Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 17: The Old Man’s Table
The man called Tor finished naming us and waited.
His voice had not lifted. His hands had not moved. He had said the names of the eight of us in two soft sentences — Algus of White Stone, his wife the Queen Wenna, his son Gord, his daughter Aelea; Brandt of Seronia, his wife Aurelin, his daughter Lirien, his son Caedric — and the dell had received the names the way deep grass receives a stone, with no echo. He had said, between the two sentences, I am Tor, the old man of the forest, and this is my wife Mal.
He had said old man of the forest the way another man might have said wheelwright, without weight, without lift; the way a man names what he is and goes on. Mal at his side had nodded once, gently, the way a woman acknowledges her own name being given.
I was standing in a dell in the late gold of the afternoon and the bottom had dropped out from under me twice within a minute. The first dropping had been the seeing of the boy at the Seronian prince’s right shoulder. The second was now.
The Old Man of the Forest.
The man Coll’s grandfather had spoken of with his eyes turned to the floor.
The figure of the kingdom’s deepest and most carefully buried books. The man before whom Wenlis the Great was said to have knelt. The figure whose name appeared in our family’s secret papers in old elvish under a scroll our King would not have read in daylight if his crown had hung on it.
This man. This forester with the wood-axe across his back.
And his wife, who had called my mother love an hour ago at the waiting camp, and to whom my mother had given her name as one gives a name in an inn.
Mate, he had said to my father on the road. Love, she had said to my mother in the camp. I had heard both. I had not, in either moment, understood them. They climbed back up out of the day and settled in my chest with the heaviness of small obvious things one ought to have read at the time.
I did not move. I had a face on me and I held it. I had been holding it since the dell. I had been holding it from the moment I had seen Caedric and Lirien and had understood that the Old Man — that Old Man — had brought us here to meet them. I held it now, while my mind reorganised the country it was standing in.
I looked, in the small space the holding-of-the-face gave me, at the others.
My father had received the introduction as my father always received the unexpected: by going still. His jaw had set and his shoulders had squared, and on any other day, in any other place, he would have stepped forward and begun the speech of acknowledgment that the Form would have given him. He did not step forward. The Form had nothing in its book for I am Tor, the old man of the forest. The Form had nothing for a man it had been criminalising the memory of for a thousand years. My father stood, and he held, and his face went a particular grey that I had seen on him exactly twice before — both times in the council chamber when news had come that he had not the strength to do anything with. He held.
My mother — Wenna — was beside him. Her hand had gone to her throat at the I am Tor and had stayed there. She had read more of the kingdom’s secret books than my father, I thought, looking at her. She was not grey. She was very pale. Her eyes had gone to Mal’s, and what Mal was doing with her own eyes back was a kind of small steady offering of presence, a yes, I am that woman, and I am also the woman you came to two hours ago, and both things are true and you may breathe.
Aelea, between them, had not moved. She did not know what the Old Man was. She had been told that we were going to meet him. She was meeting him. The two things matched. She looked at Tor with the open considering interest with which she had looked at the bear.
Across the dell, the Seronians had received the introduction differently because they had received less of it.
Brandt had received the old man of the forest as a man receives a title he has not heard before. He had filed it. His face had not changed. His eyes had gone to Tor’s wood-axe, to Tor’s plain clothes, to the absence of any retinue, and he had made the calculation of a man making a deal in a country he does not understand: this one is the host, this is the one with whom the deal will be cut, the title is what he calls himself, very well. He nodded, very slightly, to acknowledge that the names had been given. I would learn over the next days how much of what was happening in his mind in that moment was wrong.
Aurelin had received it like Wenna. Less still — she was a Seronian queen and she had not read what Wenna had read in our books — but enough. Her hand did not go to her throat but it tightened on the cloth of her dress where it lay against her thigh, and her eyes had moved between Tor and Mal and back several times in the second after Tor finished. She was reading them. She was, I think now, reading Mal especially. Something in Mal’s plainness had caught her in a way I would also later understand.
Caedric had received it precisely. He had read what Tor had said and read what it meant, and his face had gone to the same place mine had gone — the small place a young person’s face goes when the country has just turned around them by a half-degree they cannot show. He was sixteen and he held it.
Lirien — Lirien — had not looked at Tor. She had been looking at me through the whole introduction.
I had been looking back without meaning to. I had not yet entirely put the holding-of-the-face on her. She was the freckled princess of a kingdom we had been at war with for a long age of my life, and she was the sister of the man I had killed the brother of, and she had been the daughter of a Seronian king for the count of a heartbeat before the Old Man had stood up and made everything we had thought we were standing inside something else.
She was looking at me steadily. Her hands were folded in front of her. She did not seem to have moved at all during Tor’s introduction. Of all of us in the dell she was the one who appeared least surprised. I thought, with a small wrong-footed lift, that she knew.
I would learn later that she had not, exactly. She had been told by someone who knew about the forest, more than her father knew, to keep her face on her — and she had kept it. She had also, I came to understand later, been doing in that moment what she had been doing since I had walked into the dell, which was making her own measure of me. She had set the question of the Old Man aside until later because the Old Man would still be there in an hour. I would not necessarily be there in an hour. She had been looking at me because looking at me was time-pressed and looking at Tor was not.
I did not know any of that then. I knew only that she was looking at me, and that her eyes were grey-green and steady, and that I had broken eye contact with her twice and looked back twice, and that the second time I had looked back she had been waiting for me to do it.
Tor said, into the small clean space of the silence the introductions had made:
“Come. Mal has something on for supper, and there is enough time before the light goes for me to show you the dell. Then we shall sit.”
He turned and walked into the deep grass.
We followed him because there was nothing else, in that moment, that any of us could think to do.
The tour was so short and so plain that I have set down most of it already without realising.
The dell, Tor said as we walked back into the centre of it, was where suppers happened. There was a great round table of dark wood already set under the long shadow of the great pines at the dell’s south side. There were ten places laid. There were lamps on the table that had not been there when we had come in, and that had not been lit by any hand I had seen. There was a fire-pit at the centre of the dell, banked low and ready for evening. There was, at the dell’s north side, a clear flat space he indicated with his hand and called the sleeping place, and where I noticed that nothing was laid — no rolls, no canvases, no gear — and Tor did not explain the absence and I did not ask. Sleeping gear will turn up, I thought, the way the lamps did, and held the thought.
He led us out of the dell on the east side, along a small dry path through the trees, and at perhaps a hundred paces we came to a place where the path went under a great overhang of rock and into the side of a low hill. The rock had been worked. Not roughly — finely. Smoothed at the edges, channeled at the floor for water to run, the inside lit by a soft glow coming from somewhere I could not place.
Inside the hill was a room.
It was not a cave in the sense the word usually means. It was a room, with walls of cut and polished stone, and a floor that drained at one side, and a long bench along one wall with a row of stone basins set into it; and at each basin a small clear stream ran down through a hole in the wall, fell into the basin, and ran out again through a hole at the bottom. The water was cold and clear and unceasing. I had never seen plumbing like it. I had not known plumbing like it was possible.
“Toilet,” said Tor, indicating an alcove at the back where another stone bench had been cut, with a hole, and another small stream running away beneath. “Running water. It is not a flush — the water runs always. There is no need to do anything to it. Pull the curtain across when you are using it, and back when you are finished.”
He turned, walked further along the inner wall, and pushed open a wooden door I had not at first seen because the wood was the colour of the stone around it.
“Bath,” he said. “Hot. There is a spring under us. The water comes up through the floor by a way I will not bore you with. Stand under it as long as you like. The water is always there.”
I looked in. A second stone room, smaller, with a stream of steaming water falling from a spout in the wall, hitting the floor, and running away through a grate. A small bench along one side. A pile of folded cloth that I understood after a heartbeat was towels, of a softness I would not have credited if I had not put a hand to it.
“Females in the morning,” said Tor, easily. “Males in the evening. That has been the way of the house since there has been a house, and nobody has yet come up with a reason to change it. You may go now if you like, before supper, or after. The cold water in the other room is for the rest of the day.”
He turned and led us back out without further comment.
I had been raised in the Great Castle. I had bathed in tin baths heated by servants. I had pissed in chamber pots emptied by other servants. I had thought myself, all my life, the most privileged of men in the matter. Tor’s tour had just shown me a country man’s privy in the woods that was finer than anything I had ever stood in, and he had shown it to me without lifting his voice, and he had walked us back out of it the way a man walks visitors out of a tool-shed.
My father, beside me, was silent. So was Brandt, on the far side of the path. Neither of them, I thought, could entirely place where they had just stood. They had been kings of countries with great stone halls, and a forester in homespun had shown them a piece of plumbing that neither of their kingdoms could match. The silence was not, in either of them, the silence of admiration. It was the silence of two men who had not yet found a way to fit what they had seen into the way they thought of themselves.
I marked it. The Form was beginning to crack on both sides. The Form would not survive the evening.
When we came back into the dell, Mal had set herself by the fire-pit and was waiting for us with the calm of a woman who has not been hurrying and has nonetheless done a great deal in the time she has had.
She turned to my mother.
“Wenna, love. About your daughter on the road. Will you come and sit with me at the fire a moment? You too, Aelea, dear. There is something I would like to try if you will let me. Aurelin — will you come too? You will want to see this. And Lirien — yes, you also. It is the kind of thing a princess should know about.”
It was so plainly said. I heard about your daughter on the road — said as any host says it, I heard about your trouble, come and sit. There was no claim in it that she had heard by any way that mattered. Wenna had told her. Mal had asked, as she would have asked any guest coming in: and how was your journey? and Wenna, sitting down at last after the dell, had told her. The chestnut. The blue lip. The wrap on the hands. The not-knowing-why.
Mal had heard, and had set Tor to fetching what she needed, and now was ready.
My mother went to her, and Aelea with her. Aurelin, after the briefest of pauses, went. Lirien, looking once at me as she passed, went. The five of them sat down on the grass by the fire — Mal cross-legged like a country woman, the other four arranged around her — and the four of us men were left standing on the dell behind them, with nothing to do, with no place laid out for us, and no instruction either to stay or to leave.
I sat down on the grass at a respectful distance. After a moment my father did the same. Brandt, after a longer moment, did the same on his side. Caedric joined his father. There were now four men sitting in a rough arc behind the women, watching, with no role in what was about to happen.
I marked that too. We had been put aside. Mal had done it in a sentence, gently, and there was no man in the dell who could have objected, and yet we had been put aside.
Tor came back from wherever he had gone with two small cloth bags in his hand. He set them down beside Mal without speaking, gave her a small nod, and stepped back. He did not sit. He stood at the edge of the dell with his hands behind his back, the way a man stands when his wife is doing her work and he is the small useful witness.
Mal opened the first bag. She took out a single chestnut and set it on a flat stone in front of her. She opened the second bag. She took out a single walnut and set it on the same stone, a hand’s-width from the chestnut.
She looked at Aelea.
“Little one. I am going to do something to you that will itch. Not as much as it itched two days ago — much less. But it will itch, and you will not like it, and I am going to ask you to bear it for a little while, because at the end of it your mother and your father and your brother will know a thing about you that they need to know, and then we will wash it off and the itch will go. Will you let me?”
Aelea, who had been watching Mal as she had watched the bear, said, “Yes.”
“Good. Sit very still.”
Mal turned to my mother.
“Wenna. There is no medicine for what happens with your daughter. I am sorry. I have known many healers in my time, of many traditions, and none of them have a remedy. The body simply does not like what it does not like, and that is the way of bodies. It is, as they say, what is truly in every line on her palm. We do not understand why. The body is older than understanding.”
“Then how —”
“You avoid. That is the only thing. You do not let her eat what she cannot eat. The trouble is that you have not until now known what it is she cannot eat.”
“How is anyone to know? How can she not have eaten chestnuts?”
Mal shrugged. “They are not common. Nothing like this has happened before?”
“Well. Yes. Twice, but not like that. Litle things.”
“That is the second thing about bodies that do not like things. Sometimes the body learns the dislike. Sometimes it builds. The first time may be nothing. The third time may be the bad time. The chestnut you ate two days ago was, I think, the third time, and the body had had time to learn its dislike thoroughly between the second and the third.” Mal looked at Aelea with great gentleness. “So we test. We test every food the child has not had before, in a small way, before she eats it in a large way. We do not let any food into her mouth until we have asked her body whether it is willing.”
“How.”
“Watch.”
She picked up the chestnut and broke a piece off — a piece the size of half her smallest fingernail. She set it on the stone. She picked up the walnut and did the same on a different stone. She crushed each piece to a small paste with the back of two polished sticks she had drawn from the folds of her dress. Then she spat — very neatly, very deliberately — into each paste, and worked the spit in with different sticks, two strokes for the chestnut, two strokes for the walnut.
She held up her right index finger. “This finger, chestnut.” She held up her left. “This finger, walnut. Yes? Aelea, sit still.”
She bent forward. She painted, very gently, with the tip of her right index finger, a strip of the chestnut paste on the right side of Aelea’s upper lip, just under the nostril. Then with her left, a strip of the walnut paste on the left side of Aelea’s upper lip, in the same place under the other nostril.
Then she sat back.
“We wait. A minute. Perhaps two. Watch the lip.”
We watched.
I had thought, sitting in the grass watching this, that nothing would happen, because the chestnut had taken twenty minutes to fully do what it had done two days ago and I did not see how a smear under the nostril could do anything at all. I was wrong. Within perhaps forty heartbeats, the right side of Aelea’s upper lip began to redden. By a minute the redness had become a small distinct welt the size of a coin. The skin under her right nostril was hot to look at. The skin under her left was the same as it had been at the start of the minute. Pale, untouched.
Aelea was rubbing her right index finger and thumb together unconsciously and trying very hard not to scratch.
Mal nodded, slowly, to herself.
“Yes, see. The right side. The chestnut. The left side, the walnut, is fine. So your daughter can eat walnuts. She cannot, ever again, eat a chestnut.” She lifted a wet cloth she had had at her side and washed the right side of Aelea’s lip clean, then the left as a precaution. “There. It will fade within an hour. The hives will not come down past the lip. You did very well, little one.”
“It still itches.”
“I know. It will, worse yet. Wait.”
She moved her hand over Aelea’s lips.
“It’s gone!”
“Yes dear. I sent it fleeing.”
Mal turned to my mother.
“Now you know how it is done, for when I’m not here. Any food she has not had before, you take a crumb, you crush it with a drop of water — your own spit is the same, it is safer — and you paint it under her nostril and you watch for a minute. If the lip reddens, that food is not for her. Ever. You may need to learn over years what foods are not for her. But you have a tool, now. She will not die of a food the body has not warned us about, because her body will warn us before she eats it.”
She paused. Her face went a fraction stiller, and what came next she said with a quiet weight that I felt under it as clearly as if she had laid her hand on the table.
“There is one further thing. A thing that is more important than the test itself.”
My mother waited.
“No contamination. The chestnut cannot touch the bowl your daughter eats from. From this hour. There are no chestnuts in your daughter’s kitchen. There are no chestnuts in any room your daughter eats in. There are no chestnuts on the hands of any servant who serves her food. The cook who handles chestnuts for any other table in your court washes her hands a thousand times before she handles your daughter’s food, or — better — she does not handle your daughter’s food at all, and there is a separate cook in a separate kitchen with a separate set of pots, and that cook never sees a chestnut. No contamination. Make it the law of your kitchens. Make it more than the law. Make it the way your kitchens breathe. There must not be a chestnut anywhere within ten paces of any plate your daughter will ever lift.”
My mother’s eyes were a little wide. She had understood the test. She had not understood the second piece. She was understanding it now.
“I will see to it.”
“See to it the way you would see to a knife in the dark, my Lady. It is the same kind of danger. It does not need to be a great deal of chestnut. It needs only to be any chestnut.”
“Yes.”
“Tell every house. Tell every cousin. Tell every aunt. Tell every cook. Tell the servants of the servants. Make it a thing every soul in your kingdom who comes near your daughter knows in their bones. Not try to avoid it. Not be careful.Never. The word is never.”
“Never.”
“Good.”
She let the word settle a moment, then sat back, and her face softened.
“There. You have what you need. I am sorry I had to use the hard voice. You love Aelea, and this is a hard thing for a mother.”
My mother looked at the small clean spot under Aelea’s right nostril. I had noticed. And she had noticed: it was there, and then it was not. Mal had healed it, real magic.
“It’s gone!”
“Indeed. But I am just here, and Aelea will not be. This is old knowledge. It is older than your kingdom and older than mine. There was a time, before there were kingdoms, when every healer who walked the country knew it, because enough villages had a child who could not eat what the next child could eat, and every healer had to know how to find out which child it was. The knowledge was carried by the country and it was carried by women and it was carried in the heads of grandmothers, the way knowledge that does not get written down gets carried. Then the kingdoms came, and the knowledge of the kingdoms was the knowledge that got written down, and the knowledge of the grandmothers — being grandmothers’ knowledge, and being not the kind that asks to be set down — was, in many places, not set down. And then the grandmothers died, and the knowledge died with them, and now there are kingdoms which do not know. So children die.”
She looked at my mother very steadily.
“Your kingdom is one of those. Mine — “ she gestured around the dell “ — has not forgotten what was forgotten, because we have been here a long time and we have remembered what we walked through. Take this back with you. Tell your healers. Tell every grandmother in your country who will listen. The knowledge belongs to no one, to everyone. It was made by the country in the long years and it was kept by the country in the long years, and where the country has lost it, the country needs it back.”
“Yes.”
“Then we are done with the test. The rest is supper.”
There was a long silence.
In that silence I watched my mother understand a great many things at once, the way a person understands many things when a single fact has rearranged the room they were standing in. She understood that her daughter had a death waiting in any new food. She understood that her daughter had a death waiting in any food that had been near the wrong food. She understood that she had a method now for keeping the death at the door, and that the method required vigilance of a kind her kitchens had never been asked for. She understood that mortal enemies of her family, knowing this thing about her daughter, could end Aelea by getting a chestnut into the wrong soup on the wrong evening; and that this was a kind of vulnerability she would never until tonight have known to guard against, and that her king and her commanders did not yet know to guard against either, and that she would have to teach them. She understood that she had been the queen of a country which had let an old knowledge die because the court would not stoop to ask the country to keep it. She understood that the woman in front of her had given back, in a small piece, what her own kingdom had let fall. She had saved Aelea’s life inside the next year, and probably the year after, with a piece of cloth and two nuts and a minute of waiting and a warning that came next.
She did the only thing that could be done. She bowed her head.
“Thank you. I will not forget this. Nor will any healer in my court, when I have done with them. Not as long as I sit at my husband’s table.”
“You are welcome, love.”
Aurelin, across the small space of the firelit grass, had been silent through the whole demonstration. She spoke now for the first time.
“Wenna.”
My mother lifted her head.
“Wenna, while you sit at your husband’s table — and after — your daughter will not die of a chestnut at my husband’s table either. Not by any plate that comes from a Seronian kitchen. Nor by our will. I will see to it.”
It was said quietly. It was said in front of Mal, in front of Lirien, in front of Aelea, in front of the four men behind us. It was a Seronian queen swearing, in plain language, the protection of the child of the kingdom her own kingdom had been at war with for thirty years.
My mother looked at her. The look was the kind of look that takes a moment to settle. She gave it the moment.
“Aurelin. Thank you.”
“It is nothing.”
“It is not nothing. I will not forget it.”
“Nor will I.”
They held each other’s eyes a moment longer. Mal, between them, did not speak. She had, with her two nuts and her spit and her stick and her patient minute, made the two women in front of her into something they had not been when they had sat down on the grass. They were not friends yet. But the road to friends had been begun, and both of them had taken the first step, and the step had been taken in the same direction.
I looked, briefly, at Lirien.
Lirien was watching her mother with an expression I had not yet learned to read on her face. The expression was, I think — I have not seen my mother do this before. I have not seen her offer anything to anyone she did not have to. She is doing it now. The expression had a small light in it. The kind of light a daughter gives a mother when she has just been proud of her without having expected to be.
Lirien caught me looking. She did not, this time, hold the look. She looked away. I felt something inside me lift in a way I did not name.
Tor said, from the edge of the dell, in his easy voice:
“Mal. I think we have made our guests hungry. The table is set.”
Mal stood up from the grass and brushed the grass from her dress. She put her hand briefly, in passing, on top of Aelea’s head — a small ordinary gesture — and walked to the table. The rest of us, after a beat, followed her.
I have been writing for some time without setting down what we ate. I will set it down now. I will not get through it quickly, and I have decided not to try.
The table held ten places, as I have said. Tor and Mal sat at the head and foot — Tor at the head facing into the dell, Mal at the foot facing out — and the rest of us were arranged along the two long sides in an order that, I came to understand, was not random. My father and Brandt sat opposite each other at the head end, close to Tor. My mother and Aurelin sat opposite each other at the foot end, close to Mal. Caedric, Lirien, Gord, Aelea — the four of us children, though I would not for some weeks yet have called us that — sat in the middle of the long sides, two and two. I was opposite Caedric and beside Aelea. Lirien was opposite me and beside her brother.
I had not been put opposite Lirien and Caedric by accident. Nor had Aelea been put beside me at the centre of the table where the conversation would be carried by the children. Mal had set the table the way a woman who has been setting tables for a very long time sets a table that needs to do work. I would understand that fully only after.
Before the food was served, Tor sat forward. He did not raise his voice. He said: “We give grace at this table. It is older than either of your kingdoms. I will say it tonight. We will see who speaks the others.”
He let that sit a count, in case any of the kings wanted to mark the we will see who speaks the others. Neither did. He said the grace.
“For this food, our thanks. For those at this table, our thanks. For the people who are not at this table, our thanks that they too live in this country. Please help us serve our neighbours. Please help our neighbours serve us. Please help us live in peace with our neighbours, and they with us. Please help the work of this table be the work of the country.”
Mal, at her end of the table, added quietly: “This we have always done. From the beginning. In service to those who gave us our station.”