A Tale of Crown and Country

Reila

Reila and Castin set out early the next morning. They had enough supplies to reasonably last them to Ilane and theoretically last them to Aldira. Wearing her newest pair of boots and toting the least threadbare satchel in the house, Reila was in a good mood. She'd never felt like she had a purpose in life until now. She realized that before this day she hadn't been striving for anything, hadn't been fighting for anything. And that was no way to live. She had something to risk and something to gain from this experience, and it made her heart beat just a little bit faster to think of that.

    It was a bright day and the clouds passed by in waves, sometimes blocking the sun altogether, plunging the world into a shiver, but mostly just providing some scenery to the blue background of the sky.

    Reila and Castin talked a little, but being in each others proximity most of the time already, they found they ran out of interesting subject rather quickly. After a few frustrating moments of silence, Reila found something for them to do. She suggested a game to pass the time.

    Castin was surprised at her suggestion. She could see why, having never really been the one to run out of things to think of in her own head. Besides, he was always the more excitable one. But she felt a little guilty at his having followed her, despite the fact that he had insisted he come, a fact he had repeated several times over since their initial talk of the journey in the clearing.

    Reila described things she saw in the distance, and Castin guessed what they were. It didn't take long for the game to grow boring. Again Reila searched for something to do. She felt rather uncomfortable in the thin silence that hung between them.

    "Why do you want to find your parents?" Castin asked suddenly. The way he said it wasn't really a question as it was a curiosity.

    It surprised her, and she was silent for a moment as she thought of an answer. "I don't know," she said simply.

    "That's a lie."

    She didn't deny it, but neither did she elaborate.

    "Rei," he warned.

    "Doesn't everybody want to know where they came from?" she asked defensively.

    "Not when they're scared of what they might find."

    Reila didn't have an answer. They both knew he could read through her excuses.

    "Why is this so important to you?" he asked, trying to prompt her into answering.

    She answered with a question of her own: "Is there ever really only one answer? I mean–can we ever pin down a single reason for anything we do?"

    "You're thinking again."

    "Yes, Cas," she said, exasperated. "That's what I do."

    "I don't think that's true."

    "Well, you're entitled to your own opinion."

    "Rei, I know you. I know there's more to it than you'd care to admit. The logical thing to do would be to accept the fact, stay home with your real family–the one who chose you–and move past it. But that never crossed that cross-wired brain of yours, did it? You mistranslated feeling as thinking. You feel connected to this unknown past, and you need answers."

    He couldn't have known how right he was.

    "I can't explain it," she said quietly. Despite the warm air and bright sky she felt as though she were covered in a blanket of fog. "I just have this... this gut feeling... I've never had that before. I–I just have this overwhelming need to know why–to know who they were. My parents said the woman who gave me to them was desperate, but she wasn't my mother."

    Castin smiled; it was that kind of inwards smile that gets under your skin, the one where they know something and you don't, and they're keeping it in for their own enjoyment.

    "What?" she demanded a little harshly. His quirky smile held secrets of its own.

    "That's your heart guiding the way." He tapped his temple, "Not your head."

    Reila almost spoke, almost tried to disprove him, but she knew he was right. He was much better at these sort of things than she was. Silence stepped between them as Castin ran out of things to say and Reila returned to the maze in her mind; she had been stumbling through it ever since hearing the story of her adoption. It was like the answers she needed where accessible only through a haze of smoke and across a wide plain: tantalizing and completely inaccessible. She paused to think. She wanted to say something, but the words failed to come they way they always did: leaping and bounding over one another in the desperate attempt to be voiced and heard. "Who gives their child to someone else just to be given away?" she wondered aloud. "I can't help thinking she was in danger."

    "Or you were in danger," Castin added.

    She hadn't thought of that. "Why would I have been in danger?"

    "Well that all depends on who your parents were, doesn't it?"

    "I guess so," Reila admitted, dejected.

    "All answers lie in Aldira."

    "So they do," she agreed.