What He Was Taught to See

"You'll see soon enough what they really are," said the older guardsman, the night before Antoine's first rotation. "Whatever gentleness they put on for visitors, it's a performance. Don't let it fool you."

Antoine didn't need the warning. He'd grown up watching his own father hand over rents to a local noble family that lived in a comfort his own household would never see across three generations of labor, and he'd carried that particular, well-earned grievance all the way to the Temple's gates, ready to find exactly the kind of entitled arrogance he'd expected his whole life to eventually confront directly.

What he found, that first week, was a man crouched on the floor beside his son, patiently helping the boy with letters, in a voice too quiet for Antoine to make out the words but not too quiet to hear the actual tenderness in it.

"That's not what I expected," Antoine admitted, to no one in particular, the first evening he watched it.

"What did you expect?" "Someone who still thought he was owed all of this. Not—" Antoine gestured vaguely toward the room. "Not a father teaching his son his letters like any father might."

He told himself, over the following days, that this was exactly what his political education should have prepared him for: that a kind father could still have presided over real, systematic injustice, and that Antoine's own family's hardship didn't disappear simply because the man responsible for a whole unjust system turned out to be gentle in a locked room with his children.

He held that distinction firmly for as long as he could manage it. It got harder each week. He watched fear on a child's face that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with being a frightened child in a locked room. He watched a mother's exhausted tenderness that looked, from three feet away, exactly like his own mother's tenderness had looked, in a much poorer house, toward children who'd never once threatened anyone.

"They're still the reason your family went hungry some winters," the older guardsman reminded him, catching the look on Antoine's face one evening.

"I know that."

"Then why do you keep watching them like you're not sure of it anymore?"

Antoine didn't have a clean answer for that, and it troubled him more than a straightforward confrontation with confirmed royal arrogance ever would have. He'd come prepared to guard monsters. He found himself, instead, guarding an ordinary family's ordinary fear, a discovery that offered him no easy way to feel as certain as he had, arriving at those gates a week earlier, about exactly what justice required of him now.