This is what happens when I read Ulysses and write, apparently.
Yes, I had told my mother, yes.
Yes, I would become my brother. My twin, who had died, who was lost to me forever. The other half of my soul, forever ripped from me, until in death we might meet again.
For him, she had said, and for the realm.
It would please him, I thought, to know that I still played our game, even without him. He would have loved the magic.
Ah, gods! He would have loved it well.
And what a nuisance we would have been then, we twins who played our game so well already.
With magic that allowed us to be anyone, my brother and I truly would have gotten into mischief.
It hurt to think on, an ache that lingered in my breast, festering. Like a sharp seed caught in my throat, I could not dislodge the pain, and I choked on it, often feeling my cheeks wet with fresh tears.
In those days, I wept often. I was too distraught even for my pride to balk at it, and I hid in my room so knew one saw, anyway.
Mother gave me little time to grieve.
Yes, I told her.
For the realm.
Our family was an ancient one, and had long in the service of the King. Even before the Usurper King Ricard betrayed his brother the King Fredric Sumner and led an army of soldiers and common folk alike into the north, the Colletti line had served the crown faithfully.
There were only two of the great lines that had remained perfectly unbroken since the beginning of our history: ours, and that of the house of Moreth in Antion. They were the favorite of the true king in the days of the war, as we had been of the usurper.
Perfectly unbroken. Only true heirs had inherited the dukedom, since time out of memory. In the other great houses of the peerage, at some point in their histories, a Lord had been unable to father an heir of his flesh, and a cousin or other relative had needed to step in to rule when he was unfit for it. For some, heirs had died; for others, they had never been born. Some had been killed treacherously; such were the ways of politics.
But ours was unbroken.
For the realm, she had said.
Mayhap a cousin could have served the realm better than I could. But in that, I did not question her. I rarely did. My quick-witted mother was rarely wrong, and I accepted her opinion that the realm would suffer if any but a true Colletti heir ruled the duchy.
Who could say, in truth, how things might have otherwise fallen out? My magic, I have learned, is strong in its own right – but I do not have the Seer gift, and I could not guess what might have happened otherwise. And even if Arendil had blessed me with her power to see into the future, she gave to no mortal the ability to divine what might be, but only what was and what is what will be.
There are others, I have since learned, who might have been able to tell me. The elves, for one, were said to have been able to divine the possible threads of the future, but they had long since sailed from our shores before the Blessed first touched soil in the North. And there were the dragons, certainly; they had known them all, the vast web of maybes and could-have-beens, teasing out the best future for themselves from their impossible knowledge.
And yet, even they were no Gods, and they had been unable to avoid all sorrow.
Who could say? Well and so, I could not, so in that regard, I deferred to my mother unfailingly.
I would do it, too, for my father, who had always loved Samuel better. It stung my pride, but I understood it. How not, when I had loved my twin so well myself? I would have always chosen Samuel first. Even if father did not love me best, I loved him.
My father took pride in our unbroken lineage. I would do this for him.
And for me, because his pride was mine. In that, we were similar. We were both over-proud, and over-quick to anger.
And…
Gods, but I hated to admit it.
At the core of it all, I also did it for myself. I, who had always felt slighted. I, who had been born first. I should have been the heir, not my brother. I never begrudged him the title. I loved him too well for that. He was good, and kind, and his oratory skill far outshone mine. I never doubted he would be a good Duke, so I never would have done ought to attempt to take the title from him.
But deep down, I had resented it. Not him, but maybe father, and the law.
And so I took what could have been mine, had our laws not been so biased towards men. Had they not placed men above women, I would have been the rightful heir, anyway.
The Blessed prize the maternal line first and foremost.
Their God, and mine, was female. The Golden Arendil.
But the God my paternal line worshipped was male, and thus our law.
And thus the need for concealment.
Yes, I agreed without hesitation.
Yes.
And so, though I still grieved so fiercely it left me weak and exhausted, I threw myself into the studies that would allow me to become Samuel.
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