Her Majesty

[annarti.livejournal.com]

TITLE Her Majesty
AUTHOR Annarti
DISCLAIMER Mine
NOTES The beginning of this has been sitting around since I randomly got the idea back in, idk, April-ish. This being the year of Finishing All The Things, I've now gotten around to finishing it :D Just a little father-son moment from when Nol was about 15. It has been SO LONG since I last wrote Mithé, you guys, but his voice is still good and strong.

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King Mithé sat at his breakfast, chewing without tasting the melon in his mouth as he slowly rapped each finger in time against the table top. He shook his head with a heavy sigh, breaking his eye contact with the other end of the table and swallowing his mouthful of melon.

‘Can I help?’ His son’s voice, followed by a clearing of the throat as he tried to hide the teenager’s crack in his question.

Mithé looked up as Nolryn sat a few chairs down from him. ‘Let’s see if you can,’ he allowed. ‘I’m meeting with the head of the Ni-Rindena mine today.’

Nolryn frowned as his breakfast tray was set in front of him. It was his thoughtful frown, the one he always gave when he knew he should know what Mithé was talking about but was unwilling to admit it, so he tried to look thoughtful until he could figure out what he was supposed to know.

Mithé pretended not to notice, but instead fed the boy snippets of information to see how much he needed to figure it out. ‘He says the Sissillyan crown is willing to pay almost a quarter on top of what we are paying him.’

The first signs of boredom melted some of the frown on Nolryn’s brow. Mithé had to sympathise in part, but financial problems were always the most common issues he was faced with. Whether he liked it or not, Nolryn would need to know how to keep both parties amenable.

‘But it’s Raykinian iron,’ the young prince argued. Mithé allowed himself a small smile to hear his son so quickly identify the topic of discussion. ‘He can’t sell it to Kazin.’

Mithé shrugged. ‘Why not?’ he countered. ‘If they’re willing to pay him for it, why shouldn’t he? There’s no law to prevent him from doing so.’

Nolryn looked up, mouth open and eyebrows raised in shock. ‘Why not?’ he asked, his voice cracking again as it rose an octave. ‘They’ll make swords from it! Everyone knows our iron is the best.’

Mithé nodded his agreement. ‘Just as we know their wood is the best, so we buy it from them to make our bows.’

‘Oh.’ Nolryn hung his head and began slowly picking at his breakfast. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

The king shrugged and sat back in his chair. ‘Why don’t you sit in on the meeting and find out?’

The boy grinned through a mouthful of melon, nodding his acceptance.

Mithé grinned back at him and looked out through the open back wall of the breakfast room, over the balcony to the desert beyond. The red sand was drained to grey in the dull light of the pre-dawn, and the sky noticeably lighter than it had been when he had first come in for breakfast.

‘Majesty?’

‘Mm?’

For a long moment there was silence, until Mithé shifted his gaze from the window. It wasn’t often that Nolryn hesitated before asking a question, usually he would just blurt it out without thinking of the answer for himself. The king wondered if perhaps his son was learning, if he was thinking if maybe he already knew the answer without having to ask it.

‘What was my mother like?’

That question grabbed Mithé’s full attention. ‘She was a beautiful woman,’ he answered, though he somehow sensed from his son’s intensity that his normal perfunctory answers wouldn’t satisfy him this time. ‘She would have made a strong queen, if given the chance, and she would have loved you very much.’ If given the chance. Spoken to the boy who had essentially taken away that chance, Mithé felt the pang of guilt on his behalf. Fifteen years and still, though he rationally knew it otherwise, wanted desperately to feel otherwise, still some small, guilty part of him wanted to blame Nolryn for her death.

Nolryn shook his head, either ignoring his father’s heavy guilt or simply not registering it.

‘No, I mean what was she really like.’ He frowned as he tried to put his thoughts into words. ‘Something Nimay said. Well, not said, but you know. How she wishes she had someone to ask about what her parents were like. She said I was stupid for having someone I could ask, but never really asking. I mean, people who never my mother her seem to know her better than I do, and they’re all very open about telling me what a horrible queen she was, but you never say anything. You always brush it off, like it’s, I don’t know, like I’ve done something wrong.’

The king sighed and steeped his fingers under his chin. ‘No, Nolryn, you’ve never done anything wrong in asking.’

‘Then what—’

‘I’ve done wrong in brushing you off,’ Mithé interrupted. ‘You have every right to ask; she was your mother, after all. You’re a lot like her, in many ways.’

Nolryn squirmed uncertainly in his chair, and his expression turned guarded. ‘What ways, exactly?’

Mithé smiled and sat back, folding his hands over his stomach. ‘Passion for your own cause, for one thing. She was uncompromising.’ He smiled fondly at a memory. ‘She would get as passionate about the non-political as she would in any office meeting. On one occasion, she had one of the visiting Sirronan diplomats on her knees in the throne room, begging to meet just one item on her queen’s petition. The rumour was that she resigned after that, though I never learned the truth of it.’

The young prince grinned at that story. ‘That wouldn’t have gone over well with Queen… Whoever it was at the time.’ He cringed, certain he should know this.

Mithé shook his head with a rueful smile. ‘Queen Aisha, and no, it didn’t. It turned into two Own missions, and an argument could be made it started a third, too. There were quite a few more Own missions under her rule than there are now. She was… passionate.’

‘Stubborn, you mean,’ Nolryn said with a crooked smile. ‘Everyone says you could never get a word in, talking to her. She wouldn’t listen, and would just shut the door and refuse to meet with you if you had a different opinion from hers.’

Mithé took a deep breath to quell what might have been a snappy, defensive response. What Nolryn saw as a joke now was a common rumour Mithé had been trying to dispel for nearly sixteen years. ‘That was because of one person, the minister for roads and river transport at the time. He openly provoked her, because he knew he would rile a response out of her. He would have preferred that she step down, rather than help her to step up.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘And react she did. Not only did she close her doors to him, but to the rest of his ministry and any who sided with him.’

Nolryn was looking confused. ‘Why didn’t you talk to her? Surely if she was going to listen to anyone, it would have been you.’

‘Maybe she would have, in time,’ the king agreed. ‘She was two months from giving birth to you at the time, though. I had hoped it was just a—a woman’s thing, her “baby brain” getting the better of her. She was easily provoked in those months, and the ministers jumped on her for it. I’d hoped—’ He cut off with a heavy breath. He didn’t need to lay anything more on his son than he’d asked for. ‘Anyway. As those months were the last memories anyone had of her, those were the ones that stuck.’

‘Oh,’ the boy said simply. He was silent for a moment as he digested this. It seemed these days that he was more and more reading into what Mithé told him, searching for the meaning behind his words. Much as he had loved her, Mithé knew there were many lessons to be learned from his wife’s conduct in those last months of her life. Whatever her reasons, the reigning monarch wasn’t allowed to behave so petulantly.

‘What about the other one?’ the boy asked then. ‘About how she used the Own as bodyguards. Did she really do that?’

Mithé groaned at that one. ‘True,’ he lamented. ‘I can neither refute nor defend that one. I tried to convince her otherwise, but they were her Own to do with what she wished. She didn’t want them getting “soft” while they were home, she said, as though acting as her escort to the markets was any comparison to a mission.’ He shook his head and looked at his son with a grimaced smile. ‘You really have been told all the bad ones, haven’t you?’

‘So,’ he said with a shrug, ‘tell me the good ones.’

‘Well.’ He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. ‘The best was always away from public view, sadly.’ And was always the hardest to vocalise, he thought. He’d had nobody to talk openly with of his wife’s good points, and so had kept them all hidden inside. If ever he thought on them for too long, he could feel himself slipping towards that same withdrawn depression he had felt for years after her death. It had never faded, only been hidden deep under the surface where only he could see it. The good memories were always the most painful, because there would never be any more of them.

He tipped his head forward again, trying to keep a hold on his emotions as he opened his mouth.

Nolryn had frozen in the act of biting into a piece of fruit. He stared at his father with a look of mild horror that broke Mithé’s melancholy with a burst of laughter.

‘Get your filthy teenage mind out of the nira pen, Nolryn!’ he laughed.

Nolryn was blushing furiously. ‘Well, what was I supposed to think?’ he whined, voice cracking and shooting up several octaves.

Mithé cocked his eyebrows. ‘That I would have better sense than that, surely! What I meant to say was how much she cared.’

‘Oh,’ the prince said again, dropping his head in shame.

The king smiled and shifted his chair over, motioning for Nolryn to come and sit beside him.

The boy picked up his chair and moved around to Mithé’s side of the table. Mithé shifted himself a little closer so he could wrap an arm around his son’s shoulders.

‘In public, in meetings and audiences and such, she let that care turn too much into stubborn anger. It was obvious to her that so many of her ministers were only in it for their own jobs and not the people they ostensibly served, and it frustrated her that there were none jumping up to replace them, so she got angry.’

‘You’ve changed that now, though, haven’t you?’ Nolryn asked.

Mithé shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘A little. It’s been hard work, but it has changed a little. My dream it to leave you with a cabinet you can trust, because a monarch is nothing without the people to support them. In public, Alurié was frustrated and nerve-taught, but she cared. She always voiced her fears to me, how she was letting the kingdom run to waste, how everyone hated her and nobody respected her. She was scared of running Raykin to war with every decision she made, scared of the decisions she knew were right being overturned unless she made herself clear.’

Mithé patted his son’s arm. ‘In this, she was very like you. She cared for Raykin, but she just didn’t know how to physically do it. She worried too much over little problems—probably because she didn’t trust anyone enough to delegate to them—but then the bigger ones crept up on her without her knowing or being told until it was too late. She dove into problems that couldn’t be fixed, as you do, but rather than listen to the reasons why, she would just blithely dive in and demand that everyone follow her.’

Nolryn shuffled beside him. ‘Is that why you’re scared for me?’

The king shook his head. ‘Maybe a little, but no, mostly that’s why I have hope for you. She was thirty when she died but still hadn’t learnt. You’re still a boy, and I’d say already further progressed than she was when she died. You certainly have a greater sense of responsibility than she did. While you care, there will always be hope for you.’