Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 6: The Sun Room
They have a saying: the taller a man stands, the harder the ground comes up to meet him.
The plan was good — the plan Josen and I had built between us. Six days of hard riding, six long ones. It ought to have been longer, but I had been too slow to face the King, and there was this to be said for the punishing pace at least: speed is its own kind of armour. The first two nights we would lie in the inns of small towns — a risk in itself — and after that we would sleep out in the badlands, far from any soul to help us or to harm us. While yet inside the kingdom we would pass ourselves off as a senior cleric travelling with his household. Neither of us had any real notion how well the cloth would hold. But anything was better than nothing. We had even untangled the hardest knot of all — who else to take.
I went straight up to the sun-room, where the King takes his afternoon rest. That rest is sacred; no man would dream of breaking it. This afternoon I meant to break it. I was in a hurry now.
A steward sat outside the door, and sprang to his feet as I came on. “No — sir — my Lord, you cannot go in there.”
“Open the door. Now.” To my surprise he did not turn to it.
“My Lord, you cannot enter. By the King’s own order.” I shouldered him aside and took the handle. Locked.
“Why is this door locked? I must speak with the King this instant. Who holds the key?”
The steward shook his head. “Not I, Lord. It locks from within. There is no key.” His eyes would not come up to meet mine, and I marked him for a liar — but I had no patience left for it, for any of it. It was stupid. All of it was stupid, the whole endless architecture of small lies a man had to climb through to do the simplest thing in this house, and I was sick to the back teeth of it, and some reckless thing in me decided that here, now, was where I would stop climbing and start kicking.
I stepped back. I was about to put Davil’s training to a use he had never foreseen.
“My Lord, no —”
I took one stride in and drove my heel into the door beside the lock, and it burst open and slammed back against the wall, and I came through into the bright parlour with my blood already up. For a heartbeat I was blind in the flood of afternoon light. Then it cleared, and I saw the King seated in a low couch with his back to me, and a maid — one I did not know — scrambling up off the floor in front of him, her face a white mask of fright.
And I saw, as he rose, that the King was setting his clothes to rights.
Something tore loose in me.
I will not pretend, now, that what came over me in that room was righteousness. I have had a long time to look at it since, and turn it in the light, and I know it for what it was. It was grief, dressed up as fury and let off its chain. Because the girl on the floor — the set of her shoulders, the fair fall of her hair, the way she cowered — the girl on the floor looked like Su.
Su came into my rooms as a maid a little while before Davil left me.
Her hours were wrong from the start, though I was too young and too pleased to wonder at it then. Every other maid I had ever had came in the late part of the day, when I was out or busy; Su came first thing, to my room before any other, in the morning, while I was still cooling from my exercises. At first she was so overcome to be cleaning a prince’s chamber that she could scarce cross the floor without dropping into another curtsey, and it was so painful to watch that I spoke to her kindly, to put her at her ease. I suppose the rest was always going to follow, with a young maid in the room each morning while a young prince washed and dressed. We became friends, and then we became lovers, the two of us teaching each other, by halves and guesses, the way of a man and a woman.
Neither of us called it love. We were honest about that much. For me it was simply that she was there, and warm, and kind. For her — she told me it did not matter what came to her after, that to have given herself even once to her prince was more than her life would ever offer her again. I took that for sweetness then. I have since learned to hear the despair in it.
And then she was gone. From one day to the next, gone, as though she had never drawn breath in the place. No one would speak her name. When I pressed one of the other maids about her, the girl went so white I thought she would drop, and would say nothing. All I ever got was a message, carried to me a few days later by Davil, and it came from the King: A prince you may be, but you are not above the law. Davil was in a cold fury when he gave it me, and it was not long after that he fled, and I have wondered ever since whether the two were threaded together.
I should have gone to the King. I should at the least have made certain Su was alive somewhere, cared for, not lying in some ditch with her neck broken for the crime of being summoned to a prince’s bed by a schedule she did not set. I knew I should. And I did nothing. I was afraid, and I told myself I was being wise, and the truth is I was a coward, and a girl who had been kind to me paid whatever was paid, and I let her. I have carried that as the worst thing I am. And — though it shames me past the telling — I am not sure, even now, that I would have found the spine to face my father at all, over the eagle, the oath, any of it, had my own neck not finally been on the same block.
So when I came through that door and saw a frightened fair-haired girl scrambling up off the floor before my father, with his clothes undone, every bit of that buried thing came up my throat at once.
“You bastard,” I screamed at him.
The words are a shame to me now. He is the King. There is no man alive who has screamed such a word in that face and kept his head an hour. But I was past all counting of costs.
“You rotten, lawless, hypocrite bastard — how could you do this to me?”
The King came up out of his seat. “What is this — coming in here?” He was roaring now, in a true rage of his own. “Get out!”
“Curse you! I find you like this, and you think I’ll turn round and walk away? Adultery — you, the King —”
He bellowed full in my face, every inch of him enraged. “Whelp. As though the Queen — you think I would put myself near that woman? What is it to you? Get out. It is no concern of yours!”
“The Queen? I care nothing for the Queen! This is about Su. My maid. Do you remember her?”
And there the King’s face changed — not to guilt, not to fear. To confusion. Plain, ordinary confusion. “A maid? What maid? Why in the world would I remember a maid?”
He was still wearing that uncertain look, and it stopped me half a beat — but the fury had the bit in its teeth now and would not be reined.
“The maid you took from me! She came to my bed, and then she vanished, and then a message came from you — that I was not above the law! Well — who is not above the law now, you whited hypocrite?”
And then my eye went down to the girl.
She was curled small on the floor at our feet, knees to her chest, shaking, whimpering, looking up at me out of a face gone slack with terror. And a voice in me — cold, level, Davil’s voice, the voice of the still place — said: there, just above the nape, one blow and it is done. Or a kick, hard enough, and the head comes clean away. That would teach him. That would make him feel a particle of what was taken from you.
And my body shifted its weight to do it.
“Gord — no — wait!” the King cried.
I stopped.
I have thanked whatever gods there are, many times since, that he cried out — not for his sake, but because it bought me the half-second I needed to see what I was standing over.
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