*
She’d been back almost a month when Laban summoned her to his suite. She held her belly as she walked up the stairs, hoping to feel the child kicking again, always heartened that the baby could be active even while she was bored and housebound. She knocked lightly at the door and then let herself in without waiting for a reply.
His rooms here were smaller than the suite he’d had in Almont, but he’d laid out the same furniture in a similar arrangement. His practice dummy leaned in the corner behind the sofa, though the room was too cramped for him to make use of it. She walked in to find him sitting with his feet resting on the table, and he motioned for her to join him.
“Tea?” he asked, and she nodded. “Come, sit. How’s the baby?”
“Still kicking, so I think he’s okay.” She kept her hand on her belly. “He’ll be glad to be out of here.”
“And you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Me too. I’m getting fed up with this.”
“When do you expect the birth?”
“Around three months, by Daniel’s calculations. I keep wishing it to come sooner.”
He nodded, and they sipped their tea in silence.
“Why did you want to see me?” she asked at last.
“I understand,” he said softly, “that you’re thinking of keeping your child out of school.”
Eleanor nodded.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“He can live here. The Empire won’t find him – or if they do find us, we’ve got bigger problems than hiding one child.”
“But what kind of life can you offer him? What if this isn’t where his talents lie? I know the system isn’t perfect–”
“Perfect?” she interrupted. “It’s hopeless.”
“I know it’s not perfect,” he said. “Why do you think the council have always had our own measures in place? But the reasoning at the beginning was sound. No parents can guarantee a life which suits their child, or even know where their strengths lie. Only assessment do that, and the Assessors are good at their testing.”
“Don’t go saying things like that in the rebel districts.”
“You can’t threaten me,” he said, his face hardening. “I know you had a bad experience, but your assignment was designed to bring you here.”
“I’m not just talking about assignments, school was awful the whole time. You know I hated it.”
“You were very unlucky.”
“It doesn’t give me much faith in the system. What was my assignment before you got them to change it, anyway?”
“I didn’t ask.”
She looked at him, searching his face for any hint that he might be lying.
“Really,” he said. “I didn’t ask, it wasn’t important.”
“Well, I’m not sure it would have been what I deserved, even without your intervention. The Assessors never understood me.”
There was a moment’s silence, then he said, “That was your mother’s doing.”
“My mother?” Eleanor didn’t even know who had given birth to her. How could the unknown woman have wrecked her childhood?
“Didn’t you wonder why your teachers never steered you towards the areas you were best at? They weren’t incompetent. Everyone saw where your skills pointed, but she wanted to protect you.”
Eleanor took several deep, troubled breaths. Was her own mother really the reason she’d had such a difficult time? Had the woman somehow managed to infiltrate the staff and affect the whole path of her schooling? How had she even known which child was hers?
“Then who is my mother?” Eleanor asked.
His reply was so quiet that she couldn’t make it out.
“What?”
“Isabelle,” he repeated, louder this time.
She looked hard at him, suddenly skeptical. Surely it was against the rules for a headmistress to enrol her own daughter in her own school. And besides, the whole school knew that Isabelle had never had children; it was an open secret that she was barren. “How can that be? How could you know?”
“Because I’m your father.”
The silence which followed felt like an eternity. Eleanor studied Laban’s features with renewed vigour, assessing the plausibility of his declaration, trying in her mind to cause some combination of his face with that of her former headmistress to result in a likeness of herself. She’d never really paid much attention to his appearance before. He had black hair and his skin was a few shades darker than her own, but then she definitely shared Isabelle’s colourings and complexion. He was short, as she was, though that meant little. But his ears were small like hers, and his nose turned slightly upwards the way her own had done before it had been broken for her. Deciding that she probably believed him, she wondered how she was supposed to feel.
The Empire had outlawed family units three generations earlier, and no records of paternity were even kept, so she’d never given much thought to the mystery people responsible for her existence. Yet now she was surprised to realise that she felt abandoned. If her parents had always known who she was then they should have told her – even if that meant breaking the law.
“Tell me everything,” she said, trying not to betray her feelings with her voice.
He nodded, and began to recount how he’d met Isabelle when they were both teenagers just out of school, and how he’d offered to give up on his dream of finding the academy in order to stay with her. But she had told him that he had to go, so he’d gone, and only later found out that he had a daughter. Isabelle had enrolled the girl like any other anonymous child in her school, and had refused to introduce her to Laban however many times he’d asked.
So Eleanor had grown up under her mother’s watchful eye, and had been discouraged from anything that might set her to follow in her father’s footsteps – particularly after another girl from Mersioc had failed in such spectacularly gruesome fashion in an attempt to find the academy.
“So you thought you’d come and train me yourself?”
“My contacts at the Assessors’ College indicated that your skills were in the right areas – you were taking after me whether you liked it or not. I thought you might benefit from a little encouragement.”
She shook her head, trying to take it all in. “Why are you telling me this now?” It was too much, too sudden, at a time when her body and her emotions were already in turmoil.
“I should have thought that would be obvious.” His gaze strayed to her belly.
“So you can claim your new grandson?”
“Claim?” He laughed. “I’m not laying any sort of claim, to you or to him. I’m just hoping you’ll listen to what I have to say.”
“Say it, then.” Better to get it out of the way quickly, if there was to be more. If this great revelation had just been a prelude, she knew she couldn’t leave before he’d finished saying his piece.
“I don’t know how to explain what it’s like, having a child. But the one thing I have a duty to tell you is that loving someone the way only a parent can love their child – that opens you up to a world of pain beyond your imagination. Every wound you’ve suffered so far would seem a pin-prick in comparison.”
She didn’t know what to say. It sounded so much like what Daniel had said about their relationship, back at the beginning. And of course what he’d said had been right, so far as it went: there had been times when worry had weakened her, and times when he’d hurt her more than she should have allowed. But that was only half the story. Eventually she looked up.
“Isn’t it worth it, though?” she asked.
A smile twisted the corner of his lips. “Oh, it’s worth every second,” he said. “But now you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”