Whisper of Waves

38

14 Hammer, the Year of the Wyvern (1363 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

The dress itched and was uncomfortable when she sat, and only a little more comfortable when she stood. The embroidery embarrassed her. Flowers with butterflies flitting around them? She couldn’t imagine anything more banal, less her.

“Really, Phyrea,” her father said.

The words bore him down. It was as if each of them weighed a hundred pounds and he had to strain to lift them out of his lungs and drop them on the air between them.

“I’m here, Father,” she said.

He looked around as if seeing his own home for the first time and said, “You’re too young for us to see each other so infrequently.”

“You have your work,” she said as quickly as she could, before there could be any time to think that anything was her fault and not his.

“Yes, I do,” Inthelph said just as quickly.

Phyrea cringed. Could he really think she’d played into his hands and not the other way around?

“I have my work,” he went on despite Phyrea’s best world-weary sigh, “and my work depends on my having a certain position, a certain reputation in this city. I am a senator, for Waukeen’s sake, and the master builder besides. I can’t have my daughter-”

The full stop was so affected she almost laughed at him.

“You’re making all the wrong friends, young lady,” he said, his jaw tight, his mouth almost completely closed.

“I’ve told you not to call me ‘young lady,’” she all but growled at him.

“I’ll call you anything I please.”

She closed her mouth, then her eyes, and sat in silence. That was hard. That was really hard.

“I’m glad you like the dress,” he said, apparently trying to make peace.

In the past year or so Phyrea had gone back and forth with her father, and not just arguing, but in her own mind. Sometimes she hoped that the two of them would someday learn to understand, even accept each other. Sometimes she craved his attention so badly it embarrassed her, made her feel like a little baby. Other times she wanted to kill him and had to almost physically restrain herself from slitting his throat in his sleep. She tried talking to him, screaming at him, avoiding him, hiding from him, running from him, telling him jokes, and sleeping with his friends. She’d bedded her first senator at the age of fifteen hoping her father would find out about it, but it turned out she wasn’t the first fifteen-year-old senator’s daughter to try that, and the bastards had learned to be maddeningly discreet. When Phyrea realized her mother, herself a senator’s daughter, had only been sixteen when she’d had her, it made her feel even more stupid, and she stopped sleeping with senators.

“I hate this dress,” she said. “I’m wearing it because you wanted me to wear it. I’m here because you wanted me to be here.”

“Well, then….” he said, suddenly unable to look her in the eye.

“Why am I here?” she asked, sensing weakness.

“I want you to start making better friends.”

“I have friends,” she said.

“I want them to be better people,” said Inthelph, still not looking at her.

They both sipped tea from the service that used to be her mother’s.

“Do you ever think about my mother?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, but his face, and the way he looked at the teacup, said he was lying.

“Did you kill her?” she asked, not believing he did.

He tensed, deeply wounded by the accusation.

“What in the Nine Hells do you want from me?” she asked.

“A young man is meeting us for tea.”

She didn’t bother sighing or scoffing. She just sat there.

“You’ve met him,” he said. “He is a fine young man. The sort of man you should be seen with. The sort of man you should marry.”

“The Cormyrean?”

He looked at her then, and the brief flash of hope that passed across his face almost made Phyrea sad.

“Yes,” he said. “His name is Willem. Willem Korvan.”

“The handsome one,” she said.

Her father smiled, and her heart sank in her chest.

“He could be a steadying influence on you, Phyrea,” he said. “He could help you grow up, help you be the kind of …”

Phyrea wanted desperately to believe that he’d trailed off because he knew then how ridiculous he sounded.

“Excuse me,” she said as she stood.

He reached out for her hand to stop her, and she flinched away.

“If you leave,” he said, his voice very quiet, very small, “don’t come back.”

“I want to freshen up,” she lied. “I want to check my face.”

He took her hand and she didn’t flinch then. She stood there for a few heartbeats letting him hold her hand and when she pulled away, he let her go.

She went upstairs into her own bathroom. One of the maids was dispatched to follow her but didn’t follow her into the bathroom at least.

When she was alone, Phyrea dug in the deepest corner of her medicine chest, behind unused jars of powder and empty perfume bottles. She found the little knife she hid there and turned away from the mirror.

She didn’t like to see her own face when she cut herself.