[CN/TW: Classism on Elodie's part; mental illness; physical illness]

I own nothing.

Queen Elodie did not visit her father often.

There were a host of reasons for this, of course. She was less than a year into her reign, and was still working to solidify her position amidst the tumult she had inherited and that had sprung up between Fidelia's death and her own coronation. Elodie had found herself distracted by matters such as border disputes between Elath and Talasse. These were disputes that she was to understand had been occurring on and off for decades but had recently acquired a new fever pitch.

Complicating matters was the recent attempt on the life of young Duke Adair by a man who was revealed to have been an agent of the Duke of Sedna. Adair's stepmother Arisse was furious—though Elodie was noticing that it didn't take much to make the Duchess of Lillah furious, at least not where the safety of her stepson was concerned. Upon the apprehension and identification of the assassin, Arisse had demanded that reprisals be made.

As it was, Elodie had allowed Arisse to go ahead with the public execution of little Adair's would-be assassin. This carried its own risk with it, considering that the man was a foreign national and it could be argued that Nova had no jurisdiction over him, but Elodie hoped it would send the message she intended. She had also sent a letter to the king of Talasse "requesting" (which was perhaps too polite a word for the circumstances) that in future he keep a closer eye on Duke Talarist. Elodie had considered demanding restitution, but a quick review of the law codices and a word of advice from her sergeant-at-arms revealed that it would only be appropriate to demand restitution if Adair had actually died.

All told, Elodie suspected that the execution would ultimately be more effective than her letter.

Then there were the Shanjian bandits who had roamed the countryside for so long after their king was killed on Novan soil. Thankfully, the last of them seemed to have lost interest; Elodie no longer received reports of foreign bandits within the bounds of her domain. Now, Elodie faced the task of repairing the royal holdings they had broken into and vandalized—and the Shanjians seemed to have been focusing on them—and dipping into the ever-more stressed treasuries to do so. Shanjia's queen also seemed to be losing interest in the idea of doing war with Nova—apparently her warmongering over the years had left Shanjia in a poor state, financially—but there was always the risk, and Elodie could not help but look over the sea warily.

Beyond that, there was the petty backbiting of the court, the constant stress of making sure not to give one noble or functionary or official too much favor when it upset the delicate balance of keeping them all at arm's length, of keeping them all from getting too comfortable. Elodie had never realized how exhausting it was, always occupied with the task of discerning ulterior motives, had never realized how exhausting it was to always have to read into everything everyone said to her. She had thought that being queen would be hard work, but had never imagined how consumed it would be by minutiae. It had never seemed this way when she sat in on court sessions while her father was regent. Maybe that was just because, officially, the court was still in mourning.

(There was also the matter of being distracted by her new husband and sister-in-law. Much of that was actually a pleasant distraction, but Elodie could not help but define it as being, well, just that, a distraction.)

After all this time, Elodie was finally beginning to understand why her father had distanced himself from her after her mother died. It had hurt, when it seemed like Joslyn was avoiding her (no, didn't seem like; he was avoiding her, there was no denying that, no excusing it), when he hardly ever spoke to her as though he was her father and not just as some subordinate noble who happened to have been appointed her regent. It had hurt, the way he had withdrawn from her, still hurt, and would probably never not hurt. But Elodie had at last begun to understand why.

As the queen, she could not afford to be too attached to anyone. Well, maybe "attached" wasn't the right word. Elodie could be "attached" to someone insofar as it was seemly to be attached to that person. Family and spouse and close friends, all of them she could be "attached" to. It was that she could not be too dependent upon anyone, and as she bitterly noted, whether or not she actually was overly dependent on any one person did not matter; what mattered was whether or not she was seen to be too dependent on any one person.

Joslyn must have seen that too; after all, he'd been married to the last queen for many years. He must have seen it, must have seen that he would be doing his daughter no favors to be overly-involved in her life. Even if Elodie still needed the guidance of her living parent. Even if she was lonely and needed someone to talk to. She understood. She still felt the pain of losing one parent and feeling alienated from the other through no fault of her own. Maybe that pain was also part of why Elodie stayed away from Caloris.

Maybe there was other pain that kept her away.

"Daddy… I think I know where this mirror came from."

No response.

"Do you remember this mirror?" Her voice didn't shake; Elodie was proud of how her voice didn't shake.

After an agonizingly long moment, his eyes came back into focus. Joslyn looked at the mirror Elodie was holding, staring at it with a befuddled frown upon his face. It took nearly a minute more (a minute in which Elodie had to fight with herself not to repeat the question, knowing that this would only confuse him) for Joslyn to nod his head 'yes.' He'd not said a word today, and Elodie doubted he would. She'd spoken with her father's physician; he said that these bouts of silence were common.

"This is Livana's mirror, at least I think it is." Elodie tried for an encouraging smile, and wasn't sure that she'd managed anything beyond a strained one. However, she was quite sure that her father wouldn't be able to tell the difference. "Livana was a queen of Borealis, a long time ago. Does her name mean anything to you?"

Elodie never got an answer, but it had been a foolish hope, really. If Joslyn himself had even actually understood the mirror that had saved his life, the secrets he held were locked away in his mind, too far beneath the surface for Elodie to reach.

It had been her fault. If she had prepared enough, actually put aside her dislike of Lumens long enough to learn enough to kill the Shanjian king, or if she had just known the right thing to say to him to make him leave, her father would never have ended up like this. It had been Elodie's fault. She had caused her father irreparable harm. If she stayed away from Caloris so that she could avoid looking at the results of her own unpreparedness, well, that was Elodie's own business, and no one had the right to pry.

The most glaring reason as to why Elodie avoided Caloris was waiting in the sitting room when she emerged from her father's bedchamber.

The boy, whose name she had learned was Emlyn (he was never named in any of the reports she received; none of the people who had written those reports had really cared about his name, only of who he was purported to be), was sitting by the window, determinedly reading a book whose subject Elodie did not know. Elodie wasn't sure just how literate the boy was; he seemed to have advanced only a few pages since last she saw him. She had known people at her school who were highly thorough readers—they read far more slowly than those who preferred to skim through their books—but she doubted that this was the case with him.

Elodie considered sweeping out of the room without ever speaking to or acknowledging Emlyn. She could move quietly enough, even in her long, rustling skirts. She knew that expression of engrossment (even if she knew it better in herself than she did in him), and knew that if she was quiet, he would never notice her leaving. Elodie did not particularly want to speak to Emlyn. It would be better simply to leave without his noticing.

But before she could make a decision either way, Emlyn looked up unexpectedly from his book. Apparently he wasn't as engrossed as Elodie had thought, or perhaps because she didn't know him (and whose fault was that?), she had misjudged his powers of perception.

Emlyn hastily stood away from the table where he sat, laying his book down with a sharp thud that grated on Elodie's ears more than it should have. "How is he? Err, your Highness?" He didn't try to mask the strong twang of the coastal peasantry the way an imposter might have—or perhaps an imposter would have tried to make the right accent sound all the more convincing, Elodie didn't know. The look of genuine concern on the boy's face (or young man, considering he was allegedly two years older than Elodie) made Elodie extremely uncomfortable.

"Much the same," Elodie replied shortly, meeting Emlyn's gaze so squarely that it only took a few moments for him to look away, face reddening.

For whatever reason, Elodie did not leave the sitting room, instead going to stand by a window on the opposite side of the room from where Emlyn was. He was still standing—she could see that out of the corner of her eye. Someone, likely the castellan as Elodie doubted that Joslyn had been in any shape to say so, seemed to have told Emlyn that when his royal "sister" paid visits to his home, there were rules of politeness that he needed to abide by. Purported blood relations did not change the fact that she was the queen, especially considering that he was baseborn, whoever he was.

Elodie turned her gaze to the window. Caloris's ducal seat was on the coast, and out of this window Elodie had a clear view of the sea, turquoise blue and lapping against the shores.

There were vague memories in Elodie's head of early encounters with the sea. When she was very little, before her mother became queen, her parents had taken her here during the summer months when Lampsi Island was humid and plagued with gnats and mosquitoes, but coastal Caloris was milder, less humid, less infested with insects. Elodie had never been overly enamored of the sea, but she was content to play in the shallows, digging for shells. It had been when her father tried to teach her how to swim that there had been problems. Joslyn had grown up on the coast and could swim like a fish; his daughter could not, didn't care to learn how, and as a little girl had shrieked in fear as the waves buffeted her back and forth.

Thinking back on that, Elodie wished she'd just let Joslyn teach her how to swim. She doubted he would be doing any more swimming himself. Today might have been one of his better days, physically speaking. He could walk and move around without tiring for nearly an hour, even if he said not a word to anyone even when prompted and did not seem to recognize anyone he encountered, except for Elodie—Elodie was the only one Joslyn consistently recognized. However, if this was one of his better days, Elodie did not know anyone of a responsible inclination, including herself, who would ever let Joslyn into the ocean again.

Elodie heard Emlyn fidgeting behind her, heard the rug rustle as he shuffled his feet. He really was an ungainly boy, unused to having his hands empty. As a peasant, Elodie could only suppose that Emlyn was so used to having to work through the long hours of the day for a living that, stripped of all of that, he could not help but fidget easily, bored and ill at ease.

Briefly, Elodie entertained curiosity, wondering what Emlyn, assuming that he was who her father said he was, had felt upon his sudden elevation. It must have been dizzying. She remembered how dizzying the idea of being queen so soon had been to her, when she first had to think about it.

Was that pity she felt?

"How is he?" she asked instead, not at all surprised by any brittleness that escaped her mouth. Her father's condition was not an easy topic for her. Anyone would know that, and anyone who might think less of Elodie for indicating that it was a sore topic was not anyone Elodie particularly wanted to speak to.

Elodie pictured Emlyn shrugging. "He…" There was a long pause; perhaps he was struggling for words. "…He is very… It's overwhelming," Emlyn finally managed, his voice shaking.

At this, Elodie turned, and frowned at him. "You didn't expect any of this, did you?"

Emlyn shook his head. He stared down at the ground, clutching his hands in front of him. "No, ma'am, I didn't."

Elodie cringed to realize that in that single 'ma'am' there was being conveyed more respect than many of the other titles she heard flung about in the court, even when directed at her. She cringed again to realize that there was no lie in his voice.

She peered closely at Emlyn, earnestly looking at him for the first time since meeting him. As much as Elodie didn't want to admit it, Emlyn did closely resemble Joslyn, far more closely than Elodie did. He was tall and thin and fair-skinned—Elodie wondered if he had once had skin browned from the light of the sun, wondered if it had grown pale again once he began this stage of his life. If his hair was darker and his eyes were brown, not blue, the fact that his facial features were a dead ringer for Joslyn's negated differences in colorings. Emlyn wore his fine clothes uneasily, starting to pick at his sleeve cuff even as Elodie looked him over.

No, Emlyn likely hadn't expected any of this. If he was who he said he was, then he had come into the life of the father he had likely only known from afar only to find him so incapacitated that, half of the time, he didn't even recognize him and had to be reminded of who he was, Elodie could feel pity, over that. In spite of herself, she did feel a stab of pity when imagining Emlyn's situation.

Under such circumstances, some might have expected Elodie to reach out to her supposed half-brother. For a moment, Elodie almost wanted to. But…

It was accepted (was in fact a matter of law) that the King or Queen of Nova needed to name a blood relative as their heir. It was accepted (though not, in fact, a matter of law) that the current ruler's children took priority. At the same time, it was not unheard of for a Novan monarch to leave the throne to a sibling, niece or nephew or grandchild if they thought their children unworthy to inherit. That was how King Fulbert had gotten the throne, him being the nephew of the previous king, and not his son.

Dukes, duchesses, earls and countesses were not obliged to name blood relatives as their heirs. They were not obliged to prove their heir's lineage. The only condition was that they could not name anyone who was already ruler of some other duchy. The Duke of Caloris could name anyone he wanted as his heir, even if naming a previously-unknown "natural son" would set tongues to wagging, even if that knew heir would likely have trouble holding on to the duchy due to blood relatives possibly thinking him unsuitable. Elodie knew that she should have investigated Emlyn's claims sooner, but there was nothing she could do. The acknowledgement was official, and so was the adoption. Joslyn could name anyone he wanted as his heir, regardless of his state of mind.

Elodie knew that her parents had been married for a little less than a year when she was born. Emlyn was seventeen years old, possibly a few months from eighteen. If that was his age, if he was Joslyn's son, that would mean that he had been born before Elodie's parents got married.

If Emlyn really was her brother, it wasn't his fault that he had been born.

It was no use feeling betrayed on behalf of a woman who had been dead for over a year and a half.

Elodie knew all of that. And yet…

Brin, in her characteristically blunt way, had, upon finding out why Elodie was avoiding Caloris, simply asked if Elodie's difficulty was with the idea that her father could have loved any woman apart from her mother. Maybe that was Elodie's problem. She'd thought she knew her father, but it turned out that she hadn't known him as well as she thought she did. And he was in no shape to give her the answers she so desperately wanted.

So perhaps she was just taking all of this out on Emlyn, her frustration, curiosity, suspicion, all misplaced feelings of betrayal. If Emlyn really was her brother, Elodie knew that he didn't deserve that.

Elodie looked at Emlyn, and frowned.

Her mother was dead, and her father's mind lingered in the past so much that, on any given day, he was more likely to remember her as a little child than as an adult queen. Elodie had never been particularly close to her paternal uncle, who rarely left Mazomba and always seemed over-awed and nervous in her presence. Her mother's family rarely left Merva, and apart from the occasional visit, the only way she communicated with them was through letters. Now, Elodie found that she perhaps had a brother, and one who lived very close by to her. Maybe…

But no.

At the moment, Elodie wasn't sure that there was enough trust in her heart, enough love or kindness, not for this. She felt as though, whenever she opened herself up too much, she was stung.

Perhaps one day. Not today.