Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 22
Appendix: An Account of the Lower Dell, by Maerith
I set this down in the small hours of the third night after the morning at the royal dell, while the king and queen and commander are asleep and the great castle is quiet around me. If I do not set it down now I will lose the texture of the two days at the lower dell. The texture will not, I think, come back if I let it cool. So.
I set out to explain how I am the Queen’s Champion, since this is not a name the courts are familiar with. Also, I will set the lower dell down, because nobody else will. The lower dell was a place that, while we were in it, none of us understood. We understand it now. I would like to set the understanding down before it goes the way of all small wisdoms a few weeks later, when the days that followed have crowded it out.
We were brought up the path with the royal family and Tor on the first afternoon. The path climbed for half an hour through close pines. We came to a small clearing beside a river — a flat piece of grass with two fire-pits set already, with bedrolls stacked against a tree, with a low table under a stand of birches. Mal was waiting for us at the clearing’s edge.
She said: “Here is where you will stay. The four of you will join the eight that are already here from Seronia. Halian and Ressa will keep you. We will see you on the morning of the second day. Be kind to each other. Tor and I have business with the kings and the children, and we will not, in the next two days, have time for you. We have asked Halian and Ressa to give you what we would have given you. They will give you better. Be kind to them.”
She did not wait for an answer. She and Tor turned, and the royal family fell in behind them — King Algus first, with Queen Wenna; Prince Gord with his lovely sister Aelea. I could see that the King and Queen were not happy about it, but Mal had given them no choice. And she would have to brush her own hair, and dress herself. Though what with, I do not know; their bags had remained with us.
We set our fire on the north side of the clearing — Coll the country tracker, the soldier Josen, Lord Trimmel of the white stone, and me. We had taken the side because the Seronians had already taken the other side. Verel was their lead — a man in his middle forties, with the careful slow steps of a senior soldier coming into a place he had not chosen. His four men were there. And others too - I found this a surprise, given Tor’s insistence that there only be four of us. With them was a small man in a travelling robe with a leather case strapped to his back — Master Lemric Tarvell the lawyer, as I would learn. Also, the king’s mistress — a beautiful woman in her early thirties whose name was Ondine and whose presence on this trip was, I read in her face the moment I saw her, a piece of unkindness her own people had not been expecting, nor was she welcome. Behind her, the maid — Selka — a girl of perhaps sixteen with a small worn bag clutched against her chest.
Verel saw us. His hand went briefly to the hilt of his sword and stopped there. I marked the motion. They did not speak to us, and we did not speak to them.
They are our enemy, and that fact sat strongly on us.
I wondered how it would go, if Verel were to draw his sword. Our party, I understood, were set for wilderness travel. Their party were harder; soldiers. Though we had strength among us, particularly in Josen; his sword work was truly legendary, and I had already seen him at work.
Halian and Ressa, who had been quietly watching from the centre of the clearing, did not introduce themselves further than they had introduced themselves to Mal. They were a couple. They were, perhaps, in their fifties; they had grey at their temples; they had the small soft smiles of people who have been carrying a kind of patience for so long that the patience has become their face. They did not move much. They watched us. They watched the Seronians.
Then Halian, who had been waiting for us to settle, came to the centre of the clearing and stood between the two fires and waited until both fires were quiet. He did not raise his voice, but we were all watching.
He said: “Friends. There is one table. You see it under the birches. You will all eat at it. From the first meal. Ressa has the food. The food is not ours; the food is Tor’s and Mal’s; you will eat what they would have given you at their own table, only it will be the smaller cousin of it. You may rest where you like, and exercise where you like, and walk where you like, within this dell, and to the river. There is one further thing. You will not draw your weapons in this clearing. We have not taken them from you because we will not. But you will not use them. If any one of you tries, you will not enjoy the trying. Try if you must. Once will be enough.”
I watched Master Tarvell consider this.
Tarvell was the kind of small careful man who had spent the cart ride up the path looking for things to argue with. He had already argued with Verel about the bedrolls - I had watched it. He was, I would set down by the second day, the kind of man who carried an objection in his throat at all times and could be relied upon to deploy it whenever a silence offered. He looked at Halian. He looked at his own belted small-knife. He drew it.
He drew it with the small lazy condescension of a man who wants to test whether the host is bluffing about a legal claim.
The knife left the scabbard.
Tarvell’s hand opened.
The knife fell on the grass. Tarvell’s hand stayed open. His fingers, I saw, were the colour of pale wax. He looked down at the knife. He looked at his hand. He looked at Halian.
Halian gave him the same small soft smile he had been giving the whole clearing since we arrived.
He said: “I would let it lie a little, master lawyer. Pick it up by the scabbard when you are ready to put it back. The grip will not be friendly for an hour or so. Some men have tried twice. The second hour is longer than the first.”
Tarvell did not, for the rest of the two days, try the knife again. None of us did. Verel, watching from the south fire, said something to his senior Brek under his breath. Brek answered with the smallest possible inclination of his head. Verel did not, for the rest of the time at the lower dell, put his hand near his sword again. The sword stayed on his belt.
I turned to Josen, and he nodded at me; we would not need our weapons. Later, I collected them all and placed them against a tree near our beds.
We ate at the one table.
The first dinner was the longest meal I have eaten in my life, which was both good and bad.
Ressa had brought the food up from a small wooden trunk at the dell’s edge — a trunk I had not noticed when we came in, but that produced, when she opened it, an array of dishes that none of the twelve of us at the table had ever seen in our lives. There was a deep clay pot of stew, falling-apart meat in a gravy I had no name for, with herbs I had no name for and small roundels of root I knew but did not, in this preparation, recognise. There was bread that came out of the trunk warm. There was a wedge of cheese in a wrapping of leaves that smelled of cedar. There was a tureen of greens in a vinegar I have never since tasted anywhere. There was a pale yellow drink in a glass jug that, when poured, sang against the cup; I had heard of such drinks in stories and had not believed they existed.
I will say plainly that none of us, by the third bite, was thinking about being enemies. We were thinking about the food. The food was the kind of food that, eaten by people who have been on the road for a week and not eating well, demobilises whatever small political project they had been carrying. It was the best food I will ever eat. Brek across the table from me made a small sound at his first taste of the stew that he did not, I think, know he had made; Josen beside me had stopped eating after the first three bites to stare at his bread; Trimmel had taken up his cup and was holding it against the light of the fire to look at the colour of the drink. The eight of us at the south end and the four of us at the north end had been at the table for some minutes without speaking, and the silence was not the silence of enemies who would not speak; it was the silence of people who could not, given the choice between speaking and eating, justify speaking.
Ressa was at the end of the table opposite Halian. She had been watching us eat. After perhaps ten minutes, when the first round of the stew had been served and people had begun their second cups of the strange yellow drink, she said into the table, in the small clear voice of a woman who knew she had the room:
“I think we should know each other’s names. Twelve people at a table should know each other. Will you go around — say who you are, where you serve, one small thing you would like the rest of us to know. I will start. I am Ressa. I live with my husband Halian in the older country east of here. I have a daughter of twelve and a small terrier called Mouse. I like to cook. That is what you should know about me tonight.”
She looked to her left, which put her at Verel.
Verel set down his spoon. He had been, I think, hoping the food would carry the meal all the way to bed without his having to speak. Ressa had read him. She had given him the rule and he had to follow it.
He said: “Verel. Senior of His Majesty King Brandt’s security. Thirty years at the king’s service. I have a wife in the capital and four children, all grown. I do not enjoy small talk and Ressa has therefore picked the right moment to make me do some.”
He had said the last with a small dry curl. A small laugh went around the table — the first sound that was not the sound of eating. Verel looked, faintly, surprised that he had been the cause of it.
Brek went next. Brek. Twenty years in the security. Two daughters. I bake bread on the day I am at home. Then the other security men: Halgren, Pendar, Soren. They each said their name, their service, and a small thing — I keep bees. I am learning the harp. My wife is a fisherwoman and we argue about who works harder. I cannot remember whose turn it is to feed the dogs this week and it is troubling me. The room laughed at the last one. The room had crossed something.
Then it came to Master Tarvell.
Tarvell sat up. He gave the table the small careful smile of a man who had been waiting for his turn for some minutes and was glad of it.
He said: “Master Lemric Tarvell. Of the legal office of the Seronian court. I have served fourteen years. I keep my own counsel on matters of personal disclosure. I will say only that I have been observing this assembly with considerable interest from a procedural standpoint, and I have already noted three points on which I would, in a court of competent jurisdiction, lodge formal —”
“Tarvell.” Verel said it, not loudly, from down the table.
“Yes.”
“One small thing. As Ressa asked.”
Tarvell paused.
“I have a cat,” he said, with the air of a man making a concession he had not been planning to make. “Her name is Persica. She is fifteen years old.”
Brek made a small sound that was almost a laugh and that he, like Verel before him, was not sure he had made. Tarvell looked vaguely betrayed. The table moved on.
It came to Ondine.
She had been at the foot of the south side of the table, in the place Ressa had set her — not among her own people but near them, with a small chair-width of space between her and Pendar, as far as she could remove herself from the table. I had been watching her since we sat down. She had eaten very little. She had held her spoon mostly above the bowl. She had not, in two hours at the lower dell, looked up at any of her own people. She had looked at her hands.
When her turn came she looked up at last.
She said: “Ondine. Of the king’s household.” She paused. She did not, for a count, say anything else. Then she said: “I do not know what else you would have me say. I am not a soldier. I am not staff. I am not entitled to be at this table by any of the categories the rest of you have used. I should not be in this clearing. I should be in the capital. I am here because the king asked me to come, and I had not the standing to refuse.”
The table was very still.
Then I spoke. I had not, until I spoke, planned to. I understood the things she was not saying. When you spend some of your time at the court, these things become second nature. And her position was a difficult one; it was discourteous to her for the Seronian King to have brought her. And most especially, to his Queen. I was not a, well, keen supporter of our King, though I would never breathe this to anyone, but our King would not do that.
I said: “Ondine. You are entitled to be at this table because you are at it. Ressa set your place. There is no other category that matters in this clearing. I am sorry that you were not given a choice about coming. I do not believe any of us at this table thinks less of you for it.”
I did not look at Verel as I said it. I could feel him looking at me from the other end of the table. I was a member of the queen mother of White Stone’s office, and I had just said in plain language to the king of Seronia’s mistress that the king had treated her without standing. It was, by the courts both kingdoms ran under, a thing I should not have said. And I was sure that I was wrong that no one thought less of her. I could read it in their faces.
But the food had been on the table for ninety minutes by then, and we had been eating each other’s silence as much as the stew, and the time for what one should and should not say had passed before any of us had noticed it passing.
Ondine looked at me. Her eyes filled. She did not, I think, want them to. She blinked. She nodded once. She said, in the voice of a woman who had not been spoken to with that particular consideration in a long time: “Thank you. I am — I would like to learn your name.”
“Maerith. Of Queen Wenna’s office.”
“Maerith. Thank you.”
Ressa, at her end of the table, did not say anything. She had been watching the exchange. Her face had not, that I could read, registered anything. But her hand, on the table beside her cup, opened a fraction and then closed, and I understood that the introductions had done exactly what she had been hoping they would do.
The rest of us went round. Coll: country tracker, two dogs, a wife in a village I had not heard of. Josen: soldier, princess’s-man, a sister he loved and a mother he had not seen in two years. Trimmel: lord of his house, the small careful version of his usual self because the food had put him in an unusually quiet mood. Me: Maerith. Of Queen Wenna’s office. Twenty-five years old. Trained in the form. I did not say more. I did not say the dream. I have never said the dream aloud to anyone.
Selka the maid was last. She said: “Selka. I have been Queen Aurelin’s maid for two years. I am glad to be her maid. I am sixteen. And sometimes with the Princess. I have learned more in two years with the princess than in the whole of the time before. That is what you should know about me.”
The table was quiet a count after Selka spoke.
Then Coll said, without looking at anyone in particular, in the voice he used when he had understood a thing: “That princess is well served.”
Selka looked up.
“Thank you,” she said. “She is the best person at our court.”
That sat at the table for some time.
The second day broke fine. I woke at the grey hour and went down to the river to wash. Verel was already there. He was washing his face and his neck and his hands in the small clear current. He had stripped to the waist. He had a long scar along his right ribs that I would have laid silver on as a sword-cut, taken six or seven years ago, with the healing slow because it had not been stitched in time.
He saw me. He did not, in seeing me, do anything. He finished his washing. He pulled his shirt on. He nodded as he passed me on the small path back to the clearing.
I knelt at the water. I washed. I did not think about anything in particular.
Brek walked the camp to me. He had been watching me walk back from the river. He did not pretend otherwise.
He said: “I know the form. My grandfather taught me. He said it was the older school. He would not say from where.”
I said: “It is the older school. I cannot tell you from where either. My own tutor would not say.”
“Would you do it with a partner.”
I looked at him.
He was forty years old. He had the patient face of a man who had been a soldier for twenty-five of those forty, and the small steady hands of a man who had killed people and remembered each one. He was a soldier of the house that had been at war with mine for forty years, and I had been told, all my life, that I should not under any condition do the form with a soldier of his house.
I said: “Yes.”
We did the form. We did it without weapons, in the small grass clearing at the north side of the camp, with the rest of the clearing watching us pretend not to be watching us. We did it slowly. He was very good. His grandfather had taught him a slightly older variant than mine; I learned three things from him in the first quarter-hour that I had not known. I taught him one I had been taught. We did not speak while we did the form. We exchanged the small gestures of the form’s older partnership, the gestures that ask will you receive me and answer I will, and we did them as careful strangers who had become, at the moment of the first gesture, less strange than we had been the second before.
After the form we stood in the grass and looked at each other.
He said: “Your tutor.”
“He served the king for many years. He died last winter. He was the older school’s last man at our court.”