He smiles at that, although a bit ruefully. He had known she was once Queen of the Gates – he recalls her telling him this, once, but it had been in passing, not something they had discussed in depth. He had not dwelled on it much, he had not known any of the other kingdoms, had not cared when they crumbled into the sea.
“My mother was queen there,” he says, “but I didn’t stay in the Deserts long.”
A bit of an understatement. He only visited there twice, and then again, decades later, in that strange dream that hadn’t been a dream, the quest that had brought Agetta to him in the first place. The thing she no longer remembers.
He wonders, in a horrible way, how much Beyza had excised from Agetta’s mind. If he’d told her his mother had been Craft and if, god forbid, the two had met, what would Agetta say? Oh yes, Craft, wasn’t she murdered by her awful son? Such a shame.
(In truth, Agetta had been kind to him when she knew the circumstances. She had offered him forgiveness and he can still remember that feeling, like birds taking flight within him, a kind of beautiful weightlessness that he had not known he was able to experience.)
There is another hesitation when she mentions Mazikeen. He wonders how much their daughter knows of the events that transpired. He has not seen her since his accident, of course, and the news she may have had a child of her own causes a sort of bittersweet joy. He had not known any of his children long enough to see them have children of their own. He should find her, he supposes, though perhaps she hates him now, for what he did to her mother. Or maybe Beyza wiped him from Maze’s memory, too.
“Are you close with all your children?” he asks, thinking, again, of is own. He hasn’t seen Bad, either, not since before. He’d gotten the sense Bad was bored of him, or disappointed in him, so when the boy began to wander off Garbage had made little moves to stop it, until one day, Bad simply hadn’t come back. Garbage thinks, not for the first time, that he is a terrible father and the children are no doubt better off without him.
