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The sunset is slowly but surely painting the fields, a pink-red-golden hue settling over the lands, over the hills in the distance.
Cedrick watches as the sun sinks, as it leaves them and the day behind. The battlefield looks more like a painting with every passing second, and yet remains its gruesome self: his friends and colleagues, people he both hated and came to love over long months next to them in the saddle and on the ground, training, eating, fighting, now laying dead.
Soon, there will be another battle that leaves yet more of them dead; but for now the hardest part is over. Or perhaps it is yet to come, in reckoning with all that he’s gained and lost, again and again.
Beneath him, Tristan snorts. Cedrick strokes his neck, still looking out ahead, then swings himself out of the saddle, leaning his head against his horse’s side, one hand softly petting instead of holding Tristan’s reins, carelessly slung over Tristan’s neck. He’s still looking out ahead, at the day’s past, Tristan a piece of calm beside him.
He’s not certain what brought him to put saddle and bridle, although not the full tack, back on Tristan and ride out of the camp, to the very top of the hill, to overlook the battlefield, instead of spending the evening drinking and raucous, in celebration of another day survived, his horse rubbed down and resting with the others; except for that he does know.
The landscape looks harmless, quaint and quiet, just another strip of land were it not for the dead bodies now scattered across it; soon, every last one of these men will be buried, their souls reclaimed by a God Cedrick believes less and less in on days like this, when he would like to believe even more.
These are the fields his father lost his life, when Cedrick was but a boy. Part of Cedrick had been certain he would too, when he got up in the dawn of the day, getting ready for battle. But here he still stands, looking out, his loyal steed beside him.
He scratches Tristan’s mane, and Tristan snuffles slowly at him, and Cedrick suddenly has to press his face into Tristan’s coat, tears dripping hotly down his face.
Tristan has been by his side for eleven years now; Cedrick still remembers the day he got him, Tristan but a gangly one-year-old, his brown coat a bit darker than it is now, unused to working with a human or being separated from his mother and herd for any stretches of time at all, how he slowly grew into his body, into trusting Cedrick, and, how, in time, training made him steady enough to ride into battle with Cedrick for his king.
Cedrick holds onto his horse tightly; soon the next battle will come, and illness and famine still wait in the periphery of his sight, always reminding him of what he prays for, even on the days God seems furthest away.
Soon may be the day that he comes home in glory, only to ride out again not too soon thereafter, or that he doesn’t return at all, or, worse, without Tristan.
But for now, his fellow knights celebrating their victory at his back, the battlefield in front, he is alive, and Tristan is breathing steadily next to him, and he watches the sun set.