The Way Back (Champions of the Crystal Book 4)

Chapter 11.3

Sabrina did try to sleep, mostly because she couldn't think of anything else to do, but it was useless. After hours of tossing restlessly in the huge bed that had never felt like it belonged to her, she got up, went to her study, and turned on her comconsole. She'd had no leisure for research while she was Regent; she'd had people to do it for her. But she knew where to start, connecting her console to the huge Royal Archives housed somewhere else in the vast complex of Palace Royal at Dansestari.

It took her a while to get the hang of the search protocols and figure out the right key words, but in the end she gathered a collection of files she thought would give her an objective overview of the past ninety-two years. She browsed through them, then decided her brain was working too slowly to absorb any meaningful information. So she launched another search, this time using Tassan's name.

He had kept a low profile over the years, she realized as she looked over the results of her search. Mostly he was mentioned in connection with the Citizens Council; he had, for a time, acted as Chair and Royal Liaison after the space accident that wiped out half the original Council, including General Daman nar Zhahghai, who had helped her plan Rayland's funeral. She was sorry she had not been there to pay her respects at his.

Tassan had not kept his leadership position for long, surrendering it after a mere year and a half, probably the earliest he felt he could, she guessed. She wondered if he had longed to retire from the Council altogether. Would he have done so if he'd known she wasn't coming back for such a long time?

The most recent holoimage of him was twenty years old. She had to look at it for a few moments, tracing the picture of him she held in her mind over the lined, hollowed face in the image. She would not have immediately identified him if she had met him in the street, and that disturbed and grieved her so much that she had to switch off the image for a moment, burying her face in her hands.

It doesn't matter. It wasn't his face I fell in love with. His heart, his spirit, they're still there, she told herself. But were they? Who knew what ninety-two years had made him?

She took a deep breath and moved on to another file. This one was a catalog of his best-known works. She knew the earliest ones, remembering with a smile how she had asked Haaron to bring her samples of his work so she could get to know him a little. Would she be able to trace out his life, find out if he had been happy, by looking at the rest of his career?

There were several portraits of her, most of them done immediately after the Regency. Some, she could tell, were based on holos of official occasions; those were mostly in museums or public spaces. But two of them he must have painted from memory, and they were by far the most true: one of her in deep mourning, sitting with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, looking down at them almost as if meditating; the other a brighter scene, standing beside a window with sunshine streaming in, looking thoughtfully, with the hint of a frown, at an official pad. The catalog noted that several other portraits of her were known to exist, but had never been made available for public display. She wondered what those were like, and whether Tassan had hung them on his walls to remember her, or thrown them in a closet to forget her.

Some time after the Regency he had returned to landscapes, always his best work; then a child began to appear more frequently, posing in picturesque gardens or peering curiously into a corner of what otherwise seemed the picture of a deserted room. The catalog told her this was Tassan's adopted son, Farlan. As she watched the boy grow into young adulthood in a series of paintings, she realized he reminded her of someone, so she ran a search on his name.

"Oh..." she breathed, closing her eyes for a moment. His birth name had been Farlan Darice, son of Landra Darice. She'd held the rank of Subcommander when he was born, and died two years later during an expedition to a distant Realm world. She had left him to Tassan's guardianship in her will, and he had officially adopted the boy five years later, after his birth father, a soldier from a Realm world Sabrina had never heard of, met a fate similar to Darice's. There was no evidence that Darice had ever married him, or in fact ever seen him again after their posting together on Lthos. There was a story behind that, Sabrina knew, but it was nowhere in these files. Perhaps, after all, it was none of her business.