…together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” – Bonnie Burstow
Balkuzîr’s study smells exactly the same as Filigereth had remembered it from her childhood – parchments, soft leather, and the faintest hint of wet soil tracked in on her father’s boots from the gardens.
“You still wake early.”
Her father is already awake, had likely been awake for some time, and sits in the reading-chair which had never moved in her entire memory. “We leave today for Adûnazir’s family’s manor. He sleeps late,” she says, the childish disregard with which she had once intruded into her father’s sanctum replaced by a sense of being where she should not. Balkuzîr gives a hrm under his breath, occupied with writing something.
He had always been old in her memory. She hardly remembered his face from before he left, and when he had come home, he had seemed prematurely gray and tired long before a man of his age ought to have been. Now, though, it almost feels that the man looks younger – something which should not have been possible. She wonders if her mother would have looked older, if the woman’s harsh, unlined face might have finally been touched by a crease or wrinkle. Celeireth had never earned smile-lines around her mouth or eyes, though it made her look formidable rather than youthful.
“Why did you let her try again?”
A long silence passes between father and daughter at the question, both aware of a threshold of understanding from which neither could return.
“She was adamant. She knew of the risk.”
“So did you!” Filigereth snaps. Balkuzîr, unphased by her outburst, goes on.
“I also knew that it was her duty, the last obligation unfulfilled between husband and wife. One does not release that so easily – at least, not all do. I had made my peace with my lack of an heir. She had not. There is much due paid to the man’s right in a marriage, but I made vows to her as she did me. I could not forever deny her what she demanded.”
“She got it, in the end.”
“Yes.” Balkuzîr’s reply sounds more like a man doomed. “I will not say falsely that our marriage was a happy one, but I did not wish for her to endure such a thing, not for the sake of the love I bore her nor to achieve that which I had already resigned myself to be without.”
“Did you love her? She never thought marriage was happy.”
Balkuzîr sets down his pen, a bead of ink forming at its tip and falling onto his writing unheeded. “I did. I think I did, though it was hardly a tale for the bards to sing of. The match was arranged by our parents – I was quite young, and she an uncommon degree older. We met but three times before we were betrothed, and the wedding followed swiftly after. I think I feared her as much as I loved her then,” he adds, with a laugh as low and rumbling as the purring of a cat.
“It was a marriage chosen to help my status in the prince’s court, and because she was from an older, wealthier family but had already been some years without finding a husband. There are many such matches who do love each other more with time, but when the whirlwind of the wedding faded, we were left more with a marriage of steadfastness than of admiration or affection. We found ourselves two individuals who had pledged themselves to a life of cohabitation, rather than lovers or even friends.” The man pauses, one ink-blotched hand drumming against the desk. “We performed our marital duties, but – do not make that face, child, you are betrothed yourself.”
It was quite different to hear one’s father speaking of it than to imagine it oneself, Filigereth thinks, though she says nothing.
“To be sure, much of the blame was mine. I was young, and more preoccupied with managing my household without asking for help. I had little interest in her music or sewing, and she never wished to dirty her hands in my garden or ride farther from home. I ought to have tried to find some thing which we could have shared, but…” This, now, is the father Filigereth remembered. She realizes, as dimly as one hears speech underwater, that it was not age she had observed lining his face as a child, but regret. “She resented me for a time, I know, and then resigned herself to the same condition as I. She was so happy when she finally had you.”
Not that she ever showed it.
“She never forgave me for taking up a fool’s expedition while you were still so young. She blamed the fact that you were not a boy for my absence, and I fear I allowed her to think so, for the truth was more hurtful by far – that I was bored. You have inherited my restless temperament, I fear, and you must watch that it does not eat you alive as it did me.”
Balkuzîr goes back to writing, the scritch-scritch of his pen gnawing at Filigereth’s chest. “What will you do with the baby?”
“What will I do with him? He is my son. What would any man do for his son?”
I hate you! You never let me do what I want to. I wish you would go away so Father would let me…
The memory of screaming at her mother over some stupid dress or hairstyle or music lesson burns in Filigereth’s memory, and she feels a sudden pang of sympathy for Celeireth, bound to a man who saw her as a duty and was too preoccupied even to defend her from a child’s anger – a child she had perhaps hoped to find some shared joy with. He ought to have smacked me for that, truly. Will my own children have such ire for me?
“I should go. It is a full day’s ride, so we must start before long,” she begins, turning toward the door. Balkuzîr stands, crossing the distance to take her hands in his.
“Travel safely, and judge wisely. I will see to it that you may leave the betrothal if you decide against it.”
Filigereth nods, and then her father pulls her into an embrace that she is too preoccupied to be comforted by. She is quiet as she gathers her things, quiet as she and Adûnazir ride away from her home, and quieter still when she leaves a gathered handful of blue and white wildflowers on the fresh grave on the cliff.
