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Osric and Finndo were both more than brothers to me.
Finndo was like a father. Oberon was often absent from our lives and was distant when he was around. Finndo, however, was quick to fill this role, and he raised me as though I were his own starting the moment I outgrew my wet nurse. I felt equal parts admiration and fear for Finndo. He was the one who protected me and taught me to garden. However, he was also the harsher of the two when it came to combat training, and he could be outright cruel when it came to disciplining me. Still, I loved him.
I loved Osric as well, but in a much different way. He had watched with passive interest as Finndo raised me into a man, and then approached me the moment I was old enough to fill his needs. I'm sure that, if he had approached me when I was older and wiser as I am now, I would have refused him; however, he was gentle and warm, and at the time, his tender passion was a welcome and much needed release after a rough day with Finndo.
I was several decades old – still exceptionally young for an Amberite – during the divorce. It was messy and violent and left us three brothers distrustful of our father. Osric and Finndo had a plan, though. As much as I wanted to help them in their attempts, however, the two of them told me to stay out of it. I was young and naïve, they claimed; I didn't know what I would be fighting for or risking.
They attempted their coup and failed. Yet Father was surprisingly forgiving. Their days in prison didn't even number in the double digits. They were released, and indeed I was naïve because I thought it meant everything would go back to the way it was before.
But war broke out, and we lacked men to fight for Amber. Father recruited my brothers for the front lines, and knowing better than to refuse, they went. Osric and Finndo both gazed at me with sadness in their eyes the day they left, and the way Osric kissed me when no one was looking felt final and desperate. That kiss has been forever etched into my memory, and I have never been kissed like that since.
Yet I had faith in my brothers. I knew without a doubt they would return. They were the two strongest men I'd ever met. I had no idea that they had been sentenced to death, and this was the day of their execution.
Osric and Finndo fought ferociously on the battlefield, and it's no doubt thanks to them that we won that war with the ease that we did. But both of them came back home in boxes, and I was devastated. I was, for the first time in my life, completely and utterly alone.
That day, I went out into shadow and began my intense training regimen. My grieving for my lost brothers was done on countless battlefields in endless shadows. When I returned to Amber, I was a different man, and Father had taken a different wife. There was drama anew over the legitimacy of his latest offspring, but I refused to be drawn into it. I refused to allow myself to be dragged back into that world. There was only one reason why I returned to Amber, where memories of my cherished brothers were concealed in every nook, tearing open wounds I'd thought long healed. I had returned to look my father in the eye. He met my gaze unwillingly, but when he did, I could tell that he saw exactly what I'd wanted him to see.
He knew that I was no longer that same naïve little boy. I was a man, a warrior to be reckoned with. I could see in his eyes that he knew that I knew what he had done, and that there would be no repeating such a tactic on me.
And then I left just as calmly as I'd came. I returned to shadow and resumed my training, only visiting just long enough to keep Father in check by showing him what a true threat to the throne could look like.