By the morning of Aiza’s party, he felt as flat and run over as the street his mother’s ground car growled over on its way home. His mother seemed to sense it and asked only a couple of questions about his night.

“Curfew breaking is a, city thing.” She said looking out the window as the Night Plains crawled up the Turn-ward horizon. “There was no, night, in the dregs. Or no day, really. No curfew to break.”

The ride wasn’t long. “Do you think?” He asked hesitantly as they turned onto their tenement’s street. She turned to him and he forced himself to go on. “Do you think, father, would let me… go out… on a date?”

His mother smiled, not the dazzling thing Aiza displayed throughout the night whenever he, or anyone else, amused her, but a weak watery thing that struggled to touch her eyes. “I think it wouldn’t hurt to ask.” She replied.

Marroo’s father was waiting for them when they got home. Marroo’s breakfast was on a plate in front of his chair, and his father had his usual cup of tea in a mug in front of him while he waited.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” The grating of his father’s voice made it sound like a rebuke.

Marroo wanted nothing so much in that moment as to go to bed with the curious terror and hope of Aiza’s dancing lessons, and her suggestions to think on them. Instead, he dragged out his chair and sat to eat the rice and eggs dished out for him.

“He’ll be tired.” Marroo’s mother said in her quiet voice as she followed him into the kitchen. “Maybe…”

His father’s face barely moved as he flicked his eyes at her. “Quiet.” He grated.

She fell silent and turned away to hang up the cape she’d worn to pick up Marroo.

“If I’d neglected my training when I was tired, you would never have gotten out of the dark.” Darro told her back. “I would have died somewhere in the pipes and you’d still be in the Three Floors.” Silver eyes found Marroo and Marroo scooped rice into his mouth to keep from having to answer. “You’d still be a whore.” His father said as he turned back to Marroo’s mother, “Only cheaper, twenty years later, or dead.”

Marroo’s mother turned very suddenly and put her hands on her son’s shoulders. “Marroo has something to ask you.” She said and looked down at Marroo. “Don’t you.”

Marroo stared at his food while he panicked inside while his father took a single sip from his tea.

“What is it?” His father’s voice sounded like an ancient machine starting up again for the first time, and unhappy about it. “Spit it out.” He growled when Marroo still didn’t say anything.

Marroo didn’t want to say anything. Not like this, not without thinking more about it or while his father was in this kind of mood. “I’d like…, he said quietly, so quietly that only his father’s cultivation would make the word’s comprehensible, “I’d like…”

His father leaned forward. “You’re a man aren’t you?” He asked.

Marroo met his Father’s eyes then looked away again. He couldn’t say anything for a long moment, and when he did it came from him in a rush. “I want to go out on a date.” He told his father.

Darro leaned back in his chair and sipped from his tea. “Why?” He finally asked.

Marroo opened his mouth but didn’t know what to say.

His mother did, for what little good it did her.

“Darro.”

“Don’t Darro me.” His father growled. “It will interfere with his training. Until he touches the icon, nothing should be allowed to distract him.”

“You gave him the evening.” His mother said.

“And why was that?” Darro growled. He glared at her and she looked away before turning her back on the conversation entirely.

“I have already been soft.” His father growled. “You softened me. I won’t make that mistake again.”

She answered him with silence, a silence thicker and heavier than any Marroo could remember. She put her hands on the cabinet for some pans and slowed until she seemed frozen in place, more statue than human being, more stone than living flesh.

“Eat.” Marroo’s father growled, as though unaware of the silence who’d suddenly joined them at the table. He pointed at Marroo’s bowl. “When you’ve touched the icon, you can do as you please, until then, you train.” He glared at his wife’s back as Marroo shoveled eggs into his mouth that tasted like ash.

“A woman wouldn’t make you happy anyways.” His father growled. “Just soft.”

---

Marroo tried to enjoy the adult tea the morning after his mother’s funeral, to feel like an adult as he held it and sat cross legged across the exercise mat from his father. He held the cup and let the warmth seep into bloodless hands while steam warmed his face, but the tea was harsh and bitter, as though it were the flavor of grief, tainted by the bit of grease that got into it from the frying bowl it steeped in. It tasted nothing like the tea his mother used to make for him. It left a sour metallic flavor in the back of Marro’s throat, and a knot in his belly.

“We have neglected the greater part of your training for too long.” Marroo’s father told him as he set his cup aside.

Marroo closed his eyes and kept his face in the steam from his own cup.

“I was near your age when I first touched the icon. It is time you did the same, and now, there is nothing to come between you and you’re training.”

Marroo felt his father’s spirit begin to spin in the air between them, like bits of broken glass masquerading as gusts of wind that slid in and out of reality with his father’s breath.

“You’ll touch the icon in a week.” His father said, “Then you will be safe.”

Marroo glared at his father over his mug of steaming tea and remembered his father standing stone faced over his mother’s reliquary.

Never. He thought.

Never.

It took two years. Two years of watching his father kill, of sitting in the training room while his father spun the spiritual blades around him. Two years of fighting his father, and the men his father threw him against in the wasteland, and the Icon the whispered to him whenever he held a blade, even just to cut his food.

The sword cuts.

He was almost sixteen when he touched it, when the Icon drove itself into his spirit while he sat on the mat and gave in to the anger he’d nursed since his mother died. Two years of battle, that, in the end, he lost.

His father treated him like an adult when it was done. As though he’d reached his majority three years before his nineteenth birthday and no longer had any responsibilities but those he chose to keep.

“You should practice with the icon.” Darro told him during the breathing exercises he still expected his son to perform with him in the mornings, for all that they were no longer followed by sparring or instruction, at least not as regularly as before.

“The icon gives you powers, but simply because you can touch a sword doesn’t mean you know how to wield it.”

Marroo retreated to his room to read instead, and his father said nothing. He remained quiet on the subject even when Marroo began to bring the books to the breakfast table to pour over them while he drank his father’s bitter tea.

There were no more tests. No more hurdles. No more lessons or challenges. No more orders. Just, silence, a silence far emptier than the heavy quiet that once accompanied his mother, one waiting to be filled. He looked up from each book he finished and found… nothing… waiting for him, for as far as he could see into the future.

It was... freeing... at first.

Then he began to pace.

It was his birthday that finally reminded him of Aiza. He sat on the roof of the tenement building, alone, re-reading a book he’d read over and over and over again since he rescued it from the trash while his birthday formation spun lazily through the umber haze high up in the sky.

The book was boring now, predictable in all of its points, even if the characters were still as familiar as old friends. He put it down and watched the small paired squares that were his shape spin lazily, way up above him at a distance he couldn’t even bring himself to imagine. His father had given him his own sword to mark the occasion, one he said Marroo would leave his mark on as an adept, one that was fit for such a mark, but he’d tucked it under his bed with no intention of ever pulling it out again.

He watched the shapes and wished his mother were there, anyone, really, who wasn’t his father. Even three years later he still felt the ache of missing her in moments like these. He remembered her in the things she’d left him, the books he’d rescued, and the ones they’d never had a chance to share.

He needed a new book.

That was the thought that led his mind to Aiza, to the books they’d shared, and the one she’d brought that he’d never read before. Their kiss, and later on, their dancing. Three and a half years separated their dance from the moment he sent his familiar with a message asking if she would like to meet again, as friends, if not… more.

The familiar returned an hour later without delivering the message and he sent it to the city-database to see if she’d moved. She’d done more than move.

When the little glowing figure of his familiar returned it unrolled in front of him like a scroll to show him the place in the public records where she’d changed her name. Not her first name, but her last name, the surname that would have carried her father’s name or, in this case, the name of her husband after she was married.

He sat on the roof for a long time after making the realization and debated changing his note, or not even sending it at all, letting their connection fade as it already had with time until they were nothing but strangers, just as they were when she chased him through the garden all those years before.

In the end he sent the note as it was.

Maybe they could still be friends.