“Mama,” I ask, as soon as I step foot in the house, “is my father any good at speculation?”
It is late at night by the time I return, so she is mending socks in the sitting room. “Well, hello to you too,” she says with a bemused smile. “How was your trip?”
“Bought something. It goes in the safe and stays there,” I explain. Setting my suitcase on the floor, I dig around until I find it—the heavy leather pouch containing a fist-sized oblate spheroid of solid metal, approximately six pounds in weight. My mother frowns as she examines it.
“You bought…a lead ball.”
“It’s an investment. But yes.”
“You traveled across the sea to Belsie Port to buy a lead ball. For how much?”
I inhale, ready for the lecture. “Four hundred obols.”
“Eloise Viola Rossach!”
“Mother! Relax, I know what I’m doing—”
“Do you? Do you really? You sold your father’s books, his only gifts to you, to buy a hunk of metal? For four hundred obols?!”
“Listen to me. In a couple of years, the value of this metal will soar like nothing the world has ever seen. I have seen it, Mama, I know it will happen because it has happened already—”
“I don’t know about that,” Mama leaves the elysium on the coffee table and crosses her arms sternly. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it now ,” I retort. “Trust me, I can’t stand the ugly thing.”
“Sell it back, then.”
“Give it time. We’ll both start liking it when I sell it off for a thousandfold of its value, move out of this slum and into a mansion that would put the royal palace to shame, make that worthless prince regret ever turning his back on us—”
“ ELOISE!” She rises to her feet. “You will NOT speak of your father that way!”
I am stunned. After having told Mama about my past life, does she not despise him as much as I do?
“What did I say?” I ask. “That’s what he did, he turned his back on us—”
“Your father made more sacrifices than you could ever know. He gave you an education, a future. Those are worth so much more than money. If I didn’t know better, Ellie, I would suspect that you made this whole thing up just to sell his gifts—”
“I didn’t!”
“—and that you don’t believe me at all, you never did, you’re just mocking me!” She sinks to her feet, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “Me, your own mother! Who has been nothing but honest with you all these years, who told you the truth about your father! And you won’t even believe me!”
“I do believe you, Mama, about him being a prince—but he can be a prince and a shitty father at the same time, why can’t you understand that?”
“Because it’s not true! He loved me! He loved us!”
I am speechless. My mother is truly beyond reason. She knows Prince Edgar is the man who will send her to the executioner’s axe. But, deep down, I am ashamed that I did not see this coming. Throughout my life, my mother never spoke harshly of Edgar, no matter what. She only explained his absence defensively—that his family forced him to live far away, that he had important work to do that did not allow him to visit, and that it was too dangerous for him to leave the palace. I gradually grew to believe that these excuses were mere inventions of a deeply-ingrained delusion. But even after she has learned what kind of man he is, she will still not accept that he abandoned us.
My temper is rising. If I don’t back away now, I will say something I will regret tomorrow. Snatching the chunk of elysium, I storm up to my room. Mama calls out to me, but I do not respond.
“What a fool am I,” I murmur to myself, closing the door and slumping down with my back to it. “How could I think that anything would be different in this life…”
This is the mother I grew up with. This is what I was so keen to escape as soon as I turned eighteen, half-hoping I would never see her again. All things considered, the two of us do not fight often. But when we do, it is always explosive, leaving a sour taste in our mouths for days, if not weeks. And to date, it has been almost exclusively about my father. In all other matters she is quite rational, a strict pragmatist like myself, so we never argue about caring for the house or paying the bills. Only in the topic of my father do all my mother’s usual no-nonsense, practical sensibilities fly out the window. She becomes like that petulant child, suddenly told that she cannot have dessert. And I hate it.
What could possibly make her believe that Prince Edgar still loves us? He doesn’t even know who I am. On my execution day, he did not recognize my face or my name, only showing some flicker of recollection when I told him the family name, Rossach. “Eloise” means nothing to him. It’s not that I care. I don’t. I could live a long and happy life without knowing my father, and in my past life, I nearly did—Master Odric was all the paternal guidance I needed, and I hardly thought at all about my biological father in the seven years I was traveling abroad. Had it not been for my summons back to Saol Eile, I might have forgotten him entirely…
Then I pause. I frown. Why was I summoned back to Saol Eile? Somehow, that question has never once occurred to me. Mama and I were both charged with treason, but I do not know what evidence was brought to support such a charge. This evidence, whatever it was, must have been discussed and determined before we entered the throne room, possibly even before we were arrested. So what was it? My mother had no political involvement. She was an orphan, so she did not have ties to a rival noble house or foreign country. Now, of course, I had been making waves as a foreign merchant, but I broke no laws during my travels (at least, no laws of Saol Eile). Master Odric and I paid our taxes, kept our licenses up-to-date, and otherwise steered far clear of the tumultuous civil war in favor of more peaceful, more profitable countries. I can think of nothing that would draw the ire of the newly-ascendant Crown Prince Edgar enough to have his innocent former lover and bastard child executed for treason…
Unless…our very existence is the crime.
A chill runs down my spine as I remember one of the nobles present in Edgar’s court—the lady with the elaborate white hairdo and blood red makeup, whispering in Prince Edgar’s ear. No mere advisor would be permitted such intimate closeness to an unwed prince. Combined with the fact that it was that lady, not Edgar, who seemed to be calling the shots at the execution—and the fact that Edgar seemed genuinely surprised to see my mother—raises innumerable new questions.
One thing is clear: I have been looking at this all wrong. I have assumed, without proof, that Mama and I were abandoned and executed with reckless disregard—that Prince Edgar knew what he was doing, but did not care. Yet not once did I question if he knew what he was doing at all. Perhaps, the whole time, he was just as ignorant as we were.
Downstairs, I hear the creak of the steps as my mother begins her journey upstairs. Not wanting to miss her, I rush to my feet and throw open my bedroom door. She pauses on the second step and looks up at me, her eyes sad and confused.
“I’m sorry,” we blurt at the same time. There is an awkward pause. Then we both laugh, sigh, and head back downstairs to make some tea.
Just as arguing about my father is one ritual in the Rossach house, post-argument teatime is another. After a moment apart, one or both of us would come to apologize. Things would remain uncomfortable and unresolved. We would never come to agree, and we were both too notoriously stubborn to even try changing the other’s mind, but we would share some tea and attempt to talk it out anyway. In my first life, I never knew how to feel about this ritual. It rarely moved us forward; only postponed the issue for some later argument. It would not stop Mama from using her childlike tears like a weapon against me.
But in this life, I feel obliged to humor my mother at least once. I owe her one teatime from my eighteenth birthday—after which, instead of teatime, I packed my bags and never looked back. Just like my father did. Whatever his motives, I shall not repeat his mistake.
“I need to learn more about my father,” I explain to Mama. “I know what you have told me, that he was a kind man and tried to protect us, and I understand that you have your reasons for believing it. I…I will try to respect that.”
She is silent, her hands cupped around her tea to warm them. The late night and autumn weather grow ever colder, and the thin walls of our house provide little comfort.
“At the same time,” I continue, “I need you to understand that I cannot take your account at face value. It doesn’t match with what happened to us in my last life. And there are too many unknowns—both of us have been kept completely in the dark about the royal palace. So much has changed since you worked there. Maybe Edgar has changed, too.”
“Maybe,” she whispers.
I am quiet for a while as I weigh how to say this. “I need to get closer to him,” I say finally. “Not as a daughter. Not yet. If me being his daughter—and you being his former lover—if those are enough to get us beheaded in seven years, we shouldn’t show our hands too soon.”
“Right. I…I suppose.”
“I want to find out what is happening in the palace before revealing my identity. Getting a job there, maybe?”
“That won’t be easy,” Mama replies. “Saol Eile security is some of the best in the world. They will find out who you are.”
“What exactly would they find out? What would the palace know about you—about me?”
“Everything. Oh, I feel so foolish for it now…but that is why I sent so many letters to the palace, to keep them apprised. They know you are of age and that you are Edgar’s daughter. And of course they know that Edgar and I were married, since they had the marriage annulled by the high priest. They even changed your baptism certificate.”
I lean back in my chair, thinking. An annulment and changing the baptismal records? That would create quite the paper trail. So would Mama’s letters. A manager would dig up all of it with even the most cursory background check. In short, lying about my identity is not an option. Someone will always know who I am.
But not everyone has to know…right?
As I weigh my options, I notice that Mama has gone still. Her shoulders slump as if there is a great burden upon them, and she pulls her shawl tight around her body. She looks very small and very scared. I reach across the table and offer to take her hands in my own.
“Whatever happens,” I tell her, “I’m not leaving. Not like my father did.”
She looks up. Tears well in her eyes. “Promise?”
“If I must,” I squeeze her hands, “I’ll die by your side a second time.”
MEMORANDUM
TO: Eloise Rossach
FROM: Eloise Rossach
RE: Regression Returns Strategy, Revision 1
DATE: September 14, 489 AR
I chose to invest primarily in elysium for three reasons: first, its guaranteed market growth; second, its ease of transport and hiding from the authorities; and third, its bizarre and esoteric origins that make it fundamentally unsuitable for staunch traditionalists like the Saol Eile royal family.
It appears that I could not have been more wrong in the third reason. Mama knows very little about my father’s financial affairs, but she informs me that he received top marks at some of the finest academies in the world. And from Master Odric, I know that he is just as shrewd and business-minded as I am, possibly more.
Eventually, the Crown WILL get ahold of elysium. I knew this, but I never imagined it happened so early, nor that the Crown would keep quiet about its investment for so long. In my past life, the Crown revealed that it had invested in quasicurrency towards the tail end of the civil war — efforts to regulate the volatile market utterly failed, and the Crown simply snatched it up like stealing candy from a baby. While I never made the connection at the time, it lines up perfectly with Edgar’s rise into power. Did elysium help him win the civil war? If he bought low and sold high, like I intend to do, the profits would be massive, potentially enough to silence the dissenting nobles with cold hard cash.
My greatest mistake was assuming that the Crown would not get its hands on elysium until much later in the game. But if Master Odric is telling me the truth — and despite Odric’s reputation in the industry as a little bit of a con artist, I have never known him to tell a lie — then Edgar has recognized elysium’s growth potential five years early.
Mama suggests that perhaps he, too, is a regressor. But this is impossible, as the only academic agreement on the hot topic of regression is that it can only happen to one person at a time. But the alternative explanation is more concerning. If my father is playing the exact same game as I, one gifted in supernatural foresight, then I have gravely underestimated him. I must learn more about his strategy or risk losing everything.