Yuletide & Highlander Shortcuts Fics
Jan. 1st, 2012 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ishafelOr, my god, is this really all I've written lately? Sigh.
Also, guess what, Parents. Totally did find that Medieval History degree useful. Money well spent!
Highlander, for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fuzzytale:
The gray mare came as part of a ransom-- one of thirty traded for a chieftain's son Methos had taken on a raid. They were a fortune, and nothing. Thirty horses was more than many kings could have spared. But these were old, or very young, or lame, or thin and full of worms. It was a sign of disrespect, a ransom paid so-- disrespect or poverty. Kronos was furious, but in the end it didn't matter. Methos and Silas had grown bored with keeping watch over the boy, and had butchered him. There was nothing left to send to the father but his head.
Winter was coming, and they were preparing to move south. Kronos ordered the new horses killed, and the meat smoked. They were not worth the trouble of moving, or the expense of feeding. Slaughter was Caspian's job, and he was very nearly done when Methos stopped him.
There were three yearling fillies huddled together in the corner of the paddock. Two bays and a gray, the best of the thirty: they were miserably thin, but with clean straight legs and pretty heads.
“The bays, perhaps,” Caspian sneered. “But everyone knows that pale horses are bad fortune.”
Had anyone else said it, Methos might have agreed, or at least let it go. Because it was Caspian, he snorted and spat at the other man's feet. Caspian hit him hard enough to send him to the ground. Methos rolled and came up with a blade in his hand and before Caspian could draw Methos had laid his face open from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth.
This time it was Caspian who fell, and Methos on top of him. Kronos came over and kicked them apart. “You are like a mad dog,” he said to Methos. “Five minutes, I had my back turned, and in five more you would have been fucking his corpse in the dirt for all the slaves to see.”
Caspian held the remains of his shirt to his ruined face. Methos rubbed cracked ribs and said nothing. But the gray horse lived.
Over the winter, one of the two bays died, and Silas made a pet of the other, feeding her handfuls of dry grass, crushed oats from their precious stores. The gray was more cautious, or less friendly, and would not take feed from his hand.
“She is wild, that one,” Silas said when she shied away, and forgot about her.
Methos, watching, saw more in her. She ate the oats the bay filly dropped, and the hay the riding horses left unfinished. She began, slowly, to fill out: her chest was broad, her shoulder sloping, her back strong. Only her eyes were fierce and wicked as an eagle's, eager for the sight of blood.
“She will make a war-horse,” he said, and Silas did not disagree. Between them they drove her into a small, deep ravine not far from the camp and piled brush around the mouth of it. For two days Methos left her there, without food or water.
On the third day he offered her water only, from a big clay pot. She came to him unafraid and drank from it, and then she struck it from his hand with her unshod hoof and snorted at him, as if to warn him that she was not submitting so easily. Methos held out a hand to her and she pinned her ears and moved away.
From that day she got no food and no water, but what she would take from his hand-- and he was there every day to offer it. Kronos and Caspian went raiding, but Methos stayed behind and fed her wisps of hay.
“You are changed, brother,” Kronos said when he came back and found Methos sitting on the frozen ground, waiting for the mare to come closer. “There was a time when you would have slit that brute's throat rather than look at it.”
He marveled as he said it, because Kronos had thought for some time that there was nothing left in Methos of patience or thought, nothing but a certain vicious cunning that a cornered animal might manage. He had thought that the time was coming that Methos, too, might be better put down, as so often happened with very old Immortals. And he had been sorry, and afraid, because they had been something like friends once, and because Methos was going to be a difficult man to destroy.
Now, watching the gray mare lower her head and sniff at Methos' outstretched hands, he dared to hope he had been wrong. That there was more for them than death, and death, and death, so many Quickenings that in the end nothing was left of who they had been but a handful of lightning and headless corpse.
“A good horse is worth a hundred shields,” Methos said, but he did not meet Kronos's eyes, saying it. His attention was on the mare, as it should have been; she snorted at the grass he held and, quick as a striking snake, flung a front foot at him. Methos rolled away; she stepped back. If they had both been men, they might have raised their blades in salute before they began again.
Kronos turned away and left them to it. They would be moving camp soon, following the spring north, and there were so many things that could not be left to Caspian or Silas. It was more than Methos's friendship, or his sword arm, that Kronos missed.
When they rode this time, Silas was on the little bay mare. She had grown lovely: her eye was kind and her neck arched, and she came to his whistle. Methos had got a halter on the gray, and she pranced beside his gelding, going first too quickly and then too slow, so that the rope burned his fingers and he swore.
“Ill- luck,” Caspian muttered, and did not laugh as he ordinarily would have. He had been raised among the tribes in the north, and had never outgrown their superstitions, but though Methos did not acknowledge his words Kronos knew that Caspian was far from the only one who said them, or believed them.
For the gray filly, born brown, had dappled over the winter and her summer coat was almost white, only her legs and mane and tail showing hints of her original color. Pale horses were put to death in the grasslands, and in the cities east the province of kings alone. Methos was no fool, and no king, but it would have been cleverer and luckier to bleed her under the full moon than to try and ride her.
No one but an Immortal could have done it. The first day he sat on her she broke his back, and in the first week she killed him three times. She came when he whistled now, but sometimes she ate from his hand and sometimes she went for him with her teeth bared. Spring faded into summer and Methos rode the chestnut when they fought, and all along the river villages burned and men died and women wept.
“The bay of Silas's is shaping well,” Kronos said to Methos one day, as they watched Caspian and the pre-Immortal boy he'd found. “You have a good eye.” He wasn't sure what he expected, but Methos only grunted. “They were good horses, better than they looked.”
Methos's head turned at that, and for what felt like first time in a long time he actually met Kronos's eyes.
“Teacher--,” Kronos began.
Methos flinched. “No,” he said. “No.”
It was the closest they'd come to a conversation in three years, and it was nothing. Kronos let it go. “We should finish here,” he said, moving to pull Caspian away from his prize. Methos would have been the one to give the orders, once; now he sat passive on his chestnut and waited, nothing left of him but killing-- and the gray.
It was late summer before he rode the mare on a raid, and even then if it had been anyone else on her Kronos would have forbidden it. She would not stay in place as they waited, spinning, half-rearing, so that Methos was forced to keep her moving in restless circles. She did not scream, at least. If she had he would have slit her throat himself, and fought Methos if he'd had to.
When he finally gave the signal, they galloped down into the sleeping town with swords drawn, and the gray mare was at the very front. Runaway, Kronos thought, all Caspian's predictions of bad luck come true. But when he urged his own horse forward he saw that Methos was crouched over her neck, his fingers tangled in her mane, the rein loose. She was not taking him anywhere he did not want to go.
His teacher had been a wise man, who never risked his head when there were others to do the fighting. “Think,” he had said to Kronos from the first. “You must always think.” And Kronos had come to see that he was right about all of it, that there was a reason he was the oldest Immortal Kronos had ever met.
The thing on the gray mare was not Kronos's teacher, or his friend. He was one of the monsters Methos had mocked, once. Even Caspian, even Silas, had more sense. In the north, pale horses were dangerous, and in the east they were the mark of kings. To the south lay the end of the world. Kronos had come from the west.
And in the west, they said that when Death came for you, he came on a red-eyed white horse, with a sword the color of fire. He did not believe in Death-- in any of the gods who had been the borders of the world when he was young-- but even Kronos knew that the gray mare meant the end of something.
All that year, and the next, and the next after, he followed her to war. Methos led them now, as had until three years before, but this time they took no hostages and left nothing but ashes. And they won, always they won, because Methos was a madman and later because the people they fought would not stand and face the thing on the pale horse.
Kronos, who had wanted nothing more than to be Methos's second again, Kronos who wanted to be led by better men, Kronos who had had three years of making decisions while Methos stared blankly at the ground-- Kronos was afraid of Methos, and afraid of the end of the world, and afraid of the gray mare who had begun it. “She is a demon,” Caspian said, and his voice trembled, and even Silas who thought every animal he saw was a friend did not contradict him.
They burned the villages of the grasslands and the cities to the west and the forts at the mountains' edge, and everything in between. Two horses died under Caspian and one each under Kronos and Silas, and still the gray carried Methos, her neck proud and her ears back, as heartless as her master.
When there was nothing left to destroy they rode south to the sea, and still there was nothing but blue water and white sand and the mare, diving at birds because there were no children to kill. Methos rode her across the beach and into the ocean, so that the waves crashed against her knees. And then he sat, staring out at the horizon. Once Caspian would have complained, or even Silas, and Methos would have snapped at them; once there might have been blood drawn, but now they did not dare to question him.
At last Kronos kicked his horse into the water, and rode it as near to Methos and the gray as it would go. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to-- after a moment, Methos turned his head and looked at Kronos, and said, “Enough.” And for the first time in years, there was someone there, someone Kronos recognized, someone he had loved.
“Come on,” he said, as if to an invalid, or a man returning from a great journey. “There is nothing here for us.”
“No,” Methos agreed, and gathered the mare's reins, and she bent her neck to look back at him and Kronos saw that her eyes were soft and dark as an ordinary horse's. Not an ending, but a beginning, he thought, and not bad luck but only different. And this time, where Methos led he followed gladly.
14th Century CE RPF, for doreyg
He still, sometimes, talks to his cousin in the dark.
“You deserved it,” he says. “You were asking for it.”
Or, “There is no way I could have let you live.”
“They made me do it.”
“It was for the good of the people.”
Richard never answers him. Richard never did have much in the way of conversation. Richard was always full of vague threats and pompous slurs. He was tremendously popular with the peasants, of course. Still, it's not really an accomplishment, pleasing the unlettered masses; even in revolt they're not nearly as terrifying as the nobility.
The best thing about Richard was Anne. She was his one uncalculated move, his one failure at being entirely kingly. And she was kind, funny, and bright. He does not discuss Anne with Richard, because he has nothing to say, because he sometimes thinks that Anne was a saint, because he wishes that she had not died. Because if she had not died, things might have been different.
De Vere and de la Pole are different, of course. He likes to imitate De Vere's lisp, the affected way de la Pole held his sword, as if his wrist were too weak for the weight of steel. Which it probably was. Richard was a fool, he was always a fool. He never could see what men like that were like.
“Never,” he says to Richard, his words muffled by the bedclothes. “You trusted all the wrong ones. You pardoned all the wrong ones.”
For a moment he thinks he hears Richard argue. For a moment he thinks he hears Richard say, “But I pardoned you--.”
As if that didn't entirely prove the point. Richard had put his friends to death, and saved his murderer.
“All your fault,” he says. Sometimes, “You did this. You brought this on yourself, with your fine and fancy notions. It wasn't enough for you to inherit a throne. No, you had to hold it by the grace of God.”
“Tell me, Richard,” he says, there in the dark. “Tell me, where is your God now? Tell me, did you pray to Him to save you? His anointed, His most favorite son?”
Sacrilege upon sacrilege, and yet even a man who never was much bothered with God, even a man who never believed-- there is an hour before dawn when even heretics recant, when even heathens and Musselmen bend their knees.
Richard does not speak to answer, does not defend his reign, his favorites-- even De Vere who was said to be his lover-- does not defend the faith he sent men to die to keep.
Richard never did, though; even as a boy he always hated to be called to account. It was at the root of his quarrel with John of Gaunt, and with the Lords Appellant. A king should never be asked to apologize or explain. A king should never be put to the question. God makes kings, and God breaks them.
In the night it seems that he more often breaks them. This is the time when the dead walk, and the shadows move. This is the time for faith, and fear. At night all men are equal, and at night all men are nothing.
Night, darkness: this is when the questions must be asked, and this is when he and Richard re-fight all the old battles. Once again one of them is the son of the Black Prince, and one of them is the son of a man rumored to be a butcher's by-blow, and neither of them is chosen for the crown and scepter.
There is so much blood between them. The shared blood of kings; the spilled blood of nobles. So much blood would mark anyone's hands. And yet, “There was no order,” he says. “There never was.” Like Pilate, like other, better men, his hands are clean; he is a jouster, not a soldier.
Richard has no answer, had no answer for the Merciless Parliament. Oh, Anne begged, and prettily for traitors' heads; Anne put no stock in queenly dignity for all that her blood was the royalest in England. But Richard never bent, not his knee and not his neck.
“Pride,” he says. “It was always your greatest sin. If only you had been willing to listen.” It is not something he would admit in daylight, with the sun on his face: that any part of him wishes something had gone differently, that perhaps this was not the most desirable of all possible outcomes.
“Anger. That was always mine.” And if ever there were a time for Richard to say something, if ever there were going to be a voice in the night--. But ghosts never have any answers, no matter how interesting the things you have to confess to them might be. If he's honest with himself, it isn't answers he wants anyway.
It's his youth, before everything went so wrong. It's Richard on his throne, and Anne on hers; it's their hands outstretched him. It's a time when their greatest concern was the rebelling rabble, the invasion from France that even then they suspected would never come. What he remembers is that it always seemed to be summer, that the sun was always shining, and the banners blew in the wind when they rode out..
He was happy, then, when he was Henry of Bolingbroke: he was happy when he was too young and too foolish to realize that everything could go wrong, that everything was wrong already. “You weren't such a terrible king,” he says, and that too is a confession. “You weren't so wrong.”
“You weren't the only fool,” he says, because he knows Richard isn't really there to hear him.
There are a thousand things Henry says to Richard in the dark, and always he pauses between them, waiting for an answer that never comes. But the one thing that he will never bring himself to say is, “I'm sorry,” because, like Richard, he has never believed that he is wrong, and he does not intend to start believing it now.
Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles, for philomytha
Three weeks before Christmas, Rupert's mother goes away, in a flurry of trunks, hatboxes, and matching luggage, “Just for a little while, darling, to get my head straight, look after Adrian, won't you, and do mind Nanny.” Rupert knows, as children often do, that she isn't on a cruise or skiing in Gstaad; he overhears Cook and James the groom discussing the way Herself had bolted, taking Mr. Campbell-Black's favorite painting, the nude in the upstairs hallway that is supposed to be a Sargent.
Rupert misses her terribly, though he pretends not to, and he spends most of his time in the loft of the Penscombe stables with the tabby cat and her kittens, hiding from Nanny and baby Adrian who is teething and cries incessantly. He is eight years old, and already he is learning that women are not to be trusted, that even when you try to be good it isn't enough to keep the people you love from leaving you behind.
On Christmas Eve, Eddie rolls up in a chauffeur- driven Daimler he doesn't own, a beautiful woman on each side, in a state James describes to Cook later as well past well-lit. His tailcoat looks as if he's slept in it and his shirt collar has lipstick in pink on the left and in red on the right. He demands that Nanny bring the children down-- and although she complains bitterly to Rupert, she lays his clothes out for him and tells him to hurry when he's slow unbuttoning his pyjamas.
The servants don't much like Mummy, whom they call Herself and sometimes That Interloper, but Eddie is a Campbell-Black and a son of Penscombe. They watched him grow up and they believe he can do nothing wrong. Rupert, too young to drink or chase women, and therefore too young to interest Eddie and be subjected to the famous charm, knows better. If this is a war he is firmly on the other side.
Still, there's not much he can do when Nanny takes his hand and marches him downstairs to the sitting room. The two women-- Mrs. James the housekeeper will tell James later that they looked right tarts, and that clearly they were no ladies-- with Eddie are full of compliments for Rupert's blue eyes and fair hair, but put off by his scowl. They turn, a little desperately, to Adrian, who for once is all smiles and long eyelashes.
Rupert is left to Eddie, who offers him a glass of Champagne, and asks after his pony, Snapdragon. Ordinarily, either would be enough to distract Rupert, who is vastly proud of Snap and never allowed more than a sip of wine. Tonight, though, he won't be bought. “Will Mummy be home in time for Christmas?”, he demands.
“Mummy's left us. Mummy's bolted to Saudi with an oil sheikh,” Eddie says heavily. “Mummy won't be home ever again. We're getting a divorce, Rupert, do you understand what that means?”
“No,” Rupert lies, because if he doesn't understand, it isn't true.
Eddie sighs and closes his eyes. “I should have stayed in London,” he mutters. Adrian starts to cry, and Nanny bustles in. Rupert is hauled away to bed before he can ask any more questions.
In the morning he opens his stocking presents, which are so dull Mrs. James must have picked them out from Penscombe shop, and has his boiled egg in the kitchen. “Here's poor Mr. Campbell-Black with his heart broken,” Nanny tells Cook, “and those hussies he brought from the city with their hands on my poor motherless boys--.”
Rupert escapes outside to Snap's stall, feeding him lump after lump of sugar. When Mummy was home for Christmas they always brought carrots and apples and Polos for the horses, sausage and Milk Bones for Eddie's gundog and tinned salmon for the cats. Now her hunters, Ben and Blaze, stand with their heads over their doors, waiting sadly for their mistress. She'd promised to take Rupert hunting on Boxing Day, but now he'll have to stay home; Eddie can never be bothered.
Rupert kicks the wall and strokes Blaze's nose, and wishes Mummy had run away with Nick, who is an R.A.F. officer and hunts with the Quorn, or Richard, who played polo for England after the war and kissed her when he thought Rupert was sleeping, or anyone but stupid, boring Faisal in his shiny Rolls. He wishes Eddie had gone to Saudi instead. Without Mummy, Christmas is different. Penscombe is different.
Christmas dinner is vast, and there's only hungover Eddie, and Rupert who is full of the chocolate from his stocking, to eat it. “I want my real presents,” Rupert says, and sees Eddie flinch, and knows there aren't any presents. “I hate you,” he says, and slides under the table and out the door before Nanny and Eddie can catch him.
He spends the afternoon curled in the hay with the stable cat, ignoring Nanny at the bottom of the ladder, safely away from the scolding he knows he has coming-- starving Communist children in Russia and ingratitude for his poor father, and must he be as thoughtless as his mother, no doubt-- he's heard it all before. At dusk he climbs down. James is supposed to have come and done evening stables, but he hasn't bothered; Rupert fills the water buckets to the brim and measures oats for the hunters, standing on a bucket to do up their rugs.
Someday, he thinks, Penscombe's stable will be full again, instead of falling down and almost empty. When he's grown he'll hunt every day if he likes, and have a shining lorry like Harry Llewellyn's and go to the Horse of the Year Show. And he will never, ever speak to Eddie again.
He starts, a little grimly, for the house. There's a car parked in the drive, a battered Land Rover he recognizes as belonging to one of the farmers from beyond Penscombe village. That's good, it means Rupert will be able to slip around Eddie at least. With luck, he''ll be sent to bed without supper; he can always count on Nanny to change her mind and slip him bread and jam and biscuits and windfall apples.
But when he goes in through the kitchen, there's a man having tea with Cook. “'ere's Mr. Rupert now,” she says, “sure and won't Nanny be glad to see you in one piece, 'e's always mucking about with 'orrid 'orses.”
There are biscuits on a plate on the table. Rupert takes a handful, though he hasn't washed his hands, and tries to duck around Cook.
“No you don't,” she says. “Mr. Carter 'as something for you, Mr. Rupe, that he's come all the way out on Christ mas to bring you.”
The farmer stands up, and for the first time Rupert sees the puppy at his feet. A small, black Labrador puppy, a little pudgy still, with soft brown eyes.
“For me?”, he demands. Mummy had said he could have a puppy, now that he was old enough to take care of it, but Rupert hadn't really expected anything to come of it. Mum was like that sometimes, meaning things at the time but then forgetting about them.
Mr. Carter smiles, a little sourly. “Mrs. Campbell-Black told me months ago to save you one of my Bess's lads. But she never did come to collect him, and he's driving the Missus mad, chewing on everything in the house-- all the others've gone. He's yours, lad.”
“Oh,” Rupert says from the floor, the puppy in his lap, “thank you.” Carter touches his hat to Cook and edges out, but Rupert doesn't even notice. The puppy has hold of the cuff of his sweater, and is tugging hard, and for the first time since Mummy left Rupert can't help thinking that everything might be bearable after all.
Sarah Smith's Vanished Child series, for brutti_ma_buoni
Marriage is not what she expected, is both more and less than she could have hoped. Alexander is by turns a stranger and the man she loved, distant and tender, and she knows that sometimes there is another woman that he sees in her, in her things hanging beside his, in her hair on the pillow at night. Perdita is, in so many ways, blind; she can't imagine what it is like, to have memories sharp and clear as knives. Everything she remembers is blurred at the edges, softened, faces indistinct and the lines of bodies, the lines between bodies, invisible.
The city is a ruin, beautiful only because it is indistinct, and even a blind woman can smell the Seine, and the sewage. They are staying at Dotty's, and not in the lavish hotel suite Gilbert offered them as a wedding present. Alexander is proud, too proud to take money from the Knights-- or too afraid of what it will mean. Perdia tries not to mind.
Perdita minds desperately. She wants her little house in the suburbs, her bed with the quilts she chose herself. She wants to cook for her husband, the way a proper wife would. She wants her own piano. She wants peace and quiet, not only to practice, not only to learn to be a married woman and not a girl, but to learn to love the thing that is changing her body.
Dotty shops. Dotty makes calls, and receives them. She has her charities, her son. She is never still, and she will not let Perdita be still, either, and the worst of it is that it is well meant. She is trying to help, Alexander says, and Perdita knows that he is right, and hates it.
And Alexander is so busy with Jouvet. The records were saved, and the people, and everything else the Seine spoiled. He has to be there to supervise the planning, and afterward the rebuilding, and he is still healing from his injuries.
At night he falls into bed beside Perdita, and is asleep before his head touches the pillow. There is no time for words between them, and no place for touching, not in Dotty's house. Perdita lies beside him in the dark, thinking of the baby growing inside her, and listens to him breathe until she, too, sleeps.
“This is for you,” she tells the baby sometimes, and she does not know if she means the loneliness, the waiting, or the home that Alexander is designing for them. “All of this is because we love you.”
“Je t'aime,” she says to Alexander, like a proper young Parisian wife, but she speaks to their child in English, always. She loves them both so very much, and surely, if Paris can be saved, if Jouvet can be reclaimed , so can her marriage be built from the ruins of the flood.
fuzzytale:
The gray mare came as part of a ransom-- one of thirty traded for a chieftain's son Methos had taken on a raid. They were a fortune, and nothing. Thirty horses was more than many kings could have spared. But these were old, or very young, or lame, or thin and full of worms. It was a sign of disrespect, a ransom paid so-- disrespect or poverty. Kronos was furious, but in the end it didn't matter. Methos and Silas had grown bored with keeping watch over the boy, and had butchered him. There was nothing left to send to the father but his head.
Winter was coming, and they were preparing to move south. Kronos ordered the new horses killed, and the meat smoked. They were not worth the trouble of moving, or the expense of feeding. Slaughter was Caspian's job, and he was very nearly done when Methos stopped him.
There were three yearling fillies huddled together in the corner of the paddock. Two bays and a gray, the best of the thirty: they were miserably thin, but with clean straight legs and pretty heads.
“The bays, perhaps,” Caspian sneered. “But everyone knows that pale horses are bad fortune.”
Had anyone else said it, Methos might have agreed, or at least let it go. Because it was Caspian, he snorted and spat at the other man's feet. Caspian hit him hard enough to send him to the ground. Methos rolled and came up with a blade in his hand and before Caspian could draw Methos had laid his face open from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth.
This time it was Caspian who fell, and Methos on top of him. Kronos came over and kicked them apart. “You are like a mad dog,” he said to Methos. “Five minutes, I had my back turned, and in five more you would have been fucking his corpse in the dirt for all the slaves to see.”
Caspian held the remains of his shirt to his ruined face. Methos rubbed cracked ribs and said nothing. But the gray horse lived.
Over the winter, one of the two bays died, and Silas made a pet of the other, feeding her handfuls of dry grass, crushed oats from their precious stores. The gray was more cautious, or less friendly, and would not take feed from his hand.
“She is wild, that one,” Silas said when she shied away, and forgot about her.
Methos, watching, saw more in her. She ate the oats the bay filly dropped, and the hay the riding horses left unfinished. She began, slowly, to fill out: her chest was broad, her shoulder sloping, her back strong. Only her eyes were fierce and wicked as an eagle's, eager for the sight of blood.
“She will make a war-horse,” he said, and Silas did not disagree. Between them they drove her into a small, deep ravine not far from the camp and piled brush around the mouth of it. For two days Methos left her there, without food or water.
On the third day he offered her water only, from a big clay pot. She came to him unafraid and drank from it, and then she struck it from his hand with her unshod hoof and snorted at him, as if to warn him that she was not submitting so easily. Methos held out a hand to her and she pinned her ears and moved away.
From that day she got no food and no water, but what she would take from his hand-- and he was there every day to offer it. Kronos and Caspian went raiding, but Methos stayed behind and fed her wisps of hay.
“You are changed, brother,” Kronos said when he came back and found Methos sitting on the frozen ground, waiting for the mare to come closer. “There was a time when you would have slit that brute's throat rather than look at it.”
He marveled as he said it, because Kronos had thought for some time that there was nothing left in Methos of patience or thought, nothing but a certain vicious cunning that a cornered animal might manage. He had thought that the time was coming that Methos, too, might be better put down, as so often happened with very old Immortals. And he had been sorry, and afraid, because they had been something like friends once, and because Methos was going to be a difficult man to destroy.
Now, watching the gray mare lower her head and sniff at Methos' outstretched hands, he dared to hope he had been wrong. That there was more for them than death, and death, and death, so many Quickenings that in the end nothing was left of who they had been but a handful of lightning and headless corpse.
“A good horse is worth a hundred shields,” Methos said, but he did not meet Kronos's eyes, saying it. His attention was on the mare, as it should have been; she snorted at the grass he held and, quick as a striking snake, flung a front foot at him. Methos rolled away; she stepped back. If they had both been men, they might have raised their blades in salute before they began again.
Kronos turned away and left them to it. They would be moving camp soon, following the spring north, and there were so many things that could not be left to Caspian or Silas. It was more than Methos's friendship, or his sword arm, that Kronos missed.
When they rode this time, Silas was on the little bay mare. She had grown lovely: her eye was kind and her neck arched, and she came to his whistle. Methos had got a halter on the gray, and she pranced beside his gelding, going first too quickly and then too slow, so that the rope burned his fingers and he swore.
“Ill- luck,” Caspian muttered, and did not laugh as he ordinarily would have. He had been raised among the tribes in the north, and had never outgrown their superstitions, but though Methos did not acknowledge his words Kronos knew that Caspian was far from the only one who said them, or believed them.
For the gray filly, born brown, had dappled over the winter and her summer coat was almost white, only her legs and mane and tail showing hints of her original color. Pale horses were put to death in the grasslands, and in the cities east the province of kings alone. Methos was no fool, and no king, but it would have been cleverer and luckier to bleed her under the full moon than to try and ride her.
No one but an Immortal could have done it. The first day he sat on her she broke his back, and in the first week she killed him three times. She came when he whistled now, but sometimes she ate from his hand and sometimes she went for him with her teeth bared. Spring faded into summer and Methos rode the chestnut when they fought, and all along the river villages burned and men died and women wept.
“The bay of Silas's is shaping well,” Kronos said to Methos one day, as they watched Caspian and the pre-Immortal boy he'd found. “You have a good eye.” He wasn't sure what he expected, but Methos only grunted. “They were good horses, better than they looked.”
Methos's head turned at that, and for what felt like first time in a long time he actually met Kronos's eyes.
“Teacher--,” Kronos began.
Methos flinched. “No,” he said. “No.”
It was the closest they'd come to a conversation in three years, and it was nothing. Kronos let it go. “We should finish here,” he said, moving to pull Caspian away from his prize. Methos would have been the one to give the orders, once; now he sat passive on his chestnut and waited, nothing left of him but killing-- and the gray.
It was late summer before he rode the mare on a raid, and even then if it had been anyone else on her Kronos would have forbidden it. She would not stay in place as they waited, spinning, half-rearing, so that Methos was forced to keep her moving in restless circles. She did not scream, at least. If she had he would have slit her throat himself, and fought Methos if he'd had to.
When he finally gave the signal, they galloped down into the sleeping town with swords drawn, and the gray mare was at the very front. Runaway, Kronos thought, all Caspian's predictions of bad luck come true. But when he urged his own horse forward he saw that Methos was crouched over her neck, his fingers tangled in her mane, the rein loose. She was not taking him anywhere he did not want to go.
His teacher had been a wise man, who never risked his head when there were others to do the fighting. “Think,” he had said to Kronos from the first. “You must always think.” And Kronos had come to see that he was right about all of it, that there was a reason he was the oldest Immortal Kronos had ever met.
The thing on the gray mare was not Kronos's teacher, or his friend. He was one of the monsters Methos had mocked, once. Even Caspian, even Silas, had more sense. In the north, pale horses were dangerous, and in the east they were the mark of kings. To the south lay the end of the world. Kronos had come from the west.
And in the west, they said that when Death came for you, he came on a red-eyed white horse, with a sword the color of fire. He did not believe in Death-- in any of the gods who had been the borders of the world when he was young-- but even Kronos knew that the gray mare meant the end of something.
All that year, and the next, and the next after, he followed her to war. Methos led them now, as had until three years before, but this time they took no hostages and left nothing but ashes. And they won, always they won, because Methos was a madman and later because the people they fought would not stand and face the thing on the pale horse.
Kronos, who had wanted nothing more than to be Methos's second again, Kronos who wanted to be led by better men, Kronos who had had three years of making decisions while Methos stared blankly at the ground-- Kronos was afraid of Methos, and afraid of the end of the world, and afraid of the gray mare who had begun it. “She is a demon,” Caspian said, and his voice trembled, and even Silas who thought every animal he saw was a friend did not contradict him.
They burned the villages of the grasslands and the cities to the west and the forts at the mountains' edge, and everything in between. Two horses died under Caspian and one each under Kronos and Silas, and still the gray carried Methos, her neck proud and her ears back, as heartless as her master.
When there was nothing left to destroy they rode south to the sea, and still there was nothing but blue water and white sand and the mare, diving at birds because there were no children to kill. Methos rode her across the beach and into the ocean, so that the waves crashed against her knees. And then he sat, staring out at the horizon. Once Caspian would have complained, or even Silas, and Methos would have snapped at them; once there might have been blood drawn, but now they did not dare to question him.
At last Kronos kicked his horse into the water, and rode it as near to Methos and the gray as it would go. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to-- after a moment, Methos turned his head and looked at Kronos, and said, “Enough.” And for the first time in years, there was someone there, someone Kronos recognized, someone he had loved.
“Come on,” he said, as if to an invalid, or a man returning from a great journey. “There is nothing here for us.”
“No,” Methos agreed, and gathered the mare's reins, and she bent her neck to look back at him and Kronos saw that her eyes were soft and dark as an ordinary horse's. Not an ending, but a beginning, he thought, and not bad luck but only different. And this time, where Methos led he followed gladly.
14th Century CE RPF, for doreyg
He still, sometimes, talks to his cousin in the dark.
“You deserved it,” he says. “You were asking for it.”
Or, “There is no way I could have let you live.”
“They made me do it.”
“It was for the good of the people.”
Richard never answers him. Richard never did have much in the way of conversation. Richard was always full of vague threats and pompous slurs. He was tremendously popular with the peasants, of course. Still, it's not really an accomplishment, pleasing the unlettered masses; even in revolt they're not nearly as terrifying as the nobility.
The best thing about Richard was Anne. She was his one uncalculated move, his one failure at being entirely kingly. And she was kind, funny, and bright. He does not discuss Anne with Richard, because he has nothing to say, because he sometimes thinks that Anne was a saint, because he wishes that she had not died. Because if she had not died, things might have been different.
De Vere and de la Pole are different, of course. He likes to imitate De Vere's lisp, the affected way de la Pole held his sword, as if his wrist were too weak for the weight of steel. Which it probably was. Richard was a fool, he was always a fool. He never could see what men like that were like.
“Never,” he says to Richard, his words muffled by the bedclothes. “You trusted all the wrong ones. You pardoned all the wrong ones.”
For a moment he thinks he hears Richard argue. For a moment he thinks he hears Richard say, “But I pardoned you--.”
As if that didn't entirely prove the point. Richard had put his friends to death, and saved his murderer.
“All your fault,” he says. Sometimes, “You did this. You brought this on yourself, with your fine and fancy notions. It wasn't enough for you to inherit a throne. No, you had to hold it by the grace of God.”
“Tell me, Richard,” he says, there in the dark. “Tell me, where is your God now? Tell me, did you pray to Him to save you? His anointed, His most favorite son?”
Sacrilege upon sacrilege, and yet even a man who never was much bothered with God, even a man who never believed-- there is an hour before dawn when even heretics recant, when even heathens and Musselmen bend their knees.
Richard does not speak to answer, does not defend his reign, his favorites-- even De Vere who was said to be his lover-- does not defend the faith he sent men to die to keep.
Richard never did, though; even as a boy he always hated to be called to account. It was at the root of his quarrel with John of Gaunt, and with the Lords Appellant. A king should never be asked to apologize or explain. A king should never be put to the question. God makes kings, and God breaks them.
In the night it seems that he more often breaks them. This is the time when the dead walk, and the shadows move. This is the time for faith, and fear. At night all men are equal, and at night all men are nothing.
Night, darkness: this is when the questions must be asked, and this is when he and Richard re-fight all the old battles. Once again one of them is the son of the Black Prince, and one of them is the son of a man rumored to be a butcher's by-blow, and neither of them is chosen for the crown and scepter.
There is so much blood between them. The shared blood of kings; the spilled blood of nobles. So much blood would mark anyone's hands. And yet, “There was no order,” he says. “There never was.” Like Pilate, like other, better men, his hands are clean; he is a jouster, not a soldier.
Richard has no answer, had no answer for the Merciless Parliament. Oh, Anne begged, and prettily for traitors' heads; Anne put no stock in queenly dignity for all that her blood was the royalest in England. But Richard never bent, not his knee and not his neck.
“Pride,” he says. “It was always your greatest sin. If only you had been willing to listen.” It is not something he would admit in daylight, with the sun on his face: that any part of him wishes something had gone differently, that perhaps this was not the most desirable of all possible outcomes.
“Anger. That was always mine.” And if ever there were a time for Richard to say something, if ever there were going to be a voice in the night--. But ghosts never have any answers, no matter how interesting the things you have to confess to them might be. If he's honest with himself, it isn't answers he wants anyway.
It's his youth, before everything went so wrong. It's Richard on his throne, and Anne on hers; it's their hands outstretched him. It's a time when their greatest concern was the rebelling rabble, the invasion from France that even then they suspected would never come. What he remembers is that it always seemed to be summer, that the sun was always shining, and the banners blew in the wind when they rode out..
He was happy, then, when he was Henry of Bolingbroke: he was happy when he was too young and too foolish to realize that everything could go wrong, that everything was wrong already. “You weren't such a terrible king,” he says, and that too is a confession. “You weren't so wrong.”
“You weren't the only fool,” he says, because he knows Richard isn't really there to hear him.
There are a thousand things Henry says to Richard in the dark, and always he pauses between them, waiting for an answer that never comes. But the one thing that he will never bring himself to say is, “I'm sorry,” because, like Richard, he has never believed that he is wrong, and he does not intend to start believing it now.
Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles, for philomytha
Three weeks before Christmas, Rupert's mother goes away, in a flurry of trunks, hatboxes, and matching luggage, “Just for a little while, darling, to get my head straight, look after Adrian, won't you, and do mind Nanny.” Rupert knows, as children often do, that she isn't on a cruise or skiing in Gstaad; he overhears Cook and James the groom discussing the way Herself had bolted, taking Mr. Campbell-Black's favorite painting, the nude in the upstairs hallway that is supposed to be a Sargent.
Rupert misses her terribly, though he pretends not to, and he spends most of his time in the loft of the Penscombe stables with the tabby cat and her kittens, hiding from Nanny and baby Adrian who is teething and cries incessantly. He is eight years old, and already he is learning that women are not to be trusted, that even when you try to be good it isn't enough to keep the people you love from leaving you behind.
On Christmas Eve, Eddie rolls up in a chauffeur- driven Daimler he doesn't own, a beautiful woman on each side, in a state James describes to Cook later as well past well-lit. His tailcoat looks as if he's slept in it and his shirt collar has lipstick in pink on the left and in red on the right. He demands that Nanny bring the children down-- and although she complains bitterly to Rupert, she lays his clothes out for him and tells him to hurry when he's slow unbuttoning his pyjamas.
The servants don't much like Mummy, whom they call Herself and sometimes That Interloper, but Eddie is a Campbell-Black and a son of Penscombe. They watched him grow up and they believe he can do nothing wrong. Rupert, too young to drink or chase women, and therefore too young to interest Eddie and be subjected to the famous charm, knows better. If this is a war he is firmly on the other side.
Still, there's not much he can do when Nanny takes his hand and marches him downstairs to the sitting room. The two women-- Mrs. James the housekeeper will tell James later that they looked right tarts, and that clearly they were no ladies-- with Eddie are full of compliments for Rupert's blue eyes and fair hair, but put off by his scowl. They turn, a little desperately, to Adrian, who for once is all smiles and long eyelashes.
Rupert is left to Eddie, who offers him a glass of Champagne, and asks after his pony, Snapdragon. Ordinarily, either would be enough to distract Rupert, who is vastly proud of Snap and never allowed more than a sip of wine. Tonight, though, he won't be bought. “Will Mummy be home in time for Christmas?”, he demands.
“Mummy's left us. Mummy's bolted to Saudi with an oil sheikh,” Eddie says heavily. “Mummy won't be home ever again. We're getting a divorce, Rupert, do you understand what that means?”
“No,” Rupert lies, because if he doesn't understand, it isn't true.
Eddie sighs and closes his eyes. “I should have stayed in London,” he mutters. Adrian starts to cry, and Nanny bustles in. Rupert is hauled away to bed before he can ask any more questions.
In the morning he opens his stocking presents, which are so dull Mrs. James must have picked them out from Penscombe shop, and has his boiled egg in the kitchen. “Here's poor Mr. Campbell-Black with his heart broken,” Nanny tells Cook, “and those hussies he brought from the city with their hands on my poor motherless boys--.”
Rupert escapes outside to Snap's stall, feeding him lump after lump of sugar. When Mummy was home for Christmas they always brought carrots and apples and Polos for the horses, sausage and Milk Bones for Eddie's gundog and tinned salmon for the cats. Now her hunters, Ben and Blaze, stand with their heads over their doors, waiting sadly for their mistress. She'd promised to take Rupert hunting on Boxing Day, but now he'll have to stay home; Eddie can never be bothered.
Rupert kicks the wall and strokes Blaze's nose, and wishes Mummy had run away with Nick, who is an R.A.F. officer and hunts with the Quorn, or Richard, who played polo for England after the war and kissed her when he thought Rupert was sleeping, or anyone but stupid, boring Faisal in his shiny Rolls. He wishes Eddie had gone to Saudi instead. Without Mummy, Christmas is different. Penscombe is different.
Christmas dinner is vast, and there's only hungover Eddie, and Rupert who is full of the chocolate from his stocking, to eat it. “I want my real presents,” Rupert says, and sees Eddie flinch, and knows there aren't any presents. “I hate you,” he says, and slides under the table and out the door before Nanny and Eddie can catch him.
He spends the afternoon curled in the hay with the stable cat, ignoring Nanny at the bottom of the ladder, safely away from the scolding he knows he has coming-- starving Communist children in Russia and ingratitude for his poor father, and must he be as thoughtless as his mother, no doubt-- he's heard it all before. At dusk he climbs down. James is supposed to have come and done evening stables, but he hasn't bothered; Rupert fills the water buckets to the brim and measures oats for the hunters, standing on a bucket to do up their rugs.
Someday, he thinks, Penscombe's stable will be full again, instead of falling down and almost empty. When he's grown he'll hunt every day if he likes, and have a shining lorry like Harry Llewellyn's and go to the Horse of the Year Show. And he will never, ever speak to Eddie again.
He starts, a little grimly, for the house. There's a car parked in the drive, a battered Land Rover he recognizes as belonging to one of the farmers from beyond Penscombe village. That's good, it means Rupert will be able to slip around Eddie at least. With luck, he''ll be sent to bed without supper; he can always count on Nanny to change her mind and slip him bread and jam and biscuits and windfall apples.
But when he goes in through the kitchen, there's a man having tea with Cook. “'ere's Mr. Rupert now,” she says, “sure and won't Nanny be glad to see you in one piece, 'e's always mucking about with 'orrid 'orses.”
There are biscuits on a plate on the table. Rupert takes a handful, though he hasn't washed his hands, and tries to duck around Cook.
“No you don't,” she says. “Mr. Carter 'as something for you, Mr. Rupe, that he's come all the way out on Christ mas to bring you.”
The farmer stands up, and for the first time Rupert sees the puppy at his feet. A small, black Labrador puppy, a little pudgy still, with soft brown eyes.
“For me?”, he demands. Mummy had said he could have a puppy, now that he was old enough to take care of it, but Rupert hadn't really expected anything to come of it. Mum was like that sometimes, meaning things at the time but then forgetting about them.
Mr. Carter smiles, a little sourly. “Mrs. Campbell-Black told me months ago to save you one of my Bess's lads. But she never did come to collect him, and he's driving the Missus mad, chewing on everything in the house-- all the others've gone. He's yours, lad.”
“Oh,” Rupert says from the floor, the puppy in his lap, “thank you.” Carter touches his hat to Cook and edges out, but Rupert doesn't even notice. The puppy has hold of the cuff of his sweater, and is tugging hard, and for the first time since Mummy left Rupert can't help thinking that everything might be bearable after all.
Sarah Smith's Vanished Child series, for brutti_ma_buoni
Marriage is not what she expected, is both more and less than she could have hoped. Alexander is by turns a stranger and the man she loved, distant and tender, and she knows that sometimes there is another woman that he sees in her, in her things hanging beside his, in her hair on the pillow at night. Perdita is, in so many ways, blind; she can't imagine what it is like, to have memories sharp and clear as knives. Everything she remembers is blurred at the edges, softened, faces indistinct and the lines of bodies, the lines between bodies, invisible.
The city is a ruin, beautiful only because it is indistinct, and even a blind woman can smell the Seine, and the sewage. They are staying at Dotty's, and not in the lavish hotel suite Gilbert offered them as a wedding present. Alexander is proud, too proud to take money from the Knights-- or too afraid of what it will mean. Perdia tries not to mind.
Perdita minds desperately. She wants her little house in the suburbs, her bed with the quilts she chose herself. She wants to cook for her husband, the way a proper wife would. She wants her own piano. She wants peace and quiet, not only to practice, not only to learn to be a married woman and not a girl, but to learn to love the thing that is changing her body.
Dotty shops. Dotty makes calls, and receives them. She has her charities, her son. She is never still, and she will not let Perdita be still, either, and the worst of it is that it is well meant. She is trying to help, Alexander says, and Perdita knows that he is right, and hates it.
And Alexander is so busy with Jouvet. The records were saved, and the people, and everything else the Seine spoiled. He has to be there to supervise the planning, and afterward the rebuilding, and he is still healing from his injuries.
At night he falls into bed beside Perdita, and is asleep before his head touches the pillow. There is no time for words between them, and no place for touching, not in Dotty's house. Perdita lies beside him in the dark, thinking of the baby growing inside her, and listens to him breathe until she, too, sleeps.
“This is for you,” she tells the baby sometimes, and she does not know if she means the loneliness, the waiting, or the home that Alexander is designing for them. “All of this is because we love you.”
“Je t'aime,” she says to Alexander, like a proper young Parisian wife, but she speaks to their child in English, always. She loves them both so very much, and surely, if Paris can be saved, if Jouvet can be reclaimed , so can her marriage be built from the ruins of the flood.
