Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 15, 2018 13:50:33 GMT 10
Title: City under Siege
Rating: R
Warnings: References to execution, cannibalism, necrophilia, and prostitution. Lots of death and dark themes in general.
Author's Note: Thomsen's name, his status as Sir Emeric of Legann's squire, and his posting at the City of the Gods are all borrowed from Tammy's interviews.
Prompt: Healing
Summary: In the City of the Gods during the Scanran War, Thomsen of Trebond can dispose of the dead but he can't bury the past.
City under Siege
The dead, attended by swarming flies and scurrying rats, were everywhere. The City of the Gods had become a City under Siege. Maybe to ultimately transform into a City on Its Knees in the case of surrender or a City of the Dead should all its inhabitants be reduced to skeletons. Her proud temples and cloisters were humbled by thousands seeking sanctuary, though why the Scanrans who had cursed their souls by laying siege to a holy city would refuse to violate the sacred soil of the temples and cloisters themselves was a mystery answered only by the desperate.
The bells no longer tolled for the dead, because if they rang for the dead, they would never cease their cacophony. No graves were dug for the dead either. Instead the dead were dumped unceremoniously into what had once been a bustling marketplace where there had been food and furs aplenty to trade but now there was nothing to buy or sell in the heart of this slowly starving city. Now the square was deserted except for the dead, the hovering flies, the scavenging rats, and the disposal detail.
The disposal detail was just a fancy term to try to hide the ugliness of carrying corpses by the cartload to the ramparts to be thrown into the enemy camps to spread disease throughout their ranks rather than be buried in mass graves where they might poison the wells in the City of the Gods. This thought spiraled bleakly through Thomsen of Trebond’s head as he swept a lock of sweaty auburn hair out of his dirt brown eyes that had already seen too much death even though he was barely fifteen years old—his fifteenth birthday coming two weeks ago in the midst of a dying city; his only celebration the fact that he was still among the breathing.
With a weary sigh he and a fellow squire, the sixteen-year-old Ewan of Irimor, hauled a corpse of a little old lady, who had been frail in life but now was heavy as a boulder, onto the cart. How the gaunt bodies of the starving became bloated after life left them was something Da with all his talk of war had never described. Of course, Da had never—to Thomsen’s knowledge, anyhow—been on the receiving end of a siege when he served in King Jasson’s army. He had laid siege to cities in Tusaine but never been trapped in a city as the noose of an opposing army began to strangle it.
Thomsen should have been numb as the corpses on the dusty cobblestones before him, but, somehow, no matter how many times he stared into the unseeing eyes of the dead, a fresh surge of horror and sorrow would course through his cold veins.
“He used to skewer rats.” Thomsen felt compelled to offer a short eulogy for a filthy street urchin as he and Ewan deposited him in the cart. Many in the City of the Gods chased after rats—who fed on corpses and were the only fat ones in this city under siege—now that all the other animals not needed for battle had been slaughtered and devoured. Some were even reduced to mimicking the rats and eating the dead. A patrol had caught two citizens gorging like rats on the dead a week ago. The two civilians had been skinned and disemboweled before being beheaded in a public square. Command claimed that the brutality of their executions would be a harsh deterrent to cannibalism, but Thomsen wasn’t so confident. He wasn’t sure that people with growling bellies threatening to eat themselves would see even the most grisly execution as a worse fate than starvation. He figured that it was only a question of time before more people chose to consume corpses rather than starve.
“An unhealthy habit,” Ewan grunted. At first, Thomsen wondered if Ewan had somehow read his mind though the other squire wasn’t a mage. Then he realized that Ewan was replying to his comment about the street urchin hunting rats. There were so many unhealthy habits these days that it was difficult to keep track of all the things the healers disapproved of as encouraging disease. “The healers say rats are vectors of disease.”
“Probably was disease that did him in, not hunger, then.” Thomsen tried not to breathe through his nose to avoid inhaling the stench of a man Thomsen could recognize through the rot. “Disease likely was the end of this fellow too. He would catch flies and bake them into cakes.”
“Fly cakes are a delicacy now.” Ewan’s lips thinned as they heaved the man into the cart. Thomsen couldn’t disagree. With soldiers on half rations and civilians on quarter rations, flies who feasted on the dead began to seem appallingly edible to the masses. Snaring flies in nets and boiling them into hard, black cakes was commonplace despite admonitions from healers that flies caused sickness even after cooking. People, it appeared, would rather die of disease than starvation. At least disease might be quicker.
“People on quarter rations will do anything.” Thomsen shook his head as he and Ewan bent to pick up a mother of four children—who had split her rations five ways and only eaten a fifth herself—whose body was little more than jagged bones and shriveled skin. Jerking his chin down at her as they placed her in the cart, he added grimly, “Look at this poor lady. She starved herself to feed her children.”
“This one wasn’t a lady at all.” Ewan spat on the decaying corpse of a flower girl—she had called herself Lillian but Thomsen doubted that had been her true name since most of the women who followed the army to sell themselves went by fake names they thought delicate or beautiful—in a sad blue dress stained by dirt. “She was just a whore. Bet you a copper penny—which was about all she was worth—that she didn’t die of hunger but disease and not the kind you get from rats or flies. We could flip up her dress and find out.”
“She’s dead.” Thomsen scowled as he swiped the saliva off her bone-white face with a handkerchief he made a mental note to burn afterward. “Show some respect or the Black God will curse you.”
“The Black God has already cursed us all.” Ewan rolled his moss green eyes, and Thomsen’s tongue was too dry—water was as scarce as food—to argue this point. “Besides, it’s not as if she was fussy about who lifted her dress when she was alive. Why should she care now that she’s become fodder for flies?”
“You’ve got some screws loose if you want to play healer with the dead.” Thomsen glared at Ewan, who had seemed pleasant enough when they were pages but had shown his savagery now that they were starving squires, and thought that one of the worst things about being in a city under siege was that much of the violence that should’ve been directed against the enemy was channelled against companions instead. Hunger and desperation turned them into monsters as the Scanrans waited for them to die. “You’re sick to be fantasizing about flipping up a dead girl’s dress.”
“She was the sick one.” Ewan’s sneer made Thomsen’s fists clench. “She brought disease into our army, but now at least she can be flung over the city walls to carry disease to our enemy. I hope they take their pleasure of our dead prostitute here. Being Scanran, they probably are vicious enough to do it.”
Furious at Ewan for deriving a vindictive satisfaction from envisioning Scanrans raping Lillian’s body, Thomsen smashed his teeth into Ewan’s jaw. Before Ewan could recover, Thomsen’s second blow bashed against Ewan’s ear.
Ewan cried out in mingled pain and rage but didn’t pause to nurse his injuries. Instead he punched at Thomsen’s nose, bloodying it before Thomsen could duck.
As the iron taste of blood burst across Thomsen’s tongue, Ewan hissed, “Bad blood will out, Trebond. Your mother is nothing more than a dirty Corus prostitute. Giving her a title didn’t make her any less of a gutter rat whore.”
“Don’t call my mother a whore.” Thomsen scratched at Ewan’s cheeks, feeling flesh tear beneath his fingers. He didn’t know what Ma had done before she married Da. Da’s stories of his adventures in King Jasson’s army and with Alanna the Lioness from the time she was knee-high to a grasshopper to the time she earned her shield were family legends, but no lore of Ma’s life in Corus had ever been established. Only now did Thomsen question the absence of such tales.
“Most would be offended if I called their mother a whore because it’s a lie.” Ewan’s nails were cat claws cutting through Thomsen’s face. “Guess you’re offended since it’s the truth.”
“Thomsen!” Sir Emeric of Legann’s shout was sharp as an arrow to the heart, and Thomsen, recognizing the unspoken command in his knightmaster’s voice, froze as if carved from ice. The fight likewise fled Ewan as Sir Emeric, palms planted on his sword belt, marched over to them. “Ewan, your mother would stalk up here to slap you upside the head, siege or no siege, if she heard you were brawling like a drunkard in the square. I won’t tell her this ever happened as long as you scamper off to your knightmaster now and get tidied up.”
“Fine.” Ewan stuck his nose in the air and disappeared in search of his knightmaster. Thomsen was surprised at Ewan’s insolence—squires were supposed to be respectful of all knights—but then recalled that Ewan was a cousin of Sir Emeric’s through his mother. Among the nobility, it sometimes seemed that everyone was connected with invisible spiderweb ties except the new blood in Trebond.
It was this conviction that he was an outsider that made him dig in his heels when his knightmaster ordered crisply, “Come along, Thomsen.”
Sir Emeric had taken several steps before he noticed that Thomsen wasn’t following him. Pivoting and folding his arms across his chest in a warning that he wasn’t to be defied, Sir Emeric repeated even more tersely, “Come along, Thomsen. Don’t make me drag you.”
The only thing worse than being in disgrace with his knightmaster was being in disgrace and dragged about like unwanted baggage by his knightmaster, so Thomsen reluctantly trailed Sir Emeric out of the square, confining his mutiny to a mumble: “I’m not a dog.”
He had intended those words mainly as a release for the anger and rebellion boiling inside him. He hadn’t intended for them to be heard by his knightmaster, but apparently they were for Sir Emeric arched hawk eyebrows as his pale blue eyes whose light seemed leeched by the siege stared down at Thomsen in obvious disapproval. “I know you aren’t, squire. If you were a dog, you’d have come much faster when I told you. You certainly wouldn’t have needed to be called twice if you were a dog.”
Thomsen hadn’t expected his complaint to be turned into a reprimand on his lack of prompt obedience. If he were sensible, he would’ve snapped his mouth shut before it could be used against him again, but he was Trebond born and bred, which meant that he had more stubbornness than sense.
“Where are we going, sir?” Thomsen was beginning to discover that it hurt to speak through a bleeding lip now that the adrenaline of his confrontation with Ewan was wearing off.
“Back to my room.” Sir Emeric’s hand was on Thomsen’s shoulder, steering him toward the headquarters where they slept with other knights and squires who had been assigned to the City of the Gods. “We’ve got to clean you up before one of those cuts gets infected, lad.”
“Yes, sir.” Thomsen couldn’t oppose this plan when infections, disease, and starvation were the most prevalent forms of death in the city, and he didn’t want to die of a scratch sustained in a squabble with a fellow squire. His family would be so ashamed if he met such an ignominious end.
Sir Emeric was silent the rest of the way back to his room. Thomsen wished that he would scold, because waiting for a lecture was even more torturous than receiving one, but if there was one thing he had learned squiring for Sir Emeric it was that his knightmaster never spoke without taking whatever time he needed to think first.
When they entered Sir Emeric’s room, he still didn’t speak and merely nodded at Thomsen to sit on his bed while he filled a basin with water from an ewer. Placing the basin on his nightstand, he dipped a cloth in the water and then offered it to Thomsen. “Here. Hold this to your lip until the pressure stops the bleeding, and don’t talk for now. Just listen.”
As he dampened a second cloth and began to wipe the blood from the scratches lining Thomsen’s cheeks as if a barber with poor control of a razor had tried to shave him, Sir Emeric went on, “I realize that tensions are high with the enemy at our gates and the battles waged when we have to rebuff their attempts to capture us aren’t enough relief of that urge to destroy the enemy but we can’t start fighting one another whatever the provocation. We must stand united no matter what. We can’t weaken each other. That’s what the enemy wants: for us to drain our strength in silly scuffles so when they strike we’re too weak to fight them.”
Thomsen should’ve bowed his head at the reproof, which, as far as rebukes went, wasn’t that severe. That was what a proper squire would’ve done, but Thomsen wasn’t a product of centuries of genteel breeding. He still had the the bluntness of commoners in his bones.
“It wasn’t a silly scuffle, sir,” he protested, blood soaking his cloth.
“What was it then?” Sir Emeric, finished wiping the blood from Thomsen’s cuts, pulled a jar of balm from the drawer of his nightstand. This herbal salve came from the healers, whose magic was too precious to waste on minor scrapes such as Thomsen’s, but infection was too common and lethal an affliction to leave even small wounds untreated. Herbal remedies were the compromise between overextending the healers and leaving the warriors untended.
“A philosophical dispute.” Thomsen’s recitation of the traditional excuse for squires and knights coming to blows—falling down was for clumsy pages—was muffled by the cloth pressed against his mouth.
“I never knew you to be passionate about philosophy.” Sir Emeric’s lips quirked wryly. “What was the fight really about, Thomsen?”
Thomsen felt adrift answering this question. His need to fight was clear as crystal in the moment but opaque when he had to explain it to another. Thinking became even more challenging when Sir Emeric dabbed balm into his cuts. The lotion stung like a thousand hornets and was worse than a healing. This cursed poultice made Thomsen understand Da’s abiding mistrust of healers. Certainly this nasty concoction that seemed to hurt more than it helped made Thomsen wary of healers.
“Curse it!” he gasped, squirming away from his knightmaster’s ministrations. “Are you trying to hurt me as punishment, sir?”
“Healing hurts and cleaning stings, but infection kills. I’m trying to heal and clean you, that’s all.” Sir Emeric’s firm hand rooted Thomsen in place. “Now stay still, squire, and tell me what made you fight Ewan. Be warned if you feed me another half-baked lie about a philosophical dispute I’ll volunteer you for latrine duty for a week to improve your honesty or at least your creativity.”
Latrine duty stank in every conceivable way so Thomsen scrambled to speak without caring if the words coalesced into a coherent explanation for his fistfight. “Sir, I was on the disposal detail with Ewan when we came across that flower girl named Lillian. Ewan said she must’ve died of a disease that didn’t come from rats or flies and wanted to pick up her dress to see which one. I told him how sick I thought he was to want to do that, and he ranted on about how she’d brought disease to our army and how he hoped she’d bring disease to the enemy camp if they raped her. That was too much for me, so I punched him.”
“That would be too much for a lot of people.” Sir Emeric stopped rubbing the salve into Thomsen’s cleaned cuts, and Thomsen breathed a ragged sigh of relief through the cloth masking his mouth. “His mother would wash his mouth out with soap if she heard such vulgarity from him. Irimor women aren’t to be trifled with, you know. Just ask my dear mother.”
Under other circumstances, Thomsen would have grinned at the allusion to the petite but formidable in her feistiness Lady Marielle but his mind was in too much turmoil to do anything except choke out, “That’s not the worst thing he said, sir. When I hit him, he called my mother”—Thomsen couldn’t bring himself to refer to his mother a prostitute—“a woman like Lillian. I told him he was lying, but he insisted he was telling the truth.”
“Maybe you should ask your mother about her past when this siege is over.” Sir Emeric squeezed the nape of Thomsen’s neck, but his gentle touch felt like a suffocating noose. The only reason he would need to talk to his mother about her past was if she had been what Ewan accused her of being.
“She was a flower girl, wasn’t she?” Thomsen gaped up at Sir Emeric, staring with eyes as unseeing as a corpse’s. He was numb from top to toe, stunned that his parents had kept such an important secret from him. His whole identity changed now that he saw himself as a prostitute’s son.
“If she was, she did what she had to do to survive like everyone has in this war and this siege.” Sir Emeric’s hand drifted down to pat Thomsen’s back. “Many flower girls are sweet, strong, or smart. Selling themselves doesn’t make them anything less than human, lad.”
“It doesn’t make them ready to rise into noble society either, sir.” Thomsen tried to bite his lip and chewed the blood-drenched cloth instead. “No wonder most nobles avoid my family as if we’ve got the Sweating Sickness. She and Da lied to me all this time just by not mentioning the truth about her.”
“The truth about her is that she is and always will be the woman who gave birth to you and raised you.” Sir Emeric could only sound so calm because it wasn’t his mother who had never told him she was a prostitute. “Her past doesn’t shape her or you. Those who believe it does don’t matter to her or to you.”
“Easy for you to say, sir.” Thomsen snorted like a horse. Sir Emeric was heir to one of the most powerful families in the realm—there was a reason King Jonathan I had commended Legann as one of four families who comprised the shield of Tortall—and though he strove to be sympathetic he couldn’t truly comprehend what it meant to be a pariah amongst the majority of the nobility. “Even the snobbiest nobles have to admit that your pedigree is impeccable. I’m even more of a mutt than I thought. Forgive me if I fail to jump with joy.”
“Look on the bright side.” Sir Emeric was unimpressed by Thomsen’s gripe. “At least you’re aware of who your friends are and don’t have to worry about people pretending to be nice to take advantage of you.”
“I know my parents aren’t my friends.” Thomsen wanted to swallow his resentment but couldn’t. “They lied to me ever since I was born and opened our entire family to scorn.”
“Talk to your parents.” Sir Emeric wrapped an arm around Thomsen’s shaking shoulders like a blanket. “Be honest with them because that’s the only way you’ll heal. It’ll hurt but that’s how you’ll know it’s healing.”
“What if I die before I can speak to them, sir?” asked Thomsen since death was always a legitimate concern in a city under siege. In a city under siege, it was more taken for granted that you’d never emerge alive than that you would.
“You won’t.” Sir Emeric removed the cloth from Thomsen’s mouth and began to daub balm on it, scorching Thomsen’s lips. “As long as you let me finish cleaning you up, that is.”
Rating: R
Warnings: References to execution, cannibalism, necrophilia, and prostitution. Lots of death and dark themes in general.
Author's Note: Thomsen's name, his status as Sir Emeric of Legann's squire, and his posting at the City of the Gods are all borrowed from Tammy's interviews.
Prompt: Healing
Summary: In the City of the Gods during the Scanran War, Thomsen of Trebond can dispose of the dead but he can't bury the past.
City under Siege
The dead, attended by swarming flies and scurrying rats, were everywhere. The City of the Gods had become a City under Siege. Maybe to ultimately transform into a City on Its Knees in the case of surrender or a City of the Dead should all its inhabitants be reduced to skeletons. Her proud temples and cloisters were humbled by thousands seeking sanctuary, though why the Scanrans who had cursed their souls by laying siege to a holy city would refuse to violate the sacred soil of the temples and cloisters themselves was a mystery answered only by the desperate.
The bells no longer tolled for the dead, because if they rang for the dead, they would never cease their cacophony. No graves were dug for the dead either. Instead the dead were dumped unceremoniously into what had once been a bustling marketplace where there had been food and furs aplenty to trade but now there was nothing to buy or sell in the heart of this slowly starving city. Now the square was deserted except for the dead, the hovering flies, the scavenging rats, and the disposal detail.
The disposal detail was just a fancy term to try to hide the ugliness of carrying corpses by the cartload to the ramparts to be thrown into the enemy camps to spread disease throughout their ranks rather than be buried in mass graves where they might poison the wells in the City of the Gods. This thought spiraled bleakly through Thomsen of Trebond’s head as he swept a lock of sweaty auburn hair out of his dirt brown eyes that had already seen too much death even though he was barely fifteen years old—his fifteenth birthday coming two weeks ago in the midst of a dying city; his only celebration the fact that he was still among the breathing.
With a weary sigh he and a fellow squire, the sixteen-year-old Ewan of Irimor, hauled a corpse of a little old lady, who had been frail in life but now was heavy as a boulder, onto the cart. How the gaunt bodies of the starving became bloated after life left them was something Da with all his talk of war had never described. Of course, Da had never—to Thomsen’s knowledge, anyhow—been on the receiving end of a siege when he served in King Jasson’s army. He had laid siege to cities in Tusaine but never been trapped in a city as the noose of an opposing army began to strangle it.
Thomsen should have been numb as the corpses on the dusty cobblestones before him, but, somehow, no matter how many times he stared into the unseeing eyes of the dead, a fresh surge of horror and sorrow would course through his cold veins.
“He used to skewer rats.” Thomsen felt compelled to offer a short eulogy for a filthy street urchin as he and Ewan deposited him in the cart. Many in the City of the Gods chased after rats—who fed on corpses and were the only fat ones in this city under siege—now that all the other animals not needed for battle had been slaughtered and devoured. Some were even reduced to mimicking the rats and eating the dead. A patrol had caught two citizens gorging like rats on the dead a week ago. The two civilians had been skinned and disemboweled before being beheaded in a public square. Command claimed that the brutality of their executions would be a harsh deterrent to cannibalism, but Thomsen wasn’t so confident. He wasn’t sure that people with growling bellies threatening to eat themselves would see even the most grisly execution as a worse fate than starvation. He figured that it was only a question of time before more people chose to consume corpses rather than starve.
“An unhealthy habit,” Ewan grunted. At first, Thomsen wondered if Ewan had somehow read his mind though the other squire wasn’t a mage. Then he realized that Ewan was replying to his comment about the street urchin hunting rats. There were so many unhealthy habits these days that it was difficult to keep track of all the things the healers disapproved of as encouraging disease. “The healers say rats are vectors of disease.”
“Probably was disease that did him in, not hunger, then.” Thomsen tried not to breathe through his nose to avoid inhaling the stench of a man Thomsen could recognize through the rot. “Disease likely was the end of this fellow too. He would catch flies and bake them into cakes.”
“Fly cakes are a delicacy now.” Ewan’s lips thinned as they heaved the man into the cart. Thomsen couldn’t disagree. With soldiers on half rations and civilians on quarter rations, flies who feasted on the dead began to seem appallingly edible to the masses. Snaring flies in nets and boiling them into hard, black cakes was commonplace despite admonitions from healers that flies caused sickness even after cooking. People, it appeared, would rather die of disease than starvation. At least disease might be quicker.
“People on quarter rations will do anything.” Thomsen shook his head as he and Ewan bent to pick up a mother of four children—who had split her rations five ways and only eaten a fifth herself—whose body was little more than jagged bones and shriveled skin. Jerking his chin down at her as they placed her in the cart, he added grimly, “Look at this poor lady. She starved herself to feed her children.”
“This one wasn’t a lady at all.” Ewan spat on the decaying corpse of a flower girl—she had called herself Lillian but Thomsen doubted that had been her true name since most of the women who followed the army to sell themselves went by fake names they thought delicate or beautiful—in a sad blue dress stained by dirt. “She was just a whore. Bet you a copper penny—which was about all she was worth—that she didn’t die of hunger but disease and not the kind you get from rats or flies. We could flip up her dress and find out.”
“She’s dead.” Thomsen scowled as he swiped the saliva off her bone-white face with a handkerchief he made a mental note to burn afterward. “Show some respect or the Black God will curse you.”
“The Black God has already cursed us all.” Ewan rolled his moss green eyes, and Thomsen’s tongue was too dry—water was as scarce as food—to argue this point. “Besides, it’s not as if she was fussy about who lifted her dress when she was alive. Why should she care now that she’s become fodder for flies?”
“You’ve got some screws loose if you want to play healer with the dead.” Thomsen glared at Ewan, who had seemed pleasant enough when they were pages but had shown his savagery now that they were starving squires, and thought that one of the worst things about being in a city under siege was that much of the violence that should’ve been directed against the enemy was channelled against companions instead. Hunger and desperation turned them into monsters as the Scanrans waited for them to die. “You’re sick to be fantasizing about flipping up a dead girl’s dress.”
“She was the sick one.” Ewan’s sneer made Thomsen’s fists clench. “She brought disease into our army, but now at least she can be flung over the city walls to carry disease to our enemy. I hope they take their pleasure of our dead prostitute here. Being Scanran, they probably are vicious enough to do it.”
Furious at Ewan for deriving a vindictive satisfaction from envisioning Scanrans raping Lillian’s body, Thomsen smashed his teeth into Ewan’s jaw. Before Ewan could recover, Thomsen’s second blow bashed against Ewan’s ear.
Ewan cried out in mingled pain and rage but didn’t pause to nurse his injuries. Instead he punched at Thomsen’s nose, bloodying it before Thomsen could duck.
As the iron taste of blood burst across Thomsen’s tongue, Ewan hissed, “Bad blood will out, Trebond. Your mother is nothing more than a dirty Corus prostitute. Giving her a title didn’t make her any less of a gutter rat whore.”
“Don’t call my mother a whore.” Thomsen scratched at Ewan’s cheeks, feeling flesh tear beneath his fingers. He didn’t know what Ma had done before she married Da. Da’s stories of his adventures in King Jasson’s army and with Alanna the Lioness from the time she was knee-high to a grasshopper to the time she earned her shield were family legends, but no lore of Ma’s life in Corus had ever been established. Only now did Thomsen question the absence of such tales.
“Most would be offended if I called their mother a whore because it’s a lie.” Ewan’s nails were cat claws cutting through Thomsen’s face. “Guess you’re offended since it’s the truth.”
“Thomsen!” Sir Emeric of Legann’s shout was sharp as an arrow to the heart, and Thomsen, recognizing the unspoken command in his knightmaster’s voice, froze as if carved from ice. The fight likewise fled Ewan as Sir Emeric, palms planted on his sword belt, marched over to them. “Ewan, your mother would stalk up here to slap you upside the head, siege or no siege, if she heard you were brawling like a drunkard in the square. I won’t tell her this ever happened as long as you scamper off to your knightmaster now and get tidied up.”
“Fine.” Ewan stuck his nose in the air and disappeared in search of his knightmaster. Thomsen was surprised at Ewan’s insolence—squires were supposed to be respectful of all knights—but then recalled that Ewan was a cousin of Sir Emeric’s through his mother. Among the nobility, it sometimes seemed that everyone was connected with invisible spiderweb ties except the new blood in Trebond.
It was this conviction that he was an outsider that made him dig in his heels when his knightmaster ordered crisply, “Come along, Thomsen.”
Sir Emeric had taken several steps before he noticed that Thomsen wasn’t following him. Pivoting and folding his arms across his chest in a warning that he wasn’t to be defied, Sir Emeric repeated even more tersely, “Come along, Thomsen. Don’t make me drag you.”
The only thing worse than being in disgrace with his knightmaster was being in disgrace and dragged about like unwanted baggage by his knightmaster, so Thomsen reluctantly trailed Sir Emeric out of the square, confining his mutiny to a mumble: “I’m not a dog.”
He had intended those words mainly as a release for the anger and rebellion boiling inside him. He hadn’t intended for them to be heard by his knightmaster, but apparently they were for Sir Emeric arched hawk eyebrows as his pale blue eyes whose light seemed leeched by the siege stared down at Thomsen in obvious disapproval. “I know you aren’t, squire. If you were a dog, you’d have come much faster when I told you. You certainly wouldn’t have needed to be called twice if you were a dog.”
Thomsen hadn’t expected his complaint to be turned into a reprimand on his lack of prompt obedience. If he were sensible, he would’ve snapped his mouth shut before it could be used against him again, but he was Trebond born and bred, which meant that he had more stubbornness than sense.
“Where are we going, sir?” Thomsen was beginning to discover that it hurt to speak through a bleeding lip now that the adrenaline of his confrontation with Ewan was wearing off.
“Back to my room.” Sir Emeric’s hand was on Thomsen’s shoulder, steering him toward the headquarters where they slept with other knights and squires who had been assigned to the City of the Gods. “We’ve got to clean you up before one of those cuts gets infected, lad.”
“Yes, sir.” Thomsen couldn’t oppose this plan when infections, disease, and starvation were the most prevalent forms of death in the city, and he didn’t want to die of a scratch sustained in a squabble with a fellow squire. His family would be so ashamed if he met such an ignominious end.
Sir Emeric was silent the rest of the way back to his room. Thomsen wished that he would scold, because waiting for a lecture was even more torturous than receiving one, but if there was one thing he had learned squiring for Sir Emeric it was that his knightmaster never spoke without taking whatever time he needed to think first.
When they entered Sir Emeric’s room, he still didn’t speak and merely nodded at Thomsen to sit on his bed while he filled a basin with water from an ewer. Placing the basin on his nightstand, he dipped a cloth in the water and then offered it to Thomsen. “Here. Hold this to your lip until the pressure stops the bleeding, and don’t talk for now. Just listen.”
As he dampened a second cloth and began to wipe the blood from the scratches lining Thomsen’s cheeks as if a barber with poor control of a razor had tried to shave him, Sir Emeric went on, “I realize that tensions are high with the enemy at our gates and the battles waged when we have to rebuff their attempts to capture us aren’t enough relief of that urge to destroy the enemy but we can’t start fighting one another whatever the provocation. We must stand united no matter what. We can’t weaken each other. That’s what the enemy wants: for us to drain our strength in silly scuffles so when they strike we’re too weak to fight them.”
Thomsen should’ve bowed his head at the reproof, which, as far as rebukes went, wasn’t that severe. That was what a proper squire would’ve done, but Thomsen wasn’t a product of centuries of genteel breeding. He still had the the bluntness of commoners in his bones.
“It wasn’t a silly scuffle, sir,” he protested, blood soaking his cloth.
“What was it then?” Sir Emeric, finished wiping the blood from Thomsen’s cuts, pulled a jar of balm from the drawer of his nightstand. This herbal salve came from the healers, whose magic was too precious to waste on minor scrapes such as Thomsen’s, but infection was too common and lethal an affliction to leave even small wounds untreated. Herbal remedies were the compromise between overextending the healers and leaving the warriors untended.
“A philosophical dispute.” Thomsen’s recitation of the traditional excuse for squires and knights coming to blows—falling down was for clumsy pages—was muffled by the cloth pressed against his mouth.
“I never knew you to be passionate about philosophy.” Sir Emeric’s lips quirked wryly. “What was the fight really about, Thomsen?”
Thomsen felt adrift answering this question. His need to fight was clear as crystal in the moment but opaque when he had to explain it to another. Thinking became even more challenging when Sir Emeric dabbed balm into his cuts. The lotion stung like a thousand hornets and was worse than a healing. This cursed poultice made Thomsen understand Da’s abiding mistrust of healers. Certainly this nasty concoction that seemed to hurt more than it helped made Thomsen wary of healers.
“Curse it!” he gasped, squirming away from his knightmaster’s ministrations. “Are you trying to hurt me as punishment, sir?”
“Healing hurts and cleaning stings, but infection kills. I’m trying to heal and clean you, that’s all.” Sir Emeric’s firm hand rooted Thomsen in place. “Now stay still, squire, and tell me what made you fight Ewan. Be warned if you feed me another half-baked lie about a philosophical dispute I’ll volunteer you for latrine duty for a week to improve your honesty or at least your creativity.”
Latrine duty stank in every conceivable way so Thomsen scrambled to speak without caring if the words coalesced into a coherent explanation for his fistfight. “Sir, I was on the disposal detail with Ewan when we came across that flower girl named Lillian. Ewan said she must’ve died of a disease that didn’t come from rats or flies and wanted to pick up her dress to see which one. I told him how sick I thought he was to want to do that, and he ranted on about how she’d brought disease to our army and how he hoped she’d bring disease to the enemy camp if they raped her. That was too much for me, so I punched him.”
“That would be too much for a lot of people.” Sir Emeric stopped rubbing the salve into Thomsen’s cleaned cuts, and Thomsen breathed a ragged sigh of relief through the cloth masking his mouth. “His mother would wash his mouth out with soap if she heard such vulgarity from him. Irimor women aren’t to be trifled with, you know. Just ask my dear mother.”
Under other circumstances, Thomsen would have grinned at the allusion to the petite but formidable in her feistiness Lady Marielle but his mind was in too much turmoil to do anything except choke out, “That’s not the worst thing he said, sir. When I hit him, he called my mother”—Thomsen couldn’t bring himself to refer to his mother a prostitute—“a woman like Lillian. I told him he was lying, but he insisted he was telling the truth.”
“Maybe you should ask your mother about her past when this siege is over.” Sir Emeric squeezed the nape of Thomsen’s neck, but his gentle touch felt like a suffocating noose. The only reason he would need to talk to his mother about her past was if she had been what Ewan accused her of being.
“She was a flower girl, wasn’t she?” Thomsen gaped up at Sir Emeric, staring with eyes as unseeing as a corpse’s. He was numb from top to toe, stunned that his parents had kept such an important secret from him. His whole identity changed now that he saw himself as a prostitute’s son.
“If she was, she did what she had to do to survive like everyone has in this war and this siege.” Sir Emeric’s hand drifted down to pat Thomsen’s back. “Many flower girls are sweet, strong, or smart. Selling themselves doesn’t make them anything less than human, lad.”
“It doesn’t make them ready to rise into noble society either, sir.” Thomsen tried to bite his lip and chewed the blood-drenched cloth instead. “No wonder most nobles avoid my family as if we’ve got the Sweating Sickness. She and Da lied to me all this time just by not mentioning the truth about her.”
“The truth about her is that she is and always will be the woman who gave birth to you and raised you.” Sir Emeric could only sound so calm because it wasn’t his mother who had never told him she was a prostitute. “Her past doesn’t shape her or you. Those who believe it does don’t matter to her or to you.”
“Easy for you to say, sir.” Thomsen snorted like a horse. Sir Emeric was heir to one of the most powerful families in the realm—there was a reason King Jonathan I had commended Legann as one of four families who comprised the shield of Tortall—and though he strove to be sympathetic he couldn’t truly comprehend what it meant to be a pariah amongst the majority of the nobility. “Even the snobbiest nobles have to admit that your pedigree is impeccable. I’m even more of a mutt than I thought. Forgive me if I fail to jump with joy.”
“Look on the bright side.” Sir Emeric was unimpressed by Thomsen’s gripe. “At least you’re aware of who your friends are and don’t have to worry about people pretending to be nice to take advantage of you.”
“I know my parents aren’t my friends.” Thomsen wanted to swallow his resentment but couldn’t. “They lied to me ever since I was born and opened our entire family to scorn.”
“Talk to your parents.” Sir Emeric wrapped an arm around Thomsen’s shaking shoulders like a blanket. “Be honest with them because that’s the only way you’ll heal. It’ll hurt but that’s how you’ll know it’s healing.”
“What if I die before I can speak to them, sir?” asked Thomsen since death was always a legitimate concern in a city under siege. In a city under siege, it was more taken for granted that you’d never emerge alive than that you would.
“You won’t.” Sir Emeric removed the cloth from Thomsen’s mouth and began to daub balm on it, scorching Thomsen’s lips. “As long as you let me finish cleaning you up, that is.”
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!