The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 16

Valkin left his bedchamber exactly two months after his wife's death. His sudden emergence, unannounced and unexpected, was a shock to the household staff, to his administrators at the Helg manufactories, and most of all to his son, who had settled comfortably into a frame of mind that Key had come to recognize as, if not happy, then at least temporarily content.

Seffa, whose friendship had always been unwittingly vital to Key, had become something more than a friend since he had cried in her arms. Something stirred inside him, now, perhaps not romantic and certainly not yet sexual, but a new realization had taken the place of his former view of her. Whereas before, Seffa had existed merely as a separate entity, slightly more interesting than the rest, whose gender and life outside their shared sanctum struck Key as entirely irrelevant, now he saw her differently. He saw that she was a girl, and a pretty one, one whose existence outside the walls of their cistern he knew little to nothing about. For the first time, the comfortable silence they had silently agreed upon regarding their private lives seemed like an obstacle.

The truth was, he found himself thinking about her when she wasn't around, at times when doing so was both inconvenient and possibly inappropriate. Only his mother, and then in a more basic, less sparkling way, had ever figured so centrally in Key's internal universe. For Key, the experience was by turns terrifying, frustrating, and fascinating. She was like a personal ghost that followed him through the day, a hallucination that lurked at the corners of his vision and the forefront of his mind.

It was into this prepubescent turmoil that Valkin Helg reared his paternal head. Key would wonder, later, if he had become incautious: might things have turned out differently if he had focused harder on keeping his activities secret?

Suffice it to say that when Valkin Helg emerged from the self-indulgent stupor into which he'd fallen following Marika's death, it was to discover that the gap between his own values and those of his wayward son had widened considerably.

And Valkin Helg was nothing if not tenacious about getting what he wanted.

* * *

On the day that his father invited him to a private dinner, every alarm bell in Key's carefully ordered brain went off at once. The small, trapped part of him that begged to be freed from the structured embrace of his brain screamed that he should run, that they should flee and never come back. You could take Seffa, it said to him, take her with you and leave. Leave home, leave Oridos—go somewhere, anywhere, where Valkin Helg wasn't.

But Key, being Key, was unable to comply. The set of rules that governed him was too strict, too unforgiving. He would comply with his father because his father held rightful authority over him, however much he might wish it otherwise. The games he played with Valkin—the hesitation he showed in embracing his father's life's work—were small ones, he knew. It wasn't in him to cross his father. Particularly now that Mother was dead. Something about his father's seclusion following her death had convinced him that, despite what others may believe, his life was more set in stone now than ever.

Other children he was acquainted with—the children at school with whom he might have been friends had he been a different person—had lost parents, and oftentimes the loss of one parent, particularly a mother, led to a surprising amount of freedom for them. Some boys had fathers who were either too uninterested, too busy, or both to spend more than the odd moment thinking about their sons.

Valkin, though—Valkin made time.

Key spent a couple of awkward hours in his bedroom after school, waiting for the dinner bell. He had no additional lessons with is tutors today, and there wasn't time to meet Seffa in the lab and make it back in time to meet his father. He found, to his complete lack of surprise, that he was not very good at waiting.