For devilinthedetails: Bring Him Home, PG-13
Dec 24, 2021 15:22:24 GMT 10
devilinthedetails likes this
Post by Seek on Dec 24, 2021 15:22:24 GMT 10
Title: Bring Him Home
Rating: PG-13
For: devilinthedetails
Prompt: 2. A fic about Neal and Duke Baird.
Summary: Neal wants to go to the University. Facing the loss of two sons, Duke Baird isn't so thrilled.
Notes and Warnings: Some lightly implied 'cost-of-war' in the background, and rating reflects potential implications rather than majority of the content. Also, les mis reference.
“Light the stars, bright the day
May the good moon speed our way.
Goddess guard us in your night,
Mithros guide us with your light.”
—old Queenscove spell, first taught to children.
Baird of Queenscove was younger than he had expected to be, when he buried two of his sons, one after another.
He was under no illusions that his sons were immortal: one did not become the chief of the king’s healers without understanding that death is everywhere, the oldest foe of the healers. He has seen enough parents bury their children—the dead of the Sweating Sickness, a year faded into a nightmarish haze of exhaustion and collapsing healers and corpses—to know that the Black God is always there, waiting to claim his due.
All a healer can do is to defer that appointment, day by hard-won day.
But he had never expected to bury his sons.
Not Graeme, first-born, with Wilina’s eyes, or Cathal, second-born and destined to drive Wilina and Baird both to an early grave with the heartstopping risks he took.
“We expect our children to bury us,” Estelle of Nond had told him, over a cup of hot tea. Baird had schooled his features enough to hide his disbelief when the Nond matriach had showed up at the healers’, a month after she had buried her son. More so when she had thanked him. For doing his best, she said. “We never expect to have to bury them.”
But the Black God calls, and one after another, Baird’s sons-turned-knights answer.
Cathal is brought back first, on his shield, dying in the healer’s tents. A Scanran raiding party, they said. Cathal had led a group of men to deal with a squad of the King’s Own being ambushed by spidren at a burning village.
Graeme follows a month after.
An heir to a fief, particularly a ducal house like Queenscove, should never have been that exposed. Should never have been left to hold the impossible line, commanding the defense of Fort Stalwart, which had always been just that slice too far from where Tortall could comfortably project her strength.
Easily cut off by Carthaki renegades ripping open portals to the Divine Realms.
Cathal was a peerless warrior. Cathal fought fearlessly. Cathal died.
Graeme was stern. Graeme’s loyalty to the Crown and to his duties as fort commander never wavered. Graeme died.
They bury Cathal in the ancestral Queenscove cairns. Neal is blank-eyed, as he gazes at the stacked stones, at the carved reliefs of ancestors long-dead, if memorialised in various dusty scrolls and tapestries.
Baird holds Wilina’s hand tightly. They could not find Graeme’s body. They could not even recover Fort Stalwart, the grave of so many Tortallans. He wishes he had the chance to say goodbye.
They are both in mourning, his third-now-eldest son and himself. Baird wears his mourning; Neal spends it uncharacteristically bitter and quarrelsome.
The instructors at the University bear it with good grace. Everyone has been touched by the war, but to lose two brothers in such a short span of time…
Baird waits. Neal has Cathal’s boldness, turned inwards into a penchant for dramatic flourishes. When they were training with swords, Cathal never flinched from bad odds; Neal would meet it with a quip and an unnecessarily elaborate flourish of his wooden blade.
A month later, Neal writes to his father.
In the study, he paces before the mahogany desk. A leg was charred, where Maeve accidentally called heat instead of light with her Gift. Maeve has her uncle’s willfuness; Neal trained only in the workroom, when younger, and had never called his Gift until he had learned control.
Much of Tortallan magecraft was lost, in the years of the Old King. Jasson had never patience for sorcery that was not war magic; Roald, for magecraft that did not heal. But Baird has studied at the University in Carthak and he knows how traditions shuffle underground or adopt different guises to survive.
Village midwives, child’s rhymes, the Mithran cloisters.
Graeme had the Gift, Cathal did not. Strong healers run far back in the Queenscove line, and Baird admits that a part of him was proud when Neal said he wanted to follow his father into the healer’s craft.
And now, Neal is wearing a hole in the carpet.
“Sit down,” Baird says.
Neal sits. That isn’t a good sign.
“I would like to train for my knighthood,” he says, and part of Baird’s world crumbles. A vanity, perhaps: the thought that he might one day have a child follow in his footsteps; that that son would be Neal. But a small, animal part of Baird is saying no, no, no, he has lost two sons to the Crown, and that is more sacrifice than King Jonathan will demand from Queenscove, and he cannot and will not lose yet another.
They never buried Graeme.
“You never wanted it,” Baird says, abruptly. Perhaps it is more for himself than for Neal. “You never did, not the way—” he hesitates on their names. It is too soon, the wound too raw.
And he sees it, the same pain in Neal’s eyes, as Neal’s mouth tightens mulishly.
“Not the way Graeme did,” Neal says, with the clinical efficiency of a trained healer lancing a boil. “Not the way Cathal did.”
Baird shakes his head. “No.”
“I can name three pages who were older than I will be when I start,” Neal says, and now he draws himself up as though he is preparing for a university debate. “And there are many knights within the annals of Tortallan history who were scholars—Emeric of Haryse comes to mind.” He smiles dryly. “My several-times-great grandfather, as it were.”
Baird draws in a deep breath, and pushes aside the pain. He has tried not to govern his sons with a tight hand. He has always been careful to instil a sense of ethics and boundaries in Neal. Sometimes, Neal gets too carried away. But Baird’s own father forebade him from his chosen path, and Baird remembers all too well that pain.
“I’m not saying no,” Baird says, carefully. “I want to know what you expect to get from it.” He hesitated, and then adds, “I want to know if you are certain this is what will make you happy.”
There is an odd, brittle edge to Neal’s smile.
“Graeme and Cathal thought knighthood was the highest service they could give,” he says, looking down at his hands.
“Do you?” Baird asks, because that was Graeme, duty graven in his bones. And Cathal grew up on tales of Emry of Haryse, the Old King’s sword. On the legions of Queenscove knights in the scrolls and archives.
There is a flash of defiance in Neal’s eyes. “Someone should get to fulfill their dreams,” he said. “And as the current living heir of Queenscove, why shouldn’t that be me? Sir Hector of Trebond once wrote in the Virtues of Knighthood that the greatest service a fief can seek to render to the Crown is to send their heirs to serve as Tortall’s shields.”
And Graeme had died for this. They had never recovered a body, Baird thought.
“It won’t be glorious,” he said.
Neal’s mouth tilted in that odd smile again. “I never expected it would be, Father,” he drawled. “Duty never is.”
Graeme’s words, from Neal’s mouth.
“Ean has said he wishes to try for his shield,” Baird says, speaking of Neal’s younger brother. Already a terror on the training yard, by all lights. “There will be a Queenscove knight.” He hesitates, and adds, “There will only be one Neal. Is this the best you see for yourself?”
He remembers Cathal, brought back on his shield. Dying in the healer’s tents. The only comfort Baird could give him was to hold his dying son’s hand, to press it lightly.
“And Keilan might yet make healer,” Neal countered. “Or Maeve.”
Neal is stubborn. Baird ruefully acknowledges that his son might have inherited that streak from him. His own father never wanted a healer-son, for all the healing Gift ran in the Queenscove line. Too much a kingsman, too proud, and too much of the cut of the Old King, in the days when Tortall swept across neighbouring lands and conquered.
They are both in mourning, Neal and himself, and Baird thinks that he never wanted to be his father, never wanted his children to set their feet on the paths he had decided for them.
Neal has never been a fighter, has never had a killer’s ruthlessness.
Baird has always found him in the study, with his nose buried in books. Cathal was always training with the men-at-arms, and Graeme…Graeme had always been dutiful.
He remembers the first time Neal summons the magelight, the deep emerald of the Queenscove Gift blooming to life over his fingers, his child’s voice singing the rhyme that all Queenscove children learn, if they have the Gift.
He remembers the child’s excitement and wonder on Neal’s face, and wonders when his third-now-eldest son has had to grow up. How time slips through their fingers, a grain at a time.
The sunlight is bright in the chapel of the Ordeal. Baird watches the iron-barred door to the Chamber of the Ordeal warily.
Squires enter; they leave knights, or they leave dead.
He was an anxious father again, years younger, watching as Graeme and then Cathal walked out of the Chamber.
They leave dead anyway, Baird thinks—a straight line of time between the day Cathal left; cause-and-effect, and the day Cathal is carried in to the healers’ tent, bleeding out on his shield. The day Graeme strode out of the Chamber, shoulders squared, and face stern, and the day Fort Stalwart fell and no man of that fort has ever been brought home and buried.
He feels the old ache as he watches, as Wilina watches with him, his hand in hers, but he does not speak of his grief to the Yamani lady that Neal has been exchanging letters with.
Yukimi noh Daiomoru has been a lady in the court of the Yamani Emperor. She has buried brothers from Scanran and Jindazhen raids—one by the Emperor’s command—and she understands, perhaps better than Baird himself, the price of a noble title.
The sound of the Chamber door falling shut, like the sound of the lid closing over his sons coffins. Earth on their fresh graves.
“Is he ready?” Baird asks, the night before.
Alanna nods. “Goddess strike me down if I lie,” she says. “He’s as ready as I can make him.”
Cathal’s knight-master had never said as much. And Sir Kendall of Disart had spoken well of Graeme, and sometimes Baird wonders if the problem was not whether Graeme was ready, but if Graeme had never seen for himself a path that did not involve duty.
“We can’t keep them safe forever, Baird,” Alanna whispers. “Sometimes, they have to leave the nest.”
He knows that. The problem has never been safety. The Black God’s gaze is everywhere.
How do you watch your third son burn his future away in a dramatic, elaborate act of self-destruction?
Knighthood, Baird thinks, from years of watching and listening, from what Alanna has said, has never been what Neal was meant for. Neal has always been meant for study, for books, for discovering the extent of his formidable Gift.
And yes, for healing.
And yet. There is Keladry of Mindelan, and he cannot help but thank her, for Neal has been terribly lonely, and her friendship with his son might be one of the two best things that has emerged from Neal’s long years of earning his shield.
The Chamber doors open and his son walks out, pale, determined, mouth set in a tight line. Baird has never had to face the Chamber of the Ordeal. In another life, he might have.
Cathal was bold. Graeme was determined.
And Neal has forged his own path from the healer’s course at the Royal University to the shield of a Queenscove knight.
He would have to let him go, knowing that.
He would have to let him go.
Rating: PG-13
For: devilinthedetails
Prompt: 2. A fic about Neal and Duke Baird.
Summary: Neal wants to go to the University. Facing the loss of two sons, Duke Baird isn't so thrilled.
Notes and Warnings: Some lightly implied 'cost-of-war' in the background, and rating reflects potential implications rather than majority of the content. Also, les mis reference.
“Light the stars, bright the day
May the good moon speed our way.
Goddess guard us in your night,
Mithros guide us with your light.”
—old Queenscove spell, first taught to children.
Baird of Queenscove was younger than he had expected to be, when he buried two of his sons, one after another.
He was under no illusions that his sons were immortal: one did not become the chief of the king’s healers without understanding that death is everywhere, the oldest foe of the healers. He has seen enough parents bury their children—the dead of the Sweating Sickness, a year faded into a nightmarish haze of exhaustion and collapsing healers and corpses—to know that the Black God is always there, waiting to claim his due.
All a healer can do is to defer that appointment, day by hard-won day.
But he had never expected to bury his sons.
Not Graeme, first-born, with Wilina’s eyes, or Cathal, second-born and destined to drive Wilina and Baird both to an early grave with the heartstopping risks he took.
“We expect our children to bury us,” Estelle of Nond had told him, over a cup of hot tea. Baird had schooled his features enough to hide his disbelief when the Nond matriach had showed up at the healers’, a month after she had buried her son. More so when she had thanked him. For doing his best, she said. “We never expect to have to bury them.”
But the Black God calls, and one after another, Baird’s sons-turned-knights answer.
Cathal is brought back first, on his shield, dying in the healer’s tents. A Scanran raiding party, they said. Cathal had led a group of men to deal with a squad of the King’s Own being ambushed by spidren at a burning village.
Graeme follows a month after.
An heir to a fief, particularly a ducal house like Queenscove, should never have been that exposed. Should never have been left to hold the impossible line, commanding the defense of Fort Stalwart, which had always been just that slice too far from where Tortall could comfortably project her strength.
Easily cut off by Carthaki renegades ripping open portals to the Divine Realms.
Cathal was a peerless warrior. Cathal fought fearlessly. Cathal died.
Graeme was stern. Graeme’s loyalty to the Crown and to his duties as fort commander never wavered. Graeme died.
They bury Cathal in the ancestral Queenscove cairns. Neal is blank-eyed, as he gazes at the stacked stones, at the carved reliefs of ancestors long-dead, if memorialised in various dusty scrolls and tapestries.
Baird holds Wilina’s hand tightly. They could not find Graeme’s body. They could not even recover Fort Stalwart, the grave of so many Tortallans. He wishes he had the chance to say goodbye.
They are both in mourning, his third-now-eldest son and himself. Baird wears his mourning; Neal spends it uncharacteristically bitter and quarrelsome.
The instructors at the University bear it with good grace. Everyone has been touched by the war, but to lose two brothers in such a short span of time…
Baird waits. Neal has Cathal’s boldness, turned inwards into a penchant for dramatic flourishes. When they were training with swords, Cathal never flinched from bad odds; Neal would meet it with a quip and an unnecessarily elaborate flourish of his wooden blade.
A month later, Neal writes to his father.
In the study, he paces before the mahogany desk. A leg was charred, where Maeve accidentally called heat instead of light with her Gift. Maeve has her uncle’s willfuness; Neal trained only in the workroom, when younger, and had never called his Gift until he had learned control.
Much of Tortallan magecraft was lost, in the years of the Old King. Jasson had never patience for sorcery that was not war magic; Roald, for magecraft that did not heal. But Baird has studied at the University in Carthak and he knows how traditions shuffle underground or adopt different guises to survive.
Village midwives, child’s rhymes, the Mithran cloisters.
Graeme had the Gift, Cathal did not. Strong healers run far back in the Queenscove line, and Baird admits that a part of him was proud when Neal said he wanted to follow his father into the healer’s craft.
And now, Neal is wearing a hole in the carpet.
“Sit down,” Baird says.
Neal sits. That isn’t a good sign.
“I would like to train for my knighthood,” he says, and part of Baird’s world crumbles. A vanity, perhaps: the thought that he might one day have a child follow in his footsteps; that that son would be Neal. But a small, animal part of Baird is saying no, no, no, he has lost two sons to the Crown, and that is more sacrifice than King Jonathan will demand from Queenscove, and he cannot and will not lose yet another.
They never buried Graeme.
“You never wanted it,” Baird says, abruptly. Perhaps it is more for himself than for Neal. “You never did, not the way—” he hesitates on their names. It is too soon, the wound too raw.
And he sees it, the same pain in Neal’s eyes, as Neal’s mouth tightens mulishly.
“Not the way Graeme did,” Neal says, with the clinical efficiency of a trained healer lancing a boil. “Not the way Cathal did.”
Baird shakes his head. “No.”
“I can name three pages who were older than I will be when I start,” Neal says, and now he draws himself up as though he is preparing for a university debate. “And there are many knights within the annals of Tortallan history who were scholars—Emeric of Haryse comes to mind.” He smiles dryly. “My several-times-great grandfather, as it were.”
Baird draws in a deep breath, and pushes aside the pain. He has tried not to govern his sons with a tight hand. He has always been careful to instil a sense of ethics and boundaries in Neal. Sometimes, Neal gets too carried away. But Baird’s own father forebade him from his chosen path, and Baird remembers all too well that pain.
“I’m not saying no,” Baird says, carefully. “I want to know what you expect to get from it.” He hesitated, and then adds, “I want to know if you are certain this is what will make you happy.”
There is an odd, brittle edge to Neal’s smile.
“Graeme and Cathal thought knighthood was the highest service they could give,” he says, looking down at his hands.
“Do you?” Baird asks, because that was Graeme, duty graven in his bones. And Cathal grew up on tales of Emry of Haryse, the Old King’s sword. On the legions of Queenscove knights in the scrolls and archives.
There is a flash of defiance in Neal’s eyes. “Someone should get to fulfill their dreams,” he said. “And as the current living heir of Queenscove, why shouldn’t that be me? Sir Hector of Trebond once wrote in the Virtues of Knighthood that the greatest service a fief can seek to render to the Crown is to send their heirs to serve as Tortall’s shields.”
And Graeme had died for this. They had never recovered a body, Baird thought.
“It won’t be glorious,” he said.
Neal’s mouth tilted in that odd smile again. “I never expected it would be, Father,” he drawled. “Duty never is.”
Graeme’s words, from Neal’s mouth.
“Ean has said he wishes to try for his shield,” Baird says, speaking of Neal’s younger brother. Already a terror on the training yard, by all lights. “There will be a Queenscove knight.” He hesitates, and adds, “There will only be one Neal. Is this the best you see for yourself?”
He remembers Cathal, brought back on his shield. Dying in the healer’s tents. The only comfort Baird could give him was to hold his dying son’s hand, to press it lightly.
“And Keilan might yet make healer,” Neal countered. “Or Maeve.”
Neal is stubborn. Baird ruefully acknowledges that his son might have inherited that streak from him. His own father never wanted a healer-son, for all the healing Gift ran in the Queenscove line. Too much a kingsman, too proud, and too much of the cut of the Old King, in the days when Tortall swept across neighbouring lands and conquered.
They are both in mourning, Neal and himself, and Baird thinks that he never wanted to be his father, never wanted his children to set their feet on the paths he had decided for them.
Neal has never been a fighter, has never had a killer’s ruthlessness.
Baird has always found him in the study, with his nose buried in books. Cathal was always training with the men-at-arms, and Graeme…Graeme had always been dutiful.
He remembers the first time Neal summons the magelight, the deep emerald of the Queenscove Gift blooming to life over his fingers, his child’s voice singing the rhyme that all Queenscove children learn, if they have the Gift.
He remembers the child’s excitement and wonder on Neal’s face, and wonders when his third-now-eldest son has had to grow up. How time slips through their fingers, a grain at a time.
The sunlight is bright in the chapel of the Ordeal. Baird watches the iron-barred door to the Chamber of the Ordeal warily.
Squires enter; they leave knights, or they leave dead.
He was an anxious father again, years younger, watching as Graeme and then Cathal walked out of the Chamber.
They leave dead anyway, Baird thinks—a straight line of time between the day Cathal left; cause-and-effect, and the day Cathal is carried in to the healers’ tent, bleeding out on his shield. The day Graeme strode out of the Chamber, shoulders squared, and face stern, and the day Fort Stalwart fell and no man of that fort has ever been brought home and buried.
He feels the old ache as he watches, as Wilina watches with him, his hand in hers, but he does not speak of his grief to the Yamani lady that Neal has been exchanging letters with.
Yukimi noh Daiomoru has been a lady in the court of the Yamani Emperor. She has buried brothers from Scanran and Jindazhen raids—one by the Emperor’s command—and she understands, perhaps better than Baird himself, the price of a noble title.
The sound of the Chamber door falling shut, like the sound of the lid closing over his sons coffins. Earth on their fresh graves.
“Is he ready?” Baird asks, the night before.
Alanna nods. “Goddess strike me down if I lie,” she says. “He’s as ready as I can make him.”
Cathal’s knight-master had never said as much. And Sir Kendall of Disart had spoken well of Graeme, and sometimes Baird wonders if the problem was not whether Graeme was ready, but if Graeme had never seen for himself a path that did not involve duty.
“We can’t keep them safe forever, Baird,” Alanna whispers. “Sometimes, they have to leave the nest.”
He knows that. The problem has never been safety. The Black God’s gaze is everywhere.
How do you watch your third son burn his future away in a dramatic, elaborate act of self-destruction?
Knighthood, Baird thinks, from years of watching and listening, from what Alanna has said, has never been what Neal was meant for. Neal has always been meant for study, for books, for discovering the extent of his formidable Gift.
And yes, for healing.
And yet. There is Keladry of Mindelan, and he cannot help but thank her, for Neal has been terribly lonely, and her friendship with his son might be one of the two best things that has emerged from Neal’s long years of earning his shield.
The Chamber doors open and his son walks out, pale, determined, mouth set in a tight line. Baird has never had to face the Chamber of the Ordeal. In another life, he might have.
Cathal was bold. Graeme was determined.
And Neal has forged his own path from the healer’s course at the Royal University to the shield of a Queenscove knight.
He would have to let him go, knowing that.
He would have to let him go.