The unspoken is said

The windows were tightly closed against the cold, and the low fire ventured only the occasional crackle. In the silence of the room, Paul could hear Catan coming long before she opened the door.

He heard her shuffling and stumbling as she made her way through the house, awkward in part due to the unfamiliar burden of her rapidly growing baby, but also because she was sneaking and stopping at every door to make certain all inhabitants were where they were supposed to be.

Ordinarily Paul did not mind – it was only fair considering that he and the other elves could gather such information merely by lying in bed and listening – but tonight it annoyed him. Unlike the elves, who could have few secrets from one another, Cat seemed to lack in both discretion and indulgence.

“Why is your sister still sleeping in the maid’s room?” she asked immediately upon waddling in.

“Does it matter?” he muttered.

Cat sniffed. “I simply wonder why she is, after making such a stink about being forced to move into it a few weeks ago.”

Paul pushed himself up with one arm to sit, straight and square as elves sat in their halls, scorning the cushioned back of the couch.

“She’ll move back into her old room tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” Cat said. “I shall like to have my maid close enough to call again.”

She turned her face away and began to shrug her shoulders out of the gown that the distant maid had already unlaced for her. Paul might have left matters at that. However, this was not Paul’s way.

“She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in it right after Eithne left,” he explained.

Cat grumbled, “She doesn’t have fleas,” and paused to snort at her own joke.

“They were friends, Cat, and my sister does not have enough of those to be able to spare even one. She cried to see Eithne go. It was quite affecting.”

Cat stopped with her arm halfway out of her dress, considering this.

But Paul could not resist adding, “You would have known it if you had bothered to come down to say goodbye to them.”

Cat stuffed her arm back into her gown and spun around to glare at him. “I had to take a nap! You’ve no idea how exhausting it is to be carrying a heavy baby around night and day.”

Paul looked away to the fire and clenched his jaw in a sudden, startling surge of anger. At first he could not even explain it, but when he looked up and saw the round shadow of the firelight on his wife’s belly, he understood.

“You cannot know how sorry I am to hear you using our child as an excuse.”

“What?” she gasped.

She threw wide her arms and glanced wildly around for something she could fling at him, but finding nothing, she only began scrambling out of her gown like a man stripping before a market-​​day fistfight down at the forge.

Paul stood and watched her, straight and tall, an example of calm such as his father had made of himself when Paul and his little sister had been reduced to hair-​​pulling and shin-​​kicking.

He was not feeling at all calm, but his father had recently revealed to him that neither had he been. It was reassuring to know that small children were so easily fooled. Unfortunately, large wives were not.

“I’m certain it was very affecting!” she hissed. “But I didn’t need to go downstairs to know that! Eithne has always been a splendid actress. Drama everywhere she goes!”

“It was not like that,” he sighed. “They were simply two girls saying goodbye to one another, never minding the audience…”

“Ach, that’s fine!” She laughed shrilly. “So she can say goodbye when she likes. A pity she didn’t like to say goodbye to my father when she left, and tell him he needn’t have wasted his life looking for her ungrateful, selfish little person!”

This hard, unforgiving Cat was one he scarcely knew. Out of desperation, he allowed himself to soften and to plead. “Mina…”

“How fine for her that she could say goodbye to her friend! For never shall I have the chance to say goodbye to my father!” She hesitated for a moment, balancing unsteadily on her tiptoes to make herself seem taller. Then she took a deep breath and cried, “Whom she killed!”

The unspoken, rankling thing was finally out, and it hung like a curtain of cobwebs between them. Paul did not recognize his wife behind it.

“Catan, she did not kill your father.”

“Did she not?”

“No! She did not take a – a knife to him! She only ran away with a man – and such a man! We don’t even know what wicked sort of man he might be.”

His words came back to him, jangling against his own unspoken, rankling fears. He and his father were not certain that Eithne’s husband was a man at all.

“Ach, is that all, then?” Cat scoffed.

“That’s all, Mina,” he pleaded. “It was a foolish, forgivable thing – she’s so young…”

Cat laughed cruelly. “You’ll not be siding with the moth when the worm’s in your own corn! I shall remember you said it when the sister of you runs away with my cousin Malcolm!”

“Cat!”

“And I shall like to witness your precious ‘forgiveness’ when your father goes after her and gets himself killed!”

“Catan!”

He heard his sister behind the wall, stirring slightly between her sheets, and he imagined her wrapping her thin body still more tightly around the bundle of blankets she lately held in her arms and between her legs when she slept. He hoped she was sleeping.

His father was not yet abed, but at the last words he had gone utterly silent, as if practicing for his own disappearance. Paul’s leaping flames of fury were abruptly extinguished by a chilling fear.

Cat snorted victoriously at him, but her eyes appeared more panicked than defiant, and she turned brusquely away to hide them. She pulled off her shift with shaking arms and tossed the rumpled cloth into the basket.

Only then did Paul’s father return to his task of the moment before: grinding the morrow’s pigments in his little bowl as he liked to do before retiring. With his meditative patience, he would often grind them to such excessive fineness that they poured more like liquid than like powder. When he decided they were done, it must have been for reasons other than painting and known only to him.

That steady, circling whisper of stone over velvety stone had been as familiar to Paul’s babyhood as the sound of his mother’s heartbeat. It had been as familiar to his boyhood as his little sister’s open-​​lipped breathing in the bed beside his; and when he was older, no matter how late he came in, he would often find his father still sitting up, still grinding his ochres and his umbers until they were less powder than air.

Paul had always imagined that his father’s calm in the face of his tantrums was more enraging than calming. Now that he was grown and married and so close to being a father himself, he was beginning to see that his father too was a passionate elf in his quiet way. If he had hidden his own strong emotions from his son, it had been to help Paul bear his.

Often in the middle of a tantrum that his father had been enduring with infuriating patience, a tear-​​blinded little Paul would suddenly feel himself being lifted up from the floor – not to be spanked, but to be crushed against his father’s chest and held tightly through his first struggles, and then held just as tightly as he began to sob in something like relief. Even then he was rarely granted what he had been demanding with his shrieks, but somehow it always felt like he was getting what he wanted in the end.

He had not yet determined how his father had known precisely when to take him up and hold him: he had assumed some mysterious, meditative sense like that which told him when his pigments were fine enough.

But before the round shadows of the firelight on Cat’s stooped back; at the sight of her trembling elbows and the hoarse sound of sobs she was trying to contain, he thought he knew it: it was the point at which the fury had outgrown the little boy who had spawned it. Cat was frightened by the immensity of her anger and of what it made her think and say; it was not merely uncontrollable, but in control of her.

At first she struggled with him, resisted him, as he had known she would. Then she began to sob against him, as he had known she would.

“She lost her father, too, Mina,” he murmured into her hair.

“Don’t be telling me you’re feeling sorry for her!” she blubbered.

“I feel sorry for all of you. But you’ve done nothing wrong. She has to live without her father, and live with the blame.”

He hesitated then, out of love for his wife, but there was another rankling thing that needed to be said.

“And I know how it feels to be cast out by one’s own family.”

She shoved herself away from him angrily, but the face she turned aside was white with horror. “It was not the same!” she whispered.

“No,” he agreed. “What I did was far worse.”

She moaned like a wounded animal as the enormity of what she had done was at last revealed to her. Exceptionally for him, Paul did not insist or explain.

“It was not the same,” she whispered again.

“No,” he said, “it won’t be the same this time.”

She hung her head so low her hair slipped off her shoulders and fell over her face. Paul rarely saw his wife humble, but he recognized her clearly through that dark veil.

He put his arm around her and pulled her closer. She did not struggle.

“Now,” he said gently, “let’s put your nightgown on you – if it still fits – and go to bed. I know how tired you must be.”

“Aye,” she sighed, docile as a child, though she made no move for her nightgown. Paul did not insist.

The silence of the room bloomed out into the silence of the house. He heard his sister attempt to turn over, struggle weakly against the tangle of blankets in her bed, and fall back defeated. He heard his father scraping out his bowl and putting it away.