3. Mother (II)
In the same way as she was told to give her mother space, Nina was told to be good to her little brother. This was difficult because he never gave her the chance to be good or anything else towards him.
Abel, apparently, didn't talk. He never sought out anybody besides their mother, though he seemed to have started to tolerate Father. He rubbed at the Mark on the back of his hand as though trying to take it off, which nobody besides Nina told him was disrespectful. He didn't even play, except to arrange his toys in very precise formations that nobody else was allowed to touch.
Nina learned this rule one day when Father was gone and she was doing her best to be good. She had been watching Abel set up his little army, his old clay figures in a separate regiment from his nice new wooden ones. Since it was taking so long, she thought she would help him by setting up the horses on one end. Abel saw her, and yelled, and grabbed the horse out of her hand, before pushing her away and knocking down all the figures she had lined up for him.
Junia her nurse – now Abel's, too – ran over to see if Nina was hurt, then scolded Abel for lashing out. "Apologize to your sister, Abel," she said. "Let her put down one of the toys."
Abel pouted for a minute more, but then held out his hand and gave Nina one of the clay figures, a mage with a broken staff that she knew was his least favorite. She put the mage in line, then got up and left the nursery without saying where she was going, because Junia would have stopped her from leaving if she had.
Where she was going was across the castle to her parents' study in the plain corridor behind the great hall, because although she'd been told to let her mother be, she couldn't go to her father eventually for this. She knocked on the large wooden door, heard a "Come in," and with some effort pushed it open.
The big desk in the center of the room was shaped like an L, with one equal-length side facing the door and the other pointing towards it. The sideways part had always been mostly empty when it was only her father's study. Now it had more books and papers on it than her father's half, and her mother sat behind it, looking surprised to see her. "Nina. What brings you here?"
"May I come in?" asked Nina, as polite as possible.
"Of – of course."
Nina walked around the couches at the front of the room and stood next to her mother's desk. "Why doesn't Abel like me?"
Her mother half-smiled. "Between you and me, I'm not always sure he likes me, either."
That wasn't true. "He doesn't talk."
"He'll talk if you give him reason enough. Ask about his figures, or give him something he can answer in a single word."
That may or may not have been true. Nina wanted to say that he'd lashed out at her, but before she'd figured out a way to make it sound like it was worth running to the study for, her mother scooted back her chair. "I'm almost done for the day. Do you want to stay with me a while?" She patted her knee.
After some hesitation, Nina climbed up on her mother's lap, which was strange because she didn't think she ever had before. Her mother scooted the chair back forward a bit. In front of her was a sheet of paper covered with a lot of letters or numbers or both, and an open book with even more. It looked very grown-up.
"Nina, do you read yet?" asked her mother. Nina shook her head. Her mother made a noise with her mouth closed like she was thinking. "Then we'll have to get you a tutor soon. As much as I wish I might, I don't have enough time to be teaching you." She took up her pen again and scratched something at the bottom of a paper.
Something awful occurred to Nina. "Can Abel read?"
Her mother stopped. "I think he can read his own name," said Mother, carefully, "and maybe a few other words. But I've never seen him walking off with a book. So, he'll need tutoring too, won't he?"
Nina nodded.
Mother smiled and turned her face towards Nina's, like Father did when he was about to tell her a secret or tickle her nose. Mother didn't do anything like that, though. "Do you know what your name looks like?" Nina shook her head. "Well, then how about we write it out?"
"All right," said Nina.
"All right," echoed Mother as she swept over a clean sheet of paper from the corner of the desk. Her pen hovered above it. "Er...which should I write?"
Nina thought. Writing was for important, official things. "Lucina," she decided.
Mother nodded. Her hand made big lines across the page, sharp angles and elegant curves, and she spelled it out as she wrote. "L-U-C-I-N-A. It's a bit tricky, but it's pretty, isn't it?"
Nina nodded. She stared down at the lines that made the letters that somehow spelled her given name, and wondered how she would ever commit them to memory. She dragged her finger over the lines, turning the sound over and over in her head. Loo-see-na. Loosey-na. Loooseeenaaaah.
"Can you write 'Nina'?" she asked next.
"I can certainly write 'Nina'." And with that promise that nicknames weren't somehow unwritable, Mother spelled it out below. "N-I-N-A. There."
Her own name was written in all straight lines. Below Lucina's, it looked short and plain.
"See, that one's a bit easier," said Mother.
Outside, the clock went off, and the sound came stuffily through the walls of the room. Nina made an effort to count the chimes and ended up at six.
"Nina, would you give me a few minutes to finish something?" said Mother. "I don't want to forget before your father gets back." She pushed aside Nina's names, then pulled back the paper and book she had been working on before and began writing furiously. The pen jumped back and forth between the middle of the paper and its edges.
Nina stirred, readying herself to hop down; but then Mother started muttering. "I don't know who your father had doing these books..." More scribbling. "So that's where that number came from, but they forgot the tariffs...which are not trivial..." Back to the book. Mother flipped through the pages. "But do they –? Yes, of course they apply here..."
Nina supposed more of the words would make sense when she was older, but for now what she understood was that Mother was upset with some decision of Father's. "Did Father do something wrong?"
Mother answered when she next reached for the inkwell. "Well, somewhere along the line, somebody made a mistake. But I'm fixing it. That's what I'm here to do." Some scribbling later, Mother stopped. Her voice went quieter. "There. I knew it." She tapped her pen on the paper, and Nina watched it stamp little dots of black ink.
"Are you unhappy with him?"
Her mother's hand stopped. "Your father?" Nina nodded. "Over one thing like this? Nina, why would you think that?"
Nina didn't want to repeat everything that she'd heard her siblings saying, about how their mother might leave. "Because you didn't remember him."
Her mother let out a long exhale. "You're right," she said. "No, I didn't. But..." She put down the pen, and wrapped her arms around Nina. "I remember more, bits and pieces, each day. As best as I can tell, your father is the same person I married, just with a few extra years that I'm sorry he had to go through alone." Mother ran a hand through Nina's hair. "Even if he were different, I don't think anything could have changed him enough to make him less of...a good man." She paused. "Are you upset with me for not remembering you?"
Nina started to shake her head, but it turned out as a nod and then a sob and then she started to cry all over her mother's papers.
"Nina –" Her mother shoved all the books and papers down the desk, then with a much gentler motion pulled Nina back against her chest. "Nina. I'm sorry. You know I didn't want to leave you. Nina –"
It wasn't quite the same as being in her father's lap where she could bury her face in his shirt and he would hug her right around her shoulders, but it was close enough. Nina cried until it turned into hiccups and she could open her eyes again.
"I swear," said Mother, "both you and Lucina –"
And that started Nina crying again for no good reason at all. This time, Mother patted her back and didn't say anything until Nina was only sniffling.
"Look at me," Mother murmured, "making all sorts of mistakes." The pats became slow circles on Nina's back. "This just means that you and I are going to have to get to know each other. Your father and siblings are always trying to help me remember this or that, but it mostly serves to make me feel guilty when I can't. So I'm glad there's at least one person here to learn about me on her own." Mother set her chin on Nina's shoulder. Nina looked up, just a bit, and saw her smile. "And I want to learn about you on my own, also. No Lucina or anybody else. All right?"
What Nina wanted was to not cry about Lucina anymore. "All r-right," she said, and steadied herself. "All right."
"Do you know what I read a few days ago?"
Nina pushed herself off her mother's chest. "What?"
"That your name – and I mean 'Nina' – comes from the name of another princess who lived a very long time ago."
Nina had never heard this. "A princess here?"
"Well, here wasn't exactly – yes. She eventually became queen of the country that would become here."
"How long ago?" asked Nina.
"Millennia," said Mother. "It said she helped King Marth."
The Hero-King. Her ancestor. "Oh," said Nina. "I never knew that."
"Would you like me to read you the story I found about her before we go to dinner?" asked Mother. "It isn't very long."
"Yes," said Nina, because that was what Nina liked best when she sat down with Father or her siblings visited, the stories. "I would like that."
The story about the princess named Nina, or something very close to that, who was brave and kind but abdicated (which meant gave up the throne) turned into the story about the emperor who had become a tyrant (which meant a very bad ruler) when his wife still loved somebody else, which turned into the story about the knight who had died at the Hero-King's hands while defending his homeland, which turned into the story of the young prince and princess who were held as ransom (which meant in order to make somebody do something, or else) by a wicked priest who served the dark dragon, and so on, and so on.
It was from her mother's lips that Nina first heard many of the stories of the continent where she had been born, even if she had to ask Father for clarifications (which meant answers to Nina's questions) later, because Mother had a habit of disagreeing with one author or another, or even reading two different versions of the same story and never telling Nina which was more right in the end. But Nina could forgive her, since Mother often said that this was her first time hearing the stories, too. And where Mother didn't have answers, Father usually did, along with bits and stories Mother hadn't found in her books.
Despite Mother saying she didn't have time, it was she who helped Nina sound out the first words she ever read (bits of the chapter titles from A Brief Historie of the Kingdom of Orleans and Her Descendants: "to" and "as" and "land" and, one that Nina was particularly proud of at the time, "port"). It was because of this that Mother would sometimes ask Nina to sit with her when she wrote letters to Morgan or Lucina, and she would let Nina dictate her own page to her siblings, which Nina soon learned to sign with her own name. And it was because of this that, when Lucina wrote how she and Inigo had traveled along the edge of Plegia and noticed how no amount of Ylissean aid had done much to improve its sorry state after the war, Nina was the first person to hear Mother's suggestion that they go deeper into the country to see just how much needed to be done.
End of Part I.
A/N: This was split from chapter 2 late in the game. There is, obviously, a lot going on that Nina doesn't pick up on. Robin is an optimistic sort who adapts to whatever she's given, yet there are going to be wounds from what she thought she'd experienced when she ended up in Plegia. I'm trying to balance those.