His da was Semadran, but only skin deep. He wore his hair long and unbound like a red elf. Even very old and very weak, he shaved daily. Like the rest of Dirva’s siblings, he was a man who made his way through shady dealings. He was a forger. He sat on the left of Dirva’s father; their hands stayed clasped as they ate. They were old men who had loved each other much of their lives, and the love was a thing so deeply woven into both that I could not find a way to understand who either of them were apart from it. Believe me, I tried. I was, as I have said, very young then. It was a relationship I could not yet understand, one that did not make any sense to me. I studied them—fascinated, disgusted, fascinated by my own disgust. Dirva sat at the left of his da, their chairs pulled close and conspiratorial. They spoke Semadran with each other, and his da was the only one of the family to call him Dirva instead of Lorcani. When they were together, Dirva’s face broke open, relief painted across it, comfort etched in every line. He looked young with his da. He looked sweet and full of life. He looked like the boy in the painting. And his da responded to him with an equal fervor, a matched love. Dirva was his favorite: it was unequivocally, unabashedly a fact of the family, and perhaps one that the other members of the family had tried to forget while Dirva was gone.

But Dirva had come back. This old man was dying, the life leaking out of him second by second no matter what Falynn did, and in Nuri’s final days all that seemed to matter to him was Dirva. He was dying, leaving many children behind, but Dirva was the one who had his attention. The pair of them cloistered themselves together, living those missing twenty-five years together in the space of weeks while Dirva’s brothers and sisters looked on.