Charlotte Kersten

I was recently reminded of how Chicana feminists and authors are returning to the life of La Malinche to consider her subjectivity and complexity beyond the legacy of betrayal that is associated with her name. There is a great deal to be said about the way that colonized women have been villainized for both the violence that is done to them and the ways that they try to find autonomy and make the best decisions possible in consideration of that violence and the often-impossible situations that they are put in. And, with that in mind…I wrote a story about Ser and her mom. Thanks, as ever, to Robin Quinn for her excellent sensitivity reading, et merci beaucoup (et toutes mes excuses) à Mélanie pour la traduction du poème de Ser. This story takes place partially after the end of Memory and Curses, so be wary of spoilers.

1.

Ser hated parties like this more than almost anything else she had experienced in her ten  years of life, and that was principally because parties  like this one were an excuse for everyone in her world to turn against her and subject her to all of the other things she hated, one after the other, all in a row. This time, her governess had spent days urgently reviewing how she was to behave in every situation that might arise and forcing her to memorize a pretty little speech in Égidean to show off her learning and accent. Her maid had spent ages fighting with her hair, doing strange and uncomfortable things until it was shiny and straight. Her mother had turned into a different person who didn’t laugh or smile and stayed up late writing invitations and menus instead of telling Ser sloth tales until she fell asleep. 

Once the preparations were done, people swarmed into the house and acted very stupid. This was the part she hated the most. None of them actually liked each other, Ser knew, and she knew that they liked her and her mother the least of all. It didn’t matter if they cooed and smiled at her, brushed her hair and her cheeks with their hands and told her parents how well-behaved she was – not a wild little thing at all! It didn’t matter if they sharply told their children to stop talking or playing with her, if they studiously ignored her like she was something distasteful to step around on the street. It all meant the same thing in the end.

Today, some of the women clasped her mother’s hands and congratulated her on how beautiful everything was, telling her how well she had adapted, for Dreonia was a land with such particular standards and they had heard that things were done very differently in Efrus! Two women sipping tea in a corner murmured to themselves that they really oughtn’t have come in the first place – he had never actually married the woman, and though dark elves might have different standards for such things, the lieutenant had been raised in Ydur’s light to know right from wrong, hadn’t he? One man clapped her father on his back and looked at her mother and said that his service abroad had reaped rich rewards indeed. A man who was very red in the face said that the mistakes one made as a lonely man in the colonies ought to be left there instead of being brought back home, and then he fell asleep on the settee. 

All of it made Ser want to scream at them. Somehow, though, she knew that if she made a scene, these people would nod to themselves and click their tongues and say that it was only to be expected of a girl like her, a girl with such a mother. She did not want to make them nod in such a way, and then she wanted to scream all over again for caring about what they thought at all, and then that made her want to shock them even more. 

Her mother cared too, she knew. Her mother cared a great deal. Her straight and shiny hair was modeled after her mother’s, and at dinner it was her mother who had stared daggers at her until she stopped making pools of her gravy. She always smiled sweetly and answered graciously no matter how stupid and rude people were, and she stood proudly next to Ser’s father as though she did not know that everyone in the room thought they were wicked. Ser understood that everyone disliked them, but she did not understand why her mother acted the way she did in response to it. This, too, made her want to scream. If I were a mama, she thought, I would chase them from the house before I let them look down on my family. On my daughter. 

It was time for the children to show off their accomplishments, and Ser stood in her swishy blue silk dress, fists balled in her sweaty gloves.  She was supposed to recite a piece about spring flowers from Poèmes égideans pour les filles, and the first words trembled on her tongue. Then she saw one of the ladies who had said she oughtn’t be there turn to her companion and whisper something, eyes darting rapidly to Ser and then to Ser’s mother. The other woman simpered and snickered, and something twisted in Ser’s chest as she saw it. She saw that her mother saw it too, visibly swallowed and then straightened her shoulders, smiling more determinedly.  I hate everyone, Ser thought. Before she could change her mind, she started to recite the limerick a half-Égidean crossing sweeper had helped her memorize a week before. She did not understand what it meant, but her impression was that it was very wicked indeed.

Une femme se baisant, une vraie Dame,
Se donnait avec toute sa bel’ âme.
Dans une valse macabre,
Avec un grand candélabre,
Elle suçotait un plus petit sabre.*

She smiled her most charming smile, curtsied as prettily as she knew how, and bolted from the room amidst the uproar that her words had caused. The last thing she saw was her mother’s face, stricken and on the verge of tears. She doesn’t care about the rest of it, Ser thought. At least this makes her feel something. 

2.

Ser’s mother Emar did not use her true surname of Morvu-Ra. She had returned to Efrus after Dreonia’s fall, as suppressed magics had begun to course through the world again. Her former lover (now also a former lieutenant due to the upheaval in Dreonia’s upper echelons that had followed the disintegration of the empire) could longer afford the – admittedly stingy – stipend he had paid her for so long, but she had always been a resourceful woman. She now owned a coffeehouse on the third tallest tree in the rapidly growing city of Harrevan and did quite well for herself.

Ser knew all of this because of the letter carefully folded in her waistcoat pocket. It was already soft and crumpled from many furtive foldings and re-foldings, readings and re-readings, and she resisted the urge to skim it once again even as she yawned and rolled her neck, stumbling off the Srean transport into the Harrevan depot. Trains still ran throughout Efrus, a remnant of the Dreonian occupation, but most people in this new world preferred Srean transports, seeing as they involved the choked swallowing of a hot, sour potion, brief but heavy unconsciousness and only a few accidents involving horrible dismemberment in the three years since the Sreans – inhabitants of what was once the Dreonians’ Twelfth Plane -had been freed and reformed their old bonds with the Elven nation of Almainia.

The potion made Iraluri vomit a truly astonishing amount of vomit, but Ser only suffered a mild kind of dizziness and a gut ache for a day or two after she awoke in her destination. Given how often she needed to travel from Miz’rifaezar to Efrus and beyond, dizziness and a gut ache were worth it. Today the lightheadedness was only barely noticeable as she wriggled her way through the throngs of travelers and stepped out into the city of Harrevan. The forest floor level of the city was still indelibly stamped with signs of Dreonia’s claim, but Ser looked up, heedless of the foot traffic around her.

Harrevan had survived the Dreonian occupation with a great deal less deforestation than other major cities had faced, so the Efrusi had already started to rebuild in the trees. No matter how much time she spent in Efrus, a part of her still could not believe that it was real or that she belonged here. Surely no air could be this pure and crisp and sweet – wasn’t it meant to be heavy with smoke and smog and refuse? The buildings in the trees were made of the same pearlescent white stone, elegant pillars and curved windows adorned with twining vines and flowers and animals, that she had seen for the first time in the plane of Carkuto. She still had to resist the urge to trail her fingertips against the buildings whenever she passed them to make sure they were solid and real. There were steps wrapped around ancient trunks spiraling up and up and up; masterfully-engineered lifts; dozens of arched bridges crossing from treetop to treetop; sprawling and magnificent buildings that stretched multiple levels and encompassed many trees; tiny cottages nestled in crooks. It was not yet dark, but once the sun set, the city would still glow faintly. The boughs would always creak and the leaves would always rustle, and the wind would always weave its way through the city, all of them whispering: I am here, I am here.

Ser begged directions of a smiling man, distinguishable because he wore Dreonian clothing instead of the flowing silver-and-white styles that most people in Efrus wore now. She was conscious of her jacket, waistcoat and trousers, but nothing she had ever tried felt as right as what she’d worn for all of these years, and so much time spent standing out in Dreonia had hardened her to stares. She traversed the tree city, following the man’s instructions, and tried very hard not to think about what she was going to say to her mother in a few moments’ time. It was a particular skill of hers, this stubborn ability to avoid thoughts that she did not want to think, but it only worked to a certain extent. And so by the time Ser reached the door to Emar’s coffeehouse, she had thought three unwelcome thoughts: I should have asked Luri to come with me after all; I can talk about Grem if there is nothing else to talk about; I wonder if she has heard from my father at all.

Ser considered herself a steady person, generally speaking, maybe even a brave one, but as she stood outside the coffeehouse, she suddenly felt like she was a little girl again, creeping home after escaping from her governess and spending the afternoon exploring Keld with the friends her mother called filthy ragamuffins. She pushed through the door before she could convince herself to fling herself into the next lift down to the forest floor and guzzle another Srean potion.

She saw her mother immediately. Her hair was braided back now rather than fashioned to look like a light elf’s, and it was gray at the roots. She wore a loose white blouse and trailing silver skirt, the fashion somewhere between Dreonian and Efrusi. Her face was only slightly lined, and she moved across the coffeehouse with the same grace that she had used to glide through ornate ballrooms and parlors. She saw Ser only moments after Ser stepped through the doorway, and her face flickered away from its surety as their eyes locked.

“Ser,” she said, and swept over to the doorway. She did no more, looking like she did not know whether to touch her daughter or not. Ser awkwardly dropped her luggage and cleared her throat.

“I still have the cat,” Ser said in Efrusi, right as her mother started to cry.

3.

Visits from Ser’s father always made her mother hysterical.  They would shoo Ser into the bedroom and talk for hours. Her mother would sometimes raise her voice, but she would always catch herself  abruptly so that Ser could only catch snippets of what she said. Don’t understand. Think of her. You promised. Her father was the same as he ever was: calm, quiet, imperturbable. Uncaring, Ser thought now, because why else would a man make his family live somewhere else? He had always been a distant figure, yes, and he had never quite seemed to know how to talk to her, but this had never bothered her because she had had her mother. Now she looked back on all of it and realized that her father was just the same as every light elf who had ever been shocked to find that she was like other little girls or called her mother a whore in fine language. Maybe he was worse, because hadn’t he pretended that he was better? 

After he left, Emar would shoo Ser back out of the bedroom and refuse to emerge until she had stopped weeping. She would pretend that she had simply been tired or suffered a headache, but Ser wasn’t a child anymore. She was thirteen years old, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew that her mother still loved the man who didn’t think they were people like he was, and Ser thought that meant her mother was the stupid one. She didn’t understand how anyone could ever love a man so much that he could make you cry in the first place, but especially a man like that…

His visits had grown less and less frequent until they stopped altogether last month. An envelope was delivered to them each month, but Emar now sewed at home and served at a coffeehouse near their small flat while Ser ran errands for the old woman who lived across the street. She vastly preferred this to lessons with a governess, and now, as she watched her mother wander around their main room with her lips pressed tightly, she felt a flare of irritation.

“You know he’s a bastard, ma.” Bastard was a new word, one that she used experimentally now, and she saw immediately that it had been a bad choice – or a good one? She could not deny the flare of vicious satisfaction that filled her to see her mother finally stir from her listlessness as she whipped around to glare at her.

“You are still a young lady and you will not use such language, Ser.”

That flare of vicious satisfaction flamed hotter, and she knew exactly what to say next. “I would be a bastard, a real one, if I was a boy, wouldn’t I? But I’m a young lady, just like you said.”

Her mother’s chin trembled, and she said nothing at first, staring at the ground. She finally raised her eyes, and they were sheened with tears. This made Ser angrier still. “You are less of a lady with every day that passes. Everything I have done for you, everything you have worked for-”

“Good!” She was shouting now, though her mother hated shouting. Think of the neighbors, she always said. Think of the neighbors, think of the guests, think of your father. “I am glad I am not a lady. I am glad I am not like you.”
She did not wait to see the impact that these final words had on her mother. She hurried out the front door to lose herself in the Keld crowds. 

4. 

Emar taught her how to make the dough for jemat, the buttery, crumbly pastry that they sold in fat golden bricks at the coffeehouse. Ser had dunked her own square in her drink this morning, careful to ensure that it did not soak too long and break off into the coffee, and told her mother that it was delicious. Emar had smiled a tiny smile and nodded. Now they cut butter into little cubes and worked it into the dry ingredients in silence. It was not an easy silence, and none of their silences had been easy since she had arrived the evening before. Speaking was not much better – the words swelled in her throat and came out more awkwardly than Ser could remember her words being in a long time. Emar seemed similarly plagued. They had not spoken for years, and what had come before that had been very ugly. They had both changed, and the world had changed too. What words could possibly broach such a distance? At least baking kept their hands busy.

“You are just as messy as you used to be,” her mother said quietly, gesturing to the dough droppings and drifts of flour that surrounded Ser’s work.

She laughed before she could help it. “That’s what Luri says. She was so polite the first time she came to my flat in Keld, but I could tell…” She halted abruptly, realizing that her mother knew nothing about Iraluri. That story was something that was hers, and she could not tell if more of her wanted to share the story with her mother so she might begin to understand or keep it entirely to herself where it was safe and treasured.

“Some things, at least, have not changed.” Emar asked no prying questions, and Ser found that she was grateful.
It went this way for the rest of the day – steady work in the coffeehouse and only the safest of conversations. When the shop was closed for the night and the two women returned back to the flat upstairs for dinner, Ser found herself confronting the fact that she would be leaving for Carkuto in the morning. She did not know whether it was a relief or a disappointment, whether to be grateful or dismayed that she and her mother had not ventured into any ugly or dangerous territory or, really, any kind of territory whatsoever. The only tricky moment had been when her mother had started crying in the very beginning, but that had stopped almost as quickly as it had begun.

They walked the platforms and bridges that night after their dinner of swallow stew and grainy bread dotted with nuts. Her mother took her hand briefly and Ser’s fingers curled around Emar’s before she could think better of it. Ser held her mother’s hand and suddenly wanted to ask her many things. When did she start braiding her hair and dressing in silver and white again? Why had she returned to Efrus instead of settling in another Ydurian light elf country, as so many others had once Dreonia had fallen? Did those early years of luxury with Ser’s father seem as much a fever dream to her as they did to Ser? Did she still cry for him? She had written to Ser to invite her on this visit – did this mean that she no longer thought of Ser as a disgrace, the girl who had thrown everything Emar cared about in her face and broken her heart? Did she even remember saying those words on that last day they had seen each other before this visit?  She did not ask any of these questions, and her mother let go of her hand.

They walked on glowing bridges and stairs until they could see the moon and the stars. There were sloths up here with their caretakers, heads slowly tilting upwards and craning back and forth. They made happy little wheezing sounds and their caretakers chatted with them and each other as they stood in the sweet night air.

“I still think I’m dreaming when I see chorenn,” Emar murmured.

Ser thought she might tell her mother about the first sloth she held three years ago when she met Eshiro and the rest of the planar rebellion in Carkuto, now some of her closest friends. I thought they would all hate me, but they didn’t. There was nothing to forgive, after all. She did not say this, but she thought about it during the entirety of the walk back to the coffeehouse.

5.

Ser stumbled through the streets, drunk on bad ale, fury, and sheer disbelief. She clutched all of her belongings in a messy bundle and prayed that the cat would remain content to perch on top of the bundle as she hurried along. Two detours to retrieve him from alleyways and bustling streets later, she threw open the door to Theo’s gymnasium.

“It’s done,” she announced to the room. “We’ve finally had it out,  and now I’m an independent woman.”

Pansy darted over to help Ser with her bundle and then threw her arms around her with a whoop and a hearty kiss. “It’s you and me now, love,” she said. “And we’re forever.”

Ser believed it. She tried to grin back, but her face felt strange, and she realized that she was crying instead. Pansy did not know what to do about this so Theo took over, guiding Ser to where she might leave her belongings in the flat above the gym.

Once settled, Ser collapsed into her new makeshift nest of blankets and blinked at the room around her.
“She said I might do as I jolly well pleased so long as I kept my criminal friends far away from her house. I said that it was no crime to fight a true wrong however you had to, and she said that I was a stupid girl who’d ruined all my chances at decency. I suppose that just about does it, don’t it, Theo?”

The older woman had scooped Grem up into her bulky arms and dropped an absent kiss on his head as she listened. “Yes, I reckon so,” she said.

“She said what would my father say to see me dressed like a man now, and I said what would anyone in Efrus think to see her still caring about a Dreonian man who’d cast her out into disgrace after he’d grown sick of playing family with her. Then she swore at me and said I oughtn’t come back until I’d learned to respect her parents. I said why should I respect anyone who don’t respect me and-”

Theo nodded steadily. “All right, now, Ser. I understand. You’ll stay with me until you’ve settled in your own place. I’ll have no drinking on the premises and you’re to tidy up after that cat. You’ve told me plenty of tales about him dragging rat corpses home and I won’t stand for it here, mind.”

“I can clean up after him,” Ser announced. “I can take care of myself. I’m sixteen and a Trammeler besides.”

Theo gave her a light pat on the back. “I know, girl. I know.”
Ser told herself that she could take care of herself many times in the weeks that followed, and it became such a well-worn refrain that she soon learned to stop questioning whether or not it was true.

6.

She found Iraluri’s handkerchief tucked in a corner of her pack as she prepared for sleep that night. It was the one that she had embroidered with something that, if one was being generous, one could describe as vaguely resembling a hedgehog. She had hurriedly pressed it into Ser’s hands after a winter night in the pleasure gardens, and Ser had kept it close ever since. She sat cross-legged in her mother’s spare room and ran her hands over the embroidery now. The two of them had curled up together the night before Ser’s trip, and Ser had combed her fingers through the knots in Iraluri’s hair as she had fretted and tried to pretend that she wasn’t fretting.

“It’s going to be awful,” she had said.

Luri had frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe it won’t be.”

“She chose my father over me, didn’t she? Mooned after him for years and told me I could keep destroying my life well enough without her in it if I saw fit to stick with the Trammelers.”

Iraluri’s gaze had been even and soft as she took Ser’s hands from her hair and curled them in her own with a kiss. “I think… Ser, I think I chose Harlan for years – chose him above Miz’rifaezar – because it was all I could do to survive. And I think I wanted Immy to be everything I weren’t – learned and ladylike and genteel – so she’d have it ever so much better than I did and wouldn’t have to struggle like I did. It ain’t exactly the same, I know-”

“My father was no Harlan,” Ser had said, swallowing against the rising feeling in her throat. “He was just a coward and a fool who made the wrong choice. And then she made the wrong choice, too.”

Iraluri had released Ser’s hands and wrapped her arms around her, speaking into her shoulder. “Maybe she thought she was choosing you. Maybe she sees things now that she didn’t see then, and maybe you’d see new things if you talked with her. I think whatever choice you’ll make is right. You know that. And I know it ain’t exactly the same. But I just felt…I wrote to my sister after years, and I thank the ghosts in Leseolas every day that she was willing to write back.”

Ser had felt a sigh against her shoulder and she had turned to wrap her love in a fierce hug. “I’ll think about it,” she had promised, and had smiled.

Now she held the handkerchief to her chest as she drifted to sleep, imagining what she would say to Iraluri if she were here. I think my father treated my mother like she was nothing. I think they all did. And I think I learned from them no matter how much I hated them and tried to be nothing like them. She fell asleep before she could imagine what Iraluri would say in response.

They baked again the next morning, and Emar offered to walk Ser to the depot. “No,” Ser insisted quickly. “It’s much too far for you.”

“I am not so old yet,” her mother retorted with a wry smile that looked almost like one of her smiles from the days when she was happy.

“It’s fine, truly,” Ser insisted, and Emar let it rest. Ser knew that there was no more time for any of the conversations she had feared, and this made her brave enough to do one final thing. She took the package from her pack and pressed it into her mother’s hands. “I thought…you let me take it. When I left. But I thought you might want it back, after all.”

Her mother unwrapped the paper and made a soft noise to see her family’s banner carefully folded inside. It was the one non-Dreonian item that she had brought with her when she had come to Dreonia with Ser’s father, the one non-Dreonian thing that Ser had grown up seeing. Ser had treated it reverently all these years, keeping it clean and free from the attacks of moths and Grem alike. Iraluri had once asked what it meant in Dreonian, and she had translated: I fight for mine. Since she had taken the banner from the wall and embarked upon her own life, she had learned that there were many ways to fight for the things that were your own. As Ser watched her mother trace a shaking hand down the swirling patterns and lettering, she thought that her mother might know more of them than she had ever given her credit for before.

“Thank you,” Emar said simply, and touched Ser’s face for an impossibly brief moment.

Ser nodded, and then she forced herself to say something. “Maybe we could talk about it. Another time, I mean.”

Her mother nodded briskly. “Yes. When you come back.”

Ser walked to the depot and fought the crowds inside. She gagged down her potion, and this time, the last thing she thought about before falling asleep was her mother telling her sloth tales. 

* Ser’s poem translated:
A woman kissing (fucking) herself, a real lady,
She was giving herself with all her soul
In a dance of death,
With a big candelabra,
She was sucking on a smaller sword.