https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/711352
A Father's Words
“They do not exist,” Dad argued.
“How can you say that? I was just talking to them!”
“I just said it. They do not exist. I am not certain whether
you had a bad dream, or fell down and knocked yourself out, but the People of
the Earth are fiction. A popular fiction, granted, but they are entirely not
real.”
I felt like stamping my foot in irritation, but was too
tired. After a full afternoon of being told that three of the four major clans
wanted me banished, and then all night spent talking to and learning about the
strange race of black-skinned elves, I’d run home to find him, Aerona, and Seph
all waiting for me in my room. Seph was worried, of course, while Aerona was
mostly just irritated over having been left without a charge to look over all
night. Dad was—well, he was the king, and he was doing his best to make sure
that I knew it.
“Okay, so maybe I knocked myself out and didn’t realize it.
I’ll know more after I sleep a little. Please, may I have some privacy for just
a few short hours to catch up?”
“Under normal circumstances, my daughter, such a request
would be warmly met by my approval. Unfortunately, it appears that you have
forgotten your promise to begin preparations for your passage to adulthood at
sunrise on this day. Certainly there was no plan on your part to renege on this
important point from the negotiation yesterday, was there?”
“No! No, I just—I’m tired, Dad, and want to get some sleep.”
“Perhaps you should have considered that prior to—”
“I know, I know. Okay, look, I’ll put it off. I don’t need a
lecture. Where do I need to go to get the preparations started?”
“I believe the high priestess herself is awaiting your
arrival in her office. As she has been, since sunrise. I am certain that you
will find her in the most pleasant of moods when you arrive.”
I shot Seph a glare as penalty for her snicker, and then I
spun on my heel and marched out of the room toward the castle’s passage to the
cathedral. I resisted my own intense desire to hurry; Sternyface would already
be as angry as she was likely to get, and sprinting through the cathedral to
get to her office quickly would counter everything I’d done to prove myself
worthy of the title of crown princess and its requisite respect.
Well, that, and I really was bone-tired. My legs felt like
rubber. I was barely able to keep plodding along, one foot in front of the
other, while my fear-addled, sleep-deprived brain kept sending irritated
signals to my feet to turn around and run the other way.
Eventually, I made it anyway. I knocked, and after a long,
long wait that was probably only a few dozen seconds in reality, the response
filtered through the door.
“Come!”
I opened the door and marched in, wondering what I was in
for.
“Please close the door behind you,” made my heart skip a
beat. She’d never had me close the door behind a meeting with just her and me
before. We’d had a few closed-door events with my father present, but not with
just me.
“You’re late. Very late,” she chided me once I’d returned to
my spot in front of her desk.
“I went out for a jog last night to clear my head and lost
track of time,” I explained, as unapologetically as I could manage.
“Lost track of time?” she asked, giving me a doubtful look.
Obviously, she hadn’t heard the real story. “How do you lose track of sunrise
when you are outside?”
“I got into a conversation,” I answered, trying to make it
sound like the most natural thing in the world.
“What sort of conversation?” she probed.
“I met some dark-skinned elves, who told me the history of
their portion of the race. Dad told me this morning that they don’t exist,
though, so I probably imagined the whole thing while I was busy not noticing
that the sun was rising.” I gave her my sweetest smile to emphasize the level
of sarcasm I was attaching to the statement.
“Dark-skinned elves,” she repeated, her mouth dragging the
words out acerbically. “Yes, there is certainly a—constraint—upon your father
and what the king can and cannot say within the castle’s walls.”
“So he knows about them?”
“I am not at liberty to say what the king knows about and
what he does not. I would, however, recommend that you try to use some of the
sense that your birth lineage gave you and avoid introducing topics like that
where they should not be discussed.”
“So you know about the dark elves.” I didn’t let it slip
into a question at the end.
She shrugged, making the gesture into a luxurious show of
ostentation, with a sideways sneer on her face. “What I do or do not know is
not a matter to be questioned by a child, even one as privileged as the crown
princess believes herself to be. You came here to prepare for the hunhymgais.
Now, let us begin.”
By lunchtime I was convinced that the preparation for
hunhymgais was likely to kill me from stopping my breath due to boredom.
Sternyface, who apparently hadn’t gotten over my tardiness or my putting her on
the spot, seemed to delight in droning on about what makes an adult, an adult.
She refused to let me sit through the process, too, so I had to stand, shifting
my weight occasionally as one leg or the other fell as deeply asleep as I
wished that my entire body could. Lunch was brought to me, to be eaten in a
special side room, where the furniture consisted precisely of one small wooden
table and one wooden stool. Apparently Sternyface had “business to attend to,”
in her sparse terminology. The fruit and slices of meat were welcome, though,
since I’d skipped breakfast completely. At least I got to sit down to eat.
After lunch the high priestess announced that lecturing me
was too boring for Her Holiness, and suddenly I was rushed off to a smaller
office where an even more boring set of lectures were delivered by a male
priest with a high-pitched voice and a slight lisp. I was actually glad that he
wouldn’t let me sit, because I’m pretty sure I would’ve fallen right to sleep
given the chance.
“That sounds awful,” Seph comforted me as I told her the
story that evening at the table in the common dining room. I didn’t have to be
seek any privacy, since nobody other than my cousin was willing to sit anywhere
near me.
I nodded and chewed another bite. Finally I asked, “How did
your preparation for hunhymgais go?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, when you were getting ready to go for your
ceremony. How many lectures did you have to sit through?”
Seph looked incredulous. “None.”
“None at all? What did you do to prepare?”
“I stripped my clothes off.”
“And then what?”
“I stepped in to the portal.”
“That’s all?” I couldn’t believe the difference between her
and my experiences so far.
“Alyssa, I’m just a regular person. Growing up, I observed
everything that the high priestess and priest have been lecturing you on. So
when the time came, I just did it.”
“Oh. Wonder how my father’s hunhymgais went.”
“About the same as your cousin’s,” my father’s voice
answered from behind, surprising me enough to earn him a jump and a gasp. I’ve
bragged about my spidey-senses, but my father is the one exception I’ve found.
Luckily I had no fear he’d ever sneak up behind me with a dagger, because he’s
the one guy who could actually do it.
“Your Majesty,” Seph said with a flourish, and then she kept
eating at his gestured command to do so. She looked a lot like she wanted to
escape, though.
“Dad, I get the desire to see me safely through the
hunhymgais, but why all the lectures?”
“That is not mine to explain, my daughter.”
“I’m just—tired,” I said, and unbidden came a yawn to
accompany my pronouncement.
“I can imagine. You had a long and exciting night. Perhaps
we could discuss it further in privacy?”
“I’d like that. Only, not for too long,” I said, yawning again.
It was catching; Seph mirrored the action.
“Not for too long,” Dad agreed, and then headed into the
throne room. I said good night to Seph and then followed him in, taking my food
tray and its few remaining bites with me.
“So. Dark elves,” Dad said in English after silently pouring
each of us a whiskey.
“I’m a little nervous about drinking that, as exhausted as I
am.”
“Drink it. Slowly. It’ll help you sleep.”
“Okay. So there really are dark elves,” I said, unable to
make my voice do anything, accusatory or otherwise. I was impressed with myself
over merely being able to form a coherent sentence. At least, I thought it was
coherent. It was getting harder to speak in English, believe it or not, after
so many months of speaking mostly in the beautiful, complex elf language.
“Yes. As your father, I am not very proud of it, but as your
king, I cannot admit to their presence where such admission could be
overheard.”
“Why not?”
“They are—aflan,”
he said. I searched for the meaning of the elf word he used, but couldn’t find
anything. To my confused look, he added, “not—not clean, I believe is the best
translation.”
“I’m sure they could be clean if you let them into the
castle to take a bath.”
Dad grimaced. “It is not a bath-scrubbing sort of clean that
we are talking about, Alyssa. They are wild—untamed—untamable.”
What he meant slowly came to me. “Wait—you mean unclean, as
in a caste sort of thing, don’t you? Like what Ghandi saved the Indian people
from, or something.” I was so tired it was just spilling out, and besides, Dad
wouldn’t know the history either. “You’re saying that because they’re
dark-skinned, they don’t have any worth and so they can’t be in your presence.
That’s disgusting. That’s racist.”
“No, no, it is not because of their skin color.”
“That’s what all racists say.”
“Alyssa—”
“Racist.”
“No! That is not it at all. Please listen to me.”
“Okay, racist.” I was completely, totally disgusted with my
father at that moment.
My father inhaled, his nostrils flaring in agitation, giving
me the cue I needed to stop prodding him. With a measured voice, he said, “The
dark elves refuse to follow our tradition. They use magic freely, wantonly,
repetitively.”
“So do I. Are you going to call me unclean, too?”
He leaned forward, anger flashing in his eyes brightly
enough that I shrank back a little. “Did you miss the brunt of the conversation
a few days ago? The one where three major clan chieftains were suggesting just
that? You are far from stupid, my daughter, so I can only assume it is your
exhaustion making you speak so illogically.”
“Oh.” He was right, I guess. Still, it went against every
fiber of my being to ostracize an entire segment of society—one that just
happened to be identified by the color of their skin—over a social more that I
already considered dumb.
I said exactly that, only in a little bit lighter tone than
I’d been using.
He relaxed slightly.
“It has nothing to do with their skin color, Alyssa. Their
presence, their beliefs, run foul to a true elf’s sensitivities and
sensibilities. Remember the boy you met in the village?”
“Gwyn?” Of course I remembered the boy. It’s not every day
you meet the body double for Legolas, and he had just the sort of impish grin
that I liked staring at.
“Yes, that boy. He is trouble, precisely because he has
ingratiated himself and apparently has visited numerous times and at length
with the dark-skinned ones. It has gotten him shunned by his whole village, and
for good reason. Yes, I know you were attracted to him, but to be honest I
would rather you pursue even Keion than that rascal. You have a very real, very
pressing challenge to your future throne mounting, my daughter, and the last
thing you need to do is make your claim worse by raising the specter of aflan against you. Please tell me that
you will not again make contact with—those.”
“Dad, you’re still a racist. You know that?”
He looked at me for a long while, just shaking his head in a
tiny side-to-side arc. Finally he replied quietly, “I am obviously not solid on
what the term racist means, my daughter, but I can tell that it is an important
concept to you. For my part I will admit to whatever you accuse me of, in the
name of effectively governing my land. You may see things differently, and that
is fine. You may feel free to violate that tradition once you become queen,
just as you are apparently slated to violate every other tradition that
my—our—people hold dear. But for my sake, and for that of your mother, as well
as the queen and the high priestess, please pretend as though last night did
not happen until you are safely and securely crowned. Even then, I must warn
you, accepting the aflan into your
presence and society will likely cost you a large part of your following, if
not the throne itself. Tread with wisdom there, please, my daughter.”
“I will, Dad,” I said, nodding. “But for now, I just need to
get to bed.”
“Sleep peacefully, then, and please, no more night runs.”