Perhaps you will think less of me, for giving voice to such thoughts in these pages, and that saddens me, but nevertheless I strive to be truthful with you. Was I powerful enough to kill her, if she tried? Where had she been in the six years since I had announced to Laalvur that she died tragically in the wave that hit the city in 745? Did she think I had forgotten her? Was she biding her time? Was she plotting to come back to Laalvur and take Varenx House from me? The only one who remains in contact with me at the moment is a wet sop of a man named Mihel Pelatzva, a minor noble whose only useful quality is how much he longs to please me.Īs careful as they were, my spies were unable to answer the questions about my mother that obsessed me. I employed several people in Nalitzva for purposes of information gathering. My spies were very observant of such details. The only sign of any infirmity was a slight tremor in her hands-possibly a trace of my attack?-which she had trained herself to keep from view. To explain her sudden reappearance in Nalitzva, Merat told people that a long illness had kept her away for years. As a gifted Lacemaker, she had no trouble threading herself back into Nalitzvan high society and weaving around any questions that threatened to unravel her little knot of lies. Prideful creature that she was, my mother continued to go by her first name, Merat, and had returned to using her maiden name of Orzh, rather than Varenx. She did not appear to suffer from memory loss. When she surfaced at last-not in Laalvur, but across the sea in Nalitzva, six years after her disappearance-the skin of her face was unmarked. Neither her physical nor her mental wounds were lasting. I had incapacitated my father, but the damage I did to my mother turned out to be much less serious. Was I really more powerful than the parents I had spent my life obeying? Had my mother run from me? It took me no time to come up with this possible answer, and a great deal of time to accept it. Why else would she have fled her own home?
I thought she, like my father, might not remember anything. But I also thought I might have wounded her mind with my touch. I thought she might have burns after the encounter, and so my spies were always watching Laalvur and the neighboring towns for white women with blond hair and facial burns. In our confrontation, I flung a cup of hot tea at her face. She must have thought-as I did-that I had killed my father. After she and my father tried to force me to have an abortion, and I attacked both of them, she fled. Lyrebird shift, 2nd Triad of Simosha, 761
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