David Farland - Wizardborn

“I—I’ll tell you true,” he said, shaken. His voice began to rise. “You say that I don’t know what love is, and I’ll admit that I don’t. Love is a lie. My mother hated me from the day I was born. Even as a child, I could see it.”

“She hated your father,” Myrrima corrected. “Averan told me. You merely had the misfortune to look like him.”

“No,” Borenson said. “She hated me.” He tried to sound casual, but a person cannot talk casually of a wound that strikes so deeply. Pain haunted his voice. “She spoke about love when other women would talk about their precious children. My mother would say, ‘Oh, yes, I love my little Ivarian.’ Then she would look about slyly, to see if they believed her.”

“But she only spoke to reassure her friends that there wasn’t something wrong with her.”

“Clearly there was something wrong with her,” Myrrima said. She couldn’t change the truth. But she could take away some of the pain. “Perhaps she didn’t love you. I do.”

“How can that be?” he demanded too loudly. “What good is a husband who cannot give you a child?”

“I can think of plenty of good uses for such a husband,” she said. “A husband is someone who works beside you when you till the garden, and who keeps you warm in bed at night. He’s someone who worries about you when no one else even knows that anything is wrong. And he’s the one I’d want holding my hand when I stand at death’s door.”

“People delude themselves,” Borenson said as if she hadn’t seen his point. “They want love so badly that they search for it until they pretend they’ve found it. Women will meet some worthless fool, and convince themselves that they’ve discovered a treasure, a ‘remarkable gem’ of a human being that the rest of the world has somehow managed to overlook. What rot!”

“There is nothing to such love. People breed with abandon. The world is full of fools who have no other aspiration than to procreate. I can’t fathom it!” Borenson stopped. He’d been talking so fast that he was puffing.

“You don’t understand desire?” Myrrima asked. “Didn’t you feel it with Saffira? Didn’t you feel it when you first saw me?”

“Carnal urges have nothing to do with love—at least not any kind of love that I want. It doesn’t last.”

“So you want more than carnal urges?” Myrrima demanded.

He hesitated, as if he could tell by her tone that he was falling into a trap.

“Yes,” he said. “The best love must be founded on respect. Let desire grow from that, and when the desire wears thin, at least the respect will remain.”

“You have my respect,” Myrrima said. “And you have my desire. But I think that there’s more to love than that.”

“Ah!” he said, as if eager to hear her thoughts, but she could tell that he only wanted to argue.

“I think,” Myrrima said, “that everyone is born into the world worthy of love. Every babe, no matter how physically marred or how colicky, is worthy of its mother’s love. We all know that. We all feel it deep inside when we see a child.”

Borenson fell silent, and for first time, she felt that he was truly listening. “You were born worthy of love,” she said forcefully, “and if your mother never gave it to you, it was from no lack of your own.”

“More than that,” Myrrima added. “We stay worthy. You condemn people for ‘falling in love.’ You say that there really aren’t any ‘human treasures’ to be found. But people are better than you think. Even the worst people have more potential than the common eye can see.”

“When a man and woman fall in love, I don’t wonder that it happened. Instead I rejoice for them. I, too, sometimes wonder what qualities they saw in each other that I might have missed. But I respect people who have the common sense to love well.”

Borenson said coldly, “Then you will never respect me.”

“I already do,” Myrrima said.

“I doubt that.”

“Because you don’t respect yourself.”

Borenson was getting angry. He tried to change the subject. “All right, I’ve played your game. I told you something about me that you don’t know. Now tell me something that I don’t know.”

“I got some endowments,” Myrrima said. “And I learned to use the bow.”

“I can tell you got endowments,” Borenson said. “Where’d you get the forcibles?”

Modesty forbade her from telling. Besides, she supposed that he would learn the tale soon enough. “From the queen.”

He said nothing. She gave him just enough information to let him believe that they were merely a gift.

“So,” he said, “tell me something that I don’t know.” Once again, he was holding in his feelings. She didn’t want the topic to get away from her.

“All right,” Myrrima said. “When I was a little girl, my father and mother both loved me enough to care for me when they were tired, and to hold me when I fell, and to work long hours to feed me. Maybe I was lucky, because I got something you never had. I learned firsthand about love from people who knew how to give it.”

“And I learned this: the best romantic love has a good amount of lust in it, and an equal amount of respect. But the main ingredient is devotion.” She wondered that he hadn’t mentioned that when defining love, and suddenly she realized that he didn’t even see it. “And devotion is what you lack!”

Borenson took a deep breath, and she thought he would utter some denial. Instead, his hand drew more tightly against her belly, and he fell silent, as if he were astonished.

She was right of course, now that she saw it. Borenson could respect another, even feel compassion and envy. But he didn’t understand devotion, not really. That was the part of the equation that a faithless mother could not teach him.

She wondered if she should take her words back, offer some sort of empty apology. But she knew that she shouldn’t. He had to see the truth. Maybe the truth was that it was good that he was a eunuch. He might never grow his walnuts back, she knew, despite the wizard’s best efforts. Maybe it was all for the better. Making love wasn’t love, she knew, and too many people confused the two. If she could help him learn to truly love, could teach him devotion, then she would have healed a wound beyond even Binnesman’s reach.

She took the hand that rested on her belly, squeezed it and thus held him. But neither spoke for a long time. She had not yet broached the topic of going to Inkarra with him, and she dreaded it. Her husband had to know that she planned to go.

Seven miles north of Carris, they spotted a warhorse trailing its reins, pawing the ground as it looked for forage in the deadlands. They had to ride across a mile of blackened hills to get to it. Blood spattered across its back suggested that no owner would come seeking its services, so Borenson took the animal.

By the time they reached Carris, Gaborn had already left. People had begun to flee the city. With the reavers gone and the darkness lifted, refugees had already begun to choke every road for miles.

Common soldiers out of Mystarria and Indhopal were heading north to repair and defend Mystarria’s shattered castles. Weary footmen marched over the blackened land with heavy packs on their backs. The rest of the citizenry departed by whatever road they saw fit.

Hundreds of people had climbed to the lip of the giant wormhole.

Myrrima and Borenson stopped in Carris only long enough for Borenson to take half a dozen endowments—one each of brawn, grace, wit, hearing, sight, and metabolism. Then Borenson left orders that other endowments be added over the next day. Because of the foul air hanging over the city, he dared take no endowments of stamina, lest his Dedicate take sick and die. He would have to wait for it.