“Mahmen, what are you doing?” Okay, obvious on one level, but his mother was the chatelaine. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her do housework or laundry or anything of the sort. One had doggen for those things.

Madalina looked up at him, her faded blue eyes tired, her smile more effort than honest joy. “These were my father’s. We found them when we were going through the boxes that had been brought over from the old house’s attic.”

The “old house” was the one they had lived in for almost a century in Caldwell.

“You could get your maid to do that for you.” He came over and kissed her soft cheek. “She would love to help you.”

“She said as much, yes.” After she put her hand on his face, his mother went back to what she was doing, folding the linen square again, picking up the can of starch, misting over the kerchief. “But this is something I must do.”

“May I sit?” he asked, nodding at the chair beside the mirror.

“Oh, of course, where are my manners.” The iron went down and she started to get off the stool. “And we must get you something to-”

He held up his hand. “No, Mahmen, I’ve just eaten.”

She bowed to him and rearranged herself on her perch. “I am grateful for this audience, as I know the busy nature of your-”

“I’m your son. How can you think I wouldn’t come to you?”

The pressed kerchief was placed on top of its orderly brethren, and the last one was taken from the basket.

The iron exhaled steam as she smoothed its hot underbelly over the white square. As she moved slowly, he looked into the mirror. Her shoulder blades were prominent under the silk robe, her spine showing clearly at the back of her neck.

When he refocused on her face, he saw a tear drop from her eye onto the kerchief.

Oh…dearest Virgin Scribe, he thought. I’m not ready.

Rehv plugged his cane into the floor and came over to kneel before her. Turning the stool toward him, he removed the iron from her hand and put it aside, ready to take her to Havers’s, prepared to pay for whatever medicine would buy her more time.

“Mahmen, what ails you?” He took one of her father’s pressed handkerchiefs and dabbed under her eyes. “Speak unto your born son the weight of your heart.”

The tears were without end, and he caught them one by one. She was lovely even in her age and her crying, a fallen Chosen who had lived a hard life and nonetheless remained full of grace.

When she finally spoke, her voice was thin. “I am dying.” She shook her head before he could speak. “No, let us be truthful with each other. My end has arrived.”

We’ll see about that, Rehv thought to himself.

“My father”-she touched the handkerchief Rehv had dried her tears with-“my father…it is odd that I think of him daily and nightly now, but I do. He was the Primale long ago, and he loved his children. His greatest joy was his blood, and though we were many, he had relationships with us all. These handkerchiefs? They were made out of his robes. Verily, the industry of sewing was of favor to me, and he knew this and he gave unto me some of his robes.”

She reached over with a bony hand and smoothed the stack she’d ironed. “When I left the Other Side, he made me take a few of them. I was in love with a Brother and certain my life would be fulfilled only if I were with him. Of course, then…”

Yeah, it was the then part of her days that had caused her such pain: Then she was raped by a symphath and fell pregnant with Rehvenge and was forced to give birth to a half-breed monstrosity that somehow she had taken to her breast and loved as any son would have wanted to be loved. And all the while as she was imprisoned by the symphath king, the Brother she’d loved had searched for her-only to die in the process of getting her back.

And those tragedies hadn’t been the end of it.

“After I had been…returned, my father called me unto his deathbed,” she continued. “Of all the Chosen, of all his mates and his children, he’d wanted to see me. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t bear…I was not the daughter he knew.” Her eyes met Rehv’s, a deep pleading in them. “I didn’t want him to know of me at all. I was befouled.”

Man, he knew that feeling, but his mahmen didn’t need the burden of that. She had no clue about the kind of shit he was dealing with, and she would never know, because it was self-evident that the main reason he was whoring himself out was so she wouldn’t endure the torture of having her son deported.

“When I refused the summons, the Directrix came unto me and said he was suffering. That he wouldn’t go unto the Fade until I came to him. That he would stay on the painful brink of death for an eternity unless I relieved him. The following evening, I went with a heavy heart.” Now his mother’s stare grew fierce. “Upon my arrival at the Primale temple, he wanted to hold me, but I couldn’t…let him. I was a stranger with a beloved face, that was all, and I tried to speak of polite and distant things. It was then that he said something which afore now I could not fully understand. He said, ‘The heavy soul will not pass though the body is failing.’ He was imprisoned by what was unresolved with me. He felt as though he had failed in his role. That if he had kept me on the Other Side, my destiny would have been kinder than what had transpired after I left.”

Rehv’s throat got tight, a sudden, horrible suspicion parking in his brain’s front lot.

His mother’s voice was weak but forthright. “I approached the bed, and he reached for my hand, and I held his palm within mine own. I told him then that I loved my born son and that I was to be mated to a male of the glymera and that all was not lost. My father searched my face for the truth in the words I spoke, and when he was satisfied with what he saw, he closed his eyes…and drifted away. I knew that if I hadn’t come…” She took a deep breath. “Verily, I cannot leave this earth the way things are.”

Rehv shook his head. “Everyone’s fine, Mahmen. Bella and her young are well and safe. I’m-”

“Stop it.” His mother reached up and grabbed onto his chin, the way she had when he’d been very young and prone to causing trouble. “I know what you did. I know you killed my hellren, Rempoon.”

Rehv weighed whether it was better to keep up the lie, but given his mother’s expression, the truth was out, and nothing he could say would dissuade her from it.

“How,” he said. “How did you find out?”

“Who else would have? Who else could have?” As she released her hold and stroked his cheek, he yearned to feel the warm touch. “Do not forget, I saw this face of yours each time my hellren lost his temper. My son, my strong, powerful son. Look at you.”

The honest, loving pride she had for him was something he’d never understood, given the circumstances of his conception.

“I also know,” she whispered, “that you killed your birth father. Twenty-five years ago.”

Now, that really got his attention. “You were not supposed to know. Any of this. Who told you about it?”

She took her hand from his face and pointed over to her makeup table, to a crystal bowl that he’d always assumed was for her manicures. “Old habits of a Chosen scribe, they die hard. I saw it in the water. Right after it happened.”

“And you kept it all to yourself,” he said with wonder.

“And could not any longer. Which was why I brought you here.”

That horrible feeling resurged, the result of his being trapped between what his mother was going to ask him to do and his strong conviction that his sister wasn’t going to benefit from knowing all her family’s dirty, evil secrets. Bella had stayed protected from this nastiness all her life, and there was no reason to do a full disclosure now, especially if their mother was dying.

Which Madalina wasn’t, he reminded himself.

“Mahmen-”

“Your sister must never be told.”

Rehv stiffened, praying he’d heard her right. “Excuse me?”