MENTRIUS
1563 4D
Andrew looked stricken, and Mentrius knew immediately that something terrible waited to be said. His mind, so deeply trained in all the disastrous arts of war, ran frantically through one possibility after another until he emerged once again with one fact: Andrew had taken Leil from her family.
“Andrew, tell me. You must tell me. What happened?”
Andrew looked up full at Mentrius, and his face was so contorted by grief and withheld tears that he seemed a different man. “This is the worst time to tell you about it. Couldn’t we…"
“No.” The old anger rose in Mentrius. “You took her from all the rest of us. It divided us all. Lusin is dead, and your Tonda cousin, and Leil‘s parents broke their branch and took new partners. You tell me.”
Andrew drew himself up. “All right. But you will have to hear the whole story. Here is the first part.” And he told Mentrius of Arlen, and his destruction of Andrew and his family, and Leil‘s regeneration and imprisonment. Voices in the adjacent great chamber rose and fell in argument as Andrew spoke.
Mentrius put his head in his hands. Arlen, always Arlen. But he said, “So if you’d backed down and left the farm, none of this would have happened?” His anger returned, rising slowly but hugely like a long tide.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. There was one chance I could have used to undo all of it, all the way back to the first time I saw you, but I lost that chance.” Andrew paused.
Mentrius spat, “Like so many times.”
“Yes.” Andrew did not move.
Then the anger seeped away. The wounds, the attacks, the revenges, the insults, the murders, seemed to drop through a sieve in Mentrius and vanish in a deep emptiness. He bowed his head. “Andrew, I loved her, so much, but not in the way you accused me of, when we fought on the Great South Fall. You insulted me and it stains her memory in me. The love in Astran families runs deep and complex – I can’t explain it all. I’m so sick of fighting.” He looked up, and astonishment swept over him at the tears he saw falling from Andrew‘s eyes.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” Andrew said. “How can I repay such debts to you? I would die to give her back to you, even if it meant I would never see her again. Please forgive me if you can.”
“That day may come,” Mentrius replied slowly. His heart weighed in his chest. “Look, for now, just try to keep things working, pull the colls together, get us through all this. Too many people are looking to you. If it were just you and me, we could fight again, and that would mean we hadn’t changed or grown at all. But we have.”
“We have. Is there any way I can–“
“No. I’ll back you with the others. Between us lie wounds that will take time to heal, if they ever do. But life is moving.”
Andrew stood, his jaw set. “So be it. There’s one thing we need to do together. Come with me.”
