NovelChina Chapter 204: Saturday (II)
Chapter 204: Saturday (II)
Lunch was the seasonal dining hall item Liam had been anticipating — some kind of preserved fruit pastry that appeared, according to Liam’s extensive research into the dining hall’s rotation, only during a specific three-week window each autumn and was, in his assessment, worth the wait.
It was good. William ate two and understood the anticipation.
The table was full — the expanded group’s Saturday session had apparently created enough shared momentum that most of them ended up at the same set of tables, which had been pushed together in the specific informal way that dining halls accommodated groups that grew faster than the furniture anticipated.
Mira was talking with Lin about something technical — Lin’s water serpent technique, and whether the "choice" Kai had described as the unlocking mechanism could be approached more systematically. Mira had theories. Lin was listening with the careful attention of someone who’d been thinking about the same question privately and was finding it useful to think about it with someone else.
Marcus had brought up his research interest with Henrik, somewhat tentatively, and Henrik had responded with the specific seriousness that suggested he’d been waiting for someone to bring exactly this kind of question to him.
"Essence theory application research is underappreciated," Henrik said. "Most students assume the only paths are combat or administration. There’s significant academic infrastructure for research-focused cultivation development — it’s just less visible because it’s less dramatic." He looked at Marcus directly. "If you’re serious about it, I can connect you with Professor Winters. Her research focus would align with what you’re describing, and she takes on student research assistants periodically."
Marcus looked like Timothy had looked twenty minutes earlier.
"That would be — yes. Thank you."
William watched this and thought about how much had changed, in small ways, across the table in the past two weeks. Thomas, recovering. Lin, finding language for something she’d experienced. Timothy, discovering a category of contribution he hadn’t known existed. Marcus, getting a door opened toward something he’d been quietly hoping for without expecting it to actually happen.
None of it was about the inquiry, or the Hollow Court, or any of the things that had dominated the past two weeks operationally. It was just — people, building things, in the specific way that people did when given space and attention and the right kind of encouragement.
He thought, again, about tomorrow evening.
He looked at the table — at Liam, currently explaining to Sara why this particular pastry was superior to the academy’s other seasonal offerings with the specific passion he brought to all subjects he cared about, however minor; at Mira and Lin, heads together over Mira’s theory; at Marcus, still slightly stunned by Henrik’s offer; at Seraphina, beside him, eating with the efficient economy that was simply how she ate, present and engaged with the table’s conversation while also, William knew, holding the same awareness of tomorrow that he was holding.
These were the people he would tell.
He didn’t know yet how. But he was beginning to think the how mattered less than he’d been assuming. What mattered was that they’d hear it from him, and that whatever came after — their reactions, their questions, the adjustment that came with learning something significant about someone you cared about — would happen in this room, at this table, with people who had built something real together over the past months.
That was enough to start from.
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In the afternoon, William found himself walking the eastern garden path — the same path Patricia had walked, days ago, though he didn’t know that and wouldn’t have made the connection if he had.
The essence-reactive flowers were doing their slow afternoon cycle, blue toward green toward the warmer tones that the lower autumn sun produced in them. He walked without particular destination, the specific kind of walking that was useful for thinking precisely because it didn’t require navigation.
He was thinking about his father.
Not the network, or the inquiry, or the operational dimensions that had occupied most of his attention for two weeks. The person. Duke Aldric Cross, who had been, for William’s entire childhood, a figure more than a parent — present at formal occasions, absent from the ordinary texture of growing up, a source of expectations that William had spent years failing to meet by standards he’d never fully understood.
’He’s made it very clear,’ William had told Lyanna, months ago, when she’d asked about his family. ’That’s nobility for you.’
He’d said it as if it were simply a fact about how families like his operated — distant fathers, exacting standards, the specific coldness that came with houses that valued accomplishment over connection. He’d accepted it as the texture of his life without examining it much, because examining it hadn’t seemed useful.
Now he was examining it.
If the inquiry’s findings were accurate — and he had no reason to think they weren’t, given Sera Vane’s eight months and his mother’s parallel work and now Isolde’s documentation, three independent investigations converging on the same conclusion — his father had spent at least four years building a criminal network. Had used his own son’s safety as leverage in a kidnapping scheme against his own daughter. Had been, across that entire time, the distant figure William had grown up with, present at formal occasions and absent from everything else, while simultaneously constructing something that had nearly gotten William killed multiple times.
The distance hadn’t been simply coldness, or at least not only that. It had been — what. Calculation? Indifference that ran deeper than William had ever imagined? Or something else entirely — a man so consumed by whatever ambition drove the network that his own family had become, to him, simply another set of pieces to be positioned.
William didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he would ever know, in the sense of understanding it the way he understood most things — through direct conversation, through the kind of honest exchange that he’d built with Kai and Seraphina and was building with this whole expanded circle of people. His father was not someone who offered that kind of access, and after Sunday, his father would be someone facing formal charges, which made the kind of conversation that might have explained any of this even less likely than it had already been.
He thought about what that meant.
It meant he might never know why. He might spend the rest of his life understanding what his father had done without understanding what his father had been thinking, or feeling, or whether there had been any moment across those four years where some other version of events had been possible.
He found, walking the garden path in the autumn afternoon, that he was at peace with that.
Not happy about it. Not resolved in the sense of having processed it fully — he suspected that would take considerably longer than a Saturday afternoon walk, and might never fully resolve at all. But at peace with the specific fact that the why might be permanently unavailable to him, and that this didn’t have to be the central question of his life.
The central questions of his life, he thought, were the ones he’d actually been answering for the past year. Who he trained with. Who he trusted. What he was building, and with whom, and toward what.
His father had built a network across seven entities and four operations, in secret, at the cost of everything that should have mattered more.
William had built — this. The training hall at six in the morning. The dinner table that had grown to include eleven people and counting. Seraphina, beside him in ways that had stopped needing definition because the definition had simply arrived on its own, in a training hall, on a Sunday morning that already felt like it belonged to a different version of his life.
That was the answer to who he was, as much as any answer existed. Not his father’s son, in the sense that mattered. Something else. Something he’d built himself, with help, over a year that had asked more of him than any year of his life before it and had given him, in return, more than he’d known to ask for.
He reached the end of the garden path and turned back toward the main building.
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