In Which Riona Finds the Mutual Feeling

July 28, 1181

"...so since he came all the way out here, I invited him for supper."

And that was it. Hardly a climactic end note for a story about a long-lost relative. Riona waited for Isidro to add something more conclusive, but it never came. "So... he doesn't even need a place to spend the night?"

Isidro shook his head. "No, he already paid for a room at Seoth's, and he wants to head back tomorrow morning."

"But he just got here."

"He said he'd accomplished everything he set out to do."

So the man had crossed the Iberian Peninsula for the sole purpose of talking to his estranged nephew. Not that Naroni had much in terms of sight-seeing, but surely a trip that long merited more than a single night's stay?

"Must have been one hell of an important conversation."

Isidro said nothing.

"Really?" Riona kicked off the heel of one slipper and let it dangle from her toes. Her husband usually didn't do the same to her and she hoped the shoe felt no less annoyed. "You're not even going to tell me what he came all this way to say to you?"

"Sorry, I just..." He sighed. He always looked younger when he sighed, which had always struck her as odd, but it wasn't any secret he'd been a miserable, lonely child. "He gave me a map, in case I wanted to follow later. The doctors don't think my grandfather will make it to autumn, and apparently he wants to meet me before he dies."

"Your grandfather is still alive?" A disappointment tugged at Riona's heart as her husband shrugged. "You should go see him."

"Should I?"

Riona flinched. Isidro only ever hissed with such venom when his father came up. "Izzy..."

"You don't get it. Sure, one of your grandfathers is a curmudgeon who hates your father and the other is the most notorious womanizer on the continent, but neither of them shipped your traumatized mother off to marry her rapist, did they? And even if they had, they wouldn't have just forgotten about her, would they?"

His grip on his own arm tightened and he folded into himself. Riona swallowed. Isidro wasn't a large man, but he'd never looked so small to her. "Maybe he regrets it? A lot of old people want to right past wrongs before they go."

"Maybe." But she doubted he believed her. "Or maybe he wants to put a face to his daughter's suffering. Or maybe he's spent my whole life waiting to spit in my face. I don't know."

"Izzy--"

"I'm serious, Riona. I don't think I can trust him."

She closed her mouth, whatever she'd been about to say a lost stray thought. I don't think I can trust him. Isidro mistrusted people by instinct. He didn't give an inch until they'd proven worthy of a mile and she doubted he even knew that. If he had any workings of a conscious decision not to trust someone, they had to have been merited. "Izzy..."

"My mother wrote to him every week. Him, and her brothers, and her sister. Those letters were the only thing she had that my father hadn't ruined." He turned away. Riona's fingers twitched. She wanted to wrap them around his hand and pull herself nearer, wanted to tell him that wasn't true because his father hadn't ruined him, but he would never believe her and maybe he was right. She loved him as he was, but maybe he'd once been meant to be someone else, maybe someone he thought superior. "They ruined them, though. They never wrote back, not even after my siblings died. And she still kept writing.

"I found a half-finished letter in her drawer on my ninth birthday, a few days after she died. I knew it wasn't mine to read, but I read it anyway. I read it again, and again. I still remember every word. It was just an ordinary letter, about the weather and dinner with Aunt Eliana and some new dress pattern she thought her mother would have liked. She never mentioned how miserable she was. She never even told them off for not writing her back.

"I told them off for her. I was stupid and angry and I hated everybody, and I knew I shouldn't have done it but I did. I finished that letter. I told them about the screams that kept me up at night, and how her face was always bruised. I told them how she looked when I found her dangling from the ceiling. And I told them they'd never deserved her letters, not after what they did to her and not after they never replied. I told them how much I hated them, and how I wasn't a real Christian or a real Muslim but I still wished they'd burn in the hell I didn't believe in.

"I sent the letter with the fastest courier I could afford. My father didn't notice I'd left the manor and all the doors were locked, so I spent the night on my mother's fresh grave. When I pictured her in her coffin, she turned her head to avoid looking up at me, because she never liked to look at me, and I spent hours wondering why she loved her family so much when they hated her, and why I loved her so much when she hated me. By the time my father's boot woke me, I hated myself too."

He slumped, his body almost melting into the bed, the deadened effigy of a man haunted by his own ghost. "That was the only contact I ever had with any of them. I never heard back from them either. For all I know, they never read a word I wrote."

"Then go and say it to their faces." One brow folded, a troubled eye squinting up at her. She could not fathom it. She could not fathom any of it. Isidro hadn't understood how anyone could not love his mother. Riona felt the same way about him. "Could you go if I went with you?"

Obsidian eyes made a slow orbit of her face, their glints like trapped starlight, fighting to get loose and dying away in vain. "I could only go if you went with me."

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