Chapter Text
The River Camp, spring, Third Age 2981
It’s cold enough still in mid-March that they ship the body back to the River Camp instead of burying it out there on the Front.
First skirmish, the letter had said. He died doing his duty, and he did not flinch. It had been quick. He was a good boy, old friend. You have every right to be proud of him. He served me well for the short time I had him. I am sorry.
I wait outside until the wailing is over. Until my father leads my mother out and hands her off to his sister. We will dig his grave in the morning, out on the bluff.
They stand huddled, speaking softly. I should wait until I am bidden, but I do not. No one notices when I slip inside and stand beside the table staring down.
He’d been puffed up like a rooster about that uniform. The black cloak and surcote. That golden ship and scepter on the livery. An old insolence, run underground by past kings, but for this war someone had the audacity to run up that standard openly once more, and thus far it has stood unchallenged. Bigger fish to fry for now, I reckon. The enemy of my enemy…
Someone must have cleaned it, or dressed him in a new one. No blood. I don’t know where he took the hit.
He’s the wrong color, but it’s still him. It’s only been six weeks. We’d gone down to the river the night before he left. I was surprised—some of the guys were at the tavern and I figured he’d have wanted to join them, but he didn’t. I think he and Father might have fought before I got home from work that day, but I don’t know what about. The usual, probably. He hadn’t brought it up and I hadn’t asked.
We’d sat on in the dark on the rocks above Hoarwell while the snow skirled down. He’d said his commission would pay for betrothal rings. He’d said he would ask her in the summer, on his first leave. He’d said the old man could shove it, he’d taken a Nimlothean wife, the hypocrite, so why couldn’t he?
I wonder if Cóliel has heard yet. I wonder if I will have the courage to walk up and tell her. Who else, if not me? I am the only one who knew they intended to wed.
I do not know how long I have stood without moving when the footsteps come, unevenly, the tap of the cane. My father’s voice behind me says, “I will write in the morning to the Lord Tarîkthôr. He will receive you and your commission on the name of our House.”
I do not say it aloud. And if I do not wish to go and die skewered on a goblin-blade before my eighteenth birthday?
He answers as if I have, “It is your duty as the last son of the line of Rôthzagar to defend your people and your land. As much yours by rights as any man’s. Now. In Arnubên’s place.”
Arnubên had wanted nothing different. He would have conscripted to the Golden Guard had there been a war or no. Little matter that they were a band of whisperers and malcontents, skulking in their ruined keeps, ever with glorious re-ascension on their tongues and in their hearts, but never the mettle to see it done.
My brother had liked the pageantry. And he had been loyal to Father, regardless of their bickering, though I doubt he had been loyal to the cause. Arnubên was many things, but crafty was not one of them.
My father steps past me and lifts my elder’s brother’s white hand and twists the ring off of it. It is cold as a corpse when he turns and seizes mine and bestows me with it swiftly, the middle finger of my left hand. He takes my face and kisses my brow and names me in the old speech. Firstborn and heir. The marks are still on his cheeks. They may have quarreled like rooks, but they loved one another, and the grief stands stark as a fresh scorch-mark there in my father’s eyes.
He says, “The dispatch leaves in two days. Be ready to go with it. I’ll see to it the sword is sharpened afresh.”
They do not come in full vesture. They are not yet so bold. To a benighted eye they are no more than a handful of ragged lords and pauper noblemen, driven far from their own holdings, thrown together in this place with races they disdain and would rule over in turn.
But he was theirs, my brother, and they will not inter him without the proper rites. They dispense the cup, the mourners huddled close. In turn it comes to me as I stand at my mother’s side. I wear the signet of my father’s house. The sapthan does not pass me over, but marks me with the incense like a man. The words come. I have heard the response all my life, though it has not left my own lips. It does now, as is expected of me. Hail the Giver of Freedom, Lord of Anadûnê and of the Faithful. The increase of his dominion shall know no end…
It is wine in the chalice, slick and red and warm. I wet my lips and little more.
Sometimes I think it is a good thing the women are not required the observance. I do not believe my mother would drink.
We put him in the ground. I hear Tâktharan muttering. Here we stand, hooded like thieves and outlaws on the outskirts of the people we should rule. They should assemble with their faces to the ground while we entomb our sons slain to preserve them. Instead they trade and eat and whelp their children on borrowed land they pay no levy for, carry on their fleeting, vulgar little lives as his passing goes unmarked…
The taste of their wine is still on my tongue when I turn and leave the assembly and depart down the hill, the dirges of the women going up like smoke behind me to the sky.
It is a little house of beam and wattle. Thatched like a sheepherder’s cottage. My father curses it for a hovel and has gone more than once to try and barter for stone to build a house more fitting for a nobleman of his status, but there is little to be had, and even his name and the weight of his coin will not buy what there is.
But I think my mother likes the place. She has strung it all over with woolens and fleece, and the thick highland sheepskins, and braided garlands of savories and herbs. A hedgewoman’s cottage, my father mutters, but I do not think she takes it for the insult he intends. I know before she married she spent a while with a cousin learned in such things. Father considers such base practices far beneath the lady of his estate and forbade her the pursuit of them when they wed, but I overheard her say to one of her handmaids that she hopes the strange times and desperate straits of so many might call for her to revive the skills she learned as a young woman.
She’s outfitted the house for it, in any case. I am the first to return home after the burial. The others gone to food and laments, but I do not have the heart for it. My hands have blistered from the digging. No stone for lord’s houses, no stone for a cairn. Straight into the ground like a heathen.
I stop on the step, the gable above me. We had built it together, the men of my father’s house, in the autumn. Arnubên up on the roof-beams barefooted as a mountain goat, laughing down at the rest of us, his hammer strung through his belt, his trousers rolled up like a boy’s. He’d flicked more nails at me when I wasn’t looking than he’d pounded into the framing, until Nârukhôr had told him archly he’d be picking them out of the ryegrass in the dark if he didn’t cut it out…
People have asked us for years who is the elder. I am dour by habit and he wears a grin the way a fox wears a white throatpatch…
I go inside. The house is quiet. The fire is low and I stir it so the main room will be warm when my parents return. I continue through the narrow back door and beneath the adjoining roof into the adjacent cot my brother and I had shared. His bed is neat and mine is rumpled. A customary thing. He liked to tell me I had better marry a scullery maid who was used to cleaning up after slovenly overlords.
My boots are tossed beneath the bed; I rummage them out and stand them in a pair beside the door. The Golden Guard will provide me with a uniform, but it will be a long, chill ride up out of the Angle. Cote and cloak and hose and fleece-lined trousers. I do not love to be cold.
I cannot find my scarf. I search for what seems like an hour, growing increasingly wroth. I have other things to be on to. It is not in the trunk at the foot of the bed; I put down the lid with a crash. The cloaks on their hooks I leave heaped when lifting them away does not reveal my quarry. Back into the main house, but it is not hung at the front door either, nor stuffed into the basket by the bench, nor draped over the back of the chair by the stove. It is not in my mother’s mending crock, which I lift to dig through one-handed.
I do not know what comes over me. I am not given to fits of temper like my father. But I am suddenly resoundingly angry. I wheel and fling the crock against the hearth-stone and it hits and scatters to shards. One strikes me on the cheek and I feel the blood start down, a feather-touch to the corner of my mouth. I part my lips and catch the trickle on my tongue. It tastes like burial-wine.
The fire crackles in the silence.
Behind me, the door clicks softly shut.
I turn, slowly. Nothing to hide and no time if I cared to. He will rebuke me for a child and tell me curtly to clean up the mess…
Not him. My mother is veiled. She says, and it is in the tongue she may not speak but taught to us in secret nevertheless, “Ai, beloved. It is not a shameful thing to weep for him, my son.”
She is lovely, still. Our father withers and wizens by the day, and she remains untouched by that same hand. Dark hair without a thread of silver. Sometimes I think he hates her for it. Sometimes his eyes linger on her when she turns away, and not with the besotted light in Arnubên’s when Cóliel had bent to pluck forget-me-nots out of the brook.
I kneel and begin to gather up the broken pottery. My mother comes and for a moment I think she will join me in the chore. But she goes past. She enters into the kitchen and through it to the scullery. She disappears past the dark cellar door.
I have nearly finished when she emerges again. In her hand is a bundle; she is still brushing off the earth. Had it been buried there?
She brings it to me. She shakes it free, a long, heavy cloth.
It is a cloak. The color of nothing now, though perhaps it had been grey once. There is a pin over the lacings, a six-rayed star, tarnished to soot, the center stone gone. Nothing left but a little empty socket.
But I am not entirely an idiot. I know to whom the insignia belongs. I know that if my father saw it in her hands, he would burn it or beat her or worse.
I say in a low voice, “Mother, what are you doing.”
“Arnuzîr…”
My gaze darts toward the door. “Where did you get that.”
“Iôn-nin. Arandil.”
“Don’t. If he hears you…”
“Listen to me. You will die there. Arnuzîr, listen to me.” She takes my face in both of her too-cold hands. “Tarîkthôr is a pompous old fool, and his sword has not seen the outside of its sheath since Argeleb tried to take back the splintered Kingdoms. He can no more train men to fight and win than I can. He is a fat old imposter beneath a traitor’s banner, and he will get them all killed, and you among them, before the first sunflowers bloom.”
“Mother, I must go, I have no choice— ”
“You do. You do, Arnuzîr.” She seizes my arm, as my father had done the day before to string Arnubên’s ring onto my finger. This a far more dangerous bequeathment. She shoves the old grey cloak into my hands. “My father was a captain of the Rangers. He served Argonui faithfully. Here is his rune, here on the Star.” She fumbles the brooch over to show me the mark engraved on the back. “He was renowned among them, and died among them, and is honored by them still. On his name, my son, they will receive you in their ranks.”
I say, “He will kill me if he learns.”
“He need not know. In time I will forge the papers for you, a letter of commendation from the Golden Guard. It will put his mind to rest, and he will think of it no longer.”
“You would lie to him?”
“I would see you in service to men who might keep you alive!"
“To the man whose ribs he would happily put a knife between, you mean.”
“The man to whom even he owes allegiance. The man who still has mine, freely, as his father and grandfather did before him.”
I turn away and bend for the last piece of pottery. “You are asking for trouble.”
“I am asking nothing of you that he has not. Service to one man or service to another.” When I straighten and turn back to her, she is standing tall. She has lifted back her veil. I know it is much of why he took her for a wife. She looks like a queen, our mother, and the sons of Rôthzagar deem themselves deserving of no less.
She says, “Choose this day whom you will serve.”
In the morning I leave. It is wretchedly cold. In one pocket is my father’s heavy gold ring. In the other, a six-pointed, tarnished star. One a weight I cannot ignore. The other gouges me incessantly, no matter how I slip my hand in and lay it flat again against my leg.