The Mansion of Nettles — Chapter 9

The moment Kasvren spotted Isolde, he feigned surprise. When she turned her head to look at him, he even parted his lips in a silent oh!, feeling every bit the fool as he did it. Isolde's expression soured slightly at the performance, though she said nothing. Kasvren took the seat across from her, running his fingertip lightly over the crisply folded napkin before him.

"I hadn't expected to be sharing dinner with you."

"Didn't you? You'd best grow accustomed quickly to the fact that I may appear at any moment."

"Because you're the mistress of this house?"

Isolde offered no answer, but that silence was the most emphatic confirmation imaginable. She gave the bell on the table a light shake, and Rad Dat emerged from the direction of the kitchen. He bore the enormous silver tray with effortless ease, crossing the room toward the table with the slow, immaculate—perfectly butler-like—gait and posture of a man who had spent a lifetime at the trade. Two sets of cutlery, two plates, and two small servings of each dish portioned out. Hardly more than he would have had dining alone, and yet the table looked somehow far richer for it. Why was that?

Then, without warning, Kasvren felt the sensation of longing swallow him whole. A table where his entire family sat gathered; the quiet jokes and murmured conversation passed back and forth in that hushed atmosphere came flooding over him like a great tidal wave. A place he could never return to, things he could never do again—it seized him by the throat.

"What's the matter?"

Isolde asked from her seat across the table. Only then did Kasvren realize he was gripping his cravat with both hands, like a man choking on something caught in his windpipe.

"...It's nothing."

"Are you having trouble breathing?"

"No. I'm not."

Even as he answered, he unknotted the cravat and set it on the corner of the table, then undid the top button of the shirt that had been choking him to the collar. He had expected Isolde to take offense, but to his surprise she said nothing and simply began her meal.

Kasvren raised his glass first and tasted what it held. And good heavens—he could hardly help himself. He could not claim any deep expertise in drink, but he had learned to distinguish the flavors and bouquets of wine from about the age of eighteen, and this wine was unlike anything he had ever tasted. He could say with confidence that even the wines rumored to have been crafted with painstaking devotion by the winemakers of the royal palace could not rival it. Its sweetness tempted the nose first, then wrapped the tip of the tongue in bright acidity edged with a faint bitterness, and the fragrance it left lingering in the mouth afterward was simply exquisite.

"A truly fine wine."

"Is it?"

"Can't you tell?"

"Well. I don't drink wine often. I only began having it with dinner about a year ago. Before that, I'd never touched it."

Isolde answered flatly, then stopped, her cutlery suspended, and looked at Kasvren.

"You seem fond of drink, though. Surely the heir's education you received at House Selvain included wine."

The words House Selvain gouged at Kasvren's chest anew. The expression he had failed to hide surfaced on his face once more, and Isolde set her cutlery down entirely. Then, like a merchant entering negotiations from which there was no retreat, she laced her fingers together on the table and leaned slightly forward.

"Just what is it you are, exactly?"

"What I am?"

"Yes. You were my father's ward—adopted son of House Selvain, its heir. I paged through a few of the diaries my father left behind, and reading them made it all the clearer. And yet... every time I bring up the marquisate, you look as though you're in pain. As though you're desperately trying to escape the subject."

"Does that trouble you?"

"Of course it does."

Kasvren set down his cutlery as well. Then, pushing his plate aside, he folded his hands on the table exactly as Isolde had done.

"What exactly is the problem, then?"

"If a man whose identity I cannot fathom living in my house, alongside me, is not a problem—then what in the world could be?"

"You're the one who claimed to know what I am."

"Which makes me think you brought it with you. Tell me—when you first set foot here in Dravenmoor, what were you?"

Isolde's words came without hesitation. Kasvren could not help but feel a shock-laced admiration for her insight, and for the precision with which she wielded it. Even if he had betrayed himself through expression, gesture, or a stray turn of phrase—could anyone truly read all of that so clearly, in a single day? And they had not even spent that much time together!

Torn for a moment between two choices—to be honest, or to deflect—he soon realized that deception would not carry him far. He drew the plate he had pushed aside back toward himself, picked up his cutlery, and began slicing the cap of a mushroom into thin pieces. Before Isolde, neither subterfuge nor bravado seemed necessary. All at once, Kasvren felt the impulse to unburden himself of everything.

Because she did not know who he had been. She had no notion of the life he had lived, and likely no interest in it besides. She might well forget by morning whatever he told her tonight. Then what was there he could not say?

"You're right. I was once the heir of House Selvain, but now I'm simply a man named Kasvren. I no longer have any claim to the name 'Selvain.'"

"What do you mean?"

Kasvren's memory reached back to a very distant place. His first memory, strangely enough, was of being held in someone's arms, terribly cold and aching all over. Then came the memory of a warm, safe place, listening to a lullaby sung by a wet nurse.

"My first memory, I believe, is of being held in my birth mother's arms."

"Your birth mother?"

"Yes. I was adopted into House Selvain the moment I was born. My parents—that is, my adoptive parents—never hid the fact from me. My mother... no, I can't call her that anymore. The Marchioness Selvain was the second wife my father chose in remarriage, after the previous marchioness died without leaving an heir. Yet she too went more than three years without conceiving. With no suitable relatives to adopt an heir from, they finally resolved to take in a baby of unknown parentage. My father—the Marquis Selvain—told me, 'You too are of noble blood,' but whether that was true, only God could say."

"If you were adopted into a marquisate, I'd imagine your adoptive father's word was true enough."

"Perhaps. But that was never my concern."

Thereafter, Kasvren slowly traced the childhood and boyhood he had passed within House Selvain, telling her of it piece by piece. In his early years he had truly been a child brimming with happiness. Worry and anxiety were things that belonged beyond the wall, to distant lands; to Kasvren they were as fanciful and unreal as tales of dragons and goblins.

To others, his adoptive parents described him as 'the child of a distant relative'—and then, the moment the listeners' backs were turned, as 'our precious son, the future heir.' Once for every person they met, twice for every pair. With each new introduction, the first thing Kasvren learned was how to carry himself as the legitimate heir and adopted son of House Selvain—maintaining humility and dignity in the very same breath.

"I made friends, too. They were only the ones my adoptive parents approved of, but among them were a few I truly got along with."

Tobras Peloris and Johan Halborn. Ah, they had been Kasvren's true companions. He had met them when he was about four, and they had grown up together like brothers. Among them, Tobras—the son of the marquisate—had shown extraordinary talent for mechanical engineering from an early age and gone abroad to study, laden with the expectations of his parents and relatives. When that friend—the mischievous, joke-cracking boy who never failed to make Kasvren laugh—left for that far-off place, Kasvren felt a hollowness as though one of his own arms had been torn away.

He had kept his promise, and thanks to those letters, Kasvren never lost his laughter. Even from afar, Tobras had not lost his cheerfulness, folding his signature wit beautifully into every page. Whenever a letter arrived from Tobras, Kasvren always went to find Johan, and they read it together—imagining what sort of place this new world might be, where their friend now dwelled.