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He did not answer, and he was not often a man at a loss for words. The empty space gave way to all her other questions.
“Even King Odell must have gone to some lengths to hide their existence from me. They must have known too,” she said.
“You didn’t need to know,” he replied, holding her eyes like a vice as if she were challenging his authority.
“I always needed to know,” she said sharply. “You put my life in great danger. I would have died a fool. What had the other Veilin thought? Royalty, meant to be the most well equipped to fight Venennin, and yet I didn’t even know of their existence?”
“Your answer is here,” he said simply, facing forward and averting his gaze in a rare show of contemplation as he gathered his thoughts in her presence. Her father had always had an answer prepared, as if he’d done all his thinking in secret.
She searched the room. “Where?”
“Here,” he said more quietly. He opened his palms to emphasize the word. “In this sickness. We had no real evidence of its origin, only of its terror. I took the only path I knew and traced the causes to bloodline. We’ve spoken little ofit, but your mother’s father was a Venennin.”
Clea’s eyes widened. “You thought it was because of grandfather’s blood. And hiding Venennin from me, hiding that path was your best solution?” She saw now how his fixation on Kalex and bad births had poisoned his thinking.
“It was the only solution we had. We sheltered your mind, heart and body to protect your soul at all cost. Then that forest healer proclaimed that knowledge would be your death, and we couldn’t take any risks,” her father replied, sounding increasingly more defensive. “You’ve never had to make these decisions. We realized we were wrong not long after your journey when I fell ill.”
His explanations didn’t dissuade her anger. The fact that he’d apparently known about the true meaning of the golden door only angered her further. She still wasn’t even sure she believed his excuse. She looked out the window at the expanse of the city beyond. It had been so long since she’d seen this view in her parents’ room. Even as a child, she’d seldom been invited inside. She’d only ever gotten pieces of her parents’ lives, the rest of it accountable to some greater purpose, even if it was at times misguided.
She remained there with her arms crossed, feeling out of place in her worn-down forest clothes, surprised that her father had allowed her visitation without a full cleansing and change of clothes to remove any traces of the forest from her body.
“You want me to be ready to take the throne and be a symbol to all this in such a time of crisis? I can’t fill in all the space that you and Mother and all my sisters and brothers are leavingbehind. It’s too much to put on me and too soon. You’re planning this without a second thought,” she said, looking out at a full city and all its working cogs, needs, demands, and politics. There were thousands of lives out there looking for some symbol of hope.
“There has been more thought than you know,” her father said from behind her. A voice that had often scolded, controlled, or berated her felt softer than she remembered. Perhaps after all this time she was strong enough to ignore its barbs. “We raised you up as their powerful light. Had you not…run, had you gone through with the marriage we’d arranged, you’d already have children now.”
I would be dead, she wanted to say. She’d once wanted to hide her illness, now she wanted to hide her healing. They just wanted her to have children quickly before she died. She hadn’t yet revealed that she was completely free of it, not wanting to bring up further questions she couldn’t answer. People had already remarked how healthy she looked compared to her father, estimating that she had many years ahead of her still. Luckily, no one had insisted on checking the extent of her illness yet. That would come next.
“It was all fake,” she replied instead.
“None of it is fake. Do you think your mother or I are half of what they perceive us to be? Half of what they need us to be? Tell me, Clea, am I so invincible, a picture of the Lodain walls themselves?” He quoted comparisons given to him by others, not titles he’d given himself.
She turned where she stood, light cascading over her shoulder, and looked at this man who now felt more like her equal thanever before. She looked at him in his illness and in his weakness, and knew the answer.
“You needn’t be everything they believe you to be,” he said. “Just give people a chance to believe and they will do the rest. We are servants of their needs, not the other way around. The people need to hope. You will give them the spark they need to light such a powerful fire.”
He almost sounded poetic, and she got the faintest glimpse of a tenderness her mother had spoken of on rare occasions, an almost romantic view of the world that she’d fallen in love with. Her mother had sometimes referred to her father as a romantic. Clea and her siblings had never believed her.
“The final years of The Decline are coming,” Clea whispered.
“And I will be at your back, sharing everything I know. We have access to the world’s strongest Veilin, an alliance with Reudom, and an entire host of world-worn advisors. You will have access to your mother’s armory, her study, all her resources and all of mine. This will not be an undertaking you take alone, but you must soon be the face of it. Already, you’re not just a symbol of light, but of returning back from the dead. This city will see you as its path back from The Decline. We will tell your story of revival, and the city will see its own story in that.”
Already, in just a few hours since her return, he’d thought it all through. She stood there and observed in silence, as if her lack of reaction might help pause it all. The moment continued to move on regardless.
What could she say?
She looked back out at the city, but this time, she searched beyond it, staring out at the vastness of the forest.
She would be the symbol of Loda’s might. In that, she’d become the target of every enemy that sought to break her city’s spirit. Her every act would be scrutinized, every word she said would carry weight, and it would all be curated by a group of advisors, sitting in a back room, calculating and recalculating her direction. She’d dealt with some of this as the princess, but as a queen, these demands would be so much more.
As if sensing her hesitation, her father continued, “Clea,” with that same, unusual softness in his voice. “Only hours before you arrived, all the advisors, along with a representative from Ruedom, were in this room, trying to determine the city’s next direction. The people’s religious observance of the bloodlines that originally fought the Warlord of Shambelin had pushed us to two options. We would be required to elect a distant relative with little understanding of this post and with limited support of the people, or we would have to bring in someone from the royal family of Ruedom.”
Clea turned, knowing the long and tumultuous relationship between her father and the city of Ruedom and what it meant that he’d considered handing the throne over to them. Though she could not grasp the desperation in his appearance, she knew it from the state of his actions.
“I’ll consider it,” she said, knowing what her answer would have to be.
Her father seemed to know as well, because he did not object.
They simply waited there in the quiet, and Clea looked back out at the woods.
