Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 18: Kings That Lie Together at the Table
I had not, in eighteen years, slept the kind of sleep I slept that night.
I was woken by Mal’s hand on my shoulder, in the half-grey of dawn, with the kind of waking that takes a moment to find one’s own name in the dark. I had been a long way down. I had not dreamed — not in any way I could carry up into the morning. I had not stirred. I had lain on my back the whole night, with my hands at my sides, the way a man lays down a coat that has been wet through.
Mal was kneeling beside me. She did not say good morning. She said:
“Breakfast is in a quarter-hour, dear. I will wake your sister soon; she has been sleeping deeper than you. Come when you are ready.”
She moved on to my father.
I sat up. My body had the small clean ache of a body that has done its proper night’s work and is willing to do another day’s. I sat for a long moment on the bedroll, watching the dell come back to the day. The fire-pit had been built up in the small hours; the lamps had been put out; Tor was at the long table laying out cloths and small pots, working with the quiet steadiness of a man who has laid out a long many such breakfasts. Mal moved from bedroll to bedroll. The Seronian side of the dell was beginning to stir.
I rose. I dressed. I went to the bathing-room and washed in the cold water there, and came back, and was at my place at the table by the time the others were drifting in. Aelea had awoken now. Mal had said another while, and another while had passed.
When the table was settled, Tor looked across at Aelea.
“Little princess. Will you say the grace this morning?”
Aelea looked up. She looked at Mal first, then at our mother, then at me. I gave her the smallest possible nod. She put her two small hands together on the table in front of her, the way Tor had put his the night before.
She thought a count, working it out. Then she said, in the careful clear voice of a child who has been asked to do a serious thing:
“Thank you for the food. Thank you for the wood, and the deer, and the eagle, and the bear we have been allowed to see. Thank you especially to Mal, for teaching me how to test that foods are safe for me, because I will teach our cook, and our cook will teach all the cooks, and then all children in our country will be safe. Please help us not forget to teach them. Please help every child have someone who teaches them how to be safe. Please help us all eat well this morning.”
She stopped. She looked at Tor.
“Is that all right?”
Tor’s face had a small thing on it that I had not seen before. He said, very quietly: “It is more than all right, little one. It is exactly the grace this morning needed.”
Mal, beside him, did not, for a count, say anything. She bent her head briefly, and did not say anything aloud. When she lifted her head she looked at Aelea with the small steady warmth of a woman who has just been given something back, in some way, for the work of a long life.
Then Tor said, “Now. Breakfast is being kept waiting. Eat.”
Breakfast came up out of the chest, like everything else.
It was a different register of food from the night before. The night had been food we had not had the names for. The morning was food we had names for, done in a way we did not have words for either. Mal had laid an omelette on each of our plates — a great fold of pale yellow eggs around what turned out to be a filling of bright peppers and mushrooms and small chopped green leaves whose name I did not know. Beside the omelette were three rashers of bacon. The bacon had been cooked to the exact crispness at which it shatters under a fork without falling apart. There was bread on the table — fresh, with a crust the colour of dark gold and an inside whiter than cream — and small pots of butter and of a dark sweet preserve that I would later learn was made of the dark berries the iced cream of the night before had had through it. There were yoghurts in small wooden bowls, with grains and small dried fruits and honey, arranged so that each diner could add what they liked.
And the omelette. I have set down the meal as a list because I have to. The list was the surface of it. The actual eating was — well. It was an omelette. It was eggs and pepper and mushroom and a herb I did not know and a small generous pinch of something that bit a little on the tongue, perhaps the milled black peppercorn that the kingdom uses only for great feasts. I had eaten omelettes in the castle of my whole life. The omelette in front of me was the thing the castle omelettes had been trying, all those years, to be.
I sat and I ate and at the third bite a sentence came up out of me unbidden, from that old manuscript Grolen had found.
There had been a feast beyond all the reckoning of men.
I had read that line, ten days ago, in the tunnels of the castle. I had thought it the kind of thing chroniclers write to mean nothing. I sat at the table that morning and I understood, very plainly, that the chronicler had eaten an omelette like the one in front of me, sometime in his life, and had set down the only sentence he could find to describe what he had been served. The sentence was not flourish. It was understatement. The man had said the least he could say of what he had eaten, because nothing he could have said would have been enough, and so he had written one short clean sentence and let it carry what it could.
I sat with that for a long moment.
If that sentence had been understatement, what else of what I had read in that manuscript was understatement too? Wenlis knelt and pledged the kingdom’s undying loyalty. Had I read that as flourish too? Was that — also — the man saying the least he could say of an event he could not entirely describe?
I did not know. I would have to read the manuscript again, when we returned home, with new eyes. I shut the question away and ate my omelette.
Across the table the morning was unfolding in its own ways.
Brandt had eaten his omelette in five great bites without comment, and was now working his way through the bacon at an apparent pace and with apparent indifference, while not, in fact, missing any part of what he was tasting. I had begun to be able to read him a little. His face was a hard man’s face. His mouth was a king’s mouth. He could eat the best omelette of his life and not break expression. But his right hand had paused twice over the plate in the way a man’s hand pauses when he is registering something he is not allowing himself to register openly. He was being struck and he was not going to be seen to be struck. The seeing of the not-being-seen was, I realised, going to be one of my chief works for the rest of the visit.
His wife Aurelin had not bothered with the same discipline. She had eaten her omelette with her eyes shut for two bites and had then said, into the small clearing at the table, “Mal. What is in this. I cannot tell what is in this.”
“Eggs and peppers, my dear. And a herb from the garden. There is a wild mushroom in the woods to the west of the dell, with a flavour the deer like; I add it sometimes. And a pinch of black pepper. There is no secret to it; Tor will tell you the same.”
“There is, I think, a secret to it.”
“There is a long time of cooking the same dish, dear. That is the secret of every good kitchen.”
Aurelin gave Mal a small dry look that was, I think, the first not-merely-polite expression Aurelin had given another woman since she had come to the dell. Mal received it with a small steady smile.
My mother, beside Aurelin, had been eating her omelette in silence with her eyes mostly on her plate. She looked up at Aurelin’s exchange. She did not speak. She returned her eyes to her plate. But the corner of her mouth had moved a little. The two queens, who had sat opposite each other the night before and exchanged a single oath about my sister and were not yet friends, were beginning to share things sideways, the way women begin to do who are starting to consider becoming friends.
Lirien, across the table, was eating quietly. She did not speak. She watched. She had watched a great deal since she had arrived in the dell, and her watching had a quality I had not, in any other woman I had met, registered before; she watched the way a competent person watches who knows that things they are watching will become useful later. I had once watched Josen watch a tavern. Lirien was watching the table with that kind of attention.
She caught me looking. She did not look away. She did not smile. She let me hold the look for the time of one slow breath and then returned to her omelette.
Aelea came up to the table then, hair on end from sleep, the wrong-coloured marks of the cloth pad still on her cheek, with her tunic on backwards. She climbed up onto the chair Mal had left for her and looked round at us all and said:
“What is in the bowls?”
“Yoghurt with honey, little one, and grains, and small dried fruits.”
“And what is in the cup.”
“Apple juice. The same as last night.”
“And the omelette is —”
“The omelette is for you to find out. Eat slowly. It is hot in the middle.”
Aelea attended to her bowl. After a moment she added, without looking up: “Mal, my lip does not itch.”
“No, dear. It has gone. The walnut one as well. You may eat anything on this table, except —”
“Except chestnut.”
“Except chestnut. Anywhere. Ever. And there is none here.”
“I will tell my cook.” Aelea said this with great seriousness. “When I get home. I will tell my cook never.”
“That is the right word.”
Aelea returned to her bowl. Around me my father and Brandt and the queens were watching the small exchange, each in their own way, and I could see across the dell that the word never had been heard by each of them and would be, in their own rooms in their own kingdoms after this was over, made the law of their kitchens, whether by my mother’s hand or by Aurelin’s or by both.
When the breakfast was done, Tor pushed his plate away from himself and laid his hands flat on the table.
“Friends. The body wants to move after a long night of sitting at a table. I am going to do my morning set, here in the dell. Anyone who wishes to join me is welcome. Anyone who would rather sit and watch is welcome to do that. I do not press.”
He stood. He took off his outer tunic, folded it, and laid it on his chair. Beneath he was wearing a plain undertunic and breeches, the kind of clothes a man wears for work that requires the limbs to be free. He stepped out into the open space of the dell, between the fire-pit and the table, and began.
I had seen Davil do this set. I had done it myself, in the courtyard of the castle, every morning of every year of my life from the age of nine until Bran died. I had not done it in the three months since. I watched Tor begin with the first stance — the slow weighted settling on both legs with the arms drawing wide — and a thing in my body answered.
I stood up.
I took off my outer coat and laid it on my chair. I walked out into the space and stood three paces from Tor, on his right, and matched myself to him on the first stance. He gave me the smallest possible nod.
“You have done this before.”
“I have. Daily, for nine years.”
“Then we shall not be slow about the warm-up. Match me.”
He moved. I matched. We went through the warm-up.
I had — in the space of the first three figures — to attend to what I was doing, because Tor moved through the set with a precision I had only ever seen in Davil, and I had not realised, until that morning, how much of what I had thought was Davil’s particular precision was the order’s precision, given by Davil to me in the way I now saw it being executed by Tor. Davil had told me, more than once, that the set was a discipline from a named order older than the kingdoms. I had taken his word for it. I had not, until I was matching Tor in the morning grass of the dell, understood that the discipline was a living discipline still — that there were other men in the world doing this same set on this same morning, that Davil had not been a curiosity of the castle but a transmitter of a school that was being kept in many places at once.
The set unrolled between us. I did not look at the others. I was attending. By the fifth figure I had found my breath and the body was going through the figures the way the body goes when the body remembers. By the eighth I had stopped having to think about any of it.
Tor said, quietly, as we moved through the tenth figure:
“Good. Your tutor did you proud.”
“He was a good tutor.”
“I do not doubt it. The work is in the hands.”
We finished the warm-up.
I had been so attentive to the set that I had not, until that moment, looked round at the dell.
When I looked round I saw that everyone was watching.
My father was on his chair where I had left him, sitting very straight. His face had gone the particular blankness that meant he was holding a number of things at once. His eyes were on me. He had had his eyes on me, I thought, the whole time. His mouth had moved once, perhaps to comment, and had been overridden by something inside him.
Brandt was on his chair on the far side. He had been watching me too, but for a different reason. He was watching the set as a man watches a thing he does not know being done by someone who plainly does know it. He had not looked at the work of swordsmen who could swing twice his weight on a longblade with the slightly worried alertness one would expect of a small man at arms; he had looked at this unarmed set with the suspicion of a man who is unsure whether what he is watching is dangerous, decorative, or simply foreign. He had not made up his mind.
The two queens sat together. They had moved their chairs slightly closer in the half-hour of breakfast and were now nearly side by side. They watched with interest. The watching did not have a competitive quality; they were watching what was in front of them.
Aelea was on her chair, having finished her yoghurt and her omelette, swinging her legs and watching me. Her face was the open considering face of a child watching a brother do a thing she had seen him do at home, in the courtyard, on many other mornings.
Caedric was on his chair, beside his father. He was watching too. His face was a sixteen-year-old’s face composing a sixteen-year-old’s careful neutrality. He had clearly been weighing, as I had begun the set, whether he should join me. He had also, very clearly, decided not to. He was sitting by his father this morning. He was being a Seronian son seated beside the Seronian king on the morning after the previous night’s truth-telling, and that mattered to him more than the morning practice did. He held himself still. He watched.
And Lirien was on her chair beside her brother, leaning slightly forward, with her hands flat on her knees and her body composed in the way of a body that is being prevented by the chair, and only by the chair, from rising. She had been watching me with a degree of attention that made the omelette-watching look casual. She had been recognising what I was doing. She knew the set. She had done it. She wanted to be in it. She was sitting because her father was sitting beside her and she had not yet been given a way to step out of that sitting without making a scene.
Tor turned to face the dell.
“That was the warm-up. The next half is a two-person set. I would like a partner.”
His eye moved across the dell.
It did not stop on me, because I was already standing.
It moved over Caedric — and Caedric, I thought, made the smallest possible negative gesture with his shoulder. He had decided. Tor accepted it without acknowledging it.
It moved to Brandt. It stopped there for a deliberate count of one breath. Sire? the eye said, without the mouth saying. Would you join us?
Brandt did not respond.
My father, behind Tor, did a small thing then I have not forgotten. He turned his head slightly, in his chair, and let his eye rest on Brandt for a long enough moment that everyone in the dell saw him do it. He did not speak. He did not raise a brow. He simply looked, in the way of a king looking at another king, and the look said and yourself, brother? — and Brandt knew it had been said and could not respond to it, because to respond he would have had to either join the practice (which he was not going to do) or admit aloud that he was not going to (which he was not going to do either).
Brandt did not look back at my father. He looked at the table.
My father, having scored his point silently, then said, into the dell — for the benefit of the whole party — “Tor. I shall not join this morning either, for fellowship’s sake; it would not be proper to take the floor without my brother king. I shall watch.”
It was, considered as a piece of court craft, a small masterwork. He had publicly declined for Brandt’s sake while making it perfectly visible to the entire dell that he was declining because Brandt would not. He had positioned himself as the gracious one. He had positioned Brandt as the one who had failed to step forward. He had done it in a sentence and a half. I felt the small disloyal flutter of admiration for him that I had not felt for him in months, and which the flutter immediately gave back by making me sad.
Tor took it without comment.
“Then I shall take one of the children. Lirien — would you stand in. I should like to see what your school looks like in your hands.”
Lirien rose.
She rose, I would understand later, in the way her mother had rose to the gift of Mal’s broth the night before — after the smallest possible internal pause, in which she had decided that the small piece of agency now available to her was worth the cost of taking it.
The cost of taking it stood up beside her in the same instant.
“Lirien.”
“Father.”
“Sit.”
It was very quietly said. The dell heard it.
“Father, I have been asked.”
“Sit, Lirien.”
Lirien stood where she was. She did not look at her father. She looked at Tor. She said:
“Tor has invited me. With your indulgence, Father, I will go.”
There was a small silence in which several things happened in Brandt’s face at once. He was, I think, in that moment going to find a way to say it more sharply. He had the words. They were on his tongue.
Tor said, from the centre of the dell, in his easy plain voice: “Brandt. I would take it as a kindness if you would let your daughter accept my invitation. The set has two ends and it is, in your daughter’s hands, a pretty thing, and your daughter has not done it in front of strangers in some time. I would like to see it.”
Brandt looked at Tor. Brandt could not — quite — defy Tor. He had not yet built a structure on which he could defy Tor. He looked at Lirien. He said, with the small clipped voice of a man who is conceding under protest:
“Lirien. Do not embarrass me.”
“No, Father.”
She stepped out into the dell.
She crossed the grass to where I was standing and stopped three paces from me. She tied her hair back. She had it back in the leather thong already, but she retied it more tightly. She rolled her shoulders. She let her arms hang. She looked at me.
There was nothing in her look. The look she had been giving me at the table — the careful watching look, the let-me-take-your-measure look — was put away. She was about to do work. The look she gave me now was a worker’s look. Here we are. Let us see what we see.
I gave her back the same look. I let my arms hang. I rolled my shoulders. I planted my feet.
Tor stepped to the side, between us and the watching party, the way a referee steps to the side at an exhibition match.
“The two-person set, then the engagement, in the way of the order. Do you both know the form?”
“Yes,” said Lirien.
“I have done it with my tutor every week for nine years,” I said.
“Good. Begin when ready. Match each other. Do not match me; I am out of it.”
I bowed to Lirien.
She bowed to me.
We began.
I will not describe the whole set. I would not be able to, even if I tried. The set is sixteen figures of two-person work, each figure leading from the one before it and into the one after, with each partner taking the active and the receiving role by turns, the whole forming a long unbroken motion across some four minutes when done at the proper pace. It is a piece of practice older than my kingdom and older, Tor said as we began, than the order’s own records of who first taught it.
What I will set down is what was happening between us as we did it.
She had been very well taught. I knew this by the second figure. Her stances were Davil’s stances. Her angles were Davil’s angles. The way she shifted her weight on the third figure to receive my leading hand was the way Davil had taught me to shift my weight on the third figure to receive his leading hand. I had been, until that morning, the only person other than my tutors that I had practised this set with. Tor was the second. Lirien was the third.
The set is, by design, a piece in which the bodies touch. The form requires it. The lead’s hand to the receiver’s wrist. The receiver’s elbow to the lead’s elbow. The lead’s palm to the receiver’s collar. The receiver’s foot inside the lead’s foot at the eighth figure. The lead’s hand to the receiver’s hip at the tenth. There is no figure of the sixteen which can be done without contact, and there is no contact in the sixteen which is not strictly defined by the form. It is a piece of practice that uses the touching, that makes the touching disciplined, that does not pretend the touching is absent.
We touched.
I had not, until I touched her, fully registered what kind of thing was about to happen in the dell. I had been attending to the set. I had been matching her, figure by figure, the way one matches a worthy partner. Then at the third figure her wrist was under my hand and I — I will set it down — I felt the small clean pulse of her at my palm, and I had to take an extra heartbeat to settle my breath, and I matched her into the fourth figure with a discipline I had not previously had to find.
She felt me feel it. I think she did. Her eyes were on mine and her face was the worker’s face, but at the fourth figure she gave me the smallest possible flicker — not a smile, not anything I could have pointed at — and the flicker meant yes, that happened, and now we continue. I gave her back the same flicker without meaning to. We continued.
The set unrolled. Her hand at my collar. My hand at her hip. Her foot inside my foot. My hand to her wrist as the figure reversed. Each contact a piece of work done in the proper time, and each contact a thing my body was registering as something other than work.
I had a thought come up at the eleventh figure, the way thoughts come up when the body has taken over from the mind: this is the closest I have ever been, in eighteen years, to a woman not of my family. And the thought sat there in the corner of my mind while the body continued the set, and it added to itself, and the woman is the freckled princess, and the woman is a fighter, and the woman is —
I shut the corner of my mind. I attended to the set. We finished the last figure in the proper time. We stepped apart. We bowed.
The dell was silent.
Tor said: “Now the engagement.”
In the order’s tradition the set is followed by free engagement. The set teaches the form. The engagement tests what the form has built. The two students go at each other, in the limits the form sets, with their full attention. I had engaged with Davil thousands of times. I had engaged with my older brother. I had engaged with Josen. I had never engaged with a partner I had touched as I had just touched Lirien.
I would let her decide what the engagement was going to be.
I stood. I let my arms hang. I waited.
I had the advantage in every measurable: I was three inches taller; I had perhaps thirty pounds of muscle on her; I was male; I had been training every day for nine years where she had — I assumed — been training perhaps less frequently as a princess in a court that did not encourage it; I had the longer reach. I could win the engagement in fifteen heartbeats if I chose to bear down. I was not going to bear down. I was going to let her show me what she had.
She launched.
She did it from a standing start, with no telegraph, and her speed was not the speed I had been expecting. She was fast. She came in low and at an angle Davil had taught me to defend against but had taught me to defend against from people my size; from a smaller person at her speed the angle was awkward, and I had to step back, and she had landed a touch on my shoulder before I had fully readjusted. She had landed it cleanly. I had not been ready.
I reset. Good. I gave her a small nod that she did not return because she was already moving again.
She came in a second time, this time higher, this time using the longer reach I had against me by ducking inside it on the third beat. She landed a touch on my forearm.
Two touches in thirty heartbeats. I had not, in nine years of engaging with Davil, been touched twice by a student in thirty heartbeats. I had been touched twice by Davil himself, on bad mornings.
I recalibrated.
I used more of what I had. I let the long reach do its work. I made my own speed match hers; I had it, I had simply not been using it. I closed her preferred angles. I gave her the long-arm work she did not have the reach for. I scored on her — once, on the shoulder, with my hand open in the soft striking-touch that the engagement permits, and once at her hip in the eighth-figure motion. She received both touches with the small nod a good student gives.
We were in it now. The engagement had become real. We were taking each other seriously. The dell around us had gone away. I was not aware of my father or her father or any of the others. I was aware of her body in motion and of my body in motion and of the small fast space between us in which we were both deciding what was going to happen next, with our hands and our eyes and our breath.
She landed a third touch on me — at the ribs, hard enough to mean it — and I landed a third on her, at the back of her knee, the leg-fold strike Davil had taught me to use on smaller opponents who came in low. She felt it and gave me the small good-student’s nod again.
I do not know how long we went. It was perhaps a minute. The body’s measure of time in such a moment is not the table’s measure of time. It might have been less than a minute and it might have been more.
It ended — and I will set this down as exactly as I can, because the ending was the moment — when she came in for what I thought was going to be another low strike, and was not. She came in high. She came in at me. She closed inside my reach in a movement I had not seen her telegraph, and her hands were on my upper arms and my hands were on her upper arms and we had each, in the same instant, accepted that the engagement was over and that the next thing was the close.
We were chest to chest. Her face was a hand’s-width from mine. We were both breathing hard. Her hair had come a little loose from the thong and a strand of it was across her cheek. Her eyes were on mine and her eyes were the grey-green I had been looking at across two days and two nights, and they were now closer than they had been at any of the times I had looked at them, and what was in them was not the worker’s look.
What was in them was a small steady smile.
I had not earned the smile. We had not finished the engagement clean; we had stopped it. Neither of us had won. Both of us had wanted to stop. The bodies had told us where the engagement was going if we did not stop it. The bodies were right and we had listened.
I gave her back the small steady smile.
We held the moment for one breath. Then another. We were close enough that I could feel her breath on my chin. She could, I think, feel mine.
We stepped back.
It had been, I will set down, perhaps three seconds. No one in the dell could have called it inappropriate. No one in the dell could have called it appropriate either. It was the small clean moment of two strangers having engaged at full attention and having stopped at exactly the place where stopping was the right thing.
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