Post by Zen on Feb 17, 2022 16:30:11 GMT -5
She had been there when Master Clintock announced Mavros’s new Lord. She had known who it would be even before that, thanks to her involvement with overseeing the election process this turn. Clintock had allowed her to do so when she told him of her fervent wish to be part of the last election Mavros would ever hold, the only election for a Lord Holder that Pern had ever known. An earnest desire to be part of that history and the trust she earned from him over the turns had moved the man to let her assist. Had things not been so stacked against her father, she probably could have tampered enough to allow his win this time, but there was just no way. In any conversation about the election, her father was a non issue. There were a few, of course, who liked how things were, but there were many and more that preferred change, that wanted a chance to improve their standard of living, and that would be so much easier to do with a proper Lord Holder. Everyone knew it.
There was no question that her father was going to lose his seat and if she had tampered so that he won everyone would know she had done it. She would lose everyone’s trust, and her father would play innocent, claim he’d had no knowledge, that she’d acted on her own. He’d play the good father, she was sure, begging the Mavrosi to forgive her, that she had only done it out of love for him, but the damage would have been done. Vasheera was very aware of how that course of action would have played out, and it would not have ended well for her. Nor would it have done what her father wanted as Clintock would probably automatically disqualify him and have to hold a new election in which he was not even in the running to get a proper result, but then everyone might start to doubt the integrity of that election as well, and whoever won would have a tenuous start as Lord Holder at best. Which was perhaps her father’s real plan. Perhaps he would have worked to destabilize things under their new Lord’s rule in the hopes people would try to go back to the way things were, put him back in charge. No, there was no way she was going to help her father make things worse at Mavros in some hope to benefit himself.
So she had been standing with Master Clintock and the couple other harpers at Mavros who had helped to oversee the election when Asirikai became their first Lord Holder, but it had not taken long after she had parted from her peers for her father to find her. She could very well have caused a scene when he’d grabbed her arm to pull her away to privacy, but she was sure Haliya and her little siblings would pay for it if she did. So she followed him in silence, trying to hide the wince as his fingers dug into her arm, sure his vice grip would leave a bruise. People were celebrating the election, celebrating having a Lord Holder, a new start, a way forward. They didn’t pay much attention to the two of them. He shoved her into a secluded corner away from the crowds and hissed, “I let you study under that fool, get close to him, earn his trust, for what? Did I not warn you what would happen if you failed, girl?”
Vasheera rubbed at her arm, “No one would have believed it because no one wanted you!” She glared defiantly at him, “There was no point.”
“There WAS a point!” He took a step closer and she flinched, but surprisingly he didn’t raise a hand, instead the blow came from his lips, snarled with a vehement hatred as she’d never heard from him before, “Never have I doubted more that you’re really mine.”
With that he spun around and stalked away and it took her a long moment to realize just what he’d meant. Her father had never told her about her mother. She had heard the tragic tales he had often spun before Haliya of his beloved wife, taken from him too soon, his trials trying to provide for their daughter, the only thing he had left of her. But when she’d asked him to tell her about her mother once, he’d just snapped at her that he had loved her and now she was dead, and that was all there was to it. But the way he’d said he loved her made her doubt if that was true. He’d seemed so… angry about it. Now she didn’t know if anything he’d ever spun in his tales had the slightest modicum of truth to them. She died all sorts of different ways in her father’s tales and she didn’t even know which one was true. She had been three when the woman had died and had only one vague memory of her, singing her to sleep. She couldn’t remember the words of the song, but she remembered thinking her mother had the prettiest voice in the whole world. And maybe that was an underlying reason why she had been drawn to be a harper, music made her feel just a little closer to her mother.
Vashemin doubted that she was his? This was the first she was hearing of it. Was he just saying it to hurt her? But the unrestrained hatred in his voice was incredibly genuine. Just what sort of person had her mother been, exactly? It dawned on her that if she went through with her plan, if she poisoned her father, she would never know anything about her mother. There was no one else she could ask. But if she didn’t, if she let her father live, in his fury he would hurt the family she had now, and likely she’d never get any information out of him about her mother anyway. She closed her eyes tightly. Her mother, whoever she had been, was gone. If her father truly doubted… maybe she didn’t want to know the truth about who she was. Maybe… maybe she hadn’t been a very good person, despite her beautiful voice. Maybe that was why her father had been so angry when he’d said he loved her. Maybe she was why he treated Haliya so poorly. It didn’t matter. Haliya was here, alive, and so were her siblings. They were the ones that needed her. Haliya had been her mother, had chosen to be her mother, and Vasheera owed her for that.
You have a right to defend what is yours. She repeated the captain’s words, as she had been doing so often when her resolve began to waver, clinging to it as a mantra so that she wouldn’t back down, so she would be able to do what was necessary to protect her family when the time came. And that time was very near.
