“No,” Catalina said. “He just needs someone inside.”
“Cael,” I said.
She nodded. Catalina set the letter on the bedside table and looked at Solberg a beat past comfortable. “You go nowhere alone.”
Martin Solberg had sent an apology because a command would not work anymore. The apology was not surrender. It was a hook with better manners. The letter lay folded on the bedside table, the wax cracked through the crest. I went back to the corridor and stood the post.
CutOff
Rhain
I’d been waiting since the morning letter for the second one. It wasn’t optimism or hope for better from my father. I had just never mistaken my father for a man capable of stopping after one attempt.
He didn’t send a household apology and then retire from the field. The apology was the soft hand. He’d always preferred the soft hand first, because it made the closed fist look afterward like an act forced upon him by regrettable necessity. I’d watched him do it to deputies, allies, elders, and once, in a way I’d only understood much later, to my mother.
The morning letter had been the soft hand.
Catalina sat beside me with her back against the headboard, one hand resting on my arm. She hadn’t asked me what I was waiting for. She knew.
The not-asking was a kindness I had not had much practice receiving. I had decided, sometime in the last twenty-four hours, to stop being surprised when she gave me things I didn’t know how to accept gracefully.
It was becoming undignified.
A knock on the door came once, quiet. I was at the door before Catalina could move.
Graves stood in the corridor with a single envelope in his hand. “For you,” he said.
He didn’t say it gently. I was grateful for that. Gentleness, just then, would’ve been one more thing requiring management.
I took the envelope. Graves inclined his head, barely, and I closed the door.
A diplomat reads the seal first. The seal is the part the sender chooses before the words begin lying. This letter was sealed with the official clan-head wax. It was witnessed with three western-faction marks pressed in beside my father’s.
It was a large departure from the personal crest the morning had carried. The morning letter had come from Martin Solberg the father. This was Martin Solberg the clan-head, on the record. The whole message lived in the distance between those two men.
I cracked the wax.
The language was clean. My father’s drafting always was. He had a clerk’s hatred of an ambiguous clause and a tyrant’s appreciation for a clean one.
The heir Rhain Solberg is hereby disinherited from clan property, clan title, and clan voice.
The English translation of the Norwegian clipped to the back was clean too, in fairness to the council clerks. What the English didn’t carry, what only the Norwegian held in a single word near the bottom, wasavskåret.
Cut off.
Severed.
The word a clan-head used when he cut a man loose not only from his inheritance, but from his kin.
Not,you no longer hold the seat. But,You are no longer mine.
I’d been preparing to lose the title for most of my life. I’d thought that foresight was the same thing as armor and that I’d built an internal country for it. Somewhere to stand when the day came. A tidy little constitutional monarchy of one, no doubt with excellent roads and free healthcare.
I found, when the wax broke under my thumb, that I’d built considerably less than advertised.
Then I thought of my mother. I’d learned her true struggle properly only in the last weeks.I regret that you learned of your mother’s history from anyone but me.He’d meant the rival bond.
He’d meant that Margot, before she was my mother, had loved a man from across a clan line. He’d meant that my father had ended it. He’d meant that the record had been made to say she died of bond strain because the truth was tidier if kept in the ground.
