The sky was as beautiful as ever, serene and calm as the surface of a still lake. The sun shone down in all its radiance, as though attempting to cradle the child of its heart, letting him dream the way he once had in his long lost mother's arms.
He had never known her name, for no one in that house would speak it. He could not recall her face, no matter how long he lay there hunting for it in both vigil and dream. Yet every time he drifted toward sleep he dreamt of long arms stretching over his curled body.
They were always warm with the smell of flower.
He did not know whether they were hers. He preferred to believe they were, and nobody had ever given him a reason good enough to stop.
He had always been fond of poetry, letting lyrical words escape his lips whenever the mood took him. He liked to imagine his mother had been a poetess, that her blood, rich with ink and with the lineage of emperors alike, ran somewhere in his own.
He looked down at the written line on his desk.
"Day arrives as poetry and fades as the last words of a lullaby. Yet I sleep and sleep and never dream. Is that a curse, or a jest of the dread—"
He stopped as the door creaked open.
There was only one person in the world who would come in without knocking, or that usually ever bothered to comea and visit a poor bastard.
She had the brownest eyes he had ever seen. When he smiled at her they seemed to light from within, as though she carried a portion of the sun about with her. When he was in her company nothing else in the house seemed to require his attention.
He had always believed she looked upon him as a son.
Whether he looked upon her as a mother was a question he had never managed to answer, and had learned not to examine too closely.
Her lips were thin, the upper one curving into a perfect M. Whenever she caught him brooding she would mimic the expression back at him, a ridiculous game, and one he secretly treasured. Her fingers were slender, the nails neatly trimmed. Her skin was tanned from a live lived under the labor of the sun, though along her shoulders small patches of pale stood out, like grains of salt scattered over a plate of brown mushrooms.
His gaze followed the dark fall of her hair and came back up, as it always did, to her eyes.
Her eyes were the part of her he liked best. He could have spent an entire day looking into them and found the day too short.
For in their simiplicity was everything that she was.
She bowed gracefully, ebony locks cascading forward, then straightened and fixed him with that piercing stare of hers.
"Tibianus. I suppose you know why I have come?" Disappointment laced every word of it.
He feigned ignorance and tried to lighten the room. "I would like to say it was to admire this beautiful weather in my company."
Her gaze did not soften by a hair. The disappointment in it cut clean through him, as it was meant to.
"The priest made certain I knew what you did." Clara finally declared.
Tibianus clenched his jaw.
That self-righteous, dung-eating bastard.
Of course he did, she is the only one who care enough to do something about it.
He had always enjoyed running his mouth at the priest's expense, and had rather assumed the man absorbed it the way a wall absorbs rain. Evidently the priest had taken his collection of grievances directly to Claria instead, which was both cowardly and, Tibianus had to admit, extremely effective.
"Do you understand that what you did was wrong and foolish? The man was directly sent by the Pontifex himself. Do you want to give the empress an excuse to do as she wants?" she asked, her voice gentle and unyielding like the flowing of a river. The voice of a mother scolding a child who is a good deal too old to be scolded.
He was ashamed of the desire he carried toward her, and more ashamed that it did not lessen when she spoke to him like that.
"Perhaps," he murmured, turning his gaze toward the window, unwilling to meet eyes that held so much disappointment and still would not stop being kind.
With a sigh, Claria stepped closer and wrapped her arms around his head, drawing him in against her exactly as she had when he was small. Her warmth closed over him overbearing the surprise and embaressement he felt, still, he had not realised how badly he needed it until it was there.
"I know why you did it," she murmured into his hair, her breath soft and steady like a lullaby.
His heart stopped a moment before it remembered its business. He tilted his head back to find her eyes.
"You do?"
"You don't want to enter the church. Do you?" It was not a question, though she had the kindness to let it sound like one. Her fingers traced the line of his cheek while she studied his face.
Tibianus swallowed and nodded. The weight of it eased very slightly, now that he was no longer required to pretend otherwise.
"I don't."
The path of faith was not for him and never had been. He shuddered at the thought of what the church demanded, at the quiet smothering little life it would fold him into, year after year, until he could no longer remember having wanted anything else.
There was a reason the sons of rebellious and defeated nobles so often chose the knife over the cloth when offered.
For what was life bereft of anything that made it worth living?
He had considered that choice himself, more than once, late at night. He had never been able to make himself reach for it and escape the court. He was not brave enough to take a dive in the sea of the unknown , and he knew it, and he hated himself a little more each time he proved it again.
He did not want to be made a eunuch, perhaps not all were given that choice, but he would be forced that one.
Claria said nothing to that. She understood his fears, perhaps better than he did himself. She also understood that he had no choice in the matter, which was the part neither of them ever said aloud.
Bastards were granted two fates and no third. The church, or the battlefield.
Locked away in prayer, or sent off to die in a war they had no stake in and no share of. Sometimes if they managed to befriend the legitimate son of their father , they would be allowed to remain, but that was rare.
Everyone hated bastards. And yet somehow everyone seemed to have one.
He hated his mother's blood for it. And every time that thought crossed him, he remembered those long arms from his dreams, and the hating became something more complicated and a good deal more painful.
"Would you walk with me?" Claria asked at last, seeing no other way to lift him out of it.
He nodded, and they walked, trying to ignore something that came closer and closer to reality.
The halls of the palace stretched out before them, vast and gleaming beneath the soft glow of the chandeliers. The polished marble threw their steps back at them like ghosts trailing a pace behind. Portraits of emperors lined the walls, their painted eyes following him the whole length of the corridor with a quiet scrutiny, mocking him, daring him to believe that their blood and his were the same thing.
Servants moved through the halls with practiced efficiency. A few cast glances his way, faces carefully unreadable before they turned back to whatever they had been doing.
It was nothing new to him. Indifference and disdain, and he had grown used to the taste of both. He was a bastard. Everyone knew what that was worth.
But as long as he had her walking beside him, it did not matter.
But it was then at the end of the hallway, where the usual low murmur of palace life would take place that the edge of a scream broke the silent halls.