“Come along.”
The young man has been shivering for two hours in the hall, thanks to wearing nothing better than rags with a spattering of blood from the nose to lend color. No doubt they had thought he’d slink out of the cheerless marble antechamber before now. Clutching his papers in his hand, he goes where he is directed, all strength leached from his passions in the interminable wait. Now he wonders dully why he came, what he expected to accomplish, why they are even bothering to escort him from one appallingly expensive room to the next when everyone knows none of them will ever be his.
Alastair le Orban is not the imposing figure he had expected; at seventeen, Ari is taller than his grandfather, taller and leaner as if somebody seized him by the head and feet and wrung him out. He is much darker than his grandfather too, as if the ubiquitous mud of his upbringing got under his skin somehow. That’s silly, though; he knows it’s because of his mother. Then again, she is also intimately familiar with mud.
But Alastair does look like the miniature of his father that his mother keeps safely buried in the corner, all ruddy cheeks and wood-brown hair and eye. Ari’s spent evenings turning it over in hand, wondering that this stranger could be half of him, hunting for commonalities. So he can recognize the line of Alastair’s and Raymond’s and Ari’s jaw, the heaviness of their brows and the thickness of their hair, and for a moment a relief he is ashamed of floods through him. He -is- an Orban, not a delusion.
“I have consented to give you a moment of my time, Camille, because to my ever-lasting shame we are indeed connected in a way no dictate of man can erase.” Alastair’s voice is low and infinitely cultured. “So say your piece and have done.”
He will not allow himself to care that he is sore and exhausted, that this is his only chance at ever seeing Faia again, that his voice has a hopelessly thick dockside twang even after all of his lessons. He definitely won’t allow himself to care about how much he hates that name. He unfolds the papers and throws them down, right there atop the nightpine desk. “I am your grandson, Master le Orban – your only grandson. I have the Orban blood and there’s the proof. My father, your son, his name is right there on my papers. I want to be acknowledged. I can be useful to you. I’m clever, and I know how to get things done. Maybe I don’t know anything about business, but I can learn. Take me in. You need me.”
“I… need you,” Alastair muses, toying with his quill. Ari has never seen anything like it; the spine of the feather is layered with gold, the edges too. He’ll have one just like that, himself. “You, an ignorant gutter rat? Aye, you have the Orban blood. Mingled with filth. I do -not- need you, child. Petyr will marry, and have fine sons of his own, and you will be forgotten.”
“I won’t let myself be forgotten.” He’s getting angry now, which he can’t. He has to show him he’s worthy. Cool, controlled, always in command. “I’ll tell them. I’ll tell everybody that I’m the grandson of Alastair le Orban: and if I am a gutter rat, you are the man who left your legitimate grandson in poverty. The papers prove that. I can be useful to you, Grandfather… or I can be useful to your enemies. It’s your choice.”
“A strategy indeed worthy of your upbringing. Allow me to make something clear to you now, Camille.” Alastair’s hand closes on the papers. He is not old, not truly; it is no wizened claw, the parchment crumpling under his strength. “Blood is destiny. One must make allowances for the confusion of one such as yourself, born with one foot in squalor and the other in greatness. There is no place set aside for such people in this world… but there is a reason for that.”
He turned to the hearth, gold against his black velvets, and tossed the papers into the fire. The flames hungrily accept them, seeming to roar – but no, it’s the blood in his ears, the pounding of his heart. The only evidence of his birth is gone before he can force words through the sickening bile in his throat.
“You should have never been born.”
