Chapter 312: I Lied To You About Your Father

Nobody in Ashford is a fool. They said they remembered no such woman. Old Hesta at the inn said she remembered nothing at all, not even her own name, if there was a coin in it. But he looked at me. I was at the next table with my thread. He looked at me once, pleasantly, and then he went away.

I did not sleep that night.

I do not know who he is. I do not know what he wants. But I have been waiting eighteen years for a stranger to walk into the inn and ask that question, and I knew him the moment he opened his mouth.

Morgana’s hands were shaking.

She held the page tighter, to keep it from rattling. The lamp flickered. Somewhere in the walls the old stone ticked and settled, and the night pressed close against the window.

"Carrick," she said.

"You don’t know that," said Rowan.

"I do."

"But...."

"Eighteen years back. A woman alone with child. He said it to everyone." Her voice was flat, and very quiet. "He knew before he ever came to the palace. He was already looking. He’d been looking."

Rowan’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

"Read on," she said gently. "There’s more."

There was more.

So here is the thing I have kept from you.

I lied to you about your father.

He is not dead.

I told you he was, when you were four, because you asked in the way a child asks, all at once and with your whole face, and I had been rehearsing an answer for years and could not find one that would not break your heart. So I told you the plainest thing. I said he was gone. And you looked at me and nodded and never asked again, and I thought, God forgive me, thank heaven.

It is the one lie I am ashamed of. And it is the one I would tell again.

I will not tell you his name. Not in this letter. Names travel, love, and I do not trust paper with that one. I will tell you he was, once, a gentle man. He loved books and quiet and a particular way of folding a letter. He laughed when he was surprised. I loved him with everything I had.

And he did something I could not forgive.

I cannot write what. I have tried four times and burned four pages. You will have to forgive me the rest.

But I will tell you this, because I want you to hold it: whatever he did, it was not you. It was never you. You were not a mistake and not a burden and not a punishment. You were the only good thing that came out of those years, and I would walk through the whole of it again to have you.

She had stopped reading aloud.

She did not know when. Her lips were still moving, shaping the words, but no sound came out. Tears ran down her face and dripped onto the parchment, one after another, and she made no move to wipe them. She saw the ink at the corner swell and blur and thought, quite calmly, that’s where it was before. Her mother had wept here, too. Right here. In this exact place, at some desk in a cottage kitchen, weeks ago, in the dark.

"Morgana."

"I’m all right."

"You’re not." Rowan’s voice was shaking. "Do you want me to stop you? We can stop. You don’t have to...."

"No." Morgana wiped her face, with the back of her wrist. It was not a graceful gesture. "I want to read it. All of it. I’d rather know."

"All right."

"Stay with me."

"I’m not going anywhere."

She smoothed the page. She read it silently, this time, because she could not trust her voice.

There is a carving, in the hollow of the mantel, that you used to look at when you thought I was not watching. I knew you did. I watched you do it a hundred times.

I told you it came from a friend.

He made it for you. Before you were born. He sat by the fire in the evenings with a little knife and a block of pearwood and he whittled that dragon, scale by scale, and when I asked what it was for he said, "She will have it when she’s older." He was certain you were a girl. He was certain of a great many things.

I put it in a drawer because I could not bear to look at it. I did not burn it, because I could not bear that, either.

It is yours. It was always yours. When you come home, take it.

Morgana put the letter down.

She laid it, very gently, on her knee, and pressed both hands over her mouth. A sound came out of her that she did not recognize, thin and cracked, the sound of a thing breaking that had been held together for a long time. Rowan’s arms closed around her, and she folded forward into them and wept.

She wept for a long time.

When it ended, she was hollow.

She lay with her cheek against Rowan’s shoulder and her breath coming in long, shaky, exhausted pulls. The lamp had burned lower. The page lay on her knee, damp at one edge, the ink of the last paragraphs smeared and soft.

"Do you want to stop?" Rowan whispered.

"There’s a little more."

"You don’t have to...."

"I know."

She sat up. She wiped her face, thoroughly this time, with both hands. She picked up the letter.

Now I must say something harder.

When you were small, I made you promise me something. You remember. You were seven, or eight, and you had done a thing in the garden that you shouldn’t, and I held you by both arms in the kitchen and made you swear never to do it again, never to let anyone see, never, never, not even if they begged.