If you are reading this letter, then I am dead.
I expect to die, if not today, then soon. I expect that
Valentine will kill me. For all his talk of loving me, for all his desire for a
right-hand man, he knows that I have doubts. And he is a man who cannot abide
doubt.
I do not know how you will be brought up. I do not know what
they will tell you about me. I do not even know who will give you this letter.
I entrust it to Amatis, but I cannot see what the future holds. All I know is
that this is my chance to give you an accounting of a man you may well hate.
There
are three thongs you must know about me. The first is that I have been a
coward. Throughout my life I have made the wrong decisions, because they were
easy, because they were self-serving, because I was afraid.
At
first I believed in Valentine’s cause. I turned from my family and to the
Circle because I fancied myself better than Downworlders and the Clave and my
suffocating parents. My anger against them was a tool Valentine bent to his
will as he bent and changed so many of us. When he drove Lucian away I did not
question it but gladly took his place for my own. When he demanded I leave
Amatis, the women I love, and marry Celine, a girl I did not know, I did as he
asked, to my everlasting shame.
I
cannot imagine what you might be thinking now, knowing that the girl I speak of
was your mother. The second thing you must know is this. Do not blame Celine
for any of this, whatever you do. It was not her fault, but mine. Your mother
is not an innocent from a family that brutalized her. She wanted only kindness,
to feel save and loved. And though my heart had been given already, I loved
her, in my fashion, just as in my heart, I was faithful to Amatis. Non sum quails eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.
I wonder if you love Latin as I do, and poetry. I wonder who has taught you.
The
third and hardest thing you must know is that I was prepared to hate you. The son
of myself and the child-bride I barely knew, you seemed to be the culmination
of all the wrong decisions I had made, all the small compromises that led to my
dissolution. Yet as you grew inside my mind, as you grew in the world, a
blameless innocent, I began to realize that I did not hate you. It is the
nature of parents to see their own image in their children, and it was myself I
hated, not you.
For
there is only one thing I want from you, my son – one thing from you, and of
you. I want you to be a better man than I was. Let no one else tell you who you
are or should be. Love where you wish to. Take freedom as your right.
I don’t
ask that you save the world, my boy, my child, the only child I will ever have.
I ask only that you be happy.
Stephen
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