He chuckles. Nods.
Begins.
My father was always a good instructor, always clear and careful with how he laid out his information. Tonight is no different. He starts from the start. Methodical and objective. Tells me how years before the Hierarchy invaded, a Suusian trading ship was blown off course by a violent storm while travelling to Nyripk, and the men aboard made harbour at an unmapped island far to the east. How they found ruins there, and inside, a sealed trove of items and documents which they brought back to Suus and presented to my father.
It was this collection that, after he found scholars to translate the writings, first alerted him to the truth behind the Cataclysms. Cataclysms,plural. That they were a cycle of destruction stemming from an ancient war, and seemed to be tied somehow to the Aurora Columnae.
And—worse still—that they seemed to occur roughly once every few hundred years.
I listen in silent horror, the dark a curtain at the edges of our fire, as he explains how he immediately tasked our scholars with finding a solution, and our agents with discovering exactly what the Hierarchy knew about it. Then how many of the latter mysteriously vanished over the next few years, and how one woman finally sent word that the Princeps and at least some Dimidii were, indeed, already aware of the threat.
It was her last communique. Three months later, the Hierarchy were on our shores.
I stir as he pauses there. “Why not just tell everyone of the danger as soon as you found out? Make the proof public?”
“Why didn’t I?” He leans forward. Intent. Smiling slightly as he says it.
I hesitate, then can’t help but grin back. An interaction we have had a thousand times. He is no longer a king and I no longer a prince, but that doesn’t mean everything has changed.
“I suppose it would have been pointless.” I say it slowly, working through the consequences. Casting my mind back to the political climate of my youth. “You make the claim, you’re a foreign king trying to slander the Republic’s good name. You say you have evidence, and the Hierarchy demands to examine it. Discredits it and refuses to return it, once you hand it over. Or—if you refuse to give it up—points to that as proof you can’t be trusted. And maybe uses the whole thing as an excuse for invasion, too.” I chew my lip. Seeing the bind my father found himself in. “Spreading it anonymously would never work; most people would laugh it off, and even if they didn’t, the Hierarchy’s influence and propaganda would see it ridiculed before it ever gained traction.Ican barely believe it, and that’s coming from you.”
“When you have lived your whole life within the greatest empire of your time, it is hard to believe it will end. You think it is a thing of permanence, of immutability. Its existence contested but never truly threatened. And even if they did believe?” My father’s eyes shine in the firelight as he watches my analysis. A pride there that warms me. “If enough of the Hierarchy truly believed that in order to save the world, they had to stop using what let them rule it?”
I think. Slowly, reluctantly shake my head.
“Some would agree to sacrifice.” I think of Callidus. Emissa and Eidhin and Aequa. “But not most, and not the ones who matter. The Catenan RepublicisWill. To take it away from them … to them, thatisthe Cataclysm.”
“The oldest argument for doing something wrong is that everyone is doing it. To dismantle what they have built would have required the agreement of every man who had spent his life building it,” agrees my father softly. “It would have required them to give up all they have striven their entire lives to gain. And they would have needed to do it, largely, for the benefit of those at whose expense it originally came.”
“So they found out you knew,” I say eventually. “That’s why they attacked.”
“In part.” He gives me a sad smile. “But mostly, I suspect, because the information we found contained instructions for a weapon. Something we mighthave been able to threaten even the Republic with, had we worked it out in time.” He exhales heavily. “It was what Estevan used at the naumachia.”
Silence.
“You know about that?” I ask it quietly.
“I know enough. And you made the right decision, Son. I loved Estevan. But what he did was monstrous.”
A relief I didn’t know I needed suddenly loosens my chest. There’s no doubt in my father’s words. No hesitation. I have told myself countless times that I did the right thing, and even believed it. But to hear it from him … I craved it, more than I realised. “He seemed to think it was the only way forward.”
“A society cannot make a man a monster, Diago. But it can give him the excuse to become one.”
“You weren’t tempted to use it, then? To stop them from invading? Even to stop a Cataclysm?”
“I would have threatened, given the chance. And if it had been completed and working in time? Against invading soldiers?” He holds my gaze and even now I can see the hesitation, the struggle, but he nods slowly. “Yes, Diago. I would have used it, and then I would have threatened to burn the Republic to the ground unless they destroyed the Aurora Columnae.”
I swallow. The screams of the naumachia in the whisper of the wind through the hills. “And if they hadn’t?”
He pauses. Thinks for a long time.
“When Ysa was born, I was terrified, you know. I knew exactly what I had to do to be a king, but to be a father … I was so sure I would fail her. That being a good ruler and a good parent were incompatible. And then your mother said something.” He smiles. Eyes warm and glistening with fond, sad recollection. “She told me that a child needs to hear and truly understand only three phrases from their father as they grow up. ‘I love you.’ ‘I will help.’ And, ‘I don’t know.’ The two of us were only just getting to that last one, Diago. You were only just beginning to see that sometimes, I had no answers. No simple way forward. It’s the hidden truth of how we eventually have to face the world—of being an adult. None of usknow.” He meets my gaze. “So I don’t know what I would have done. And I don’t know whether it would have been the right choice. Sometimes I’m glad I didn’t have to find out, but most of the time …” He sighs. Leans forward and briefly tousles my hair, the way he used to. “Most of the time I just want you all back.”
“Mother said that?”
“She was always the one who knew what to say. You remind me so much of her. I know you listened more to me because I spoke less. But when I spoke, it was always with her words.”
I smile fondly at the love in his voice. Then hesitate. “You told Mother all this. And Ysa.” It’s not a question. Those last few months before the invasion, the weight on their shoulders, the tiredness in their eyes—I’ve wondered about it so many times. “Why not me? I could have handled it.”
