“Um,” Florian started with uncertainty. “Should we go?”
Jerah gave a slight jump and scrambled to his feet, laughing nervously. “Of course, of course,” he said, gesturing for Florian to follow. “You, um. You wanted to see a picture of your mother, right?”
Florian blinked. That had been his whole reasoning for coming, but somehow he had not expected Jerah to present him with it so soon. With how badly his father seemed to want him to stay, he had almost expected the man to draw it out and make him wait.
“Yeah, I do,” he replied softly, and Jerah gave him a nod.
“Follow me,” he said, stepping toward the door without looking to see whether or not Florian followed. He had to jog to keep up with his long stride as they made their way through the corridors and up a flight of narrow stairs. They emerged at a spacious landing with a set of double doors on the far end. Jerah stepped up to the doors, paused, then glanced back at Florian for the first time since they'd left the dining hall.
“These are my private quarters,” he said, sounding more nervous than Florian had expected. “There are a few other pictures in my study, but... We'll start here.”
“Okay,” Florian agreed, nodding. Jerah seemed to steel himself before opening the door and stepping inside. Florian followed.
The room was quite spacious, and it had clearly been kept clean and tidy in his absence, though Florian was unsure of how long he had been away. The door opened into a sitting area with a plush chair and a writing table of some sort. A large four-poster bed lay against the far wall under tall, airy windows that made the room feel well-lit, despite the dark stone and lack of direct sunlight. In the opposite corner was another door, closed. It looked comfortable, and not at all as ostentatious as Florian might have imagined; and he wondered what it meant that Jerah was a king, yet lived so simply.
“It's here on my desk,” Jerah said, his tone soft as he brushed past Florian to stand at the writing table. There were a few papers there, but he pushed past them to pick up a small picture frame, looking down at it for a moment, before he passed it to Florian.
The picture must have been of their wedding day. On the right side of the frame was a man Florian easily recognized as a younger Jerah, who was dressed in a dark formal outfit with golden accents and a deep red cravat tied loosely under the high, open collar of his shirt. Pressed to his smiling lips was the hand of the woman next to him. She was the same height as Jerah, with black curly hair framing her face and spilling loosely over her shoulders, and red roses braided into something of a flower crown atop her head. The dress she wore had a plunging neckline underneath black lace that covered her shoulders and arms. Her lips, a dark red, were pulled into a pleased smile. But while Jerah’s warm amber eyes stared at her with obvious adoration, her eyes were a deep, intense blue that looked out of the frame and straight at him.
Florian had no memory of his mother's face, yet here she seemed somehow intimately familiar, as if he had always known the woman in the photo. Her smile was the same he had seen looking back at him in the mirror, he realized. His eyes were suddenly brimming with tears; he lifted his free hand to wipe them away, but couldn't bring himself to look away from the picture.
“I want you to keep this,” Jerah said softly, squeezing his shoulder. “It's... It's a shame to not have any pictures of her. So that's for you.”
“I couldn't,” Florian protested, but even as he said it, he knew he wouldn't be able to give it back.
“Please. I want you to have it,” Jerah insisted, and slowly Florian nodded. The taller man let out a long, slow sigh before speaking again.
“Florian, I... Inessa died only a few months before I sent you to live with August. I was grieving, and I was so afraid I was going to lose you, too. I completely understand that you may hold it against me forever, and I don't want to try and change how you feel, but please just know that I agonized over it and made what I truly thought was the best choice. I still don't know if I made the right choice in the end, but I have to live with it forever. I only wanted to protect you. More than anything.”
Inessa. He had only ever heard her name a few times before from August. Her name was Inessa.
“I know,” Florian said, barely above a whisper. When he finally allowed himself to pull his eyes away from the picture and look back up at his father, Jerah's face was stained with tears. When he noticed Florian looking at him, he pressed a hand to his eyes and wiped them away.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice breaking with a nervous laugh. “Sorry. This is... This is harder than I thought it was going to be.” He turned away and took a few anxious paces across the room, before stopping next to Florian once more. “Like I said, that one is for you to keep. But there are a few more in my study if you want to see them.”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” Florian said, nodding. He kept the picture frame cradled in his hands as Jerah led him back out of the room.
This time the trip was not so long, as Jerah led him across the landing and down another hallway, pushing another door open at the end of the hall. He had said it was his study, but it looked more like a library to Florian. It was larger than his bedroom with shelves along every wall that reached from floor to ceiling, stuffed with books and trinkets. A few other bookshelves were set up throughout the room with several different chairs and tables alongside them.
“Here we are,” Jerah said briskly, stepping past him to walk further into the room. “I think there are two more in here.”
“Do you take pictures with a regular camera?” Florian asked, the thought suddenly occurring to him, as he looked down at the picture frame in his hands once again. Jerah chuckled, looking back at him.
“The execution is a little different, but the basic mechanism is the same,” he replied, nodding. “Here, this was a painting we had commissioned when you were small.”
Florian stepped closer to him, looking at where he was pointing. Propped near the top of one of the bookshelves on the far side of the room was an oil painting on canvas depicting three figures. Jerah was instantly recognizable to him, sitting opposite Inessa. Her hair was shorter than in the photo he held, and their clothes were less formal; but their smiles were just as wide as they looked out from the canvas. Between them was a child, a little girl of no more than three with dark wavy hair that barely hit her shoulders, wearing an uncertain, toothy smile. Florian laughed when he saw it; he had so few pictures of himself as a child that to see himself as a baby girl was more strangely amusing than anything else.
“This was before everything happened, of course,” Jerah said quickly.
“It doesn't bother me,” Florian replied, shaking his head.
“I'm glad,” Jerah said, sounding relieved. “She loved you very much. She would still love you so much. Everything we did was to keep you safe, to make the world safer for you to grow up in.”
Florian hesitated at that. “I know,” he said softly, but he didn't really know. He could only trust that Jerah was right.
“Here,” Jerah said, gesturing toward a portrait on the opposite wall. “This is the last one.”
This one was of Inessa alone. Here, she was wearing what appeared to be armor that gleamed in bright light: a silvery metal wrought with dark accents and curling, almost floral designs. Like the other pictures, she was smiling, but there was a sense of pride in her eyes that was notably different. Her arms were folded across her chest in a similarly confident pose, and coming up from her shoulder was the hilt of a sword that must have been strapped to her back.
