Page 97 of Children of Fallen Gods

“Yes. Is that worthy of such surprise?”

Yes.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

The truth was, I found it nearly impossible to imagine Ishqa dealing with children. Children loved shouting and pretending and rolling around in the dirt and having wild outbursts about the slightest inconveniences. These were all things that I could not picture Ishqa having much tolerance for.

Ishqa turned the letter over. There were ink stains all over the back, too, wild slashes of it. He frowned at his hands, which were now smudged.

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Six summers.”

Despite myself, I smiled. “A good age.”

“One might say so.”

He opened the letter. I glimpsed two scrawled lines of large, messy writing, then what appeared to be a half-finished drawing of… a horse? A cow? A horse cow?

Ishqa looked at this letter very seriously, a line of concentration over his brow.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

He shot me a sharp look. “What?”

“You look as if you’re decoding military operations.”

He stared at me as if this answer meant nothing to him.

“No one should look so serious when reading a letter from a child,” I clarified.

“Why not?” Ishqa put the letter down. “He lost interest after two lines.”

“And?”

He gave me a stony stare. “Do the Sidnee not value education?”

“Of course we do. But he’s six summers.”

“At six summers, my father had me writing pages of Wyshraj history.”

I almost scoffed. Mine hadwantedme to write pages of history, too. I just had never been any good at it. From the looks of it, Ishqa had been better than me at such things.

I shrugged. “He is a child.”

“He is flighty and distracted,” he huffed, in a way that reminded me all too much of how my father used to click his tongue and shake his head at my own sloppy, half-finished essays.

“Perhaps he’s a dreamer,” I said.

“A dreamer is a hard thing to be. I fear so now more than ever.” He looked down at the letter, and the disapproval on his face softened. “I only hope that I’m raising him to be strong enough to survive such a world.”

A bittersweet ache twinged in my chest.

Did my father ever wear that expression when he talked about me, I wondered? Was there ever any fragment of his disappointment in me that was secretly love in disguise?

I looked back down at the table, at the letter waiting there, written in my father’s unmistakable hand. A lump of nervousness curled in my stomach.

“That’s all any of us can hope,” I said, then picked up the letters and excused myself back to my room.

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