Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 2: The Drunken Pig
I sat alone in the corner of the pub, pushing the weak, tasteless stuff the publican had called stew around my plate with a battered and rusting old spoon. I was only avoiding it, truly — but I knew I would eat it in the end. Had to, and with a smile on my face besides. Looking at the thin grey swill, I regretted again the spur-of-the-moment thing it had been, to sneak out of the palace.
It had seemed a good idea when I set out. Or not good — necessary. A thing I had to do, to go and find the courage I knew I would need on the morrow, the day I must stand before the King about the invitation. There was danger in being beyond the walls, of course. If I stood out, if any soul marked that I did not belong, questions might be asked, and questions led to trouble. Real trouble. At the best of it I might hope to be rescued by the palace guard — and then?
But the confronting of the King my father held a deeper danger than any back-street of the city.
I thought of old Torney, and of the hour the invitation came.
The King had taken one look at it, before the eagle was even gone from the sky, and flung it from him with an oath. Torney — long-serving, faithful, a minister to the crown through three hard reigns of my father’s moods — bent and retrieved it and read it for himself. “But sire. Perhaps you should consider this?”
“Fool. It is a device of our enemy. There is no Old Man of the Forest, as every man well knows.”
It was the measure of Torney’s shock, I think, the depth of his turmoil, that he went on at all. “But — the eagle, sire.”
And that was enough.
“Guards. This man has unmasked himself as another of our enemies.”
I knew, in that breath. Torney knew too. I saw the knowing arrive in his eyes, the instant he understood the size of his mistake. He stiffened. And then he turned his eyes to me, and made his appeal — no word in it, only the look. He was still looking at me when the Red Coat took him across the back of the head, and he went down, and then he was taken out, and never seen again.
I sighed, and turned back to my stew, and set myself to shoving the grey muck down my throat with a smile, as a poor man would who could not afford to waste it.
I looked about the room, and was sickened anew. Every soul in the inn nursed a single drink with both hands, grim and grey of face. One drink to a man — by order of the King. The food was pitiable. The clothes had been patched and patched again until the patches wore patches. This was the kingdom now, past the palace gate. All men are brothers, we said, at the white table on the green lawn. I looked at the brothers.
I finished the pig-swill and drank down the last of the thin sour beer, and I thought of Bran.
How I miss Bran. The apple of my father’s eye, great prince of White Stone — tall, handsome, quick of hand and quicker of mind, the heir any king in the world would have begged the gods for. I lived all my life in his shadow, the second son, the lesser thing, and I should by every right have hated him for it. But no man could hate Bran. That was the whole trouble of loving him. For all those gifts, and not in spite of them, he was a kind and open-hearted man who wished only the good of those around him — and me he loved past all of them, knowing my lesser place, doing what small things he could to mend it.
Bran is dead these three months. Slain in our long war with the Seronian kingdom, one more hero laid in one more field. So many fallen. None of them missed as Bran is missed: our sun has gone to hell.
The King blames me. He blames me though I was the only man who could cut a way through those fields of destruction to reach Bran at all. By the time I came to him the thing was already done: the Seronian prince had cut my brother down, and Bran, going down, had opened the prince to the bone in the same stroke, so that the two of them lay there together in the churned mud, the one already dead and the other most of the way to it. Bran was past any man’s saving. I had come too late by the length of a single breath.
What I did after, at the end of it, I will not set it all down — not even here, in the dark of a pig-pen inn where no soul knows my face. I will only say that I did not do it for the kingdom, nor for hatred, nor for Bran. I will say that there is a thing the Seronians believe about how a man should go to meet what comes after, and that I knew it, though every law my father has made says I should not. And that I was seen doing it, that mercy stroke. And that I ran from the one who saw, and have run from him in my sleep every night since.
I drank, though the cup was empty.
So I am the heir now, to my father’s great grief. From birth I was groomed to be Bran’s second — a wise man, a well-read man, but above all a loyal one, the advisor at the great prince’s right hand. Not for me the training of the leader, the knight. Some little of the sword I had, some little of the horse, but they fed me arts and lore and the counting of money instead, and when I complained of it my tutor Davil only laughed and told me it was to my advantage. Survival, Davil called my schooling. He taught me all a man needs to live anywhere on the earth — to the very point of teaching me how to pass for a serf. May you never need it, he would say, but none shall ever say I left you unready. Most of all he taught me the ways of unarmed fighting, and the discipline, and the patience, and the long stillness of the meditating mind. What faults I have are my own. They are no failing of Davil’s.
I see his blunt, scarred face even now. He is gone too. I think of his last words, the night he fled my father — that White Stone was in deep trouble, that my own fate as prince was bound to the kingdom’s past all untangling. Forget the brotherhood, and the lofty principles of reason, he said. They are a chimera. A painted cloth hung over what is truly being done here. I should not hope to escape it, he told me — though I should escape if ever I could. And he said again, pressing it on me, that the life of a king and his kingdom is bound to the welfare of the people who hold it up. My father might believe otherwise. He would expect me to know better, and not to forget it.
I have not forgotten.
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