Erlkönig
who rides so late through night and wind?
Mithrigil Galtirglin
with nods to Goethe and Schubert
Al-Cid never told you that Drace died the same day as your father. You do not remember her face. It shocked you so that your knees gave, when Zargabaath mentioned it in passing, as if you ought have known, that you must not speak of her where your brother, the autocrat, could hear. No one had the heart to tell you that Gabranth, your, her, beloved Gabranth, had been the one to kneel beside her and work the blade past the chapped lips of leather into her ribs. This you deduced entirely of your own accord, years after, when the red threads of intrigue at last unraveled full. It once gave you pleasure, stilled the racing of your heart on nights-become-mornings, hot and alone, to think that the learned men were wrong, that the stuff of our bodies was not all, that the souls of Gabranth and of Drace and all you loved most in the world would seek and forgive each other, find love, find peace. You tried to make it a faerie-tale, you sincerely did.
So much of your life was spent in pursuit of an end. Your world was a story, and you were hero and author and audience all at once, and a story is not yet a story until it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it was ever the end that evaded you. Your eldest brothers told you tales, and when your brothers were no more, Gabranth sang to you of his home, and all the songs of his people were tales as well. There remains with you the song of a man driving his horse through a violent storm, clutching his dying son in the saddle, and the child hears the voice of the faerie-king calling to him. Thrice the boy pleads with his father, hear the danger, he is near, the faerie-king has his arms around me, and thrice the father demurs, it is wind, it is Mist, it is folly. The child dies. Gabranth would sing it in four voices, low and stable for the father, plaintive for the son, and his voice for the faerie-king raised the hairs on your skin, the vowels themselves magical and starved. And his own voice, his storyteller's voice, was the strange and guttural voice you loved, shaped unbidden by Archadian gentility like clay left too long in the open air.
You tried once to sing that song to your children, and you had forgotten it, but they could not tell, for they had never heard it before. Only one of the five, Heios, ever asked to hear it again, and this time you had prepared, and after the boy was asleep you went back to your chambers and held your wife and cried, and she did not understand.
Never once did your father sing to you, though he was tender and gentle with you beyond all others, and you cannot recall his face ever being the last you saw before sleep took you. Indeed, you do not remember his face, but inwardly you refer to the concept, and his smile, or the memory of it, was still a driving force in everything you did, even after he was dead. You studied, dressed, were quiet to see the crows-press at the corners of his eyes. And he would hold you, and this you loved most of all, until you became able to stand. It is by his example that you ceased to coddle your children, once they too found their feet, but you did not cease to touch them even after the eldest shied from you and the girls became women. Four have left you, but will of course return, and none too long from now.
You told yourself so often that you were jumping at shadows, stabbing through ghosts, prey to whispers, but you never believed your own honeyed words. You foresaw this; you have been wrong before, many times, and the phantoms of it haunt you, your honor guard against future failure. You thought it they, whispering, singing, and you were wrong then as well.
You were wrong about Azelas. "Don your helm," you told him, and he did, and still did not stop being himself, and you wonder now if anyone else in your life has not become someone else when his face was concealed, if it was something unique to this man you had only just met. You know it was true of your brother, of Drace, of Gabranth, that Gabranth was never Gabranth. You know it is true of Basch, that Basch is not Basch when he is Gabranth, that Basch is not Basch when he is with you, that Basch is never Basch, that something about Basch prevents him from being anyone at all, that Basch died before you met him, twice. But this man, this Captain Azelas, did not cease to be Captain Azelas even as he wore the mail of his enemies, and you knew him in that moment. "Know they that you are wearing their guise?" you asked.
He answered you, "None that yet live."
"Then tread lightly," you commanded, and he obeyed, and none of the Leviathan saw what you saw, that this man who walked among them was a singular being, that his person was too impassioned and his ambitions too great and his eyes too bright for the helm you had him wear, and you remember smiling and thinking, knowing that this could be the man to end this war. He was the Lady Ashe's Knight and shield and he loved her, more than himself and almost as much as his country, and you erased the false armor of your country and contrived a circlet for his brow. You tried to make it a faerie-tale, you sincerely did.
And you told him so, in the circuitous way you tend to speak; you elucidated your suit for peace, your earnest desire to stay your brother's hand and rectify the indignities wrought by your council, father, Motherland. You let him believe it was his idea. You secured him and his escape and succor and when he uncovered his face he bowed his head to you, you scoffed and smiled and closed your eyes, and said to yourself, this man will be their King.
You were wrong about Penelo. So vain you were, and deferred until you had grown into yourself to approach her again, hoping she would not recognize you outright. You answered her letters evasively and sequestered yourself until you ceased to be the child-Emperor, until you no longer had to powder your face to hide the pustules, until you reconciled that yes, you share Vayne's nose and cheekbones, perhaps she will not notice. When the Queen of Dalmasca announced her royal engagement, you planned to use that wedding, dispatched privateers to assure that there would be no action in the skies to give Penelo an excuse not to be at the ceremony, delayed your letters so that you were not the first thing on her mind, bribed the musicians and the scenic designers so that you could approach her on the dance floor, just so. You were twenty and taller than her at last and she was a woman but she still blushed when you knelt and kissed her hand, the way Al-Cid had done to Ashe all those years ago when she was Lady and not Queen, and it worked for them. And you danced with her, and at some point she knew it was you, or perhaps she had from the moment she saw you but at least she indulged you, let you sweep her off her feet.
You knew everything about her, everything she'd done for the last eight years, and she still told you most of it, and you let her. For four months you courted, and for six she shared your bed and forsook even the sky. You knew from the outset that you would not marry her, that there was a girl in a Kiltian temple, on a grape-ripe island near where Landis used to be, her royal blood censored until she ceased to be a child, but you thought that you and Penelo could be like Basch and Ashe, like Gabranth and Drace, but you were wrong about Basch and Ashe, about Gabranth and Drace.
Perhaps you were in too many faerie-tales at once, or were singing in too many voices.
"Who is she?" Penelo asked you, lying beside you in bed, and you had a thousand answers.
"A daughter of the late king Heios Nabradia," you told her. "Illegitimate, but the accounts ring true. She was sequestered with the Kiltias on an island off the coast of—" and you had known this for years, since before you took Penelo as your mistress, since before you had discovered that you share your brother's cheekbones.
And she interrupted you; "Yeah," she whispered, "but who is she?" And you spoke no more, not only that night, but for the rest of your life. You married Adina, as you had planned, and lengthened one song of princesses and stones with years of peace and public approval and five children, all on the same woman, something your own father had not done, and you speculated that her Southron birth made her a hardier creature than the mother you never knew. Once, you told Adina so, that she was strong, and even as she beamed you thought of your cuckoo flying hastily away, further south and stronger still.
You were wrong about Adina. She was not like Al-Cid, content to sideline herself to your vagrancies, to be second to the realm. Upon leaving you Penelo told you that your first love was Peace, and she was right, and Adina was as jealous of Peace, which is perhaps why you had five children with her. You maintained fidelity, as did she, and as did Peace, and not even you suspected that you remained faithful more for Penelo's sake than Adina's or the children's. And your children, you love your children, but they are not your only children; your Motherland is your child, and her territories your stepchildren, and the Southrons and Westerners your cousins. And you know to which of your sons the realm will pass, and that you have chosen well, but your agency dies with you, and though your sons do not begrudge each other their existences, when you are gone the links of the Solidor chain may yet weaken. Noah, the second son, you chose for your heir, for Heios, the elder, would wear holes in the senate's floor pacing and fray every cushion he sat upon were you to chain him down. And Vayne, your third son, left for Bur Omisace not a year ago, and the irony caught up with you only moments after he was gone. Your daughters were married before you turned half a century old, Ferinas in Rozarria, Drace in Ordalia, and you saw them off, certain that you would miss them more than the air and the light and the face of your father, and you were wrong.
You bore it well, or so you tell yourself, as if to say, "There are no men as I," no men who have lived such a story. But it is not yet a story, and perhaps it never will be, with so many beginnings and so few ends, and the middle a tangle of threads that have twined round your heart and cathetered your veins, embroidering patterns in your skin like the ink on Penelo's arms, and how often you would tease her about that, however much you loved it and her. You knew, somehow, that you would not live to be three score years old, or a grandfather, but you hoped you would be wrong about it, as you were wrong about so much else.
You showed more respect for faerie-tales than anyone you knew, and you knew so many, and so many of those with their eyes past the horizon and their heads enveloped in the same clouds as yours. They lived in the same world as you, a world of stories, of princesses and stones, injustices remedied and loose ends neatly tied, wolves turned human and kisses awake and futures in which every morning the sun rose brighter than the last. But you have been wrong before, and perhaps you were wrong about faerie-tales as well. In fact, you are certain that for most of your life, you have misunderstood. The faerie-king has his arms around me, the boy shrieked, and he did not want to be taken.
And there is a hand around yours, and it is warm and wrinkled like your father's, not that your father's hand spent much times with its fingers interlaced with yours, and the skin is golden and hard. "Your Honor," you ask him, because you know not who he is, only that he is a gleaming metal blackness before you and must be someone you care about, but you'll not call him by any Judge's name, there have been so many, "why am I dying?"
"…Because the world is on your shoulders," he says, and he is Basch, "and it has grown too heavy for you."