msmcknittington (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
msmcknittington) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
loathlylady2012-12-03 10:40 pm
msmcknittington) wrote in loathlylady2012-12-03 10:40 pm
Excerpt
Dorran turned away from the window, just enough to look at Jermyn standing behind him.
“There is an expression from the humans which I was fond of from the first time I heard it. ‘What the eye does not see, the heart cannot grieve over.’ You have heard it?”
Jermyn inclined his head in acknowledgment that he had. It had struck him that it was roughly the same as another expression — “it isn’t illegal until you get caught”. He wasn’t exactly comfortable with either one. They both seemed very convenient for whomever adopted them.
“It is a very comforting saying for someone who deals so often in politics. So convenient! If only I were more successful in blinding some citizens of my empire. We would not be in this mess.” Jermyn tried to cover his smile before Dorran caught it, but the emperor-king turned fully from the window and grimaced at him. “I have said exactly what you were thinking, haven’t I? This expression is not for such men as you, but I wish it were.”
“Dorran?” This did not seem like the sort of conversation where honorifics would be used.
“Go to Monteverde and enjoy yourself, Jermyn.” He held up his hand to stop Jermyn from objecting when he opened his mouth. “I have known you for years, long before you were married to my sister. You mourn her, and I cannot, cannot fault you for that. It is the great privilege of my position in life to have siblings, let alone such a sister as Lenar, but the tragedy of our people is that we should have those like her for so short a time. I know her absence burns like a coal in your chest, as it does me, but it is killing you. She is the one who is dead, and you are following after her. If the hole in your heart burns any larger, you will turn into a deravgar, and what good will you be to any of us then? Least of all yourself.”
Jermyn’s hand had grabbed the edge of the desk at Dorran’s first sentence, and his grip tightened as his long time friend spoke. By the time he reached the deravgar, the color had been pressed from Jermyn’s knuckles and each bone and tendon showed through the tightened skin. Deravgar were the men who wandered the streets of their cities like ghosts, their wives’ deaths having drained them of life and spirit, the which they tried to restore with chemical dissipation. It was not exactly an insult — the deravgar were too much pitied for it to be — but it was a shocking revelation that Dorran thought he was capable of this fate. He thought he had hidden his melancholy well; it was not as if he had secluded himself in some distant place or neglected any of his duties.
“Do you doubt my ability to serve you? Do you make this suggestion out of self interest?” he asked, voice rougher than he intended.
“If I were making suggestions out of self interest, then I would suggest you take my place here and let me run away to the pleasures of Monteverde,” Dorran retorted. “No one would notice. They look at the veil, but not past it. If Vavi were larger, I would put him in the chair and veil and head directly off planet.”
At his name, the sand-cat lifted his head from his front paws and looked at the men. After seeing no food was forthcoming, he stretched out one paw with a yawn and dropped it over his nose before going back to sleep.
Jermyn sighed and released his grip on the desk.
“What would you have me do? I know no other way to proceed. I am as bound by duty as all men of my caste are. As all men are. Even the poorest among us must mourn until they die.”
Dorran waved that away.
“Your honor makes you naive. Do you think every man never looks tenderly again at another person? Never again stretches himself in any dimension of pleasure? You know this is not so, and yet you persist in acting as if it is.”
“I do not. I do not.” Jermyn denied this with a frown and by pushing his bent wrist away from himself across his body, emphasizing his denial with the gesture.
“Would you have taken a glass of wine or eaten the sweet cakes if I had not been the one to offer them? And even then you only took the wine.” Dorran’s tone was one of exasperated patience. “Only ever enough to be polite, Jermyn. Never more. Indulgence stamped out.”
Jermyn almost burst out with the numerous times he had indulged on board the Mirabel — the sharply sweet fruit, the heavy food, the scent of Nicola’s hair as she leaned close during their last conversation in sickbay, the conversations alone indulgent beyond propriety — but bit his tongue before he could speak. Those details would do him no favors.
“I cannot believe I am having an argument with you about sweet cakes, of all things,” he said instead.
“If you ate them, then we would not be.”
Jermyn laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it.
“It is different for you,” he said. “You are allowed to move on. It is sanctioned by the entire empire.”
“Do you think it becomes any easier the second time? Or the third?” Dorran’s hand strayed to the cuff on his left wrist. In the gleaming metal were set braids of his wives’ hair, separated by lines of precious stones. “Each time is worse than the last. The pain only grows, because it is added to what came before, and you are never numbed to it. Instead you become very, very grateful for what you are given and dread the moment when it will be taken away, because your entire world is set up so that you have no choice but to participate in the whole ludicrous cycle. Do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I know what you are going through. I have buried four wives, and each one I loved. I chose them for this fate. I would that they all still lived.”
Jermyn swallowed and touched the cuff on his own wrist, containing a single braid bordered by opaque green stones. Dorran had come to the throne young and married almost immediately. Alone out of all citizens on the planet was the emperor-king allowed to have multiple children, and more than that, was expected to, with everything that included. The wheels of change turned slowly here. A leader who did not marry many times would not have a steady throne. Not that Dorran’s seemed especially steady at the moment. Jermyn felt a headache begin to build.
“My apologies. I should not have said that.”
“No, no, no. An apology is not necessary. I made you angry and you spoke rashly.” Dorran settled into one of the armchairs, slowly, as if he were a great deal older than Jermyn and they were not the same age almost exactly.
“My old friend, I will not let you retire from the world just yet, and I cannot. Veren is too young, and if he does not show signs of maturing soon, then I will have to wait until Cassus is of age.” Jermyn snorted at this mention of Dorran’s eldest son, and Dorran added, “Yes, Veren is possibly the only person who frustrates me more than you do at this point,” and they both smiled without reservation.
“I take it you would like me to suffer along with you,” Jermyn said as he sat down in the chair next to the emperor-king’s.
“I am hardly suffering, and I do not want you to do so. I want you happy. You are not Alavarin in some old story, wandering the wastes in sorrow after Corliana’s death.” Dorran spread his hands wide. “What the eye does not see, the heart does not mourn. You are going off planet, far away from all the eyes which are watching you and waiting for you to falter.”
“As if every man there will not be watching every move I make. The ambassadorial crowd will even be taking notes to report back to you.”
Dorran made a derisive noise.
“They will all be so busy with their own vices that they will not notice yours. Worry about the Monteverdeans, but not too much. I know you are capable of discretion.” Dorran looked at Jermyn, his smile taking on a gleam that he remembered well from their childhoods. It usually signaled that some mischief was about to be suggested. Jermyn had taken to thinking of it as a warning light, like the one that came on slightly before the glider crashed. “Speaking of notes and vice, one hears the most interesting things when one debriefs lower ranking officers by one’s self.”
Against likelihood, given how uncomfortable their conversation had been so far, the glider was about to crash.
“I have never noticed anything of that nature,” Jermyn said, hoping to turn the subject. “My subordinates have only very rarely reported anything interesting. I once commanded a man who scrupulously reported what he had eaten for dinner, on the off chance it could be useful knowledge. It never was.”
The gleam increased.
“They would not report anything of this nature to you, especially not in this circumstance. Something about a lieutenant commander who broke both your ribs and your leg, and then continued courteous while you recovered.”
Jermyn briefly gritted his teeth.
“It was the gravity being turned back on which injured me, not the lieutenant commander.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Dorran said, pointing at his eye.
“But she was responsible for the black eye,” he relented. The concussion he was convinced was his own fault.
“And what does she look like, this human woman who blackened your eye with her . . . fist?”
“Elbow,” Jermyn corrected. “I do not see how what she looks like is at all relevant.”
“I am curious about someone who has accomplished such a thing when no one else has done it for years. When I have not done it since we were youths.” Dorran struck a contemplative air, elbow propped on the arm of his chair and his head leaning on his hand. His fingers curled against his cheek; he looked at Jermyn almost coyly over them. “She is quite ugly, no doubt, and much larger than you.”
The glider was crashing, and Dorran was enjoying himself more with every degree of altitude lost.
“No.” Short words were safest in the event of an emergency.
“Hmm. I have noticed a propensity among human women, especially those from Monteverde, of being rather delightfully shaped. Well padded, you might say.”
“Full, lush,” Jermyn said before he could stop himself. The thought of Nicola being described as well padded! “They are not . . . furniture.”
Dorran laughed, and in his head, Jermyn cursed. The glider had crashed, and its contents had spilled.
“I would suppose not. No corners, all curves. And is this lieutenant commander lush? The debriefings seem to suggest so, but they were not definitive.”
Jermyn did not say anything and concentrated on a neutral expression. Dorran gleamed at him.
“Don’t glare, Jermyn,” his friend said contentedly, and Jermyn gave up all pretense of trying to appear calm and impartial.
“Our space corps would be honored to have Lieutenant Commander Elizalde as a member of it.” He glared, daring Dorran to make something of this.
“Of this I have no doubt. I have read the file Intelligence compiled on your lieutenant commander. She is an exemplary officer, and as much a credit to Monteverde as you are to me. More so, maybe, given that I have pushed you into prominence, and she has only had what the Monteverde space corps had to offer to prove herself.” He reached for the desk and pulled his viewer free from a stack of papers on top of it. After tapping a few codes out on the screen, he held it up so Jermyn could see what was displayed. Nicola looked back at him from her service photo, her pale face beneath her service cap incongruous in this most Tirian of rooms. “All the same, she is lovely, isn’t she?”
Almost without impediment, but Jermyn was not about to say it, not now and not to Dorran. He folded his arms across his chest.
“I did not notice, as I was too busy wandering the wastes like Alavarin.”
“Stung you with that one, did I?” Dorran murmured.
“A bit. You’re very good at it.”
“It comes from years of relentless practice, as you can attest.” Dorran pushed the viewer a little closer to him and spoke quietly. “Let her put out the coal in your chest. Come home, Alavarin.”
“No,” Jermyn blurted. He tasted guilt like sour bile in his mouth. It was blasphemous, a betrayal. In the six years since she had died, Lenar had never left his side, her memory drifting alongside him like a sweet burst of perfumed air. He carried her hair in a dark red coil around his wrist. She carried his. If she could not take off her cuff, why should he?
“I am not suggesting you take her into your bed, at least, not straight off,” Dorran continued earnestly. “Though if you did, I think the censure would be almost nonexistent, should there be any at all. Certainly none from me. You find her attractive, yes, but more than that I think you like her. Befriend her. Learn to enjoy life again, to indulge. The Monteverdeans are masters at it. Let her guide you.”
A guide? More like a beacon. Again, the sour taste of guilt.
“What if,” Jermyn asked, “what if the grief I am worried about causing is my own? I cannot hide what I do from my own self.”
“The trick there is to do nothing that causes you grief in the first place,” Dorran said. He reached across the gap and prodded Jermyn hard in the chest with the first two fingers of his left hand. “I cannot change our entire world in a single motion, but I can change you. With you, the most honorable of men, I can set a precedent which will fall down like rain. We are weighed down with dust. You could help me wash it away.” Again he prodded Jermyn in the chest, over his heart, before dropping his hand.
So here was the reason for the conversation. Dorran wanted him as a figurehead for his endless reforms, for his attempts to turn Tir upside down and then realign its entire being.
“We cannot change Tir, Dorran. We have talked about this before. It cannot be done.” The headache that had been building renewed its efforts as he sank back against his seat.
“But we can, Jermyn! Cultures change constantly. Ours is changing right now, shifting one way or another under the force of a million influences. We are jumping into a new era, with Monteverde as its catalyst. Room for growth, the resources that we need to grow now available. The future is a bright place.” Dorran’s voice fell in pitch. “We must be sure that the wrong people do not influence what is about to come. By the end of my reign, great changes will have occurred, for good or for ill. Together, we must set precedents.”
“You want me to betray my wife — your sister — to set a cultural precedent for political reasons?” Jermyn almost spat the word.
Dorran took a breath, released it.
“Lenar died years ago, Jermyn. There is no one to betray.”
This was said in French, Tirian not having the ability to express what Dorran was saying. It lacked the grammar — verbs with a female ending were always used in the present tense, regardless of whether the verb signified a current action or state of being, and not even context changed that. Jermyn felt sick. Lenar lived in the present tense; it sustained her memory. Whenever he spoke of her, she was there again, as if she had never been gone. The jeweled cuff kept her beside him, like the weight of her hand on his wrist. And Dorran had proved, in ten words, that this was all an illusion and that was all it had ever been. She was not there and had not been for nearly five years. Jermyn had known that, but the ruse, oh, the ruse was a comfort.
“No one knows better than I do,” Dorran continued, gentler now and still in French, “that no amount of self-trickery or observation of customs will make a wife breathe again. They die and they are gone. Remembrance is just that — times that are past. Our marriages are predicated upon ghosts.”
“There is an expression from the humans which I was fond of from the first time I heard it. ‘What the eye does not see, the heart cannot grieve over.’ You have heard it?”
Jermyn inclined his head in acknowledgment that he had. It had struck him that it was roughly the same as another expression — “it isn’t illegal until you get caught”. He wasn’t exactly comfortable with either one. They both seemed very convenient for whomever adopted them.
“It is a very comforting saying for someone who deals so often in politics. So convenient! If only I were more successful in blinding some citizens of my empire. We would not be in this mess.” Jermyn tried to cover his smile before Dorran caught it, but the emperor-king turned fully from the window and grimaced at him. “I have said exactly what you were thinking, haven’t I? This expression is not for such men as you, but I wish it were.”
“Dorran?” This did not seem like the sort of conversation where honorifics would be used.
“Go to Monteverde and enjoy yourself, Jermyn.” He held up his hand to stop Jermyn from objecting when he opened his mouth. “I have known you for years, long before you were married to my sister. You mourn her, and I cannot, cannot fault you for that. It is the great privilege of my position in life to have siblings, let alone such a sister as Lenar, but the tragedy of our people is that we should have those like her for so short a time. I know her absence burns like a coal in your chest, as it does me, but it is killing you. She is the one who is dead, and you are following after her. If the hole in your heart burns any larger, you will turn into a deravgar, and what good will you be to any of us then? Least of all yourself.”
Jermyn’s hand had grabbed the edge of the desk at Dorran’s first sentence, and his grip tightened as his long time friend spoke. By the time he reached the deravgar, the color had been pressed from Jermyn’s knuckles and each bone and tendon showed through the tightened skin. Deravgar were the men who wandered the streets of their cities like ghosts, their wives’ deaths having drained them of life and spirit, the which they tried to restore with chemical dissipation. It was not exactly an insult — the deravgar were too much pitied for it to be — but it was a shocking revelation that Dorran thought he was capable of this fate. He thought he had hidden his melancholy well; it was not as if he had secluded himself in some distant place or neglected any of his duties.
“Do you doubt my ability to serve you? Do you make this suggestion out of self interest?” he asked, voice rougher than he intended.
“If I were making suggestions out of self interest, then I would suggest you take my place here and let me run away to the pleasures of Monteverde,” Dorran retorted. “No one would notice. They look at the veil, but not past it. If Vavi were larger, I would put him in the chair and veil and head directly off planet.”
At his name, the sand-cat lifted his head from his front paws and looked at the men. After seeing no food was forthcoming, he stretched out one paw with a yawn and dropped it over his nose before going back to sleep.
Jermyn sighed and released his grip on the desk.
“What would you have me do? I know no other way to proceed. I am as bound by duty as all men of my caste are. As all men are. Even the poorest among us must mourn until they die.”
Dorran waved that away.
“Your honor makes you naive. Do you think every man never looks tenderly again at another person? Never again stretches himself in any dimension of pleasure? You know this is not so, and yet you persist in acting as if it is.”
“I do not. I do not.” Jermyn denied this with a frown and by pushing his bent wrist away from himself across his body, emphasizing his denial with the gesture.
“Would you have taken a glass of wine or eaten the sweet cakes if I had not been the one to offer them? And even then you only took the wine.” Dorran’s tone was one of exasperated patience. “Only ever enough to be polite, Jermyn. Never more. Indulgence stamped out.”
Jermyn almost burst out with the numerous times he had indulged on board the Mirabel — the sharply sweet fruit, the heavy food, the scent of Nicola’s hair as she leaned close during their last conversation in sickbay, the conversations alone indulgent beyond propriety — but bit his tongue before he could speak. Those details would do him no favors.
“I cannot believe I am having an argument with you about sweet cakes, of all things,” he said instead.
“If you ate them, then we would not be.”
Jermyn laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it.
“It is different for you,” he said. “You are allowed to move on. It is sanctioned by the entire empire.”
“Do you think it becomes any easier the second time? Or the third?” Dorran’s hand strayed to the cuff on his left wrist. In the gleaming metal were set braids of his wives’ hair, separated by lines of precious stones. “Each time is worse than the last. The pain only grows, because it is added to what came before, and you are never numbed to it. Instead you become very, very grateful for what you are given and dread the moment when it will be taken away, because your entire world is set up so that you have no choice but to participate in the whole ludicrous cycle. Do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I know what you are going through. I have buried four wives, and each one I loved. I chose them for this fate. I would that they all still lived.”
Jermyn swallowed and touched the cuff on his own wrist, containing a single braid bordered by opaque green stones. Dorran had come to the throne young and married almost immediately. Alone out of all citizens on the planet was the emperor-king allowed to have multiple children, and more than that, was expected to, with everything that included. The wheels of change turned slowly here. A leader who did not marry many times would not have a steady throne. Not that Dorran’s seemed especially steady at the moment. Jermyn felt a headache begin to build.
“My apologies. I should not have said that.”
“No, no, no. An apology is not necessary. I made you angry and you spoke rashly.” Dorran settled into one of the armchairs, slowly, as if he were a great deal older than Jermyn and they were not the same age almost exactly.
“My old friend, I will not let you retire from the world just yet, and I cannot. Veren is too young, and if he does not show signs of maturing soon, then I will have to wait until Cassus is of age.” Jermyn snorted at this mention of Dorran’s eldest son, and Dorran added, “Yes, Veren is possibly the only person who frustrates me more than you do at this point,” and they both smiled without reservation.
“I take it you would like me to suffer along with you,” Jermyn said as he sat down in the chair next to the emperor-king’s.
“I am hardly suffering, and I do not want you to do so. I want you happy. You are not Alavarin in some old story, wandering the wastes in sorrow after Corliana’s death.” Dorran spread his hands wide. “What the eye does not see, the heart does not mourn. You are going off planet, far away from all the eyes which are watching you and waiting for you to falter.”
“As if every man there will not be watching every move I make. The ambassadorial crowd will even be taking notes to report back to you.”
Dorran made a derisive noise.
“They will all be so busy with their own vices that they will not notice yours. Worry about the Monteverdeans, but not too much. I know you are capable of discretion.” Dorran looked at Jermyn, his smile taking on a gleam that he remembered well from their childhoods. It usually signaled that some mischief was about to be suggested. Jermyn had taken to thinking of it as a warning light, like the one that came on slightly before the glider crashed. “Speaking of notes and vice, one hears the most interesting things when one debriefs lower ranking officers by one’s self.”
Against likelihood, given how uncomfortable their conversation had been so far, the glider was about to crash.
“I have never noticed anything of that nature,” Jermyn said, hoping to turn the subject. “My subordinates have only very rarely reported anything interesting. I once commanded a man who scrupulously reported what he had eaten for dinner, on the off chance it could be useful knowledge. It never was.”
The gleam increased.
“They would not report anything of this nature to you, especially not in this circumstance. Something about a lieutenant commander who broke both your ribs and your leg, and then continued courteous while you recovered.”
Jermyn briefly gritted his teeth.
“It was the gravity being turned back on which injured me, not the lieutenant commander.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Dorran said, pointing at his eye.
“But she was responsible for the black eye,” he relented. The concussion he was convinced was his own fault.
“And what does she look like, this human woman who blackened your eye with her . . . fist?”
“Elbow,” Jermyn corrected. “I do not see how what she looks like is at all relevant.”
“I am curious about someone who has accomplished such a thing when no one else has done it for years. When I have not done it since we were youths.” Dorran struck a contemplative air, elbow propped on the arm of his chair and his head leaning on his hand. His fingers curled against his cheek; he looked at Jermyn almost coyly over them. “She is quite ugly, no doubt, and much larger than you.”
The glider was crashing, and Dorran was enjoying himself more with every degree of altitude lost.
“No.” Short words were safest in the event of an emergency.
“Hmm. I have noticed a propensity among human women, especially those from Monteverde, of being rather delightfully shaped. Well padded, you might say.”
“Full, lush,” Jermyn said before he could stop himself. The thought of Nicola being described as well padded! “They are not . . . furniture.”
Dorran laughed, and in his head, Jermyn cursed. The glider had crashed, and its contents had spilled.
“I would suppose not. No corners, all curves. And is this lieutenant commander lush? The debriefings seem to suggest so, but they were not definitive.”
Jermyn did not say anything and concentrated on a neutral expression. Dorran gleamed at him.
“Don’t glare, Jermyn,” his friend said contentedly, and Jermyn gave up all pretense of trying to appear calm and impartial.
“Our space corps would be honored to have Lieutenant Commander Elizalde as a member of it.” He glared, daring Dorran to make something of this.
“Of this I have no doubt. I have read the file Intelligence compiled on your lieutenant commander. She is an exemplary officer, and as much a credit to Monteverde as you are to me. More so, maybe, given that I have pushed you into prominence, and she has only had what the Monteverde space corps had to offer to prove herself.” He reached for the desk and pulled his viewer free from a stack of papers on top of it. After tapping a few codes out on the screen, he held it up so Jermyn could see what was displayed. Nicola looked back at him from her service photo, her pale face beneath her service cap incongruous in this most Tirian of rooms. “All the same, she is lovely, isn’t she?”
Almost without impediment, but Jermyn was not about to say it, not now and not to Dorran. He folded his arms across his chest.
“I did not notice, as I was too busy wandering the wastes like Alavarin.”
“Stung you with that one, did I?” Dorran murmured.
“A bit. You’re very good at it.”
“It comes from years of relentless practice, as you can attest.” Dorran pushed the viewer a little closer to him and spoke quietly. “Let her put out the coal in your chest. Come home, Alavarin.”
“No,” Jermyn blurted. He tasted guilt like sour bile in his mouth. It was blasphemous, a betrayal. In the six years since she had died, Lenar had never left his side, her memory drifting alongside him like a sweet burst of perfumed air. He carried her hair in a dark red coil around his wrist. She carried his. If she could not take off her cuff, why should he?
“I am not suggesting you take her into your bed, at least, not straight off,” Dorran continued earnestly. “Though if you did, I think the censure would be almost nonexistent, should there be any at all. Certainly none from me. You find her attractive, yes, but more than that I think you like her. Befriend her. Learn to enjoy life again, to indulge. The Monteverdeans are masters at it. Let her guide you.”
A guide? More like a beacon. Again, the sour taste of guilt.
“What if,” Jermyn asked, “what if the grief I am worried about causing is my own? I cannot hide what I do from my own self.”
“The trick there is to do nothing that causes you grief in the first place,” Dorran said. He reached across the gap and prodded Jermyn hard in the chest with the first two fingers of his left hand. “I cannot change our entire world in a single motion, but I can change you. With you, the most honorable of men, I can set a precedent which will fall down like rain. We are weighed down with dust. You could help me wash it away.” Again he prodded Jermyn in the chest, over his heart, before dropping his hand.
So here was the reason for the conversation. Dorran wanted him as a figurehead for his endless reforms, for his attempts to turn Tir upside down and then realign its entire being.
“We cannot change Tir, Dorran. We have talked about this before. It cannot be done.” The headache that had been building renewed its efforts as he sank back against his seat.
“But we can, Jermyn! Cultures change constantly. Ours is changing right now, shifting one way or another under the force of a million influences. We are jumping into a new era, with Monteverde as its catalyst. Room for growth, the resources that we need to grow now available. The future is a bright place.” Dorran’s voice fell in pitch. “We must be sure that the wrong people do not influence what is about to come. By the end of my reign, great changes will have occurred, for good or for ill. Together, we must set precedents.”
“You want me to betray my wife — your sister — to set a cultural precedent for political reasons?” Jermyn almost spat the word.
Dorran took a breath, released it.
“Lenar died years ago, Jermyn. There is no one to betray.”
This was said in French, Tirian not having the ability to express what Dorran was saying. It lacked the grammar — verbs with a female ending were always used in the present tense, regardless of whether the verb signified a current action or state of being, and not even context changed that. Jermyn felt sick. Lenar lived in the present tense; it sustained her memory. Whenever he spoke of her, she was there again, as if she had never been gone. The jeweled cuff kept her beside him, like the weight of her hand on his wrist. And Dorran had proved, in ten words, that this was all an illusion and that was all it had ever been. She was not there and had not been for nearly five years. Jermyn had known that, but the ruse, oh, the ruse was a comfort.
“No one knows better than I do,” Dorran continued, gentler now and still in French, “that no amount of self-trickery or observation of customs will make a wife breathe again. They die and they are gone. Remembrance is just that — times that are past. Our marriages are predicated upon ghosts.”