Songs of Experience

5/2/365

Casimir is dead.

Somehow, despite all the times we came so close to this, I never quite believed it would happen – never quite believed anything would get him. Even as I agreed with Brynieve’s judgment, even as I said he had to die for this, I never believed.

I wish I’d never told him. I wish there’d never been anything to tell him. I wish he’d been sane enough to deal with the news like a normal person. I wish he hadn’t let the bad in himself win, but I think I knew, deep down, it was never going to end any other way.

Every time I spoke up for him, every time I tried to coax or herd or force him onto the right path, I knew I was kidding myself. Sometimes wounds heal but the body never works quite right again… and a crippled soul is even harder to fix.

He had to die because he was never going to be able to control himself, but that doesn’t mean he was evil.

And who can I say that to, who can I talk to about him? I doubt my friendships with Cellan and Tomas will ever recover. I know I’ll forgive them, in time, but the world has shifted in a way that it won’t come back from. Broken things can be glued back together, but they’ll always be vulnerable at the stress points, and Casimir was nothing if not a stress point.

Her… I can say anything to her, somehow. I’m not quite sure how that happened. I need to put some distance between us before I do something regrettable, but I can’t yet, not when the two of us need each others’ support so badly. That nurse applicant… I should interview her. Yes, the sooner the better.

God, I can’t even write in a straight line over all of this, meandering from topic to topic. I feel terrible today, and I’m not even hungover; coughed blood several times already. It’s as if my body’s trying to express my grief in some physical way, or remind me of him through all the things we did to one another. Some people would say it’s crazy to miss someone who put so many scars on you, but I think that connections take all sort of forms. All relationships are about the marks we leave on one another. It’s just… usually not quite so physical.

He was so young when we met. Such an arrogant asshole, I remember thinking, someone I couldn’t trust one bit. Out for glory, out for power. I never considered there was more to him until that day he saved my life. I challenged him to a duel for someone else’s honor, I played with him – scarred his face, intentionally – and he saved my life. After very nearly taking it himself.

None of the people who hate him would understand that. Understand that both deeds were done wholeheartedly, that both were the real Casimir. That’s not the kind of story people like, because it’s complicated and confusing and colored in a million shades of grey.

No, they’ll say Casimir was a bad seed all along and eventually it finally caught up with him. The good that he did, the good that was in him, will be erased. Here lies Casimir ab Azadar, a bad man who did bad things and met a bad end. The kind of nice, tidy narrative that people love to hear, the kind that snips off the messy ends of injustice and trauma and good intentions. But he was more than that. He was more than his damage, more than his bad deeds, more than his heresy and his jealousy and his never-ending disrespect. He was multitudes.

And now, just like that, he’s gone.

I thought that, at least, I knew myself.

I might have many flaws and many weaknesses that prevented me from being the man I wished to be – but at least I was under no illusion that I already was him. Even if I could not always do right, I understood what right was, and I understood the faults in my being that opened the gulfs between the real and the ideal.

But I had never thought myself to be so afraid.

Every night, a new dream seeks out another impurity in my soul and, with unerring accuracy set to the tune of distant laughter, rubs my face in it. I’ve learned, already, that I am terrified of so many things a man ought to be able to bear with more equanimity than this.

Last night, I was in the oubliette again. I had almost forgotten that for some time after they pulled me out of that hole I hated and feared the dark; for months I kept a candle burning even when I slept, an extravagance that would have horrified Maman if she had been in town.

The Sleepless winnowed that germ of old terror from its hidding place in the recesses of my mind and magnified it to madness. A year of nightmares, I bargained, once a night. But time is one of the many powers and principalities that must bend the knee in the face of dreams, unstoppable in their own logic.

I was in the oubliette again for what seems to have been about two hours in the real world, but countless years in my mind. This time, though I was starving and thirsty just as I had been in reality, I wasn’t given the bare minimum required to keep me alive.

Yet I didn’t die.

My body fed on itself, reducing me to wasted skin and hollow bones, but I didn’t die. My lips cracked, my tears evaporated, and finally my eyes withered like old grapes in their sockets, but I didn’t die.

In the real world, they came twice: one to question me, and once to torture me for the fun of it. I had not realized that those moments had been a sort of reprieve until I knew, somehow, their appointed time had come and gone without one sign that anyone was ever coming for me. I would have cried, then, if I had still been able.

I don’t know if the Sleepless is getting better at flaying my mind – none of the other dreams have been this bad – or if an unpredictable routine is part of her charm. Lulling me into a sort of comfort with a milder dream one night, just so that the next can shatter me harder.

But I do not think I can survive a year of this.

Not in the lonely, duty-filled life I’ve made for myself. After Gianina, I embraced the Knighthood in the hope that good work would soothe me – would cleanse me. But I think I wasn’t getting better; even before my deal with the Sleepless, I was getting worse. And now that I’m having these nightmares, I’m sick nearly as often as I was before the surgery – I’ve even been forced to use my cane a few times. My mind is falling apart, and because of it my body is following suit.

Who can I turn to? Is there anyone? I have friends, thank the Lord, who would help me – at least a few. Tomas will be there if I ask it of him – will drink with me, spar with me, distract me for a time. Rain would talk to me of everything and anything, Physicians’ work and the Southside – and she would listen, too, if I simply needed to unburden myself. Cellan has already offered to sit up with me during the nights I can’t get back to sleep after the dreams, though that’s a side of me I’d rather not show just about anyone.

…but I want someone there. I want someone to hold me, to let me hold them, when I wake up shaking. I want someone who will say soft things to soothe me and look after me and prevent me from doing anything – stupid. If I don’t make it through this year, Levona’s soul is surely forfeit, and then it will all be for nothing. Not even to mention the mission I’m failing so desperately at already.

I went to the Palazzo the other day, and stared at the windows. Even with how roundly I’ve insulted her pride and hurt her, I don’t think Marisa would turn me away if she knew the depths of my despair. She might well even be willing to give me everything that I needed… but I would be the worst sort of bastard to try and find out. I cannot, I will not, ask for things that I am not sure I would be able to properly give in turn.

But I cannot allow myself to be destroyed, either, not with so much left undone. I must find some way to get through this. After the oubliette I lit every candle in the house, gorged myself nearly to the point of sickness, and then ran as far as my leg would allow. Even with that kind of mindless overindulgence, the temptation of more… drastic remedies played in my head.

When the Sleepless doesn’t hold me, I dream of dying… and it is not a nightmare any longer.

1/9/364

The Tubori, my romantic people, have a word that has no good equivalent in Lithmorran – or any other language I know, at that.

Allawahu*, the missing of a thing perhaps irretrievably lost. The sadness of its absence, the joy that it brought to you, and the resignation that we are all bound to and broken on the great wheel of Fate. Allawahu is woven into the life of the Tubori; it is the feeling for a companion lost at sea ten years ago and never recovered, or for proud Tubor the great Kingdom before it was crushed by the traitor Jaren.

It is sharper than nostalgia, more potent than wistfulness, more complex than melancholy; deeper than poignancy, more stubborn than memory, sweeter than despair.

For allawahu, you must have loved something (even if you did not realize it; in a way it is all the better if you did not realize it) and have lost it, yet you remain neither sure nor unsure if it will ever return again. That is the added torment that it gives to you: you remember its sweetness and you simply do not know if you can have it again. A sadness untainted by hope is a sadness that can be put away, in time; the sadness of allawahu whispers in your even ear decades later, a quiet suggestion that not all is lost. Listen to it too long and you’ll stay rooted in one place, thinking the past could perhaps return.

I know allawahu intimately. Mostly I see it in faces and names, when I re-read my journal or my letterbooks some quiet, rainy evening. Lien, Bryne, Trouble… perhaps you might come back, someday, and things would be like they were before. (But they cannot be like they were before. Not now, not that Lien has a daughter and a dead husband; not now when Bryne is a heretic confirmed twice over; not now when Trouble comes and goes and every time we meet we both are sadder.)

I would spare Shaylei that. Whatever the objective truth might be, the reality must be that Argider is dead. I won’t see her sit staring out her window pining for a hope slim as a needle, fine as dust. Growing old in listless solitude waiting on the return of a dead man. It’s not my choice to make, but when have I let that stop me?

I don’t know that I think she’ll need it. I saw the signs of both recovery and danger in her, when we spoke – a foot on each of the paths that follow from grief. She is strong, but strength has very little to do it in the end. We all falter. So, if it comes to that, I will not let her hurt herself with hope. If anyone can be cruel to be kind, it is me.

Hope is dangerous. Allawahu is dangerous. And yet, I am giving into it myself, aren’t I?

No – it’s not the same. I am choosing action. Instead of standing still and dreaming foolishly of a past that is almost certainly lost, I am moving forward, taking steps. I am reaching to reclaim it myself. Is it stupid? Oh, very possibly. Is it ridiculous? Also possibly that.

In the last few months I have been happier. I’ve felt myself thinking things might be supportable this way, after all. And that… that is the hope I fear most of all. I don’t want to accept reality. I don’t want to mourn uselessly for that which is lost. I want a third path.

I’ll make a third path. My will is filed; all that’s left is the final planning. And if it goes poorly, Lord protect my loved ones from any allawahu of their own.

*This post brought to you by saudade, a Portuguese emotion term I thought very fitting for the Tubori people and renamed ‘allawahu’ to make it sound Tubori. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade)

12/14/363

Life can often be so beautiful that it hurts. I forget that subtler and sweeter pain too often, when I am focused on the more brutish and demanding sort.

When I am exhausted, when I fear I’ve lost my way, the Lord always contrives to send me a reminder. Not actively perhaps; no, I’m not so arrogant as to think I’m the next Dav, as Soler suggested. But in following His will, in trying to live how He would have me live… when I walk the right path, I naturally seem to encounter shining moments that revive me when I falter.

I have had blood come out of all sorts of undignified and unpleasant places today, my leg throbs with a dull, steady pain I could set my heartbeat to, and I am weary beyond imagining. But… I am at peace.

How much did it cost her to make? That only makes it more precious to me, not because the cost matters in and of itself but because of the regard it bespeaks. I have always wondered if anyone truly sympathized – not just tolerated me, but sympathized, understood why I live as I live. I cannot recall the last time I felt so… validated, so accepted.

And I keep thinking back to that Charali in the graveyard. (Less powerful, perhaps, but safer to consider than thinking of her gift too long.) I doubted everything, in that moment. No, not doubted; I know the truth. But how I hated it all, the endless need to feed witches to the pyre, butting heads repeatedly with everyone and never, ever being done with blood and suffering and death. And I just so happened to encounter, then, someone who could sympathize and yet remind me of all the greater suffering in the world.

The Lord leaves us to make our own path, in the light of his example or the dark of heresy. But I think he helps us in myriad small ways so long as we follow his lead.

(Ah, journal, how -did- I go so long without you?)

I am beginning to remember, these days, why I always name my horses Luck.

I may be old before my time, grumpy and crippled and ill, but one thing has not changed: I ride chaos and chance as well as any other man alive. Insanity is erupting all around me, yet I feel more exhilarated than troubled. There is mystery afoot, and by the Lord, I am awakened at some deep level by the scent of it in the air.

All of its threads trace back to her. What does this girl have to do with so many problems? When the criminal who’s paid with his own manhood for supposedly assaulting her himself begs me not to question her if it would cause her distress…

What in her would lead men to such madness as the contradictory tales I hear imply? I have met her myself and I cannot answer. She is pretty enough, one supposes, although slender blondes are a silver a dozen in Lithmore. She has a pleasant enough mien in the way most gentlewomen just past their En Passant do: naive, biddable, shy. All in all, she seems remarkable for little beyond adhering so precisely to the stereotypical ideal of Lithmorran womanhood, as if one had assembled a paper doll from fragments of a hundred books on comportment and manners.

My, I am negative on the women of my adopted homeland. But I cannot live without being challenged, backtalked, shouted at. I do love that about Marisa. Should I speak sharply to her, she doesn’t cringe; she takes me to task in return. I would never desire an obedient flower… or, rather, though I might desire one, I could never live with one. My temper would crush the blossom, or it would lose its charm rather quickly.

She seems to be one such blossom, but perhaps it is an illusion. This matter with the Justiciar, with Breckenridge, and now the castrated man? It all stinks to the Abyss below, and she nestles at the heart of it. Perhaps she has simply been a victim of both those who would hurt her and those who would help her. Or perhaps she knows the value of a blushing cheek in convincing others to do her bidding.

Well. I know a thing or two about convincing others, myself. Let’s see where chaos and chance carry me.

10-9-363

Years ago, when I was young and handsome, Marisa and I used to joke I had a golden tongue; mere silver couldn’t possibly account for my powers of charm and persuasion. These days I think my tongue a baser metal. Perhaps steel, sharpened by loneliness and tempered in pain. Certainly it seems to cut deeply enough, and has lost all memory of days when it flattered and cheered instead.

Rain, Casimir; those I want for friends think I hate them, because I cannot seem to withhold my venom. I seem to make Cellan cry half the time I see her. I even snapped at Tomas, whose mild and understanding disposition rarely gives me the slightest offense (imagined or otherwise) to quibble with. And that innocent Courtland girl, all good intentions, roundly mocked by my cynicism.  Not to mention the political missteps I have made by being too harsh, too cutting, when diplomacy would have served me far better. I have attempted to repair matters with His Holiness, but I expect his pride will never truly forgive my harshness even if he now trusts my sense enough to seek my counsel. Two years ago I would have never-

Many times in the last dozen years I have feared myself in danger of losing my mind, but now more than ever it feels an imminent possibility. I am so lonely and so frustrated; I awake with my jaw aching from the grinding of my teeth at night. Joy is gone, simply gone, but for the children and for the few bright moments with my friends not tarnished by my own choleric or melancholy behavior.  I told myself I had accepted matters, but I am beginning to fear I cannot go on like this.

Lord, I am so ungrateful. I am blessed with so many things, just as Casimir said. Why can I not be simply content? The pains I contend with are less than many others; I yet live, there are many activities not lost to me. But rage at myself as I might, I face the truth – no amount of ‘should’ can change what is.

Still… how long have I excused myself by saying that I could not change? Perhaps that is merely a comfortable defense to shelter behind. Perhaps I have reached a time when I must change or die.