Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 333
alone in my bedroom, and it was as a figure from a drama that I
saw myself, moving to commands issued by some forgotten
playwright. I felt a certainty at that moment that it was so, that
my duenna's shock, my coming grief were roles cast for us by
someone, someone great far in the past. I could be other than
grief-stricken, if I chose. I could go mad, in other words.
I chose to go mad. In that moment I decided that
although I could not change the fate of my mother, there was
no law immutable in the heavens that decreed how I was to
react to it. Only much, much later in life can I look back and
see that whether I knew it or not, I was under the sway of an
emotion then: fury, which I swallowed so deeply that I was
unable to experience it until... oh, very recently.
"Come," I said to the duenna. "Rise, and let us practise a
while on our dulcimers. The day is still fair, and the next ones
will not be." She looked at me with a new horror in her eyes,
and I knew I was lost. I wondered what was to come of it, now
that I was no longer playing my role in the drama begun by my
father.
He was terrified of me from then on. The servants
treated me with gentle respect, as one does the mad. They
knew I was so overtaken with grief--although I did not witness
my mother's execution, and I had seen her a few afternoons a
week since I was a babe, never for more than a few hours at a
time--that I could no longer feel anything. The king, however,
believed I was training myself in hate, keeping inside me a
desire for revenge that was willing to wait. He thought perhaps
that I would kill him in his dotage, when he could not raise a
hand to defend himself. As I grew toward womanhood, he
began to look for ways to dispose of me. For I was sunny and
cheerful, I claimed to forgive him for slaying my mother, and I
was gracious to his new queen. I harbored no instinct for