October 24th, 513 CE

Incoherent words from three familiar voices rumbled across the distant surface of my thoughts as I drifted, listless through the near void of my mind. Moment by moment my memories replayed; my brother, the bar, the boulder of a man, the back alley, the brutality. The man’s colors fade to shadows. He becomes a slinking silken figure in the cracks of my memories, a shade to haunt my thoughts, and now, I wonder, how much of it is memory, and how much of it was simply just a nightmare?

October 25th, 513 CE

A warmth lapped at the side of my face, at first comfortable, soothing, as if it might wash away my aching pains, then sweat trickled down my neck and the warmth became an uncoformtorble weight pressing down on me with suffocating pressure. With a groan I turned in my bed, every sore muscle and joint in my body screaming in vibrant protest at the slight movement.

Slowly, I opened my eyes to a crackling hearthfire spitting fuzzy sparks across my blurred vision. Blinking to clear the haze I raised my head as far as I could manage, taking in the vague shapes and outlines of Osa’s weather worn villa. Squinting, I focused on a long crack running up the dining room wall until it sharpened into focus, a black line slicing through the off-yellow plaster and the familiar faded, flaking murals already half gone from the gentle ravages of time. I imagine that once, long ago, it told a beautiful tale of myth and magic, but now it was little more than severed feet and the stumps of long dead trees playing over gray green weeds.

I closed my eyes again, gritting my teeth and pushing up onto my elbows. A searing pain tore through my back the moment it left the cushions, as if a hot strip of iron were being pressed into my lower spine. Images flashed through my head, the hulking outline of a shadow clad man, blood stained cobbles, a copper coin in the palm of my hand. My heart thudded in my head like a drumbeat and a gargled scream broke from my dry throat before I could swallow it back down, sounding much as a goat with a cut throat.

Across the room, the door slammed aside and a tall slender figure filled the frame with his presence, his whole body falling still as his pale gray eyes found mine from behind bright rose-gold hair. He reminded me of a deer caught on the wrong side of a longbow staring down a hunter with the arrow at full draw.

I knew those crystalline eyes, that beautiful face unlike any other I’d seen before or since I first met his gaze, the long strands of pale hair framing his features, the overlong limbs and delicate, long fingered hands. I could practically hear the sloshing as my stomach churned, my finger’s shaking on the frayed edges of my sheets as my lagging brain came up with both a name, and the significance of his presence.

“Master Lleu!” A firm feminine voice growled from behind the former king’s aide’s long linen cloak. The hanging cloth shifted beneath Lleu’s arm where it was practically bolted in place against the doorframe and Osa burst forward, the mess of stiff white curls atop her head bobbing up and down as she thundered forward, a sour look on her deathly pale yet youthful face.

“Lay back boy, you’ll only hurt yourself more by moving,” she said, the words like tiny knives as she pushed me back into the thin cushions, gentle and firm as alaway. It was then that I realized I was on the dining table, the place reserved for treating those not of her household. My heart ached at the realization, but I know why I was here, and I didn’t blame her.

The back of Osa's hand found my forehead as the over-warm bedding folded in around me, once again pressing down on me with that uncomfortable weight. She mumbled to herself, the fragmentary mess of words impossible to discern, then moved to one of the shelves above the hearth lined with various apothecary materials and set about brewing something in a shallow cauldron above the fire.

“Where’s Gwyn?” I asked, my dry throat making the words flat and raspy like the sound of rustling river reeds.

Osa pushed a mug of water into my hands as she turned away from the fire and sat at one of the stools set around the table. “Drink,” she said simply, then when I had, she continued. “The only person you should be worried for right now is yourself.”

I glanced at Lleu still standing in the door frame then swung my gaze back to Osa. “Where is he?” I asked again, my voice already sounding a bit more crisp instead of crackly.

Osa sighed, rolling her eyes towards Lleu. “Sit down already, man. You’re making my boy anxious,” she said, and my heart ached with a sad sort of joy at the use of ‘my boy.

The words caused the man to blink before he did as she ordered, pulling out a chair on the other side of the table. She then returned her gaze to mine, a hardness I knew all too well filling her red irises. “Your brother is out helping Volso move his flock into the fresh pasture, a job I’d have sent you on had you not been laid out on my dining table like a corpse.”

There was an edge to her words that turned my arms to gooseflesh. “I-” I began, then swallowed hard, floundering under the hot anger in her gaze. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning my eyes down. After another moment I asked, “what happened?” My voice was so soft I barely heard myself, but Osa’s ears were sharper than a hound’s.

“I have an idea of what happened, but I was hoping you’d tell me,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. I couldn’t help but cringe away from her glare. “I told you what would happen if you kept up that work,” she continued. “I’ve seen the same thing more than a dozen times. Young boys and girls floating in the docks or slumped in lifeless heaps in back alleys. You swore to me that I’d never find you like that, but here we are anyway.”

I put a hand over my eyes, biting my lip as I held back tears. “I don’t know what happened,” I choked out, the words both a lie, and not.

“I do,” she said with a simple, terrible finality. “I know, and so do you.” She sighed and put one hand over her eyes. “Once you’re on your feet again I want you gone. If you can’t listen to me when it matters, I see no point in trying to keep you safe.”

I nodded, gritting my teeth as the tears jerked free from the corners of my eyes, rolling down my cheeks as I stared into the flames. I’d spent most of the last eight years of my life in this place, under her care. I wasn’t sure what I’d do now that I’d lost both, and I hated that man for taking it from me, but I hated myself even more for letting him.

Osa’s chair ground against the floorboards as she rose to take the pot from the fire and poured out the tincture into another mug, replacing the now empty one in my hands a second later. I could feel her eyes on me, but didn’t dare raise my head.

“Where should I go?” I asked when the tears finally stopped, my voice timid as that of a hare, my words so quiet a butterfly's wing beats might have been easier to hear.

From the other side of the table Lleu gave a polite cough. “Actually, boy, you’ll be leaving with me.” He paused. “And your ‘brother.’”

I shifted my gaze to meet Lleu’s gray eyes, then looked away, unwilling to face this new fear beside the shame crushing my soul.

“I said nothing about Gwyn,” Osa argued, settling herself back into her chair. “I told you you could have Bast, but Gwyn is safer with me than he’d be sailing the seas. I don’t care who you are, the boy is under my care, and he is needed here.”

“Why now,” I said softly, then again with more stone to my voice. “Why now?” I pushed up to a sitting position, doing my best to ignore the searing pain in my lower back as I met his gaze again. I winced, and wasn’t certain if that was a frown that touched his lips, or just a trick of my imagination. This time he was the one who broke away, looking aside to the flaking mural on the wall. Osa let out an indigent scoff behind me, but I ignored her.

“I’m sorry,” Lleu said, bowing his head slightly. “Things have been difficult these last eight years. But things have changed, and your brother is needed, what he represents, what he is, is needed.”

“So he’s dead?” I asked flatly.

“Who’s dead?” Osa snapped. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

Lleu glanced at the woman, then back at me, and just nodded. I sighed, laying back down, my problems suddenly small in comparison to the wave of shit heading towards my brother’s head.

“How?” I asked, closing my eyes as a sudden thudding ache filled my head. At the very least this new problem was a distraction from everything else.

There was a brief pause, then Lleu asked, “would you mind if I spoke with the boy for a bit. There is much we must discuss that I fear you there are things you would be better off not knowing.”

Osa grumbled, but a second later I heard the scratch of chairlegs moving across the floor, then the door closing as she left.

Lleu sighed, then said, “A sickness of the mind took the old man in his sleep. It was quiet, more peaceful than he deserved.”

A bitter taste filled my mouth, but I pressed on. “Why Gwyn?” I asked again.

“Because it is his throne to claim, it his his right by birth, his responsibility, to his people, as it was his ancestors. He can not run from it, Bast. He is bound to that throne by the same powers that held his father and his forefathers,” Lleu said. “Aelius died with no formal heir. The Tuath have called for all with a claim to gather and be judged under the watcher stones. Whether he wants it or not, the throne will call to the boy, and he will not be able to resist.”

I snorted as derisively as I could manage, which wasn’t much. “You’re talking about old magics as if they are more than myths and the trick’s of money grabbing charlitons and priests.

“Because they are,” Lleu said simply.

“Right,” I said, rolling over and giving him a glare. “So it doesn’t have to be him.”

“He is the true king, he-,” Lleu began, but I cut him off again.

“Gwyn is an orphan, not a king. I don’t care what bulshit belifs you hold, they don’t mean shit to him anymore. He has barely any teaching for the role, no preparation, and certainly no ‘responsibility’ to a people who abandoned him to starve in this forgotten ruin of a town.”

Lleu’s gaze was almost cold as he said in a calm, quiet tone, “until six nights ago, the people thought him dead.”

“Good,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned it can stay that way. Prince Carewyn died that night, and your people don’t need to know anything more than that. My brother has a good life here. I won’t let you take it from him.” The pain in my back was almost too much to bear, but I didn’t care. I was too angry and frustrated.

Lleu was quiet for a time again, simply meeting my gaze with a calm stare. “ With due respect, my boy, that is not your decision to make.” He said and looked me over before continuing. “In fact, it seems that you have left yourselves with few other options.”

I scowled at the man’s low blow. Who that fuck did he think he was? “I only have to leave,” I said, using my pain to muster up some more defiance.. “I don’t have to leave with you.”

“You will,” he said, rising from his chair and resting a hand on my shoulder. For just a moment, I imagined that a warmth flowed from where his hand met my bare skin into my body, tracing the lines of my pain like a cool, soothing thread, but it was simply another trick of my mind. “If you trust me on nothing else, then trust me on that.”