Songs of Experience

Ah, journal, I have needed you less and less as the years have gone on. Life never ceases to have its pains – especially of the physical sort – but I have grown to wonder at them less, and need less ink to explain them to myself. But here I am at another major crossroads, and feeling such levels of doubt that a written exploration of my thoughts is perhaps the only thing that will serve me any good at all.

The Regency… I am conflicted. There is a part of me that hopes I do not win, even as I’ve thrown my hat into the ring. Whatever they say of me – and they say a lot! – I don’t enjoy power for its own sake. I enjoy it as a tool to achieve more important outcomes, a weapon I can wield against the enemies of what is good and righteous. Is it only hubris that tells me I need the Regency’s power to do so now?

Certainly I am not the only person in this kingdom who could use the Regent’s power well, though so far I do not think much of my competition. Only this Steffon le Fictis is a truly unknown quantity, and if I am honest – surely I can be honest with myself at least here – I doubt I will find him a better choice than myself.

But at the same time, I doubt myself. I have come so far already. To aspire to such a position… it’s almost too much to even think about. Yet the moment I thought of those damned drug laws, my draft languishing forgotten somewhere, and that treacherous seed: “You could finish them…” So many goals, so many ideas, have sprung forth in my mind. So many things I could do for the Kingdom, so much I could see done. And Edessa – I was certain convincing Herazade would be an uphill battle, and now if I obtain the Regency I will not need to… It seems as if every sign points me toward this choice, states that I was wise to make it.
Every sign but that small voice whispering in my head, telling me all my gains thus far have been illusion and shadow. The result of a man who knows how to fake confidence, and in doing so appear as if he knows what he’s doing. We failed in Edessa, in the last major battle, and that was at the least partially my fault – if not nigh completely, given my obvious mistake. Was I meant for such power?

I told Cellan I thought everyone was faking it, and at times such rationale soothes me, but I don’t know. Still, perhaps I shouldn’t be looking at this in the abstract. Other than Fictis, whom I know nothing of, I would wager on myself versus my competition any day of the week. I don’t want any of them in the Regent’s seat, and if that means I must fill it instead, I will manage. If I am a total disaster, I can always slink off to obscurity after two years have passed.

I must try. For Edessa and the drug laws, I must try.

And at least this time, Marisa backs me. Though it would raise me to be her direct superior, more or less, she backs me. That… is a surprising comfort, a burden lifted I did not know I bore so heavily until it was gone. Even knowing it was more her own insecurity than her doubt in me did not salve it – the only thing that has was her promise to support me in this.

Really, that alone should be enough.  (Must get something for her birthday…)

Has it really been over a year since I’ve written? Arien, what have I been up to?

…well, that’s a foolish question. What have I been up to? Being married and having a child, of course. Why would I have time for something like a journal, of all foolish fripperies?

But I find myself wanting to talk to someone again, in this little lull, about things I daren’t say to anyone.

My honors (and responsibilities) only increase. The Keeper of the Seal, now, as I so badly wanted to be years ago. Yet it feels so strangely… unchanged from how matters used to be. Before, as Lord Secretary, I would simply do as I wanted as if I were the Keeper anyway. It’s bloody amazing how much you can get away with thanks to acting as if your authority’s unquestionable. I know I’ve said it before, but I never cease to wonder. I simply had to ensure I wasn’t conflicting with Cellan and Gavin, as my superiors at Court – and that’s exactly the same as it ever was.

It bothered Marisa, my promotion; I know that it did. Well, that and the Poet Laudate’s idiotic dismissal of her as merely my wife, the mother of my child. I don’t know what drives people to underestimate her. Her beauty, perhaps, and her attention to fashion… but those are foolish considerations, as they’re merely tools in her arsenal. Perhaps it’s that she so clearly is a child of privilege, or that she is at best an indifferent fighter. Ah, I can’t figure it out. From the moment I met her I knew that a woman with a mind like hers would always be a danger… it’s part of what I’ve always liked about her.

And now my first real task in the position is to deal with Casimir. Arien. I constantly worry that I’ve been too optimistic, too hopeful. Perhaps what I’m seeing in him is what I -want- to see in him, out of gratitude for his preservation of my life. How many times have I been deluded by wanting to trust people who proved unworthy of it? Julea, Bryne… It will be a bitter pill to swallow if this plan fails. More bitter than many I’ve choked down in my time in Lithmore.

No, I know I’m right. I know there is something of goodness and worth in him. Even if it fails – even if nothing can be redeemed – I know it was there. I’ve seen it in his eyes, witnessed it in his actions. There is something there.

Perhaps that will make it all the worse if I do, in fact, fail.

Well, another murderer down. Proud of the small role I played in it. If only they were always so quickly caught.

I am… truly the luckiest and happiest of men. The trials I have borne are nothing compared to the joys I need now. Whatever it was I feared before the wedding, the opposite has come to pass. Everything is better than ever.

I know the Lord must have forgiven me my sins, at last, because He would not allow me to be so happy had I not cleansed myself properly. I must donate something to the Church, something sizable for some sort of special project… share my joy with the world.

…On a slightly less pious note as well, I may be not as young as I used to be, and a cripple, but I’ve still got it. Heh heh.

So the first thing I do upon my return is bury a few putrefying bodies while hearing tale of a new murderer about town.

Oh Lithmore, you fair and fickle bitch of a mistress. I -am- sorry I had to leave you, you know. You needn’t punish me for it; a man has duties to his lawfully wedded wife. She understands she must share my affections with you. Why test her patience with such stunts?

Ah, well. I suppose I wouldn’t love you so much were you less unspeakably ugly and cruel.

The days have passed quickly – too quickly – on our honeymoon. We are naught but a day away from our return to Lithmore now, I believe.

Marisa sleeps peacefully behind me, curled in the blankets. We hardly need them, truth be told; she has never been one to stint on luxury, and the braziers banish even the hint of chill from the air. It smells of spices, sweet and sharp at turns.

I do not sleep so much, myself. The rocking of the ship is peaceful, and reminds me of dim memories spent in my Maman’s arms. But it speaks in a thousand strange voices: the groans of oiled planks, the grinding of small patches of ice churned under the prow, even just the whispers of the currents we part. I have lived too long away from the sea and all its sounds have become foreign words I cannot understand. Where there are things I cannot understand, I cannot sleep easily. I drowse away hours in the dark, then awaken at once with my heart pounding readiness for battle.

And it is truly dark out here on the water, darker than it ever is in the city. The dark makes it worse. It’s funny how quickly my eyes re-adjusted to the light after Lien and Jei took me out of that place. Within days I could see again, when I thought it possible all light had gone out of the world. I used to find the dark soothing and comfortable; dark is a friend to the predator, after all. I guess it changed when I discovered there were greater predators than myself out there in the shadows.

When I wake up I sneak out of bed. (Carefully; you would be surprised how much nature aids and abets the trickery of those with two good legs. Those of us no longer so blessed must unlearn many things our bodies seemingly knew from birth in order to achieve the same results.) I go just far enough to light a candle, and I bring it back with me so I can watch her sleep in the candlelight. From that I drink in my own relaxation and calm. I am not suffering in some dark cave somewhere; I am floating down the river Bren with my wife. I blow out the candle, and sleep more soundly, for a while.

I am afraid. I am afraid for this water-born dream to end. I am afraid that this is all the peaceful bliss we have been alloted in this life and that the moment we step off this ship the end will begin. Slowly, but inexorably, dragging us into the depths. But I have always been afraid of so many things.

I must not let fear cloud my joy. I fought and suffered and killed to stand by her side at the altar of St. Aelwyn’s. The Lord has heard my prayers, and it has been enough. When we return, I must give Him my thanks. Someone might look at me (weary and aged before my time, white-haired and crippled, plagued by memories) and ask how I could still believe in the Lord, after all I’ve seen and done. But I would ask them, how can I not? He turned even a vessel so flawed as myself into an instrument of his will. The prices I have paid have been… large. But the rewards have been greater and sweeter still.

She sleeps peacefully. I think it time that I blow out the candle again.

8/18/357

Had the loveliest birthday picnic with Marisa the other day. I brought along plenty of candles and took her out to that valley to the east for a midnight dinner and to watch the sun rise. Such moments of peace and comfort are about the only thing that keeps me sane.

As it is, knowing I’d have to be my usual cheerful, playful self for it allowed me to banish some of the guilt that’s been haunting me about the scene in the Queen’s Inn. Not all, but enough that I’ve been sleeping again.

I still hope that Her Holiness will see fit to give me a proper penance for the matter, though. I know that I had that problem with both Romana and Caria; when I would confess matters that troubled me, they seemed reluctant to assign penances of sufficient weight. Perhaps it was because I’d already done penance for the mattrs I confessed, but I think that if guilt still troubles a man, it’s a sign his penance was insufficient and he is required to suffer further for proper expiation.

Speaking of expiation, I have been thinking constantly of my Almshouse. The Tenebrae wasn’t entirely wrong; I have been unable to do what I wanted to do with it. It does a fraction of the good it could properly do, were I able to actually invest more time in it directly.

Perhaps it’s time I search again for an overseer, but every time I’ve tried it’s ended in complete failure. I am at my wit’s end on the matter. Why can I not find a commoner who is sincerely concerned with the state of the Southside and not a thief, heretic or mage? To be fair, I can hardly find a member of the gentry or a noble either who fits those criteria. People are content to ignore that massive pit of human suffering that devours all those unlucky enough to fall into its teeth.

Maybe it’s the sheer scope of the problem. I could put my entire fortune into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it; the Crown could probably pour its entire coffers into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it. The problem is in minds and hears conditioned to desperation over histories of cruel years. You can fill people’s bellies, put roofs over their heads and clothes on their back, but that isn’t going to change their pasts. Once you’ve learned morality is a luxury, why should you ever go back to it?

It goes back to penance, too. I don’t think it’s only a fault in me, this feeling that sin clings like tar long after penance has been done. I think that people find it difficult to forget, to forgive the things that they’ve done. If you are damned already, why try to be a good person? The hope that you could, perhaps, be forgiven one day is far more painful than the knowledge that you are not. Better to accept a life without morality, because admitting morality means facing the brutality of what you’ve done.

Or so I gather it goes. Me… the brutality stares me in the face every day. I go to the graveyard and walk among the stones, thinking of those whose death I had a hand in. Maebel Maldrek, Ramil Barrows, Sigrid Latago, Julea Sanguine, Setina Rethvin, Benedictus ab Piuso, Leto Bharani, the scar where Remi leBou lay, Cedany ab Clarke… to some extent I am implicated in every last one of those deaths, and countless more buried without name or marker.

And then there is the grave I dug for the men and women I killed myself. Ended with my own hands, buried with my own hands.

No. It’s not for me, pretending I didn’t do anything wrong. But I can understand the temptation. This work becomes far more palatable if you eschew morality, or reduce it down to black and white. The victims and the villains; the sheep and the wolves.

I fight the urge to reduce it all to that every time I think about it. The dead deserve better.

I keep going over the situation again and again, in my head. The damnedest part of it is… I don’t see what I could have done differently.

Couldn’t let the Tenebrae think that he could threaten me with the lives of innocent people. It’s the ransom example, but so much more raw and immediate. If I will give in to those kind of tactics, then he’s won – completely and irrevocably, he’s won. He could ask anything of me and have it granted.

And he doesn’t intend to only ask things I can agree with. He wants my Almshouse. The whole bloody point of my Almshouse is to provide a springboard for those who want to escape Southside without being caught up in the cycle of crime that exacerbates their poverty. You start seeing the Brotherhood as the only ones who care, the only way out, when in reality they just use you as foot soldiers and get you caught in deeper. If I gave him my Almshouse… it would mean quashing that dream. I know there are people who have already benefited from it to save up enough to get away, move Northside, find a job with our placement services.

I can’t give that up.

He wasn’t going to kill her. I knew that as soon as I stepped one step closer, just as he threatened, and he didn’t. And I suspected it as soon as I came in. I’ve known a lot of villains in my time, and one eventually begins to recognize which sort you’re dealing with. This Tenebrae is the sort who believes himself to be a hero. The mage murders, the distribution of the silver to Southside… many of them pretend to be a savior for the poor, but this one actually believes it. So she was safe. Saviors don’t murder innocents.

Those are the facts that I – and I alone, in that bar – had to work with. Knowing them, I had to convince him that I didn’t care, so completely and thoroughly that he wouldn’t try again. I had to minimize the importance of her life to a trifle, while getting close enough to disarm him safely at the right moment.

I had to.

Or is that what I tell myself?

I tried to apologize to her. She accepted the words, but the sentiments slid off her like water on stone. I don’t think she understands that I did what I had to do, or if she does, she doesn’t care; it’s not sufficient and I should have done anything else. I’m not forgiven. But it’s utterly misunderstanding the point of an apology to say that I -should- be, that I ought to be. Being sorry gives you no right to demand forgiveness; especially when you’re sorry, but you’d do the same thing all over again. So why should I expect that she’d forgive me? I earned the ill regard fair and square.

This is the price you pay, Ari. Don’t let yourself forget that. This is the price you pay for being the one who’s willing to do anything for the greater good. You pay in rumors, and you pay in hatred. You pay in eyes that smoulder with resentment and bows that you coerce with the threat of the whip. You pay in being the cold bastard who does arithmetic with lives.

I threw away honor long ago as the self-satisfied luxury of men who quail at doing what needs to be done. So I shouldn’t falter at the cost.

…at least I can comfort myself by saying I’m not Uvarov. He wouldn’t even have been bluffing, and she’d be dead. The Tenebrae probably would have escaped all the same, and he would have called it a ‘victory’ because he blooded the man, whatever the cost. I shudder to think of what he said he’d do, in a pitying way as if it were a shame I was not hard enough to do it myself.

I may be willing to do what’s required for the greater good, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all perspective about what the greater good is. It’s not sacrificing the people I do all these things to protect.