The first in a sequence of ficlets set waaay post-Sunrise. Nasuada's son, breaking and learning.
Disclaimer: Really, not mine.
(Also this is v. likely to change soon as I'm not entirely happy with it. thoughts?)
Legacy (Pt. One):
Tor is fifteen when he figures out that the King of Surda's not his real dad. To say that he loses it a bit would be an understatement of draconic proportions.
It goes like this ('nth verse, same as the first)--his mother loved someone not his father (whoever that stranger is, who shares his blood—he's not Tor's dad. That will never not be Orrin) and when he died she was pregnant. But by then the war was ended and then she married the King of her people's greatest ally, for safety and for allegiance, and to rule her people.
Maybe they even did sort of love each other, if not with that soul-rending love that destroyed his birth-father, but with a comfortable comradery—Selena is beautiful and bright and shining, the best of all of them; the people love her when she is born, three years after Tor.
There is, however, always something, something wrong in Nasuada's eyes, and three days after Tor's fifteenth birthday he sneaks into his mother's second study and reads the love-letters.
They are thin white parchment, good-quality, and dotted with the signs of travel. They crackle under his touch. They read:
My dearest Lady Nasuada,
Are you well? How is the baby?
And then there is chatter, some of it idle and some about the state of Surdan crops and left-over war troops and then, right before his father's familiar scrawled signature-- I'm sorry, Nasuada. I know you loved him.
Tor blinks twice, shuffles the papers back away where they had been, with no trace of his being there; goes out and gets drunk. He has a hangover the next morning, but the pain (betrayal) in his heart is worse. He drowns his sorrows (and his soul) in all the vices of youth—alcohol and sex and drugs and things he doesn't quite remember; though he always comes home sober (or appearing such); he doesn't want to worry his father. Even if there is lingering resentment simmering towards his mother, still, he doesn't let it slip that he knows her secret; he loves his dad, after all.
Selena looks at him with twelve-year eyes, guileless as ever—they're Orrin's blue, when all's said and done, and the jealousy in his stomach churns—she asks him why his breath smells funny. He stops coming home; writes brief notes and sends them home with his guards.
His mother knows why he's gone; when he drops in--to reassure them that he's alive and they don't have to send out the national guard—he waits until after Selena's asleep, though. Nasuada's eyes are weary and she says, tiredly, looking frail and almost small, "What do you want me to say?"
Tor doesn't know; that's not something he really considered. He lets his hand linger on the doorknob. "What was his name?"