Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 4: The Upper Council Room, the Great White Castle
“Any other business?” the master of the council asked, as he asked at the close of every session, though there never was any. No man would dream of raising a thing unlooked-for — none but the King himself, and he saw to it that all was set on the agenda beforehand, for everything must be done properly. But the question must still be put. One asked, so as to be sure that the proper thing had been properly done.
This was the moment. All the morning I had been turning it over, whether I would truly do the thing or no, and I had changed my mind a dozen times and back again. Have I the strength? But every man has to die. The only choice left to any of us is the manner of our living and our dying, never the hour. My hand closed on air at my hip, where my sword was not — a man bears no blade into the council chamber. I drew a long breath. From this word forward there would be no unsaying it.
“Yes. There is. I would speak of the invitation from the Old Man of the Forest.”
The pause that followed was long, and there was a weight in it. I looked about the table and saw that every man there knew at once what this was and what was now to come. The faces had gone smooth and empty all together, the bodies still. Danger — but no surprise in it. They had only wondered which of us would be fool enough.
When the King spoke, his voice was soft. “Are you certain you wish to do this, princeling?”
A cold went through me. The soft voice and the false sweet word laid together — that was my father at his most deadly. But it was past the place of turning back. Death stood all about me, as it had at the inn, as it had in that field with Bran; the one road out was through. “Yes. I do wish it, Sir.”
“Did we not make our will plain on this matter? Why do you do this thing?”
I swallowed. “Because I believe it a grave mistake to set the invitation aside.”
The King drew breath through his teeth. No other man at the board was breathing at all.
“You little runt. You dare to school me?”
“No, Sir. I ask only that you weigh it again.”
A long silence, while he stared at me. “You stake your life on this.” Not a question — a thing said in disbelief, and half in dismissal, as one might marvel at a beast that had walked into the fire of its own accord.
“You have staked your life on it, Sir, and mine, and my mother’s, and my sister’s. I have no choice but to stake what is already wagered.”
He stared, willing me down. I gave him back his own refusal and did not lower my eyes. Win or die; I was committed now, and a committed man and a dead man stand the same height. The silence stretched between us until I felt I must break it or break under it — and I had no notion what I would say if I were forced to speak first —
“Very well,” said the King. “What is it you have to say?”
I breathed. The first gate had opened, and I had not died in it.
But I knew my father, and I knew the truth of what had just happened, and it was not that he wished to hear me. It was that he had not yet found the proper grounds on which to be rid of me before the council, and until he found them, the Form required that a man called to speak be let to speak. He was hunting. I had perhaps a hundred words before he found his footing. I had best make them the right ones.
“The invitation,” I said, “carried words in a tongue none of us could read. So I took the scroll to Grolen.”
Grolen — the withered old keeper of the Royal Archive, whose years were past any man’s reckoning, who could scarce stand upright, and who held the whole of the kingdom’s written memory in the palm of his shaking hand. I did not say the rest of how it had gone: that to learn what the words were I had been made to ask men who could lose their heads for the answer, and that the asking itself had spread the secret of the scroll to a dozen mouths where my father believed only one. There is no keeping a thing close in a house like ours. I was only beginning to understand how little of anything is ever truly close-kept.
“He thought he had seen the like before. He searched three days, and brought up this, from the deepest of the old tunnels beneath the castle.”
I laid the second scroll on the table, gently, for it was old enough to crumble at a rough touch. And here I came to the knife’s edge, and I walked it with great care.
“One of the loremasters told me — and he told me low, and looked over his shoulder in the telling, as a man does who knows the price of the word — that the strange line had the shape of the old elvish speech.”
The word fell into the room like a stone into a still well. To name the elves at all was an offence in my father’s kingdom, punishable as the old ways were all punishable. I did not look at the King. I went on quickly, laying the fact down plain and bare and giving him nothing to seize.
“Whatever a man believes of the elves now, there is no arguing that there was once an elvish tongue. Few men ever spoke it; it was made for the turning of poetry, for beauty more than use. But the oldest tale of our own house holds that Wenlis the Great spoke it. And so Grolen searched the records of Wenlis — records I had never known we still kept — and there he found this.”
I set my hand on the old scroll. “The same six words stand across the head of it. After them it is our own tongue, though in a very ancient hand. With your leave, Sir, I will read it, and then it shall pass round the table.”
The King said nothing, which was leave enough. I read.
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