The Balance (First Draft | Discontinued)

Chapter 14 (Ari)

Before now, Ari hadn't known that there were different types of silence. Normally, when he and his mother ate breakfast together, there was a comfortable sort of quietude between them. She read the war reports and picked at her smoked fish while he traced shapes on the smooth oaken tabletop with his finger— not the loud, boisterous conversations he'd seen between some of the lords and their children, but it was something of theirs.

What was between them now was not peaceful. She still held the war reports in her hand, but the papers were crinkled at the edge from the occasional tightening of her fist. He was not tracing anything; his hands gripped the edges of his chair tightly. Every now and then, their eyes would meet and they would stare at each other for a moment, waiting for the other to speak first.

As uncomfortable as it was, Ari preferred the silence to talking. The way her fist clenched, the way she watched him... did she know? Was she going to ask him what he had done? The connection, the feeling...

You can never do this again, she'd told him, but he had. Not only that, but he'd done it to her. And he didn't know how to stop it from happening again because he didn't know what he had even done—

Ari took one shuddering breath and looked down at the napkin in his lap. It was nothing special, just thick, white linen, but he stared at it as if it held the secret of life itself. He couldn't bear the weight of his mother's gaze on him, couldn't bear the question that had to be running through her mind: What have you done?

"Skatten min?"

Ari's head shot up. "Y-yes?"

"Are you all right?"

"I-I'm fine." Does she know?

She nodded, and there was silence between them for a few moments before she said, "I didn't mean to upset you. You know that, don't you?"

"I guess?"

"There are just some things that children don't need to know— you understand."

He didn't. Not about what children did and did not need to know, but about why she was being so... cordial. But then, she had been fairly pleasant to Aleksander right until she threatened him. Was she simply being nice to him in order to extract a confession? He acknowledged her comment with the slightest dip of his head, hoping that the conversation would end there.

"What about you?" His mother's bright eyes were focused on him like a hunting falcon's. "Do you have anything you want to say?"

He swallowed hard. She knew, she had to; why else would she ask him? He could feign ignorance or he could admit to everything here and now. Both options sounded bad to him— if he chose the former, his mother might get frustrated enough to do something beyond giving him heated lectures, but if he chose the latter, then there would be no question of whether she knew or not.

"No," he whispered.

"That's not quite the answer I was looking for," she said, and his heart seized up. "You and I both said things that we regret, didn't we?"

"I..." He didn't regret a single word, but there was no way that he would tell her that. So he said nothing at all.

Silence built between them again, and it seemed that with each passing minute, his mother's eyebrow rose higher and higher.