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.We were entitled to our pride and our rule.” Raus smiled a grim, sarcastic smile, waved a sweeping hand out before him.“See the splendor our pride and our rule have wrought.“My father was displeased with my choice of Milla Marz and incensed with what he considered to be her presumption.She’d made none of course.She knew what would happen, but she made no demands on me.I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping our love secret, it didn’t seem fair to her, but it would be her death.Though I loved her, I was still in thrall to my father.He convinced me to make a public example of her for the good of the Kapler name.”Jav narrowed his eyes, swallowed hard.“What did you do?”Raus sighed.“In those days, the sun was still bright, springtime was still associated with life, with green, and with growth.The Black Fields were not so ominously named.They were paved with stones and home to markets and colorful pavilions.Music and the laughter of children filled the air.I can still remember it if I try hard enough, or it could simply be a testament to the power of my imagination.I think Sarsa died its first death that day, the first of many I would bring about.“At my father’s command, I throttled her.Upon a dais in front of thousands, with forbidden tears stinging my cheeks, I closed my fingers around her neck and crushed her throat.For propriety.For place.For nothing.I make light of what I can and can’t remember, but the look in her eyes I will never forget.For though she died that day under my clenching hands, she has since graced me with that same look four times more.Each time she comes, sometimes separated by months, usually separated by years, I am made to kill her.I have tried to avoid it, have tried to reconcile with her ghost, if that’s what it is, but in the end it’s always the same.I set something in motion all those years ago for which I will be forever punished.“If you say you thought you recognized someone in the crowd, you an off-worlder, your first time here, who am I to dispute you? If it is Milla Marz come again, you are welcome to her, for I have nothing but death to offer her.”Jav took a deep breath.“Tomorrow, I’d like to go among them and search.”“Of course.And if you find her?”Jav shrugged.“I suppose we’ll see.”10,689.142“Did you have any luck?” Raus said, beckoning Jav to follow him.“No,” Jav replied.“I’ll try again tomorrow.It would seem that you’ve made a fair number of enemies over the years.”“Yes.All of them,” Raus said, chuckling.“How did it happen? Politics aside, what made you choose the Empire over your own people?”Raus shrugged.“Circumstance.Fate.Wisdom.A lack of it.“Do you have any family?” Raus asked.Jav pursed his lips.“I don’t know.My memories, my life as I know it, began seven years ago.I don’t remember anything before that.”Raus looked at Jav hard with a combination of disbelief and something close to outrage.“You?”Jav shrugged.Raus’s face softened.After a pause he said, “I’m sorry.”“You needn’t be.”They came into a five by five meter room that was designed for pragmatic efficiency, but had the look and feel of a shrine.Against the back wall, lit internally by ghostly green light, a tank filled with a gel solution held Ban Kapler suspended, where he slept the sleep of decades or of death.Jav couldn’t be sure which it was, and neither could Raus, not any more.“Everything is for my brother,” Raus said.“I did as my father commanded.I killed Milla Marz, but I hated him for making me do it.The people hated me for doing it.They hated our family for what the murder represented.The Kaplers had kept the peace and protected the land from the savagery of the northern Witch Kings for ages, but then, for something as big as love or small as pleasure, we showed them very clearly with little room for doubt that we were just as much an oppressor as any: closer, more familiar, perhaps even entitled to some degree.But they would not have that indefinitely.All men yearn to be free, whether from tyranny, from unwanted responsibility, or from the shadow of an overbearing father.The people wanted one kind of freedom; I wanted another.“My mother was always my father’s thing.She had no hand in raising me, showed no interest in me.That was a kindness compared to the contempt she showed my brother.”Raus sighed as he gazed at the man in the tank before him.“Ban.He was born small, something that by custom is not easily excused or forgiven, especially not by the birthing mother.It’s an insult, an affront, though there’s no question that by then my father’s seed was to blame—so much exposure to exotic energies and radiations.“Ban was 15 when I killed Milla, and afterwards only he understood.Milla had been our personal attendant for five years.Besides Ban, several years my junior, she was and is the only person I’ve ever really been close to.To me, the resulting relationship was natural.And I was young, passionate for her flesh, her companionship, and for her affection.She was like a real mother to Ban.She showed him love and kindness and by all rights he should have hated me for what I’d done—at least as much as I hated myself.But he knew why I’d done it.Not because I agreed with father, but because one didn’t say no to the old man
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