Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 21: A Kingdom Won
The dell was quiet around us. The morning had come up enough that the sun was on the long grass at the dell’s western edge in long warm stripes. The bodies of my father and Brandt lay where they had fallen, locked together by my father’s sword, with my father’s head two paces off in the grass. Caedric stood with his own sword down at his side. Lirien was kneeling beside Aelea and my mother at the dell’s edge. Aurelin sat at the table where she had not moved.
Lirien rose.
She did it slowly. She kept Aelea’s hand. She did not, at first, speak. She looked round at the dell — at the two bodies, at the head, at her mother at the table, at my mother kneeling with Aelea, at Caedric with the sword, at me, at Tor at the centre and Mal beside him.
She said, plainly, into the dell:
“We have two queen mothers. We will respect and honour them. And we have our princess. There is nothing more to be said of that.”
Aurelin spoke for the first time since the killings, in the voice of a queen mother accepting her office at her daughter’s hand. “My queen.”
My mother said it after her. “My queen.”
Lirien said: “Mothers, thank you. We will have much work for you to do, but for now, you may rest.”
It was, I would learn over the days to come, the form of address Lirien would use for the rest of her life when speaking to them together.
Aelea looked up at her.
“And me, Lirien.”
“Yes, princess. And you. You above all. You are our princess, and you will walk this road with us.”
Aelea was quiet a moment. Then: “I would like to stay here a while. With Mama.”
“Stay. We will not be long.”
“Where are you going?”
Tor had come up. He answered before Lirien did. “To the armies on the plain, little one. Your brothers in arms and your sister have a thing to do that cannot wait for the day.”
“How will they get there in time?”
“Do not worry about that.”
Aelea looked at him a long count. She nodded the way an eleven-year-old nods at a thing she has decided to ask about another day. She returned her head to my mother’s shoulder.
“Well, you better go do your thing,” she said, as only an eleven your old can.
I had been about to take Lirien. She stopped me with her face.
She had turned to me with an expression I had not seen on her in three days — not at the table, not in the dawn at the island, not in the dell at the killings. Her face was stricken.
I came to her.
“My princess. What is wrong.”
She took a deep breath. “Gord — I cannot do this.”
I looked at her.
“Why on earth not.”
I could, in the half-second she took to answer, think of several reasons. The morning had given any one of us several reasons. I waited to hear which was hers.
She got an anguished look on her face. She said, almost wailing the word: “Because I’m not beautiful.”
I had a moment in which I made a decision. The decision was that I would say what I had to say loud enough for the dell to hear, because the dell was the new kingdom in miniature, and the new kingdom needed to hear it. I took both her hands. I did not lower my voice.
“My queen. Hear this. You are truly beautiful in the ways that matter most for our kingdom. Your heart and your soul. That is the beauty that holds a kingdom together. That is the beauty our country has been needing for thirty years and has not had.”
I waited until I could see, in her face, the small flicker of acknowledgment.
“And you are also beautiful in the ways you are thinking about. You took my breath away when I saw you the first night and you have been taking my breath away in every hour since. For that alone I wanted you, and for that alone the kingdom will know what it has in you, when the kingdom sees you.”
“But still — “ She let it tail off.
“Your freckles.”
She nodded.
“I tell you now,” I said. “I will kiss you on every freckle you have.”
She gave me an extra grin for that — I had seen them all, and she knew that the line was a promise that referred to parts of her the dell would not normally see. The grin was the queen of hearts breaking through.
“And hear this too. You are our queen. So you are beautiful anyway. You will see: in a month all the great ladies will be paying their maids to paint freckles on their faces. They will see what I see. The kingdom will learn to see what the king sees. The kingdom always has. You are it’s beauty.”
She gave me a smile that was, in the moment, the smile her face had been waiting eighteen years to give. “Yes. It will be as you say. I am beautiful. Thank you.”
Across the dell, against my mother’s shoulder, Aelea’s small voice came up.
“I want freckles too.”
She said it without lifting her head from my mother.
The dell laughed.
The dell laughed in the half-second of the line landing — Lirien first, her laugh coming out of her short and clear, the way her laugh had come out at the island; my mother after, with a hand to her mouth; Aurelin at the table, surprising me with a small dry laugh I had not heard her make in three days; Caedric, on the grass beside us, a short bark; even Mal, by the fire, the small quiet laugh of an old woman who has seen what she has been waiting to see. The dell laughed and the bodies were still in the grass and the morning was still a morning a kingdom had died in and been re-made in, but the new queen had been told she was beautiful and the new princess had said she wanted freckles, and the morning held the laugh.
I pulled Lirien to me and kissed her with all the skill I had.
The kiss was longer than I had meant. It would have gone longer still if I had not heard, after a count I could not measure, a small dry cough behind us.
I drew back. I glanced over Lirien’s shoulder.
My mother was watching us with her lips pursed. Her face was the face of a queen mother who had just realised her son had not learned the difference between a private kiss and a public one. Beyond her, Aurelin was making the same face. The two mothers had, in the span of an hour, come to share a face.
I said to Lirien, with my mouth still near hers: “I believe we are meant to take that elsewhere.”
“I suppose so.”
We did not, in the saying, move.
It was Tor who spoke.
“Gord. Lirien. A thing before you go.”
He came forward. Mal came beside him. They stopped three paces from us. Now we did move.
Tor said: “You have made your choice this morning. For each other, and for your kingdoms, and the two are the same choice. The work of the queen of hearts is the work of being the king’s wife. The work of the king is the work of being the queen’s husband. The lords and ladies and captains will tell you the kingdom is held by the law and the army and the grain and the coin. They will not be wrong. But none of those will hold if the king and queen do not hold each other. Hold each other. Hold each other in plain sight. The bed, the table and the throne are the same room.”
Mal said: “And your love is not yours alone. Your subjects depend on it. When the king kisses the queen, the kingdom must feel it, as we just did. When the queen calls the king to bed, the kingdom will take comfort that you hold each other. Do not be shy. The court must know; they will spread the word; they will not resist.”
Lirien, beside me, with a small laugh: “Yes, Mal.”
I said: “Yes. That is how it will be.”
Tor: “Good. Now. Neither of you is dressed for what comes next. Mal.”
She went to the small wooden chest at the dell’s edge — the chest that had produced lamps and bedrolls and lutes and slabs of meat at no apparent warning. She knelt. She opened it.
She lifted out a tunic.
The colour was a deep blue. The deep blue of a wood at dusk. The deep blue of a lake before dawn. Neither of our kingdoms had ever dyed cloth with this colour. White Stone wore the deep red of the house; Seronia wore the same red with black. The blue Mal lifted out of the chest did not belong to either of us.
She held it across her arms.
“Gord. This is the colour of the country when the country was one country. Before either of your kingdoms stood up. Esthavar wore this colour. The kingdom of Esthavar wore this colour. I have kept the colour in my chest for the better part of a thousand years, waiting for the morning when the country would be one again. The morning is this morning. The colour is for you.”
I took the tunic.
It was a king’s travelling tunic, cut in an older style — long, with white trim at the collar and cuffs, with a small embroidered figure at the throat I did not, in the moment, take time to read. The wool was finer than any wool White Stone had ever sheared. It smelled of cedar and time.
I put it on. It fitted.
Mal lifted the next piece. A queen’s dress, the same deep blue, with white at throat and cuffs.
Lirien lifted Brandt’s shirt over her head and let it fall on the grass. She had been naked in front of half the dell and had nothing further to hide. Let them see all the freckles, and where the King proposed to kiss her. She pulled on the deep blue dress.
It came down over her shoulders, over her chest, over her hips, to her ankles. It fitted her as though Mal had measured her the week before, though someone would have to tie it up.
She was the queen.
She was the queen in a way she had not been on the beach in Brandt’s shirt and had not been in the dell yesterday at the table. The deep blue had taken her face and placed it: she was born for this colour. And she saw it too.
Mal turned to Caedric. She held a black tunic with deep blue trim — the inverse of mine. The black of command, with the blue of the older country at the collar and cuffs.
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