It's a rare thing to open a box and find yourself hidden away there.

As a war criminal, I wasn't allowed to go most places.

So I had a choice to make. Either spend time in the jail cell generously offered to me as a room or stay in the General's quarters.

That's how I found myself spending my sixth day in Samaria, watering the desiccated plants the General kept on his dusty window sill.

Clearly, "dad" spent no time in here, too busy stomping around battlefields or making some poor recruit's life hell. 

I sighed, dragging a hand through my hair, giving up on the plants. 

I had officially run out of things to do, and the evidence was all over the house. The General's lonely table was covered in military books I couldn't force myself to read again, and the kitchen was an active crime scene from my experiments with Samarian dishes. 

My muscles twisted and raged. Usually, back in the military bases in Salos, I'd be training. Running, fighting, executing missions or people.

Here, the Samarians didn't trust me to use the bathroom without conspiring to take down their plumbing infrastructure.

So I did the only thing I'd consistently done for days: I paced.

I paced the length and width and diagonal of the General's shitty, unbreathable home. The corridors were crowded with people who'd gladly kill me, and I couldn't let my standards or training slip.

As I walked back and forth, I ended up going from the wardrobe to the curtains. And back. And to the wardrobe. And back again until my nose brushed the curtains.

I turned on my heel and saw a box at the very top of the General's wardrobe.

I know spying was the exact crime the Samarians were waiting for me to commit, but it's built into me. Answers, secrets, and having value keep you alive in the game.

And it's not like I trusted my father just because I spent five days in his awful home.

Quietly, I moved one of the chairs to the wardrobe and grabbed the box. It was painted with the sky and clouds, different from everything dull and strangled in here.

Dropping into the chair, I gently eased the box open. A rolled-up scroll of paper, a small wooden sword, and a hairclip. 

So not a treasure trove of secret battle plans. I unrolled the paper and stared as a small, watercolour portrait of a happy family emerged.

My eyes immediately went to her. She wasn't anything like what I'd pictured, and I analyzed her face like a map of enemy terrain, hungry for every detail, from dimples to bone structure.

Nothing was triggered in my useless memory, but I pored over her picture anyways. Her bright, amber eyes. A sheet of dark, shiny hair very different from my frizzy brown. She was lighter than the General and I were, and I realized painfully that I resembled him more. I had her hooked nose, and long neck, but that was it. 

In the painting, the General beamed, one arm around my mother and the other holding me up back when I was younger. I had short, chestnut curls, and the usual babyish chubbiness. 

I studied the General's smile too. I didn't actually know he was capable of happy facial expressions.

But it looked right amid such a happy, glowing family.

I finally loosened my death grip on the paper, picking up the ridiculously tiny wooden sword. It had intricate, cursive lettering spelling out the M-A-Z-A-R of my name, then a jagged, roughly scribbled i-n. 

Mine. I gently ran a finger over it. The General meant to raise a little warrior like him, not a murderous traitor like me. 

My eyes stung, and long-lost tears ambushed me. What if I'd gotten to stay with them? Been normal? Would we have always been that giddily happy family?

I rubbed the tears into my shoulder. I'd go insane if I ever seriously considered the messed-up childhood I'd endured in Salos.

Now I know why I had been disposable in Salos. I was a valuable tool to hurt my own people, but not a citizen. 

Reverently, I ran my fingers over the carved sword. Somebody had toiled to make it just right for a little kid's hands.

"I made that while Sienna was pregnant." 

I almost jumped out of the chair, staring up at the General in shock. He must have snuck in while I was busy forgetting all my training. 

His dark eyes were fixed on the wooden sword. "Yeah, I remember the months it took. Where we come from, every family makes a carving of their craft. Fishermen make poles, riders make horses..." He sighed heavily. "Our family protects, so I made..." The General gestured at the sword in my lap. "And I broke about eight of them making just the one." 

I nodded, hanging onto his every word. "Did you-were you guys planning on naming me, Mazar?" I held up the sword as an explanation.

"Oh." The General smiled, looking like he'd forgotten. "Mazar for a boy and Mazarin for a girl."

"Did you want a boy?" Such a petty question, but I needed to know.

"Hmm." The General snorted at that. "I didn't particularly care, Sienna didn't either. I carved Mazar because we could add the i-n after, and Sienna put it in the night you were born." He rolled his eyes then, fondly. "Ruined all my hard work too."

"What was she like?" I asked, carefully avoiding his eyes. They'd wanted me. 

"She was strange." The General said unexpectedly, and I looked right at him.

"We grew up in Galen Creek, it was a shitty town, and your mom went around like she owned the place. She had a polite laugh and a firecracker one. Sienna always insisted that her nose was ugly and refused to hear another word on it." The General looked lost as he rambled. "When I proposed, she told me I was an idiot. Because apparently, she'd liked me since we were fifteen, and had already arranged it all with our mothers."

I seared every word into my heart, comparing myself to my mom.

My laugh was loud, but I'd never given much thought to my nose. If anything, I hated the stupid hooded eyes the General had passed down. My mother sounded in love, bossy, and happy.

In short, I was nothing like her.

"Do you remember her? Us, at all?" The General asked with an obviously forced nonchalance.

I rolled my eyes, but my voice was hoarse when I finally managed to speak. "Some things. I remember you almost drowning me in teaching me to swim. I remember mom making utensils fly. I remember her scolding you over forgetting something..." And other snatches of memory mostly tainted and drowned out by war, pain, and hatred. 

"You did not drown. I was careful, you just wouldn't shut your mouth, even underwater." The General declared, sounding weirdly paternal.

Remember, idiot, he's thinking about an adorable six-year-old, not some brooding, treacherous maniac, I warned myself.

"I remember that night," I said, trying to stop my voice from shaking. The General froze. There was only really one night that mattered.

The night he wasn't there. The night so much blood was spilt that it turned Galen Creek's water red.

"What happened?" 

It's a fight to retrieve a single, happy moment, but the second I close my eyes, the nightmare flows out.

"Mom-Sienna and a few members of our village started telling people to hide and stay at home. The vampires couldn't come in uninvited, she said." I drilled a hole into the floor. "But our neighbour started setting the houses on fire. Then everything just went crazy. Vampires started killing everyone. We got to the creek. Mom was covered in blood, and I think one of them had bitten her. She was turning, right in front of me. She put me on a horse and magicked it to go away." 

I looked up at the General's pale face. "I was captured the same night. Soldiers from Salos were waiting to kill anyone that escaped into the woods."

The General looked gaunt and tired. "And Sienna?" He asked.

"I don't know," I replied honestly. "I have no idea."

We sat in a silence thick enough to smother us.

"I'm sorry for what happened to you." The General said, and I saw a battle between his composure and anger. "I should've found you."

"What happened to you that night?" I asked, but I didn't really care. It was in the past, too late to change, too late to be angry about.

"Salos invaded a nearby city. So I led a small army to protect it and left Sienna and a few others behind to guard Galen Creek. Halfway through the night, we heard that Galen Creek was burning. So we retreated back." The General's words rush out of him, but he kept his face stoic. He'd waited years to somehow convey his guilt. "The bodies were almost unrecognizable. But I never-I never heard anything about either of you..."

We just stared at each other, both doing our dead-eyed stare. It was like looking in a mirror.

My fingers traced every letter of that lovingly carved name. M-A-Z-

My mind flashed back to the trainers in Salos who carved cuts into my arm for every time I said my name was Mazarin.

-A-R-

And then that rushed, messily scribbled i-n. My name. Given to me by a woman I'd never see again and by a father who I couldn't have disappointed more.

I traced it again and again. Replacing soldier, you, and the other insults into my mind with that name. Mazarin.

"Why Mazarin, or Mazar?" I asked, staring out of the window.

The General breathed in thoughtfully. "In your mother's tongue, Mazar was this famous poet who used to make fun of a king. He eventually got his head chopped off, but I think the lesson was courage or something."

"Inspiring." My father and I chuckled.

"In my language, Mazarine means blue moonlight or the moon's light in water. It's synonymous with beauty and mystery. We felt like it was a good compromise." My father stepped forward. "I wasn't there then, Mazarin, but I am here now."

I traced the family in the painting. "I know." They wanted me to be Mazarin.

And my fingers found the letters again. Part my father, part my mother. 

M-A-Z-A-R-I-N.