One more comment on The Goblin Emperor, following my recent reread? Again, close to the end:
He lay on the bed and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t look at Beshelar, and the next thing he knew was Avris saying, “Serenity, it is a beautiful morning and the Great Avar has sent you three messages already about meeting him in the east stables.”
That’s right, Maia thought, I have a horse now.
He sat up. “Do we have time?”
“Yes, Serenity,” Avris said. “The Great Avar has made that very plain.”
Avris said, “The Great Avar, Serenity, has spoken very firmly on the subject to Lord Berenar and Mer Aisava and we do not know whom else. He says that you must be allowed time to do things that are for yourself or you will go mad.”
“Oh.” Maia felt his face heating.
“So you have the entire morning, Serenity,” Avris said encouragingly. “And the Great Avar is waiting.”
Maia was aware of the irony, but he was too grateful for his grandfather’s interference to resent it.
I honestly think this was the single kindest thing that anyone in this book has done for Maia.
Just. His relationship with his grandfather will always been complicated, given his mother and how abandoned Maia felt she was by her family, abandoned to her death, for all he knows that legally and politically his grandfather had very little choice. And then the politics of their respective positions on top of that. But over the course of the state visit, they have built something rather warm and rather honest together, and then this little moment at the end of it …
I don’t think anyone else at court has at any point fully understood how titanic the pressure is that Maia has been under. And more to the point, how he has absolutely no escape from it. The Emperor has no privacy. None. Maia has had not one single moment to himself since his father died. He has been constantly surrounded by those who have the ability to judge him, to betray him, to spread rumours about him, to attempt to kill him. There’s no escape. He has been thrown into a job he has no training for, against people hostile to him to the point of death, under the worst possible circumstances, and has spent months now living every moment of every day in that pressure cooker with no privacy, no ability to cry, to lose his temper, to have a moment to himself, while several massive sections of his court have actively betrayed and tried to kill him. And no one … No one gets it. The sheer amount of damage that lack of privacy has done.
Even Csevet. I love that the Avar spoke to Csevet specificially. Because Csevet …
He’s trying to help. He’s been single-handedly ensuring Maia’s political (and to a large extent physical) survival from the moment Maia decided to trust him. He works himself to the bone for Maia. But I don’t think he … I don’t think he understood that Maia has no privacy? The nohecharei have a better one, especially after that painful conversation about not being able to be his friends, but I don’t think Csevet …
Csevet has friends. Maia has at least once, on realising this, tried to give him small opportunities to speak to them. Csevet, when he clocks off, goes to his own rooms and his own friends and his own business. I don’t think he quite … He’s a courier, not a member of the royal family. I don’t think he quite understood that Maia doesn’t have a life outside of their scheduled hours together? Csevet was only doing what he thought was necessary, arranging Maia’s schedule to do the most longterm good possible. But he did …
The amount of pressure Maia has been under has been horrific, and months of that? Years of that? A future without end? With no privacy? Not even a moment to himself to act as a release valve?
The Great Avar is right. Maia would have gone insane. Completely and utterly.
Nobody intended to do that. As the conversation with the archprelate also revealed, none of them quite realised the amount of damage that had been done. But the Avar did. Because he’s an emperor too, and while the goblin court is nowhere near as rigid as the elvish one, any royal figure still understands much better how sharply defined the edges of their lives are. He saw … He saw the splinters in Maia, understood them for what they were.
And in this one single act, I think he did more kindness for Maia than anyone else has done.
It’s an apology. For everything that happened to Chenelo, everything the Avar could not stop. His relationship with his grandson is so strained, and for such good reasons. So this was, I think, an apology. But it was also just a kindness. Because he saw Maia splintering, and wanted to help. Realised he was the only one with both the clout and the understanding to help. So he went out of his way to speak with those closest to Maia about what he needed to stay sane.
And gave Maia the courage, too, to start maybe asking for himself for what he needs to stay sane.
I don’t know. It’s a tiny moment. But I really do think this one single thing is the most vitally kind thing anyone in this story ever did for Maia.
Because without it, without this sliver of leeway, I really do think he would have gone insane.
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