Page 63 of Sanctifier

She said nothing.

“It’s ingrained in us from birth,” he went on, apparently not needing a response. “Love. A need for connection. It is biological. Chemical. Nothing more than that. And yet… when I fell in love with this girl, it felt as if I were the first person in the world to experience joy at the sight of a young woman’s smile. To want to be near her every minute of the day. I don’t know why she loved me back. I was intense, opaque, my conversations dull and overly complex. But she seemed to adore me nonetheless. She was so unlike me, so open to the world and so ready to… toshare.

“But I was not. I was greedy.”

Finally, he looked at Ru. He caught her wide-eyed gaze across the room, and she found that she couldn’t look away. She wanted to know what happened — to the girl, to Hugon. What, or who, had made him who he was?

“We never married,” he said, a clearly painful admission. “I asked her time and time again. I knelt before her, offering my hand, my name, my lands… but she refused. I knew she loved me. I couldn’t understand why. I loved her more than…” he stopped, biting off his words.

Then he said, “We had a child together. In secret, of course. Her father hid her from society while she was with child, kept her away from prying eyes. The truth would have ruined us both. I tried to give her what she needed. Support, love, a husband, gold. She refused all of it. She always wasunfettered, often talking of traveling the world. She claimed she would leave, sail to Solmaria on the western coast of Navenie, and seek a new life with some distant cousin, someone who might claim the baby as their own while she stayed on as a doting aunt in the eyes of society.”

Ru knew, somehow, that he spoke of Lady Bellenet. She saw it in his eyes, the pain he revealed to Ru when his mask slipped. And something else, some gnawing emotion she recognized but couldn’t quite name.

“I lost her for years,” he went on, speaking faster now, beginning to pace by the window. “She disappeared. I tried to track her down, wrote letters, even asked her family. They wanted nothing to do with me. I was the father and equally the enemy.”

“Did she come back?” Ru asked, the question spilling out despite herself.

Hugon flashed a glance toward her, then looked away again. “Seven years later. She found me in my country home, drunk and alone. My father had died the year prior, and I was the last to bear the D’Luc name. And here came this woman, the girl I’d loved, who would have been my wife, had she only…” He shook his head, schooling his features. He lifted his chin, slightly. “Our child, she said, was gone. Dead those seven years. She had to tellme twice, I was in such a drunken haze. I told her to go, pleaded, begged her to leave me. To forget about me. I couldn’t bear the pain of her return and this revelation that our child was lost.”

Ru had never seen Lord D’Luc like this, had never seen his expression so open, his agony so palpable. “Did she leave you then?” Her voice was low, muffled by the wail of the wind.

“No,” he said. “She did not. She claimed that she had somehow changed, been reborn. She wanted the same for me. She wanted to help me.”

“And did she?”

He looked at Ru for a long, unguarded moment. His fingers flexed, a thoughtless, nervous movement. “Yes,” he said at last.

“And you forgave this woman?” Ru said, hating Lady Bellenet even more, if such a thing were possible. “She abandoned you and left you to rot. Whoever she was, she obviously didn’t care about you.”

Lord D’Luc met her gaze. “I didn’t care about myself, Delara. I’d thought that much was obvious. I had nothing to my name but a house and a vast misery. And here she was at last, the woman I loved, ready to take me back. To be with me. She had been young, confused, when she…” he trailed off, his expression hardening. “I needn’t explain myself to you.”

Ru clenched her jaw, emboldened by Hugon’s vulnerability. “Fine,” she said. “Then tell me how I fit in. And Festra, and Taryel, and the artifact. All of it.”

He regarded her thoughtfully, smoothed his hair, and arranged the lace at his cuffs. “You are but a player in the story that Fate has been telling since the birth of the gods, Delara. Lady Bellenetsawthe Destroyer’s heart buried in the scorched earth. A physical manifestation of Festra himself. And shesawyou arrive there; saw the spool of thread unfurling between you and the heart.”

“What does that mean, shesaw?” Ru asked, careful to sound contrite so as not to break this spell. Afraid that Hugon would close up again, locking her out.

He smiled ruefully, a wan curve at the corner of his mouth. “Through the eyes of Festra.”

“A vision?”

“Something like that.”

And even then, Ru saw his eyes hardening, the lines of his jaw stiffening. She would lose him. “But… what if Festra has nothing to do with it?”

“Has nothing to do with what, exactly?”

“The artifact, what it can do, my connection to it, Lady Bellenet’s powers…” she trailed off, realizing how she sounded.How could all of this obvious magic, these inexplicable things, be explained by something as far-fetched as a god?

Hugon raised an eyebrow as if understanding exactly what she meant. “Do you have a better answer? After all that reading, all those studies you conducted in the Tower, do you even have a hypothesis? Or are you beginning to accept the truth?”

Ru stared defiantly. “Magic is science we can’t explain yet. It’sreal. Gods… just aren’t.”

“How many times must we discuss the difference between magic and religion, Delara? When will you get it through your head that they’re the same? Once upon a time, your ancestors believed in both.”

She knew it was true, but the academic part of her, the one that demanded explanation, resisted. But it would do no good to argue with Hugon now; he was back to his usual self, prim and distant.

“What do you get out of this, anyway?” Ru asked.

---