Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 16: Welcome to the Forest
We were woken by the small bright noise of Aelea building the fire.
It cannot have been more than three hours since the last of us had lain down, though it felt longer. The watch had ended at first grey. Coll and Josen, the second watch, had stood through the small hours alone — Trimmel and I, after the killing, having neither the energy nor the steadiness to give the perimeter what it had wanted from us. We had slept across the fire with our weapons in our hands and our cloaks across our faces, like soldiers, the way I had not slept in eighteen years. We had not been asleep so much as stopped.
The sound that brought me back was the small steady noise of a child blowing on coals.
I opened my eyes.
Aelea was kneeling by the fire-pit. Her hair was a half-bird’s-nest of bracken and the dried mud of the previous afternoon’s rain, and her tunic was still ruined at the wrist where she had worked the cloth-wrap against herself for an hour the day before, and her face had a faint pinkness across her cheekbones that I understood, looking at her, was health. The wrong-colour had gone. The hives had gone. She was, by every visible measure, a girl of eleven on the second morning of a journey, awake before the rest, doing the work no one had assigned her, because the work was hers.
She fed the small flame the same way I had taught her three nights before. She set the kettle on the stones. She turned and saw me looking, and the smile she gave me was the smile of a small private triumph, and she said: “Don’t get up. I’ve got it.”
I lay back. I lay back and watched her for a while.
The bodies were gone. Coll and Josen, in the small hours, had finished what we had begun — had dragged the last two of the brigands deeper into the bracken on the far side and arranged them as the country would want them arranged, which is to say not arranged at all. The clearing was clean. The fire was warming. The kettle was singing. My sister, who had nearly died the morning before by the failure of every system in her body, was awake and useful, and I could not, looking at her, find a way to be afraid for her in this moment that did not insult what she had become in the doing of it.
The others stirred to her water-noise the way men stir to a bell rung for them. The King, who had slept across the inner perimeter with his sword by his right hand, sat up slowly, looked at his daughter at the fire, and rubbed his face with both hands. The Queen was awake before any of us had known she had been awake — I think she had not slept at all — and she came to her knees beside Aelea without speaking and took the kettle out of her hands and finished pouring the cups with her. Maerith woke last, which I had not seen her do, and woke ashamed at it, and was up and to her duty inside a breath. Coll and Trimmel and Josen, on the perimeter, came in to the fire by an unspoken consent that the watch was over.
“My Lady the princess,” said Coll, taking the cup Aelea handed him with both hands and bowing slightly to her over it, “has done a thing this morning that the kingdom in its bones knows how to value, even if it does not yet know how to say so.”
“What does that mean,” said Aelea.
“It means you are the keeper of the fire on this road from here to wherever we are going. I am formally relieved. I shall sleep better for it.” He drank his cup, which was hot, and made a small face, and drank it down anyway. “Hot tea. Of a sort. I do not ask what you put in it.”
“There was a herb growing by the brook. Maerith showed me which.”
“Aye. There would have been. It is a good one.”
It was the first thing that had been said in the camp that did not have the night’s blood in it.
When we had eaten what little we could eat — the last of the dried meat softened in water, a piece of bread each — the King set his cup down and laid his hands flat on his knees in the way I knew from the council chamber, and looked round at us.
“Before we ride,” he said, “I would have us account for what happened yesterday.”
I will set down what came of it without setting down all of it, because most of what came of it was nothing.
He led the review himself. He took it through the chain as a king does take a thing through a chain — Coll on the buying, Maerith on the distribution, me on the eating. The stall in the market with its pile of small cloth bags; the stall-holder reaching into the bucket with the big spoon and ladling chestnuts into a bag at random and tying it off; Coll choosing the bag from the front of the pile because the front of the pile is what a man chooses without thinking; the bag riding in Coll’s saddle-pack overnight; Maerith pouring nuts into her own palm from the bag and giving one to each of us without choosing; my taking Aelea’s bitten nut and eating it without thought. There was nothing in any of it. He worked each step with the careful, slow attention of a king examining a witness, and he found nothing, and when he had found nothing he said so, and then he asked the further question.
“Could it have been a thing of magic?”
The party went still in the way the party always went still at the word.
The Queen, who had been holding Aelea against her side, did not look up. She said: “It was not.”
“How do you know.”
“Because she has had it before.”
“When.”
“Twice. The first time after the Lord of Aspeth visited, three years ago, as she said yesterday — I had not been told of it; she thought she had been bad. The other time, perhaps four years before that. A small reaction; I had taken it for a fever. I see now that it was not a fever.” The Queen turned her hand on Aelea’s shoulder. “Whatever this is, my Lord, it is in her. It is not on the nut. It is not on the bag. It is not on the road. It has been in her since she was small and it has come up before and come down again and it has come up now bigger than any time before. There is no agent. There is no enemy. There is no one to be careful of.”
The King considered that. He nodded, slowly.
“Then there is also no one to act against.”
“No, my Lord.”
He sat with that. To his credit he did not flinch from it. To find that the danger had no shape was the kind of finding a king like my father most disliked — it offered no policy. He sat with it.
“Very well,” he said at last. “We cannot guard her from a thing we cannot name. We can hold her in our arms while it passes, when it next comes, and we have learned at least to do that. We can keep her from such food as we know she has had it from. The road and the wood will give us food enough. Coll — no more chestnuts.”
“No, Sir.”
“No more nuts of any kind in any meal she eats, until we have a man who knows better than we do. Roasted, raw, ground in a flour, in a bread, in a sauce, in a cake. None.”
“No, Sir.”
“My Lord,” said Maerith, low. “If I may. There was a woman in my Lord uncle’s house who would not touch shellfish. She had had a thing like this once. She lived sixty years on the strict avoidance of one food and was otherwise well. It can be done.”
“Aye. It can be done.” The King looked at his daughter, who had been listening with her head against the Queen’s side. “It will be done. Aelea — when you are offered any food you have not eaten before, you ask. You ask your mother. You ask Maerith. You ask me.”
“Yes, Father.”
He sat a moment longer. He had done the kingly thing. He had found that no kingly action was possible, named the absence, and ordered such small useful preventions as could be ordered. It had been the closest thing to actual kinging I had seen him do in my life.
Then he turned to Maerith.
“There is one other thing I would say, while we are at this fire.”
“My Lord.”
“You are no longer a Blue Coat on a road. You are Aelea’s. You are at her shoulder from this hour until I or my queen or my heir release you. You are not a maid. You are not a guard. You are hers. Do you take this charge.”
Maerith bowed her head.
“I take it, my Lord.”
The Queen, who had been holding her daughter very still through all of this, lifted her eyes from Aelea’s hair and looked at Maerith.
“Maerith. Is that your heart.”
Maerith did not look away from her. There was a small pause, the kind a woman gives a question that has a more honest answer than the simple yes she had been about to give. Then she said, very plainly:
“It is not my vision, my Lady. But Aelea is in my heart.”
The Queen held her eyes for a long count of breaths.
I marked the held look without entirely reading it. The Queen’s eyes flicked, briefly, to me — once, the smallest motion — and back to Maerith.
“Very well,” said the Queen.
The conversation moved on. I did not at the time understand what the Queen had read in Maerith’s answer or what she had thought when she had glanced at me. I do not know that I entirely understand it now. I have set it down as it was.
I rode the first hour of that morning thinking about my father.
It is the only way I can put what I was doing. I had spent the morning watching him do a thing I had not, in eighteen years of being his son, ever seen him do. He had led an inquiry. He had heard the answer. He had named the absence at the heart of it. He had ordered the small useful things that could be ordered, and he had handed his daughter to Maerith with the right kind of trust. He had been, for the space of half an hour around a small fire in a wet clearing in the wilderness, a king.
I had not known he could.
And I had felt, watching him, the slow rising of a thing I did not want to feel and could not put down. It was not pride. I had no right to pride in my father. It was something colder and quieter than pride: the small careful note a man takes when a sick relative seems to be recovering and he has lived long enough to know that the recovery may not hold. This is happening, I thought, riding behind him in the morning. This is happening because the Form has fallen off him and because Davil’s old training has come back to his hand and because the road has taken from him everything he was using to hold himself up against being a real king, and what is underneath has begun to come out. This may last. This may not. The man I rode out of the castle with would not have done what I just watched. The man I am riding behind may not be that man at all by the time we are home.
I marked it. I would mark it again. I would keep marking it, I thought, the whole way to whatever we were riding toward, and try not to let what I most wanted — that my father would be my father — get in the way of seeing whether he would be.
I have spent some time since on that morning, and on whether I had been right to be careful. I was. I was right to be careful. I will set that down now and not return to it.
I will skip lightly over the day. We rode through a wilderness that was opening into the country before the forest — broken hill, long stretches of birch and pine, small running streams. The road was a faint thing under us, more memory than road, the kind of road the country grew over and then re-grew when the forest had taken its pleasure. Coll was up at the front with his eyes on the country and his mouth quiet.
We made camp at noon to let the horses drink and eat the long grass, and I went out with Coll’s spare bow — a small plain ash bow he kept in a leather sleeve on his saddle — and a quiver of his hunting arrows, to see what could be put on the fire.
I came back two hours later with a yearling roe deer across my shoulders.
I had not expected it. I had expected rabbits. Davil had drilled me on the rabbit and the pheasant and the small bird, and I had thought of myself, on the way out, as a man hoping for one rabbit and willing to be glad of two. I had come down through a stand of low birch into a small wet hollow and the yearling had been standing at the far side of it cropping fresh shoots, head down, with the wind in my favour, and I had taken him from twenty paces with one arrow under the foreleg and through the heart, and he had been dead inside three breaths.
I had not, at any moment of it, felt the small private guilt I had thought I would feel. He had not been the bear. He had not been the great hind on watch above her herd on the saddle. He had been one yearling of many, a single life in a country thick with them, and I had taken him because we were eight people on a road and we needed to eat, and I had taken him cleanly. Davil would have nodded. I let myself feel the small pleasure of that and walked the yearling back across my shoulders with the slow easy pace of a man bringing the day’s work in.
Aelea saw me coming first. She came running.
“Gord. Gord, you got a — ”
“A yearling. He stood for me. The wind was right.”
“He’s huge.”
“He is medium. There will be enough on him for tonight and tomorrow if we cook the rest down for the road. Coll will know how.”
Coll, behind her, was already smiling. He had not smiled often that day, and the smile was, I thought, more for me than for the yearling.
“My Lord,” he said, “you have done your tutor proud.”
“He drilled me on rabbits. He did not drill me on yearlings.”
“A man is rabbits until he is a yearling. Then he is a yearling. You are a yearling, today. Bring him to the stones; I will show you the way to butcher him.”
We butchered him together, with Aelea watching at the careful safe distance Coll had set, and Aelea asked the questions she asked — what is this part for, why do you take it out first, what does the wilderness do with what we don’t take — and Coll answered each one without losing his thread, and by the late afternoon we had the meat of the yearling smoking on the green-stick frame Coll had taught us to build, and the smell in the small wet clearing was a thing I have not forgotten.
I chopped the wood for the fire. I borrowed Coll’s small belt-axe — the axe that had cut the rope at the Boundary, I did not let myself think about, but my hand registered it and gave back the right grip — and I set myself to a fallen pine at the edge of the clearing and chopped it into the lengths a fire wants, and stacked them, and chopped the smaller branches into kindling. It was plain work. The body remembered what the body knew. Davil had drilled me on the axe as he had drilled me on the bow. I had not held an axe to wood in two years and the shoulders did not believe me at the first stroke, and by the fifth the shoulders had remembered and the work went out of my head.
I worked for an hour. When I looked up Maerith was standing in the middle distance with a bundle of cresses she had cut from the brook and a small fixed expression on her face that she put away the moment our eyes met. She turned and went back to the fire without speaking. I did not know what to make of that and did not let myself spend the time on it.
The yearling roasted slowly through the evening. The King and Queen sat close at the fire as they had sat the night before, not touching, near enough that her cloak and his sleeve were within a finger’s-width of each other for the length of the meal, and they did not move away. They spoke quietly to one another about small things — the country, the road, what we had seen. Once the Queen laughed, low, at something the King said, and the King’s mouth lifted in the small private way I had not seen on his face since I was a small boy. Aelea was sitting between them with her face shining in the fire and her hands wrapped round a bone — gnawing, in fact, in the unselfconscious way a child gnaws a bone when she has decided she is entirely safe — and the two of them around her were the picture of what they might have been if the kingdom had let them.
It was good. It was good and I knew it was good and I did not press it.
Aelea slept the sleep of a child who had built the morning fire and watched her brother bring in a deer and eaten roasted yearling round a fire with both her parents present and aware of her. She slept all the way through to the morning, and Maerith slept curled around her, and the rest of us took watches that were not, that night, watches at all in the proper sense; the country had loosened around us. I took the middle one. Nothing came. The owl spoke once. The horses, including Tarn, slept standing in the way horses sleep, with their weight on three legs and their eyes half-closed.
I did not, that night, read the paper.
I had carried it in my coat for four days. The bones had been correct on Cinder and they had been correct, in the way I had been afraid of, about the chalice; or they had not been; I could not tell. I had decided, sitting against a low rock with the yearling’s smell still in the night air, that I would not read it again until I had to. I have come to believe that was a small grace I gave myself in the time before the forest. There are not many such graces a man can give himself on a road like ours. I took the one I could.
The next morning Josen and Coll lost the way.
I did not understand it for the first half-hour. We rode out of the clearing at first grey, north and slightly east, on the line Coll had been holding for two days. The country looked as it had looked. The road, such as the road was, ran on under us. The trees thickened a little, then thinned, then thickened, the way the country had been thickening and thinning since the saddle. I rode in the middle of the column behind the Queen and my father and noticed nothing.
Josen drew us up perhaps an hour in.
“Coll.”
“Aye.”
“That ridge.”
“Aye.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.