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The Carian couple trot their eldest out like a prized show pony, his ruin-red hair combed and coifed just so.
Even from his throne, Godfrey towers over the boy, who is all angles underneath the rich embroidery and filigree. From his mantle to his tunic – all of it works tirelessly to conceal his gangly stature but not one bit of it succeeds. Anyone and everyone in the royal court can spot those spindly wrists peeking out shyly from sleeve and shirt like a lovesick teen forbidden from showing herself for fear of causing a stir but wanting to be seen by her paramour all the same. (The ankles, at least, are held back by a combination of long pant and high boot.) The little prince is not so little any more, growing at a pace that no tailor can match.
Godfrey eyes the not-so-small child (only seven summers? Hard to fathom) and makes his choice.
His chin falls in a short, sharp motion. He will take the boy into his city, his home, his care.
Radahn of Liurnia will foster with the golden couple of Leyndell.
(Curiously, his queen, his silent queen, says nothing of the boy or the royals. Her eyes bore endlessly into the swaddling held in the crook of the other queen’s arms. Godfrey has eyes for Prince Radahn. Marika has only eyes for Princess Ranni.)
So, too, will Godwyn the Golden, shining as bright as the Erdtree itself, foster with the riverland royals, twice-reviled foe-turned-ally Rennala and champion-turned-consort Radagon. How strange the shape the Lands take in these giant-slain days. To think that he would greet the Carian blues with anything less than his axe and half or more of his Crucible Knights. To think that he would send his eldest into their arcane jaws.
This gesture will foster relations between the Elden and Carian thrones, or so the Erdbishops like to think. Marika was a woman of faith and communion, spending more and more time these days in the most hallowed of chambers to commune with the Tree itself. To break her ever-expanding vigil was tantamount to sin. She could not be bothered, and so it fell to Godfrey to run the city he had so tirelessly championed.
Godfrey was a man of war, not statecraft. He warred long and hard against gloam and giant and glintstone. Or so he had envisioned in his blood-red dreams. The last of the three had been robbed from him.
Radagon was only ever meant to be the tip of the spear, bloodying them and battering them and finding their weakness in their armor before Godfrey marched down from the burning mountain with his main force. Now Radagon the Red stood here, sheathed in a queer collaboration of intermingled gold and blue. Godfrey spied rings of gold woven into his braids, which reminded him entirely too much of Marika’s own braids. A shallow attempt at flattery. Godfrey saw the sea of stars reflected in his deep blue cape, which hung from familiar golden armor. And if the runners and spies stationed at the gates were to be believed, before surrendering any arms in deference to his golden hosts, that golden armor had been bracketed by a Numen hammer on one hip and a sword of shining blue fire on the other. A sacred hammer and an ensorcelled sword.
Radagon was the very spirit of cooperation, the Erdbishops assured him.
Radagon was an opportunist who schemed to steal glory, Godfrey’s own eyes and ears assured him. All the worse, he did so in the bedchamber rather than the battlefield.
If Radagon well and truly wished to ingratiate himself to the Golden Mother, he would have returned with Rennala’s head, not her hand in marriage.
And he would not have bothered to sire a brood upon her. How many of Leyndell’s secrets became pillow talk? How many sacred oaths were superseded or cast aside in the name of the one oath sworn in marriage? How many times did he bury himself in her after her soldiers had buried his men in that damp, foreign soil?
Radagon had returned to Leyndell with a poor prize indeed.
But Godfrey would take it all the same. It was a fair trade.
Radagon had stolen his glory. Godfrey would steal his son.
The problems began when Radahn exceeded his expectations.
Seven summers old, and already the son of Caria had bested the youngest of the squires. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? Radahn would grow into a mountain of a man (or at least a redwood), that much was clear to Godfrey even now. Moreover, he was a child sired by a champion and surrounded by knights. Of course his pedigree had afforded him a strength and a vigor and a martial education that most of these glorified stable boys lacked. He knew more of proper swordplay than most soldiers.
So Godfrey set young Radahn against the elder squires, almost knights in their own right, and considered the matter solved.
When Radahn lay gasping and gawping in the dust and the blood of the training yard, where the blood was his own, Godfrey felt the thrill of secondhand victory. Yes, this would do. Let the boy be humbled so that he might return to Liurnia with tales of golden strength, absolute and unassailable. Let the next generation of the Carian royal court live in fear of the plateau rather than comforting themselves with delusion that they were somehow equal. Let them know their proper place in the Erdtree’s radiant shadow. They were low men of low lands.
Then Radahn stood up, wiping his mouth on a lovingly threaded sleeve as if it were no more than a rag and leaving behind a pearly white smile dyed the color of Godfrey’s victories.
“Well done, Ser Squire!” The princeling said, swinging his wooden sword back up into an open stance that demanded a response. “You have drawn first blood, but let us see who carries the day!”
Radagon’s boy was a proud one.
Godfrey had broken prouder horses.
To Radahn, first son of the Carian royal family, went the last and the least of the horses.
“Think on it as a gift for the day of thy birth.”
And then Godfrey thrust the reigns into Radahn’s growing hands. He half-expected the boy to throw down the reigns in an act of childish petulance, to spit on this act of charity from his fostering family and jeopardize the entire venture.
“How marvelous,” Radhan said instead, taking one hand off of the reigns to stroke the narrow little thing’s snout, which jutted out more like a bird’s beak than a horse’s snout. “He is a skinny thing, but he will grow into a mighty steed, just as I will grow into a mighty knight.”
“Shall thee counteth yourself as one of the Knights Carian or a Knight Leyndell?”
“Is there a difference, m’Lord?”
Godfrey should have known that it would come to this.
The Elden Lord had not busied himself with the Carian prince for over a fortnight. Very little else mattered in the face of the festival of war. The city of gold swam with colors. Green, growing things imported from the Limgrave forests to be collected and cataloged and concocted by the perfumers into new perfumes, new salves, new balms. Blue, brilliant things imported from Liurnia to delight the nobles who could only guess at their cosmic significance and instead decided amongst themselves that they must be blue sapphires to shower on their wives and daughters and mistresses (though not all of those things at once, lest the Erdchurch brand them heretics for the sin of turning the branches of the family tree back toward the trunk). Shining, silver things from the mines of Caelid to make for simple tools like cutlery, as all things from that region were delightfully simple and dreadfully practical.
Yes, even the Fire Monks, those stalwart guardians who stood guard over Godfrey’s greatest victory and embarrassment (for what was a war that ended unwon?), had chosen to send perfectly smooth planks of wood stretched flat and burned artfully to depict in ash the fall of King Surtr and the building of the First Church of Marika on that site to ensure that his bones would never be exhumed by whatever pagan wished to build a reliquary in his honor. “Pyrography,” the man in the red hood had called it.
Red. Yes, red. The color closest to his soul.
Not his wife’s gold, though he loved it so. Not the gold he wore in rings and the crown sitting heavy upon his brow. Not the gold of the tree that afforded him an age of abundance and an era of plenty, a far cry from the cold that crept in even as he huddled around the meager campfire with his sixteen braves in the days before the Tree and the bride.
Yes, he loved that gold, but his soul would always return to red.
So it was that all other colors would melt away, and he would see the world painted red. Starting with the colosseum.
The same colosseum where, on the first day of the festivities, a contest of archery was to be conducted. Godfrey had no love of archery, but he did respect it. His longbowmen had brought him victory, so arrow-filled that he might have mistaken it for a porcupine, more than once. Then there would be a day of gallant horsemanship. Then a day of spearmen. Then a day of jousts combining the previous two. And so on and so forth until the final day, when all pageantry would fall away and the Leyndell Colosseum would sing a song of cheers and shouts and war cries. The true gladiator games would begin on that final day. Today was only a taste of that sweetness, to whet his appetite.
Yes, Godfrey was a man of hunger and simple pleasures, but he knew the value in delaying that gratification. Victory was the finest cut of meat and anticipation the finest seasoning.
When young Radahn (ah, he had forgotten all about Radahn in all of this revelry, hadn’t he?) strode forward with a grown man’s bow in hand, Godfrey felt his hunger abating.
When he drew that bow without trouble, Godfrey felt a sweat dampen his brow.
When Radahn struck bullseye after bullseye like the magicians that raised him, Godfrey felt his pulse quicken.
Very well, Radagon’s get. I accept thy challenge.
No more games. No more japes.
In spite of himself, Godfrey would admit error and appraise Radahn with a sharper gaze. A horse to be broken? No, the Elden Lord had been wrong.
Radahn was a blade to be sharpened.
“Doth thee yield, champion’s cub?”
Radahn looked up at him with the cosmos swirling in eyes. A constellation of anger, a meteor of shame, a starburst of obstinate refusal. ‘Tis a most majestic sight indeed. Godfrey was glad to have wrung it from little Radahn, for even a child of Radahn’s mounting size is little next to his Elden Lord.
In spite of that spirit, which would see his head hung upon the wall of Leyndell had this been a time of war, Godfrey eased back and swung his axe not to cleave the upstart but to sling it casually over one shoulder.
“Indeed, did I give mine own word to teachest thee to wield an axe as great as mine own, but alloweth me to teachest thee another lesson: There art times at which even the mighty must yield.”
He extended the fallen prince his hand.
“Just as my father yielded to my mother or you yielded to Queen Marika?”
There was that unbroken spirit again, but Godfrey knew better than to break it. He must shape it, temper it like steel.
“‘Tis true that I am powerless before the Queen, but it is not the defeat ye bethink it is.” He bridged the gap between them and yanked Radahn to his feet. It was not gentle, but it was necessary. “Let us put away our axes for the day.”
“If not axes… then what are we to do with the rest of the afternoon, m’Lord?”
“I shall teach thee the ways of womankind.”
(It will strike him later, much later, too late to make a difference, that he never had this conversation with any of his blood sons. Not the one in Liurnia and certainly not the two below.)
Godwyn returned a full summer later than planned.
Godwyn, the older of the two fostered children, would reach the age of majority first. At such time, that sixteenth summer, a child would be a man grown, capable of determining his own home and his own way in life. It went without saying that most fostered sons would return to their roots at precisely the day of their sixteenth.
The fact that Godwyn misses this unspoken appointment causes the Erdbishops no shortage of heartache. Has he forgotten his mother’s face or his Erdtree’s love? Has the wicked Witch-Queen placed him under a trance as surely as Radagon lives under her thrall (even though such talk has been explicitly outlawed by the same men of the cloth)? Will he return to the plateau at the head of a Carian phalanx?
He returned with such little gallantry or glamor (or glintstone) that Godfrey does not hear of his son’s return until he hears his voice, clear as a bell.
“Has the war with Liurnia continued in my absence?”
Godfrey looked up from the tangle of limbs where he has pinned Radahn (who is still doing his damnedest to wrestle his way out of his predicament, because he never yields, not even now) and beheld his baby boy cutting a fine figure in a tunic so white that its shine nearly eclipses the Erdtree. The shirtwas so white that it drew the eye even more fiercely toward the swan-shaped glintstone brooch glittering upon his snow-white breast.
A mingling of traditions
How very much like Radagon
Has Godwyn returned to him as another man’s son?
Radahn grew into a youth that is both sweet and sullen.
He greeted “Queen Mother” and “Lord Father” with honey in his voice. He greeted “Ser Godwyn” with venom.
Godfrey saw the wheels turning even now. His two sons were both children standing astride a gap as large as the precipice separating the riverlands and the plateau. What are they to make of themselves, these patchwork children?
No, not children.
Godwyn was a man and has been for some time. Even now, he has stepped in the magisterial role that Leyndell has long lacked. Godfrey was her warchief, Marika her shaman. Godwyn, at long last, completed their holy trinity. Strength of arm and faith and vision, all unified under one gilded canopy.
There is no longer any place for Radahn here.
And so, at long last, after years of wrestling and axe-training and hard-won bits of knowledge sifted from a river of mistakes, Godfrey released Radahn from his obligations at the age of sixteen.
“Go, Radahn,” Godfrey told the not-so-little prince, clapping one paw-like hand over Radahn’s shoulder. Radahn stood almost as tall as him now. “Go and be well. Liurnia calls you home.”
The prince, embraced by Leyndell gold in a Leyndell knight’s armor, paused.
“I think perhaps I should spend my sixteenth summer in Caelid. If it please you, m’Lord.”
Godfrey blinked, perplexed. This was the first he had heard such a thing from Radahn’s lips. What lived in Caelid but rock and stone? But Radahn is no longer his charge or his ward or his. Godfrey holds no sway over him now.
“Do as thou wilt.”
And so Radahn left the walls of that golden city behind him.
He left carrying only the arms and armor that Godfrey had gifted him last and the spindly horse that the Elden Lord had gifted him first.
Radahn returned a man of twenty-seven, larger in body and spirit.
No longer little Radahn of Liurnia. Now he is Radahn, Hero of Sellia, Savior of Caelid, Scourge of the Stars.
Leyndell threw open her gates and welcomed back her conquering son.
When the giant of a man knelt (for it was both custom and the only way he could fit comfortably in a hall too small for men of such greatness) before his lord, the Elden Lord asked a question of him.
“Do not mistake me, Radahn. Thee have rendered great service, holding Sellia secure. But what compelled thee to undertake this trial by stars?”
Radahn’s smiled so wide that he could have swallowed a wagon whole.
“Steel sharpens steel,” Radahn said. “Only a great victory against a great enemy would make me worthy of a place at your side. I was born a champion’s cub. Now I am the Lord of the Battlefield’s lion.”
Now it was Godfrey’s turn to smile.
“Rise, if you would. Rise and take upon your shoulders a new title. Rise, General Radahn.”
“TO GENERAL RADAHN!”
The call thunders down the halls and over the ramparts, shaking Caelid from one border to another. A weary traveler might have felt a moment of respite in that moment as the rot seemed to stop its ceaseless seething. Even the wretched creatures born into that detritus and decay seem to retreat back to their festering burrows and hiding holes, if only for a few hours. Castle Redmane shakes for General Radahn for the last time.
There will be no more stories, no more glory.
General Radahn is well and truly dead.
“A well-told tale,” the eccentric across the bonfire says. “I counted General Radahn as my truest friend, and I have heard many of the stories you deigned to tell. But this is my first time hearing it in such a way. This is my first time hearing it from the Elden Lord.”
“I am Elden Lord no longer,” the newcomer rumbles, gazing into the fire. “But Elden Lord again shall I be. And so shall be my first decree: To cleanse this land that he loved and hew his remembrance into the Erdtree.”
“A righteous honor,” the eccentric says, taking up his undulating blade. “But I must take my leave as well. We have mourned our general for eight days, as is custom. Now that I no longer hear his voice across the dunes, I hear another, older oath calling me back westward. Our interests diverge in Limgrave, but I think I should like to walk with you and hear more of that man we both loved as our own. Think of it as food for the soul. What say you, Lord?”
Godfrey rises without a word, sweeping up his own weapon in the smooth motion of a warrior who has woven his weapon into his soul. His strides carry him westward so quickly that Jerren breaks into a run to catch up to him.
Jerren wonders for a time if this a wordless acceptance to his invitation or a silent rejection.
As he overtakes Godfrey and turns his face upward to ask the man a question, he sees the Lord’s face set hard and eyes shot red.
“Speak,” the Lord begins with a voice trembling and teetering on a knife’s edge. “Speak to me of this man we both loved as our own.”