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"I climbed up a mountain and looked off the edge
At all of the lives that I never have led.
There's one where I stayed with you across the sea —
I wonder, do you still think of me?"
“Sometimes I feel like you’re the only person who sees me,” Tandred said, breaking the silence as he skipped a rock out into the surf with a vehement flick of his wrist. His clear blue eyes gazed after the piece of shale, narrowed, with a soft furrow between his eyebrows that mirrored his older sister’s. At fifteen, he hadn’t quite grown into his broadening shoulders, though the quality noble tailoring of his coat did an admirable job of attempting to hide the awkward lankiness of his frame.
Save the cuffs that didn’t quite reach his wrists, Flynn thought with an amused smirk, pulling off an ill-gotten flask of cheap Dampwick rye. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his own jacket, worn leather held together in places by waxed twine through hand-awled holes.
“Brings that on?” he asked, one leg dangling from the flat rock on which he perched, above the rough sands on the shore. “You’re in the public eye far more than I am. Which is just the way I like it — probably your family, too.” He grinned.
Tandred turned away from the waves with some effort, a similar joviality not reflected in his face. “Yes, my family,” he said, and sighed, boots shifting in the sand as he climbed back up to the rock where Flynn sat. “Suppose that’s what I mean.”
Flynn blinked. “I’m lost.”
The youngest of the Proudmoores leaned his back against the rock. “I don’t mean being looked at,” he clarified. “I mean being — seen. All anyone does is look at me. The people. Mother. Father. Sometimes even Jaina.”
Flynn winced. The omission was glaring, even now. Some seven years on, the people of Kul Tiras still bore the scar of the loss of Derek Proudmoore, and none more so than his family. By Tandred’s accounts, the Lord Admiral had grown only colder since the Third Fleet’s destruction, and him not ever having been a particularly warm man in the first place.
He was still talking. Flynn shook himself to attention.
“—but I’m not a soldier like him. Jaina, she’s on the mainland so often now, tides know Father’s encouraging it, allying more closely with Lordaeron, it only makes sense, and they like each other well enough, her and that prince. He’s not good enough for her, of course, but she won’t hear it…”
“Tand.” Flynn held up a hand. “Go easy on the common folk, aye?” He attempted a reassuring smile, though he suspected it didn’t look quite as confident as he meant it to be. “Say it like a person, will you? Not some toffee-nosed noble.”
Some might have taken offense; Tandred only softened. It was a rare thing. Probably why he was the one noble Flynn could suffer without developing hives.
When Tandred spoke again, it was calmer, with little hint of the desperate mania that had been riding on his voice. “That is… exactly what I mean,” he said. “You’re not afraid to talk to me like anyone else. I’m not my father’s son to you. Or my sister’s brother, or Kul Tiras’s… anything.”
He smiled, the sun behind him making a glowing halo off the soft fuzz on his cheek. “You just see… me.”
Flynn Fairwind, well-known teenage scofflaw and occasionally rumored most-likely-to-turn-pirate, was not very much for philosophy. He was, however, bright enough to know when a particular thing held importance for someone. If he didn’t necessarily understand the details, well, that mattered far less than accepting what was said.
Besides. It was rather hard not to see Tandred, when he looked and smiled like that.
Flynn gave an easy half-grin, taking another pull from his flask and offering it out. “Aye, and shall continue to do so! At least until your father has me jailed for being a sour influence on your pretty little head.”
Tandred laughed, taking the flask with a half-toast and a nod. “Believe it or not, Fairwind, I can be plenty sour on my own.”
“Ah! Excellent. Supposing you tell him that.”
"I carry your image always in my head,
Folded and yellowed and torn at the edge.
And I've looked upon it for so many years,
Slowly, I’m losing your face."
Rain pelted down on Tiragarde Sound as if it would never get the chance again. Hail in pellets of ice bounced pell mell off of eaves and gutters, skittering into the streets to be crushed underfoot. Candles burned in windows everywhere you looked on the street; the bells at the monastery tolled across the cove, solemn, mournful, every hour on the hour. They echoed like siren song, lingering in the air, somehow peeling out even over the roar of the deluge that set water running over the cobblestones like a river.
Flynn cursed his boots. They were solidly made and a step up from the trappers he’d worn growing up, but there were yet some spots near the arch that weren’t quite waterproofed. It had been some time since he’d seen a cobbler, he guessed. He’d have to rectify that.
Some other time, he amended, bearing the discomfort of wet wool-covered toes as he ducked out of The Shark — so named for the grisly trophy that hung mounted over the bar. It wasn’t a bad tavern, really. A bit hoity-toity, but it beat anything in Upton Borough. No one there, Flynn knew from experience, could ever take a joke.
Of course, today, they had good reason for it.
When the fleet had limped back from across the sea — decimated, battle-scarred, some taking on water the whole way and surviving only by a desperate rotation of men to bail out the bilge day and night — it was as though the entire nation was plunged into unending darkness. Rumors from the deckhands were out on the streets before the official news was ever released.
Daelin Proudmoore, Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras, fell in battle to the Orcish Horde on the Isle of Theramore, off the eastern shores of Kalimdor.
Lady Jaina Proudmoore, his daughter, is hereby wanted for dereliction of duty, and for the crime of high treason against the nation of Kul Tiras.
It sounded preposterous, even to Flynn, who’d heard his share of preposterous things. But then came the decree, and the town criers, and he supposed the Proudmoores wouldn’t go quite so far for a rumor as all that. Which left Tandred stuck in the middle of it, a nation blaming his sister for the death of his father, still mourning his brother who’d gone before. And what was he left to do about it?
Evidently, send a note by courier, asking Flynn to the hedge maze beside the keep.
He probably shouldn’t have tipped back quite so many, Flynn realized now he was on his feet and navigating the streets as they turned from rough cobblestones to smoother, more noble-suited masonry. If he concentrated — very painfully concentrated — he could manage the incline of the hill without swaying too visibly, and if he was lucky, the academy cadets would be tippled to some degree as well; it seemed the whole island had been drinking in grief since the news broke.
Well, grief and anger. Never let it be said that Flynn Fairwind’s allegiances couldn’t be bought, but even he balked at some of the things being said in the pubs. Lady Jaina still had her supporters, but they could only insist that there must have been a reason for her actions; no one denied that the Lord Admiral was dead, or that her inaction had contributed to it. Most of the talk was far worse.
Who in blazes was Rexxar, anyway? He’d never heard the name.
The Proudmoore hedge maze looked somehow more foreboding in the sleet and darkness. Rather than a covert little hideaway, it seemed intimidating, the shadows hiding any gaps in the brush that might have otherwise let a person see movement through them.
Flynn’s nerves were already jangled, and this was not helping.
He started humming, almost without thinking about it, a habit he sometimes fell into to calm himself when distracted, or drunk, or on edge. Or all three. Tides knew which it was tonight. The tune was something they’d been drumming up in the taverns, with the Kul Tiran usual preference toward shanty rhythm and rhyme, though he had to admit, the lyrics were altogether morbid; it seemed a Lord Admiral could be better eulogized than by agonizing over the circumstances of his death.
Flynn trailed a gloved hand against the right side of the hedge maze, carefully trimmed twigs and branches bending under his fingers where they poked him as he passed. Old logic trick. Pick one wall and follow it through the maze, you’ll find your way out eventually, dead ends and all. And surely the center had to be coming up around any turn now? “Hm-mm, hm-mm, the daughter of the sea…”
He felt the hands gripping his collar before he saw them, saw the lantern in the center of the hedge maze spin like a swarming firefly before he realized what it was. Tandred, pushing him back into foliage, a desolate, desperate look of pain on his face that Flynn had never seen before. And anger, he realized; the youngest Proudmoore so rarely rose to anger that the expression looked almost alien on him.
“Where did you hear that song?”
Tandred’s voice was low and thick, but quivering with emotion — not vulnerability, but something else. Five people in the whole of Azeroth knew that melody, that song, those words. How had it gotten out?
“Where did you hear it?” he asked again, hardly aware of his fingers seizing tighter on Flynn’s collar, knuckles paling with the effort.
“What song?” Flynn looked genuinely perplexed.
Had he not even been aware? Tandred’s brow furrowed, the nigh-visible steam that might as well have been coming off of his rage fizzling out into the sleeting mist of the night. His fingers loosened without his concentration behind them, cold and wet, almost numb.
“The song you were — the daughter of the sea,” he forced out. “That song. Where did you hear it?”
Flynn blinked and cocked his head much the way the Norwington hounds were prone to do. “But it’s in all the pubs, mate,” he answered. “People are — they’re upset.”
An understatement.
Tandred’s hands fell from Flynn’s collar, awkwardly half-flattened against his chest. He could feel the change in his expression more than anything else, the weak downturn of his mouth, the blurring in his eyes that was less rainwater than tears; he hoped Flynn couldn’t tell the difference.
“Mate,” Flynn said, the sound vibrating under Tandred’s cold hands. “What is it?”
The words wouldn’t come. His brow furrowed again, in frustration, his throat working against a barrier he had hardly known was there, instilled and reinforced by years of his father’s conditioning, no doubt, his father, Daelin, the stubborn and headstrong way he had of shutting down questions and answers —
Enough!
“That was my sister’s…” he managed. “Jaina’s — lullaby.”
There was a sour, sharp taste like coppers in his mouth, and he spat it out into the rain. Flynn studied him for a moment, then took his upper arms in both hands, steering him away from the center of the maze and toward one of the hidden cellars that ran beneath it. Covered by haphazard vines and flowers carefully tended to look as if they weren’t, they’d often ducked Tandred’s lordly duties growing up by hiding out among the foodstuffs and garden stores below ground.
“All right, all right…”
“It’s not —”
“I know,” Flynn said, somewhat more sharply than perhaps he ought to a noble of the nation’s ruling family. In keeping with that insolence, he seized Tandred by the cheeks, cupping his face in the palms of his rope-rough hands, covered as they were by worn wet leather; his fingertips were bare, however, and pressed against the soft scruff of Tandred’s blond beard.
The young lord closed his eyes, Proudmoore blue disappearing behind weary lids. He was tired, weighed down by grief, rage, and helplessness. What could he do from across the sea?
Flynn studied his face, then gathered him up with rough tenderness into his arms. Tandred clutched onto the back of his coat without hesitation, and so Flynn held him there — a better buoy than any in the harbor.
“The sun and the moon, an ocean of air —
So many voices, and nothing is there
But the ghost of you, asking me why,
Why did I leave?”
The ropes swayed calm in the wind over Tiragarde Sound, a gentle breeze following the warm rays of the sun. Autumn would come, but not just yet, and the weather was still good for sailing.
It would have to be, Tandred thought, with a league of Tidesages onboard.
They were just as concerned about the recent silence from House Stormsong as anyone, and well they should be, with said house belonging to their lord regent (though some, perhaps, took the name with less fervor than others). The voyage was not intended to be a long one, no more than a surveyor’s journey to look for anomalies or budding maelstroms of unnatural make.
Tandred braced his hands against the spray-sanded wood of the ship’s taffrail. Truth be told, he was itching to be back on the sea again, no matter the reason; the soles of his boots were on fire with it. It had always been this way, but the yen had only grown since the death of his father. He had not liked how the tragedy had hardened Katherine, made her colder and more unwilling to bend, and tempered the gentle disposition that had once made her Daelin Proudmoore’s perfect foil.
No, he could no longer speak more openly to his mother than to a tree — and given what he knew of druidry, he suspected with some bitterness that he would find the tree more receptive.
“Ahoy, ‘hoy,” called a familiar voice from the gangplank, shaking him from his thoughts as it always had.
Tandred smiled to himself, lifting his hat to smooth back his hair before replacing it — fully aware of how often the end of the day brought about a truly embarrassing display of hat-head, a gift inherited from the thinner, finer hair of his father.
He came down the steps of the forecastle deck, greeting Captain Fairwind as he boarded with a warmly clasped hand and a firm, clutching hug around the shoulders that for an instant brought their chests together, solid and reassuring.
“Come to see me off, then?”
“More like hound you for dogging off again.” Flynn flashed a cheeky smile. “What’s it been, only two weeks? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were avoiding me…”
“A paltry two weeks? It’s been three, at least!” Tandred laughed. “As if I could ever, the way you follow after me.”
“Ah, you’ve noticed?”
“Hard to ignore the puppy at your heels.”
“Oh, you love it.” Flynn squinted, pleased with himself as ever, and Tandred took a moment to appreciate the soft wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. They were more apparent now than when they were boys, but somehow that was almost more endearing.
To have spent so many years together…
They stood side by side at the rail.
“Honest, Tand — what do you think you’ll find out there?”
He thought about it. Sighed. “Honest, Flynn, I don’t know. I know Mother’s hoping for answers. I suppose part of me is, too…”
Flynn cocked his head. “But…?”
“But…” Tandred nodded assent. “I don’t know that we’ll find any. House Stormsong has long kept to themselves, far more than Waycrest or Ashvane. If something really is amiss, I have my doubts as to whether we’ll find even the barest trace.” He leaned forward, arms folded on the balustrade.
His companion joined him. “Hm… are you taking odds, then?”
Tandred glanced sideways, then laughed, knocking his shoulders into Flynn’s. “Not from you.”
“What? I count fair as a lady’s thigh!”
“Hah! More like a farmer’s daughter’s.”
Flynn opened his mouth as if to protest, then grinned. “Touché.”
An easy smile crossed Tandred’s face, then faded slowly, matching the sun as it disappeared behind the gentle rolls of a drifting white cloud.
Flynn studied his distant expression, the soft blond beard that had grown in, the sharper, defined angles of his jaw and cheekbones. He favored his father in the way Jaina had favored her mother — save the color of his hair; all the Proudmoore children had golden locks. Or had had them, as the case may be. It softened the likeness, somehow. Where Daelin had been cold cutting steel, Tandred was the glow of the sunrise on the horizon, slowly melting into its reflection on the water.
And, Flynn realized quite suddenly, he was going to be quite sorely missed.
A soft frown flitted across Flynn’s face. An odd thought. He’d had his fair share, to be certain, but this was — well, while not out of the question, and certainly not the first time — a bit of an inopportune moment.
Wouldn’t you say, old boy?
Perceptive as ever, Tandred caught his hesitation, and turned to him with a question: “What else?”
“What’s that now?”
“You looked as if you were about to say something.”
There was something about those damned blue eyes that made it hard to think. Flynn cleared his throat and straightened his collar; he pursed his lips.
“When you get back,” he said, finally, and smiled. “It can wait till then.”
It was Tandred’s turn to look as though he was still searching for the right words, but Flynn preempted him, pulling the young captain into another bracing hug, affectionately cupping the back of his neck with one hand. He knocked foreheads with Tandred, a bit roughly, beneath the brim of his cap, and grinned.
“You will remember to write?” he said.
Tandred’s eyes crinkled softly again, and he nodded, his lips curving beneath his carefully trimmed mustache. “I will.”
Flynn caught his gaze and held it, even as he straightened up, relinquishing his hold on Tandred, though it took most of his willpower not to show the reluctance he felt in doing so.
“Tides keep you, mate,” he said, and saluted with two fingers to his temple as he stepped up to the gangplank.
“And you.” Tandred nodded, and returned the salute, giving Flynn the last memory he could call to mind of the young sailor before the shouts of the town crier, the mother dressed in black, the nation once more plunged into the abyss of grief:
A halo of blonde beneath a salt-rimmed cap, the sun shining brightly, a silhouette in a blue coat lifting a hand in farewell.
“Oh, the ocean rolls us away, away, away,
The ocean rolls us away.Oh, the ocean rolls us away, away, away,
And I lose your hand through the waves.”