Whimsy didn’t want to talk to him, and proved harder to corner than he expected.
There was so much harvest stuff to do. Some families would have dismissed this woman’s work and its importance, but not the Rather family. What Missus Chastity Rather needed to turn an acre’s worth of vegetables into a cellar’s worth of pickling, Chastity got: Dalliance, Whimsy, Cadence himself. The big man carried endless crate after endless crate of expensive sand-glass jars, in empty and out full, the rough wood smoothing under the grip of iron-hard hands—another horrifying display of Rather might.
And despite being in the same room, Whimsy wouldn’t look at him. He shouldn’t, he knew, have said anything even resembling I told you so.
I told you he wasn't our father. It was stupid. Topaz had words on the topic: ‘shortsighted’, ‘cruel’, ‘infantile’, ‘disappointed’. Dalliance couldn’t defend his actions in any way. No wonder she wouldn’t talk to him. He took her father away, in the person of her blood relative, and then, through his actions, he took her father away again by showing his affection was hollow. He had also failed to save her afterward.
He didn’t know if Whimsy blamed him for not saving her. It had taken a conversation with Earnest to wear him down on that point. “You have no way to know if she blames you,” his friend had insisted. “You’re telling yourself she blames you because you blame you. You’re assuming she knows what you know, but she doesn’t. And even if she did, who’s to say who’s at fault?” His friend had dramatically thumped himself on the chest and cried, “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one in the whole world who thinks clearly! And sometimes you fool me long enough for me to think there are two of us, and then you do this.”
Dalliance had pointed out Mr. Best’s existence, Morality, and Charity, and Earnest told him to piss off; he was working up to a point. “Don’t be stupid.”
And still, Dalliance didn’t know what to do about his sister until, quite at random, Effluvia waved him over. The third Games were tomorrow, followed by the third Hunt. He would either have to put everything into Grit or risk everything for his future. He finally put together what Topaz had asked him to consider. His choices at any point were what he wanted in the future or what he must do to protect what he had now. He had been doing a lot of protecting recently.
If he allowed himself to be pushed into one more point—just one—he risked overflow, hastening his Tier-Up whether he wanted it or not. It had to go into Wit or Charm. It would almost do better in Charm, to offset yet more Grit in the future, but that too felt too much like letting himself fall into his father’s trap. Spend a point on the low-hanging fruit, get some Charm, and then the cost for Grit would be lower. He might be able to afford the Grit, and then he would be one step closer to being a monster like his father. No, he wouldn’t do it. Wit, or bust. His father wouldn’t hurt his sister, because she’d be gone before he could. If she would just talk to him.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What do girls want?” he asked Charity. He didn’t expect her face to color or for her to stammer that she was sure she didn’t know what he was talking about.
He had been pretty confident Charity would have some idea, being a girl. When Effluvia met up with him outside of the classroom later, looking terribly amused, he began to put together the terrifying implications of the mistimed utterance.
“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I don’t think it’s very strange for a brother to miss his younger sister.”
This gave him the confidence he needed to tell her why he missed his younger sister, and after she told him what an ass he’d been, she told him that his sister was, if not related to his father, at the very least related to Dalliance by weight of the evidence that she, too, was an ass. A fine pair of asses they were. And doubtless their father was an ass. She was giggling. He managed to interrupt what would doubtless have been a fine comic effort by repeatedly, if gently, kicking her in the shin until she collapsed, laughing.
The two had been growing closer since the second hunt. She’d explained the idea of a life-debt to him, and he had explained that she had saved him from goblins, and they both left off staring at one another in wonderment that the other could be so dense.
“In a word,” she told him eventually, “apologize.”
“I did,” he claimed.
“She didn’t believe you, so you mustn’t have done it properly. Tell me what you said.” And, after she had had another good laugh, she explained to him that right now, his sister felt certain of her closeness with her mother and despised her mother, and possibly did not feel certain of her closeness with her brother, or of his paternity, or of hers.
“‘You are my sister and I love you’ would go a long way,” she explained. "Also, 'I was an ass',"
He walked her home. This necessitated nearly an hour of extra walking, which he put to good use on the way back. He had a lot to think about. As it turned out, despite his last expenditure on Wit, he discovered he wasn’t thinking any more quickly, which annoyed him; he was simply thinking more deeply.
There was a wealth of information behind every turn of phrase if you thought about it, and now he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He would get distracted by simple words, like "archery" or "fencing," which hadn’t previously been much of a problem. Behind each of those words was a deep well of human knowledge that he hadn’t thought to be curious about before, and every time he discovered one, he felt the sudden, urgent, and inexorable urge to get all that curiosity out of the way immediately.
Nevertheless, once he was done pondering Effluvia’s newfound and deeply interesting obsession with asses, he dedicated himself to the prospect of a proper apology to Whimsy.
Interestingly, on another story, the author of this one helped me formalize my description of proper apologies for another book... I'd forgotten to say 'thank you' to the person you're apologizing to for hearing you out.
Unexpected favorites among the side characters?
