To
my son,
If
you are reading this letter, then I am dead.
I
expect to die, if not today, then soon. I expect that Valentine will kill me.
For all his talk of loving me, for all his desire for a right-hand man, he knows
that I have doubts. And he is a man who cannot abide doubt.
I
do not know how you will be brought up. I do not know what they will tell you
about me. I do not even know who will give you this letter. I entrust it to
Amatis, but I cannot see what the future holds. All I know is that this is my
chance to give you an accounting of a man you may well hate.
There
are three things you must know about me. The first is that I have been a
coward. Throughout my life I have made the wrong decisions, because they were
easy, because they were self-serving, because I was afraid.
At
first I believed in Valentine’s cause. I turned from my family and to the
Circle because I fancied myself better than Downworlders and the Clave and my
suffocating parents. My anger against them was a tool Valentine bent to his
will as he bent and changed so many of us. When he drove Lucian away I did not
question it but gladly took his place as my own. When he demanded I leave
Amatis, the woman I love, and marry Celine, a girl I did not know, I did as he
asked, to my everlasting shame.
I
cannot imagine what you might be thinking now, knowing that the girl I speak of
was your mother. The second thing you must know is this: Do not blame Celine
for any of this, whatever you do. It was not her fault, but mine. Your mother
was an innocent from a family that brutalized her: she wanted only kindness, to
feel safe and loved. And though my heart had been given already, I loved her,
in my fashion, just as in my heart, I was faithful to Amatis: Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.
I wonder if you love Latin as I do, and poetry. I wonder who has taught you.
The
third and hardest thing you must know is that I was prepared to hate you. The
son of myself and my child-bride I barely knew, you seemed to be the
culmination of all the wrong decisions I had made, all the small compromises
that led to my dissolution. Yet as you grow inside my mind, as you grew in the
world, a blameless innocent, I began to realize that I did not hate you. It is
the nature of parents to see their own image in their children, and it was
myself I hated, not you.
For
there is only one thing I want from you, my son—one thing from you, and of you.
I want you to be a better man than I was. Let no one else tell you who you are
or should be. Love where you wish to. Believe as you wish to. Take freedom as
your right.
I
don’t ask that you save the world, my boy, my child, the only child I will ever
have. I ask only that you be happy.
Stephen
