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Sometimes Gavinor can’t remember. Sometimes he remembers too much.
Some memories creep like cremlings into his bed as he sleeps. Those nights, he dreams of bad things. His heart thuds so loudly he wakes up. Can people hear it too?
The nice memories are more slippery. He can feel them, warm in his chest. They wash away with the highstorm.
He remembers big hallways lit up with spheres and dinners with his mama. Even if she didn’t hold him like his nursemaid did, she’d take his hand or comb his hair. She smelled sweet, like the women’s food he wasn’t supposed to eat.
He remembers his papa, too little and too often. Papa with dark hair and green eyes. Papa walking away in shiny Shardplate.
Papa, cold and pale in a blood-soaked uniform.
Once upon a time, Gavinor’s mama and papa were alive. The nights he dreams of them, he wakes up with blurry eyes.
…
“He’s so quiet.”
“There’s something odd about him.”
Gavinor can hear people talking about him as he walks down the hall with his nursemaid. She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t say anything back, and he’s not sure if that’s good or bad. A few moments later, they are alone again.
“Gavinor,” she says, her voice loud as the storms, “are you ready to see your grandmother?”
He is ready and not ready. That doesn’t make sense. You can’t be and not be something. And yet that’s how he feels, with his mouth spitless and his palms sweaty. His sword’s hilt is slipping from his hand.
He thinks he’s met his gram before. Mama took him to the Shattered Plains to visit Papa, though he was little and he barely remembers. Even now, those memories are almost gone, leaving behind the bad things in their place.
“Gavinor?”
They’ve stopped walking. Gavinor feels dizzy just standing still. When he looks up, he sees his nursemaid’s face. She’s looking at him, and her mouth is pulled down like one of the enemies’ bows. He sees the bowstring loosen, feels the arrows pierce his skin with prickles and pain.
“Gavinor,” she says.
His mouth doesn’t work. They stand in the empty hallway. Slowly he feels a bit better. His stomach is still funny, but the prickle feeling is gone. Finally, he says, “I’m…ready.” It sounds like he’s telling stories, like it isn’t something he wants to be true.
He tries again. “I’m ready.”
It’s better. His nursemaid smiles. “I know she’s excited to see you! That’s all her Brightness has been talking about this morning.”
They start walking again. He feels wobbly.
Excited? His mama wasn’t happy to see him in the end. Having someone besides his nursemaid be excited about him is nice but scary.
It’s another two feelings that aren’t supposed to be together. Maybe that’s what growing up is: learning to live with the is and isn’t, the are and are not. Holding both close, even though it hurts.
His nursemaid doesn’t wait for him to say something. She keeps talking until they reach a massive door. She knocks until a voice from inside says, “Come in.”
…
The palace was big. So, so big, with ceilings that he thought was the sky until he saw the real sky outside.
As he grew older, he realized that the world had to be so much bigger. Somewhere out there, his papa fought Parshendi. That’s what everyone said, though he didn’t know what a Parshendi was.
Mama told him that his papa was a good man. She made a face as she said the words, which was weird. Mama didn’t hold Gavinor like she used to, but he had stared at her face so often it was one of the few things he knew as truth. That face wasn’t happy.
It made him wonder. Was Papa good? He thought so. He hoped so.
Gavinor remembers seeing his nursemaid kill a cremling. She stepped on it, and it made a crunching sound. Its shell was broken and sticky.
That night in bed, he felt sick. The cremling was alive that morning, just like him, and now it was dead.
He tried to not feel that way. He wasn’t supposed to think like that. Men were supposed to go to war, and going to war meant killing.
He hoped Parshendi weren’t like cremlings. Maybe they were big, and scary, with giant teeth. Teeth could bite. Would they try to kill him?
Maybe then he wouldn’t feel bad, knowing he was trying to kill them back.
…
Gavinor feels lost. The man who helped him escape the palace, who convinced him to come with him to the tower, is standing in his room. He’s tall like Gavinor remembers.
When the man introduces him to his friend Dru, all Gavinor can see is dirt and mud and the cold light of spren. His papa lies in blood, and the city is nothing but rocks.
Is he back there? Is this a dream?
The man’s smile is nicer than in his nightmares. He tries to trust it, even as his body shakes.
…
Gavinor feels like he’s growing backwards.
He has a sword, like the one he promised he’d have when he got big enough to fight like his papa. He knows what a Parshendi is. He’s seen the bigness of the world.
None of that feels like growing up, though. A grown-up wouldn’t feel smaller than he was as a kid. A grown-up wouldn’t be so afraid. Even now, as he stands beside Gram, his heart is pounding.
Gram isn’t touching him. He feels bad for that. She had crouched down, reaching out her arms for a hug, and when she’d tried, he’d pulled away. Why? He didn’t know. Suddenly, he smelled something sweet, and he thought of his mama, and then he thought Gram was her, reaching for him with dead eyes.
Gram’s eyes are the color of the fearspren wiggling around him.
“I won’t hurt you.” Her voice is wobbly, like his thoughts. He steps closer and allows her to hug him. He wants to pull away, but he doesn’t.
Nice, but scary.
…
The servants talked about his family. There were so many stories going around the palace, and he tried to remember them all. Mama used to tell him all sorts of stories, but lately she’d been strange. She didn’t seem to see him, even if he stood beside her. She held him, but she was cold.
He’d see his family some day when he was a grown-up like his papa, going to war for the kingdom. He eventually found out what a Parshendi was, and when he heard about the way they’d killed his papa’s papa, he found he didn’t feel so bad about them dying.
His papa was king. A king was supposed to be in the palace, but it was also important for men to go to war. He kind of wished he had a normal papa, because then he wouldn’t hope for him to return so much. He just had to get older, and then they could meet out on the Shattered Plains.
…
Gram is warm. She is so different from his mama, even though he thought she was like her at first. He’d thought her eyes were the color of fearspren, but now he just thinks they’re pretty.
Gram looks like his Aunt Jasnah, who he met once at the tower. His aunt is like his papa, except she’s a queen and not a king. Thinking about his papa makes him sad, but there’s another feeling there too.
Anger.
The feeling feels dark inside him. He doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t like his papa being dead more.
When he got to the tower, everything was scary. It was dark, even when there was light. He should be used to the dark, given how his room in the palace was filled with shadows. But even if it were lighter outside, he couldn’t seem to see things right. Their shapes were blurs. He could see a person, but that person would become a monster if he didn’t look hard enough.
He could never look hard enough.
He carries his sword with him, just in case.
…
“Gav?” says the man in the hallway. Gavinor isn’t sure who it is at first, although the man seems familiar.
The man crouches down and doesn’t step closer. He holds out a hand, like the way Gavinor would to the stray cremlings in the palace, the ones he was trying to make friends with. Gavinor’s relieved. The hand doesn’t hit, doesn’t become something else. It’s just a hand.
“Gav, I’m Adolin. Your father was my cousin.” Gavinor notices how the man’s voice goes funny on the word father, and he realizes that Adolin must be sad like him.
He might be angry too. His fist squeezes around his sword’s hilt.
Gavinor steps closer, and Adolin smiles. It’s a nice smile. His hair is yellow, like his mama’s eyes. It doesn’t scare him like he thought it would. Adolin feels like Gram, warm as hearthfire.
“I like your sword!” Adolin says.
The sword is always with Gavinor. At first, it was because he was scared. Now, all he can think of is the red of his papa’s uniform and the black of the dark feeling inside him. “Thank you,” he replies.
“Do you like swords?”
Gavinor nods, and Adolin looks at him before slowly holding his hand out to the side. Then he asks, “Have you seen a Shardblade before?”
Gavinor suddenly feels trapped. All warmth disappears as he falls into the thoughts he sees at night. He thinks about the blue sword piercing the spren that surrounded him—no, was it a sword? He can’t remember.
He remembers it was a spear that killed his papa.
“Gav.”
“Gav!”
It takes a moment to recognize Adolin’s voice.
“Can I hug you?”
Gavinor blinks but can’t see clearly. He can only see that Adolin is closer, and that his hand isn’t out any more. When he nods, Adolin steps forward and gives him a hug nearly as nice as Gram’s.
…
One memory is always clear. Gavinor holds it tightly so he’ll never forget.
He was on the Shattered Plains. His mama had taken them there, along with his nursemaid and other servants. The trip was a little scary, but he was excited. His heart thumped like the clack-clack of the wagon they rode in, and he sneezed at the dust kicked up by the wheels.
They were in a tent, huge to Gavinor but smaller than the palace. It was blue, and there were soldiers running around. They looked like Gavinor’s favorite toy.
“Little Gav,” his papa said in wonder. He looked just like Gavinor. “No, not so little anymore.”
Gavinor stood taller.
“You’ll be a soldier before you know it, helping me with the fighting.” Papa patted Gavinor’s head. “I know you’ll protect me.”
I’m ready, I will be there, I can help you, Gavinor wanted to say. He had so many big thoughts, too many for his small mouth. So he spoke the word he could. “Yes.”
It wasn’t enough. “Yes!” he said again, swinging his arms.
The smile Papa gave him was just for him.