Chapter 1266: A knight of princes and kings(4)
Chapter 1266: A knight of princes and kings(4)
"Madam?" Vilon called out, a bit daunted by the sudden, drastic shift in the air.
He turned his head, his sharp eyes scanning the rest of the table only to find that both the daughter, Marila, and the eldest son, Harl, wore identical expressions of profound unease.
All three of them? Vilon wondered.
The suffocating silence stretched until it was finally broken by the mistress of the house, who forced a rigid, brittle smile back onto her face. "And how exactly did you two meet, Ser?" she asked in a sweet, sweet voice.
Vilon may have been dumb but not enough not to see she was throwing herself onto a completely different topic with the desperation of a drowning sailor catching a rope.
"On the field," Vilon replied carefully before continuing when he saw the attack on the woman’s face. "Though not on the one of battle, initially. You have a kind boy, for he was gentle enough to lend me a bucket when I had lost mine."
"A bucket?" Harl interjected, his brow furrowing as he paused mid-chew. "To shit in?"
The young man instantly received a clout across the ear from his mother’s hand. From the practiced, effortless way Harl took the blow, barely flinching as his head bobbed, it was perfectly clear this was an exceptionally common occurrence under their roof.
"Not such language at the table, Harl!" she admonished fiercely, her eyes flashing. "We have a guest!Weaver sew your mouth shut, boy!"
Vilon let out a rough chuckle, mostly to hide the sudden, awkward embarrassment creeping up his own neck.His father would give many clouts , though they were harder than hers. "No, nothing of the sort. We were watering the earth to make mud before the lines advanced."
"Did you make it?" Marila asked, her green eyes wide with a young’s pure curiosity.
"Aye," Vilon murmured, his gaze drifting toward the small bowl. "The battle was entirely filled with it. With mud." And steel, and the screaming of dying men, and a terrible mountain of the dead, a lot of all three. "Anyway, we simply continued speaking in the camp afterward. The lad proved himself a fun company to have"
"I rode his horse!" Owen suddenly piped up, his chest swelling with that same explosive excitement he had been carrying around for the last week when he knew he was going home. "The grand, massive one, Mama!It was brown when I did, but now it has white!"
"Aye, he rode Chestnut," Vilon agreed, a small, genuine smile returning to his face. "Handled the reins better than most boys, I’ll give him that.He is heavy but he was kind to it"
"Can I ride it too, Ser?" Harl asked immediately, his eyes lighting up as the clout to his ear was instantly forgotten.
"Oh, can I? Please?" Marila joined in, leaning halfway across the table.
"I don’t see why not," Vilon said, nodding easily. A true knight was meant to be kind and generous to the common born, just as much as he ought to be valorous in battle. "He’s a steady beast, provided you don’t surprise him from behind."
That was for Old Chestnut, but Vilon believed it went the same for the new one.
"That is a fantastic idea," their mother chimed in, her voice entirely too eager, practically pushing the children toward the threshold. "Were I a few years younger, I would want to try my luck with a warhorse too. But alas, my bones are like this. Owen, why don’t you take your brother and sister out to the paddock and show them how it is properly done?"
Owen seemed more than recipient to the idea. He turned his blocky head toward Vilon, silently asking for permission, which the knight granted with a brief nod.
Vilon may not have known what the grand constellations in the winter sky were named, nor could he recognize their shapes, but he knew with great certainty that Owen’s mother wanted him alone in this kitchen. It had been the exact moment the boy referred to himself as his squire that the invisible iron gate had dropped over her demeanor.
He felt a sharp gush of freezing winter wind rattle the back of his hair as the heavy wooden door swung open, and then a resounding thud as it clicked shut behind the children.
The sudden, heavy quiet of the cottage rushed back in to fill the space. Vilon sat perfectly still on the wooden bench, his broad shoulders squared, having a very distinct, very unpleasant hint of exactly what she wanted to speak about.
"You disapprove, don’t you?" Vilon said at once, his low voice slicing through the heavy silence of the kitchen. He wanted to reel the delusion in before it grew any larger. Of course she disapproved. Did he not look at himself?
She did not answer for a brief moment, her eyes fixed on the empty wooden bowl before her.
"We wept when that boy hopped onto the back of that cart heading toward the capital," she said softly, her tone dropping into a flat, rhythmically painful cadence. "Wept indeed we did. And for good reasons at that. There were ten boys from this valley huddled in the bed of that wagon, Ser. Ten of our village. We are still waiting for the rest of the host to filter back, but do you know how many of those ten have actually returned to our doorsteps?"
The raw, piercing look she leveled at him made Vilon shift uncomfortably in his seat.
She didn’t give him the time to guess. "Only Owen." She let out a long, shuddering sigh, speaking the words with a cold finality, as if her own boy’s survival was some sort of cruel anomaly. "There is going to be a terrible howling from the neighboring families before the sun sets today. Good families, Ser. Godly ones that work hard to make ends’ meet."
Vilon could readily believe that. Owen had been right at the Bastion, and then later in the thick of the crimson muck at the Ford. In both places, death had reaped a monstrous, widespread harvest. It was a miracle any of them were breathing at all.
"We wept when he first revealed his intentions," she continued, her rough fingers tracing a crack in the table. "The recruitment cart was scheduled to move out by the next morrow. If we had our way, we would have tried to convince him with everything we had not to go. War and the faceless slaughter of a battlefield is absolutely no place for a lad as sweet, but as slow, as my Owen. No place at all for our boy. But... he had to go."
She looked up, a sharp, defensive edge entering her voice. "The iron tools? The new sheep? The thriving herds? There was absolutely none of that under our roof until a season ago. A village must fulfill a certain quota of recruits for the King’s levies to even be considered eligible for those crown loans. If we had spoken Owen out of it, if we had hidden him in the hills, the elders would know. Another boy from another family would have been forced to go in his stead.You have seen what good came from those, no one would have faulted the elders on that choice. they would have blamed us.
And then what sort of life could we possibly live here? Shamed in our own valley?I ask you that, how could we have lived?"
Vilon had no words to offer in return. He had never grown up in a village; the gravel of the road was his only home. But he was a pragmatist; he could tell there were no more than two hundred souls in this entire valley. Everyone knew each other’s secrets, each other’s debts. To be an outcast here would be a death sentence whenever help would be asked and needed.
"So we made the choice," she whispered, her voice cracking. "The months passed by, and no news came from the south. We honestly thought him dead. We thought the Father Protector had turned his back on us, and the Weaver had cut our boy’s thread. But we allowed it. I allowed it.
My boy is slow, Ser. Kind as the summer day, but undeniably slow. A magnificent worker in the soil, but absolutely no soldier. He was bound to fall into some ditch or simply be too slow to parry a coming sword or to have a blind eye to a lance."
She looked down at the floor, her shoulders slumping. "I had prayed he would be smarter than all the other foolish lads who dream of fighting in some grand war. But when the recruiters’ trumpets sound down the road, the boyish dreams wake up, and the doors fly open and all our hopes come crashing down. They all go marching down the path, singing and smiling in the bright summer sunshine behind that cart... and by the turn of winter, they are all dead. Summer boys, we call them.For they are all boys of summer."
Suddenly, she raised her eyes, pinning him to the spot. "Do you have a mother, Ser Vilon?"
"Don’t all men have one?" he replied evenly.
"Is she alive?"
Vilon paused, the question digging into a dark, forgotten corner of his mind. Was she alive? If she were, was she still working the damp, candle-lit rooms of that dockside brothel? Still selling her flesh for half a silverii a night to any merchant , hired sword, or sailor who stumbled through the door? Did he have more half-brothers scattered across the land?
He probably did on the latter.
"Nay," Vilon lied smoothly, his voice flat. "She is dead."
"I am sorry to hear that," she said, nodding softly. "And your father?"
Vilon shook his head, and this time, he knew the absolute truth. "Dead. Taken by the smallpox two years ago. Watching down at me as we speak." Or looking up at me from the pits, Vilon added silently.
His father had been a knight, but he had been a cruel, angry man, and besides when he buried him he did not say the right words, though he had plenty of those for Old Chestnut.
"My boys and girl have no father either," the mother said, her expression softening. "He was taken by the plague some years back too. Harl was just big enough to work the heavy plow, so we managed not to starve in the winter. And Owen..." She let out a long, affectionate sigh. "He is a good worker, so he took right after his brother. He spent his days watching over and milking the goats. We made fine cheeses from the milk and packed them into the village’ carts to sell in the capital. They sell remarkably well, you know. The city folk love our cheese and they have ample stomach for that."
She leaned across the table, her rough, calloused hands coming to rest near Vilon’s heavy steel gauntlets. The brittle facade of the proud peasant woman completely shattered, leaving nothing but the desperate, trembling heart of a mother.
"I beg of you, Ser " she pleaded, her voice dropping into a fierce, weeping whisper. "Please. Leave the boy here. Do not take him back down that road.I am sorry to ask this of you, but do not do this."
Vilon braced himself, but she pressed on, her eyes wild with terror.More wounding for Vilon than any sword had been in battle.
"It is already a miracle from the gods that he survived this war. You and I both know he will never survive another.Let the singers have their poem and the boys their summer. But my Owen is made to go through winter.I need him to.
My Owen was not built for the war, he was not built to kill. His hands were made to milk cows and tend to the goats, to hold a wooden staff, not to wield a heavy broadsword and a steel shield.He had no business killing. Gods going to punish me for allowing him to go, and I will curse myself for that choice all my life.But I’ll born in the five hells if I let him go now.
If you take him away to play at being a knight, the road will eventually swallow him whole, and I will have naught of my dear boy, not even the bones to mourn.A mother the bones of her son must have Ser.Should she not? I have given the King his quota. I have paid our blood-price in the south.
Please, Ser... let me keep my boy.That all I ask. By the Weaver sir, leave my boy be and let my sons have their brother home.For the sake of your mother, think of another’s worries about her brood. Look into your heart and do us this kindness.
I beg you.It’s my dear and kind boy."