by Marin Landis
Mikael on the other hand, spent weeks away from home. He didn’t neglect Melvekior from a tutor’s point of view, but from a father’s, he did. Their relationship changed gradually over the years, coming to a natural plateau on his seventeenth birthday, the day when, according to Mikael, a boy becomes a man in all ways but one and that one way was best left up to the boy.
CHAPTER SIX
The Prince
“I should have slain them where they stood for impugning her chastity. Would that I had.” - Melvekior
At seventeen years old Melvekior was as tall as most adults, taller than many. Indeed, only lanky Egalfas was as tall as he in the household. His diet and exercise regime, heavily influenced by Aeldryn, contributed to his size and muscled form. Certainly Ottkatla had noticed that he was growing into a fine man, but refused to see him as anything but a boy. One she loved dearly and she had certainly tried her hardest to be a positive female role model in the best way she knew how. Between her, Aeldryn and the cook, Magret, they had conspired to take the place, as much as possible, of his dead mother and mostly absent father.
They succeeded in raising a confident, polite and gallant young man. Well educated in the arts, but unsure how to utilize that knowledge. As good a warrior as any untested man had a right to be. His every needs were met, but of course, a teenager’s needs start to diverge from those of a younger boy and his attraction to Ottkatla started to take on different dimensions. No longer simply dazzled by her exotic ways and simple beauty, but now the curve of her hips, redness of her lips and pale skin excited in ways he didn’t feel comfortable discussing with anyone.
There was also the matter of the wanderlust that was the inevitable consequence of a broad education alongside little real world experience. It was a foregone conclusion that his time at Saens Martelle was limited. In addition to that it had been discussed, on a theoretical basis, that at the time of his coming of age in less than a year, Ottkatla’s time may be up. Mikael had already said that Aeldryn’s service would no longer be required and though he dearly loved the young man, and others in the household, he was ready to return to Vanakot, the quasi-mythical city of the Aelvar. Long had he been without the rejuvenating rest needed to maintain his people’s long life.
It wasn’t long after his seventeenth birthday that he and Ottkatla sat in the grass at the front of the house, where a sparring area had long since been created. Wood chips covered an area roughly twenty feet wide and forty long. Mikael had insisted that it be created on the opposite side of the ancient willow so that it didn’t spoil his view, but he, more often than not, had his chair facing their training square.
Years ago, Aeldryn had introduced them to the Kehan. The meditation that somehow increased physical prowess and reduced fatigue. He explained that it raised the power from the secret mystical centers of the body. They couldn’t be seen or felt so Melvekior paid them little heed. He’d yet to feel much beyond his ken apart from the fear he had only recently remembered. The fear of the undead.
Through the last few years Ottkatla had been a light in the dark for him, so much so that he barely recalled that night and the memories of his mother had faded into faint pictures possessed of little emotional content. Certainly not enough to upset him. Now that he believed she might not be with him for a great deal longer, something had changed. He had started to dream, when sleep found him, which was rare enough now. Dreams of the dead, chasing him, always behind him, but invisible in the dark and always his mother, shouting, calling for him.
All that banished those memories was the intensity of their combat training, into which he threw himself with gusto. He’d always been an apt and successful student, but now, since his most recent birthday, he’d stepped up to a new level.
Kehan was more important now, it helped keep him grounded and kept his anger and fear in check. Both of his teachers worried that either or both emotions would overwhelm him so intense were his feelings suddenly. Thus on this day, Ottkatla kept up their quiet contemplation longer than usual, hoping to start a regime that would see his ever blackening mood come under stricter control.
“I’ve sat long enough, come Katle, please let us use the remaining time you have honing my skills. I will need them in due time, I’m sure.” Melvekior stood from his cross legged position, stretched his legs and his back and collected his wooden shortsword from the ground next to him.
She nodded and stood and then froze, cocking her head to one side. Melvekior also stopped his stretching and listened. Horses. It wasn’t long before they came into view, four of them, coming at quite a pace. They rode the path from the guardpost and would have been halted and questioned there, though they carried a pennant of the ruler of the land in which they lived. The crest of Sunar; a mailed fist radiating sunlight. They stopped roughly two score feet from the house, dismounted and one of them, the least richly appointed of them, plainly a servant, started seeing to the horses, tying them to a post situated at the path’s end for exactly that purpose.
The other three started on foot towards where Melvekior and Ottkatla stood watching them. As they approached, it became evident that one of the trio was the head of the pack. Taller, handsomer and heedless of his colleagues, his manner cocky and confident. He stood easily two inches over six feet, roughly the same height as Melvekior though not as powerfully built. His easy gait spoke of physical assurance and authority; a nobleman no doubt. His hair was jet black and long and it blew back from his face as he walked. There was a slight sneer to him that Melvekior found himself wishing he could smack from his face.
“What’s this? I’d say that we’d stumbled upon men-at-arms at practice, but there are no men here, merely a whore and a rather large and dull boy,” he said, the smirk widening. His overly generous lips curling in faux-disgust as he spoke.
Melvekior had little experience with insolence of this scale and had faint cause to remain polite in the face of such behavior. He threw his shoulders back, his thin cotton shirt doing little to hide the extent of his advanced musculature, his practice blade loose in his right hand. “So screecheth the crow at the vulture, yet what will he receive but scraps?” he quoted haughtily at the men. The insult plain to any familiar with the Mithraic canon, and the reaction of the two lackeys indicated they were not. One frowned as if confused, the other, his dark shaggy hair hanging in his eyes looked to the rake in the center seeking an emotion to ape. Surprise, for the briefest second and then annoyance were his cues.
“You impudent get, how dare you quote the Maru, I’ll have your hide.” His annoyance flared to fury, the stranger lunged reaching out to grab Melvekior’s shirt. Almost too fast for the eye to follow, Ottkatla had moved in front of her student, grabbed the man’s arm and used his momentum to propel him to the ground. He hit the bark chips with a thud and scrabbled away from her, expecting an attack from behind which didn’t come. The man’s two companions instantly drew metal and spread apart to match off with Melvekior and Ottkatla.
Melvekior could feel his heart pounding and a strange taste in his mouth. Not since the time he’d been attacked in his room had he had to fight in earnest, he had been protected against such things by the people around him. He felt an urge to pee, but he ignored it and thought to his training. Push the fear away, use your peripheral vision, understand your environment and take nothing for granted. He kept note of what was happening with his teacher, but honestly felt that she was in no danger, especially from such oafs as these. It took the teenager mere seconds to determine that the man he faced was barely trained and had convinced himself that his above average height and stockiness, due mostly to fat, made him a fighter. The urge to piss changed to a thrill of almost sexual excitement as adrenaline shot through him. Fighting down the urge to laugh out loud he composed himself and met his opponent’s charge with the ecstasy of the berserk.
Sidestepping easily a clumsy thrust, he spun and brought his training weapon to bear on the side of the man’s head. Insensate, the ruffian fell heavily to the
ground. Turning rapidly, Melvekior caught sight of Ottkatla standing ramrod straight, the arm of the other man stiff and twisted in her grasp and he contorted uncomfortably on the ground, whimpering and shouting. Melvekior had been the victim of that wrist lock enough to know that man’s suffering, though he suspected the man face down in the grass was experiencing no mercies.
He approached now the leader of this trio of fools, still not risen, but now on his posterior and he had kicked himself to the edge of the training square. His eyes were wide and he had lost the mocking sneer of only a few moments ago.
“What say you now?” said Melvekior coldly. “Will you still have my hide?” He loomed above the man, disregarding safety concerns for he knew the man to be a rotten coward, too scared to even lash out with his feet.
“P-P-Prince Sunar will hear of this,” he stammered, trying his hardest to make the words seem threatening rather than pathetic.
It merely served to enrage Melvekior who reached down and slapped the man hard on the side of his head. There was a yelp and then a voice rang out above the various sounds of distress.
“That’s enough of that.” It was a deep, authoritative voice, unmistakably Mikael Martelle, Melvekior’s father. The young would-be warrior, grimaced belligerently one final time at the man at his feet and turned around. Ottkatla had released her victim, while the other man lay still on the ground, a rapidly growing lump beneath his ear. Standing next to his father was another man, an older man, whose cruelness was written large upon his face. He owned the scars of a man who had taken hard punishment for some grand transgression and the handsomeness of a man who glorified in his appearance. Although Melvekior had never seen him before, he had seen his likeness and even without that prior knowledge would have guessed no differently were there to be any doubt. This was Sunar XV, Prince of Maresh-Kar, Slavemaker and his father’s oldest friend-cum-enemy.
His hair was like steel. There was no other way to describe it. It was gray and black and short, the fringe severe and straight over a sun browned forehead, heavily lined and right now curved into a hardly-interested, single-eyebrow-raised look of dispassion. He was old, older than Mikael and looked much older than the mere handful of years Melvekior knew separated the two. He reached the Earl of Martelle’s shoulder, though he radiated no less power.
Both father and Prince wore similar, casual yet high quality clothing. Loose pantaloons in the style of the day, which Ottkatla had forbidden Melvekior wear for fear that he would fall over himself, and similarly loose tunics. They would be cool in the heat of this day. He wondered, in that moment between seeing them and greeting them, how he had not heard their horses arrive when he noticed a carriage in the distance, stopped further along the road than where it would ordinarily stop. They must have walked the intervening few hundred feet on foot in their soft, made for reclining, shoes.
“Father,” he nodded his head respectfully. “Sire,” he bowed correctly, as Aeldryn had many times ensured he rehearsed to perfection, his eye caught by the Prince’s odd charm necklace. A nobleman would never take the knee, but all others would be required to do so and he suddenly panicked, realizing that Ottkatla would never do so.
“Ottkatla, would you be so kind as to instruct Cook that we have the pleasure of Prince Sunar and his heir,” this last word he stressed while looking at his son with an almost imperceptible narrowing of his eyes, “for supper.” He turned to Sunar quickly, “Will you be staying the night?” and thus deflected from the fact that the barbarian girl wasn’t about to bow to the man who enslaved her entire race.
“I shan’t, Mikael, but thank you for thinking of me.” His voice was soft and refined, Melvekior felt as though he liked him. “Boy, why are you sitting there on your arse like that?” There was no unkindness in his tone, nor was there a hint of joviality.
The man that Melvekior had recently slapped swallowed hard, his eyes wide. “Sire, this oaf…” he raised his arm towards Melvekior.
“This ‘oaf’ as you put it is the Count Martelle and your host, one day to be your loyal subject. I suggest that you arm yourself with more than just those knives and we’ll all,” he put a command into his next word, “forget the events of the past few minutes. I’m terribly thirsty. Let us sit beneath your tree, Mikael and drink to a long life.” He laughed to himself and Mikael chuckled as well.
Whether it was precognitive or just an odd breeze, Melvekior felt the chill of realization. Had he just made an enemy of the man who would be one of the most powerful men in the Three Kingdoms. He snapped out of his reverie to see the back of his father and their august guest, trailed eagerly by the rest of their visitors leaving him standing by himself. Deciding that making himself scarce would be ill-received he hurried on after them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lessons in Loss
“Something changed in me when Katla left. I was already a man, so it was nothing so trite as a rite of passage, but I became an angry man. When fate took what I most loved for the second time it made me want to take back.” - Melvekior
Melvekior knew that she would be leaving soon. He believed she did not want to, but that she had some unmanifest destiny that drove her onward, drove her to take steps she did not want and make choices she would not have ordinarily made.
“I am not free to choose my own path, Melvekior,” she said the week before she was to leave. They were having breakfast and the day again was bright. She looked wistfully through the glass doors. At the lush green lawn, the trees in the distance, the birds swooping and Aeldryn’s gardens. She would return to rocky paths and cold, poorly insulated huts, yak fat smeared on extremities and ox blood soup. While she loved her people and her visits to the mountains were a highlight of her year, she’d grown used to the higher standard of living here; besides which she was not considered a slave here. Her people at home and abroad groaned beneath the weight of servitude for fear of total annihilation. Though she knew that Mikael Martelle appreciated her, as the King’s Warlord he wouldn’t hesitate to throw his legions at her folk and destroy them. His son however was a different proposition. He loved her. As a mother replacement, as a woman, as a friend. And she loved him. In what ways she couldn’t properly determine.
About only two things was Ottkatla confused. The Herjen and her feelings towards her teenage charge. She held six years on him and he was an untested article, yet she recognized the man within and it excited her. What would it be like when he fulfilled whatever destiny was written in his thread? He would be a titan. She didn’t think of it or more correctly, didn’t want to think of it. Her thread led her from here. From him.
“I don’t understand,” he countered, his age showing. “You can do what you want. You can go over there and pick up that bowl of fruit, nothing prevents you. What prevents you from staying?” He clenched his fist tightly, “I don’t even know if I’m making myself clear.”
“I understand. It is not a physical thing. There is no force, merely a compulsion. A feeling I cannot ignore. And would not.” She held his gaze. “I have done all I can here, besides. You are the finest fighter of your age in the world, I guarantee it. That was my task and we, together, accomplished it. What you will do now is beyond me, but it will be something grand. Something amazing. Cherish this time, before you are thrust into the arms of your destiny. Just be a young man with nothing to do.” Her voice softened. “Even if you don’t understand, pretend that you do, for me. Let us spend these last few days watching the birds and listening to Aeldryn recite his silly poetry and sing those faerie songs.”
He yearned to touch her freckled face, her hand, her pale skin, but he dared not. “By Mithras, once this curse you call destiny is lifted I will find you. I swear.” He started to stand but she grabbed his wrist.
“Do not make vows in the heat of emotion, I know not where I will be. Or what I will be doing. Although I know one thing; your name will be legend. Melvekior, do not think that these past years have been for naught. The Herjen does not call lightly.”
She was gone the next morning. Without any goodbyes and days before he expected it. The loss was as sudden as the disappearance of his mother and her memory had become inescapably entwined with his feelings towards Ottkatla. When he thought of her, what little he remembered, she always changed into the mountain girl. Her soft brown eyes and soft features and perfect teeth. He wouldn’t admit it but he could no longer recall his mother, besides the tilt of her head and her golden hair. Her memory was idealized to him, but still he thought of her frequently.
He stayed in his room for days. Aeldryn tried to rouse him but he had barred the door. On the second morning, Magret left a pie and a pitcher of ale outside his bedroom door. Melvekior had never had ale before and found that he liked it. It also sent him to sleep and when he awoke he wasn’t quite so sad. He found another pie and more ale the next morning and spent the next four days in a sort of stupor. On the fifth day, he awoke to muffled voices outside his door. He felt woozy, more due to the amount of ale and heavy food he’d been consuming, so angry at first he stumbled to the door and flung it open dramatically. It was Aeldryn and Magret. She held in her chubby hands a huge jug of ale. Bigger than the ones he’d previously found.
“Ye’re not in charge of me, old man,” she bawled at Aeldryn who had one hand in the air; his remonstrating posture and one Melvekior had learned to dread. It wasn’t threatening by any means but it meant that a lecture was incoming.
“Magret, I do not rule, but common sense should. The boy will never learn to deal with loss if we are to simply soporize him whenever there is a problem. I appreciate that may be how your people do it, but he will cope without such aid.” Melvekior winced. Aeldryn’s condescending attitude and imperiousness would win him no friends with salt-of-the-earth Magret.
