Unnamed Olberhardt Pre-Canon Fic

The moon was scraping the heights of the mountains; she was touching the pad of her pale finger to the highest white tip. On nights when the sky was ice-clear and the moon was wide, the world in Hornburg is white and black alone. Blackness as heavy and total as shame, slit by stacked white stone where the moonlight cut down. The drips of white stars. Pale reaching arms of scraggly mountain trees, leafless. And that was all.

It was a cold summer night, and Erhardt felt as utterly alone as he had ever been, perched like a bird on the wing between the looming black vault of the sky and the wide black valley of all the world below.

He had been alone before and hated it. He felt alone in the world now, like everything else had burnt to white ash already, blown away, left him without judgement, without fear, without his crimes and his shame. He felt alone like the body would feel alone separated from the soul; empty, contextless, hollow.

Yesterday, he had taken Olberic’s virginity.

He had… known and not admitted to himself that that was true, that he was going to be Olberic’s first. Olberic was… Olberic is… Olberic is a man unlike any other. He is a mountain as much as the stone that holds his feet down against the uncharitable vastness of the black world all around him. Towering, firm, unconquerable; so much himself through and through. Most men, you peel their layers back to find a fragile or rotten heart, or else as rough and sharp one, like a geode. Olberic was himself, right through. You mined him like a steelworker. You found rock no matter how deep you went. Solid. Unchanging. More layers, all of them stone.

The metaphor made him sound cold. Most mountains are. High in the world of the birds, wind-swept, misted with clouds.

Olberic had been very warm indeed. Very literally. He was hot like a gore-soaked blade inside. Swelling with blood. Olberic was a big man, and it took a lot to keep a man his size working; blood, sweat, muscles, a core like a forge. And he was warm like vulnerability. Openness. Eagerness. He hadn’t kept his body untouched through frigidity or a sense of being ‘too good’ for such baseness, but rather—

Well.

Erhardt really didn’t understand why he had remained untouched.

He had been alone for years (like he was alone now) with the urge to touch Olberic, both kindly and unkindly, both sweetly and deeply. He had always wanted to rest a hand on his face, watch his eyes close with contentment, in trust. He had always wanted to slip his palm down the rough crags of his stomach to clutch at him below the belt, watch that massive body tense and twitch.

Erhardt assumed, with some discomfort, that if you want to softly touch as well as befoul a person, hurt them and adore them, that you were likely in love.

--

His first impression, actually, of Olberic Eisenberg was that he was the tall one with short hair. It wasn’t the fashion at the time; it never became the fashion, actually. He had it chopped so short he was sometimes teased at; why the monastery crop, Berg? And at the time it had been rather uneven, like he had just grabbed fistfuls of it at hewn it off as he could. Combined with his height, how, even as a man in his late teens, he was filling out very well along his shoulders and his chest, that odd face, the pinched brown beyond his years, the sculptural furrows and curves, his cautious and still posture, as the other new knights joked and postured around him; he stood out.

Erhardt learned quickly that ‘the big one’ had come from impressively far away, the southern bounds of the kingdom, where the mountains were all but impassible, wet with sea salt, home to sea birds and pines. He had come from a small collection of people, nomadic, whose homes were where the wandering goats went; he had become the full-formed, slightly scarred, and far-sighted youth he was attending to them. He still had the air, then, that he would rather be in a little village somewhere, that the noise and hurry of Hornburg Hold was a little much for him.

With peoples like the one he had come from, they had lost very much in losing him. Had they supported him, leaving the tribe behind, their best blood, their strongest youth, for a cause almost alien to their way of life? Had he even told anyone he was going?

Erhardt didn’t talk to him after his knighting ceremony, when he was inducted into the ranks he himself had just risen to not half a year before. He didn’t talk to him for some time, as talk about him mingled with he smoke in simmering mead-halls and wash-halls, as daily life in Hornburg passed word of the new and strange blood around and around, carried on the backs of the yoked oxen lugging milk, bundled in the herbs of tired midwives, carried with firewood and cattlebones in and out the backdoors of the Hold’s kitchens. Every new young man from the far reaches of the kingdom would be an interesting subject for the peoples of the mountain kingdom, trapped in the wooden bounds of their Hold as they often were, away from the thousand deadly terrors of the high mountains; Olberic had the extra interest of an accent. Clipped, rough, forceful. He spoke slow, as nomads were wont to do. Erhardt could see his eyes widen in panic when a particularly effusive, fast-paced serving maid or running boy started speaking to him.

And Erhardt didn’t talk to him at all for quite sometimes as he sometimes idly picked up news and rumors about him, and about he other new knights, indiscriminately. (Each newly knighted man could be a trained warrior Erhardt would have to cut down when the day came.) Partly because, as a totally new knight, Erhardt’s days were brutally rough, absolutely packed with both warlike and social responsibilities to prove himself as a knight of the realm. Him even moreso; he had been unknown entirely in these parts before he showed up to earn knighthood not a year before, and he had surged through his training and his requirements fast. He had the strength to pick up a man and fling him, keep eyesight, the stubbornness of a goat, a very single-path mind, and a certain hard-knock-life tirelessness. Olberic had been the subject of discussion for some time already. Now that he had earned his knighthood in an unprecedented short time…

Well, let’s sum up. Entirely unknown, unconnected youth from the nomads comes to the castle, declares his intent to become a knight, shows off incredible talent and training, earns the knighthood fast, and does the whole thing while never properly socializing. He never stands up and gives a speech, never explains to Dame whomever or Miss Lady where he came from, why the knighthood is so important to him, what his deal is. There was a mystery about him. He was reserved. He had no ingrown social graces whatsoever, though he was courteous and apologetic if he made a misstep. (Frankly, Erhardt had assumed the rumor that the bulk of his training for knighthood had come in etiquette and chivalric code, not the arts of war, to be true).

He was strange. He was new. He was different! And though Hornburg Hold might be the greatest city in the mountains, that did not mean it was a great city. All mountain towns and cities were sparsely populated; Erhardt himself had seen the brilliant fire-lit roads of Marsalim, the cathedral of Goldshore, the clear-cut stone mansions of the north. Here, in the mountains, men were not used to travellers or men of different strips; Olberic had an exoticism to him that was no fault of his own.

In sum, Erhardt had been HEARING about Olberic for quite some time before he ever spoke to him.

--

“If you would, Sir Adlieg,” rumbled the tall, handsome young knight, who wasn’t looking at him.

Now, Erhardt, in the flower of his youth, was used to being looked at. He wouldn’t say he took it for granted, but he noticed when it wasn’t happening. Sir Eisenberg, however, had his gaze fixed on the autumn apples he was plucking from the scraggly tree, whose high branches no one else had yet managed to scour.

Erhardt had seen him, in passing, with one arm high in the branches and the other clutching about as many cold red apples as he thought one man could hold. He paused, and walked again; then paused again, and chose to walk up to the young knight, brow furrowed in concentration, as he tried to reach the last of the late crop no one else had yet harvested. He had asked him, “do you need someone to hold those for you?” and had expected a laugh.

Instead, Sir Eisenberg had said “If you would, Sir Adlieg,” calling him by his ‘family’ name (it had been chosen over a round of cards in a bandit camp many years ago, on grounds of being the best midpoint between dialectical accuracy and coolness), and carefully but masterfully extending an arm teeming with apples to him, that he could take a few, never looking at his face except for a quick glance to identify him.

Curious, Erhardt began to take the apples. They transferred smoothly from Olberic’s tight and gentle grip to his warm hand, which Erhardt them took from, beginning to fill up his own. They were fine apples, the last they were getting this year, almost too long on the branch; Olberic’s hand was being flurried by furious honeybees as he picked the last of their harvest.

“Why so many?” asked Erhardt, after two minutes of silent, patient work in the winding branches proved that he wasn’t offering information himself.

Yet, when asked, he was free with it. “Miss Marta of the Scullery requested some of her gentleman and folk. Each declined. She then requested help of me, though I was just passing; I assume to shame her menfolk for not helping.”

“And you agreed?” Erhardt asked, not accusatory, amused.

“I saw no reason to not,” he said, and for the life of him Erhardt couldn’t quite tell if it was true nonchalance or if Olberic enjoyed the humor in it too. “The gentlemen grew nervous at a stranger being asked to do their work, so I took my leave. I hadn’t noticed that all the trees had been harvested,” he admitted, using the flat of one hand to move spiny branched out of his way, indifferent to their poking.

“Folk have been through them all,” Erhardt agreed, his eyes briefly scanning the winter-like dearth that had already begun to rest on the slopes. “Most are plucked fast, to avoid them all dying in an early frost. Even if they had to be picked while still hard.”

“Then that’s more luck for me, coming late to get the best of them,” Olberic said without concern, reaching to the very heights of the tree, almost to the frail branches that couldn’t support fruit, to find a final, little apple. He observed it plainly, turned it around to see each side; it was rotten in the back. He had a somewhat quaint, unthinking ‘yech’ of disapproval; then, thoughtlessly offloading the most of the apples on to Erhardt, he reached onto his belt to pull out a horn-knife with a thin blade, and cut the rotten apple in half. He observed both sides; one unfit to eat, one white and clean, with only slight bruises on the edges. He dropped the rotten side onto the ground, where it landed soundlessly on the precious cold dirt stuck to the mountainside; the other half he lifted to his lips and bit from.

“Still good?” asked Erhardt, somewhat amused.

Olberic looked at him properly, then, hie eyes seeming to suddenly gauge the man he had unthinkingly recruited. Dark eyes, a sort of stone-brown. Open. He had mountain-eyes, for scanning the breadth of the vast horizon, for a monster miles away. “This half is fine, yes,” he said, and bit into it again. “Sir Adlieg,” he continued, after swallowing, “I may have interrupted you from your duties.”

To the point, matter of fact. He had only just thought about it now. “Nonesuch,” Erhardt told him. “As I’m about a year removed from the newly-knighted gauntlet you’re running through, I have such a thing as free time.”

Olberic observed him somewhat quizzically as he reached out wordlessly to start taking back some of the uneven load of apples. “The gauntlet?” he asked.

“The practice of running new knights ragged for their first few months and seeing who breaks,” explained Erhardt. “You should—unless they’ve changed the practice immensely in the past year—be enjoying sixteen-hour work days where you constantly beat up your fellow knights for supremacy and slave away to the orders of the princesses?”

Olberic nodded. “Just so. Oh, that’s a hazing practice?”

He pronounced the word ‘hazing’ like he had just learned it. There was something of a soft ‘z’ in his speech, now that Erhardt was paying attention. “You thought you were just going to be run ragged the rest of your life like this?”

“I asked for a knighthood, not a lordship,” Olberic countered, his brow furrowing just a little—just a little—and with just a little bit of a smile. The first one Erhardt might have seen on him. “I hadn’t thought my workload too hard.”

He—he thought Olberic was bragging. He must be. This must be his sense of humor. It was so dry it was like a pinot gris. Almost indistinguishable from humility. But that little sneak of a smile, the tiniest rumble in his voice—he was certainly showing off how easy the drudgery was for him. Oh, do the city boys struggle with the work? How droll. “Then you should find it very agreeable indeed once you’re settled into a district,” Erhardt smiled back at him, in the same fashion; miniscule, amused.

“I’m not interested in districting,” Olberic shook his head.

“No?” Erhardt asked. “Since you hail from so far away, you could easily become the lord knight of your own district.”

“I’m interested in staying here,” he said, casually letting slip that he had his eyes on the King’s Guard.

What a coincidence. So did Erhardt.

((this scene needs finished but I clearly don’t want to, let’s plan to move on.))

--

There was a refreshing survivalism to being back in the mountains, in Hornburg, now what Erhardt was used to them again, their clear, thin air and their cold foreboding. Lonely circling birds of prey and scrabbling haggard hedges aside, the bulk of the Hornburgian person’s day was spent in the work of food. The surplus agriculture that the plains and hills and river societies enjoyed  just beyond their borders, alien as the moon to the average mountain man, did not quite exist up here. The agriculture was not surplus. It was a pittance of the diet, carefully tended fruits and nuts and hardy grains, and the scavenger with knotted baskets on his back pulled in as good a haul as the house-woman with her hands in the silty dirt all day. Because the farmhand didn’t pull in three man’s grain a day as he would in the fields around Saintsbridge, every man and woman was occupied in food work, every day, in some way—churning milk, pressing oils, harvesting honey, hunting, tracking, scavenging, salting and smoking. Even the knights like himself, since they had to eat just as much as the next man, and that food didn’t come out of some magical storage room. An extraordinary amount of one’s day was spiced and sugared and salted, spent half-minding or right beside a process of preserving, soaking, slow-boiling, drying, or baking.

There was an essentialism that appealed to Erhardt. He didn’t harbor some basic jealousy for the kind of person who never worried about their meals, their safety, or if the houses just raised would last the next bitter winter. He preferred it this way, being close to the edge of life. It reminded him. It kept him from straying into the perfumed shallows. It kept him in the truth, the serene knowledge of how close he, and every one of these bastards, was to death at any time.

Another person who seemed to avoid the endless and encumbered march away from death was knight-in-training Olberic Eisenberg, or so Erhardt came to believe, working next to him for some time. Olberic took to the work of survival with a sort of distracted intensity, with his hands working hard and a perpetual look on his face that said he wasn’t quite here. He was a quiet man; Erhardt wondered what occupied his mind so, as the rest of him patiently stripped sinew from bone, threshed grain, sifted hulls.

He himself liked to stay focused on the task at hand. Now we were butchering sheep, now rolling the heavy stones that separated seed from husk with the yokes on our backs, now beating them down with rakes and brooms. He liked the moment of it, the drudgery of it, the hunger and the exhaustion. He felt like more of an animal, straining to eat. He felt more like part of nature, another predator, just another mountain lion waiting for the old king to grow sick and weak.

Sometimes other knights noted he was beautiful, that he had fine things in his quarters, that he had taken a strange grace with him from his travels far beyond the mountains, a sleek and deceptive skin of having more than enough and soft hands. They would ask him was it was like out there, the flat lands, the gentle breeze, the slow waters. And he would say, men are something else there. Their own creature. Not like unto other animals, and not like men here.

They have other concerns. They aren’t trying to stay alive. They have enough food and their feet are up in front of the fire, and they are worried if they are good men.

He doesn’t like to have that time to think.

--

Nor does, apparently, Olberic Eisenberg, who is out before dawn, in the barest of grey light, sitting somewhat blearily (a warm barley-ale barely touched beside him) not far outside the barracks, sharpening swords that are not his. Erhardt knows this, because Olberic’s own is already polished and strapped to his back.

“Hey there, Eisenberg,” he says, somewhat teasing. You can only act so superior when the knight in training is up and doing chores while you just rolled out of bed a minute ago, pissed, and are in the process of pulling knots out of your hair. “Who stuck you with their chores at this time of morning?”

Olberic blinked a haze out of his eyes; not fatigue, he had been lost in thought. Erhardt knew because once Olberic did focus on him, he was clear and unaffected as always. “I agreed last night,” he told him, and the shock of how low and calm his voice was prickled at Erhardt again, as it did every time the young man started to speak. One hell of a voice.

“And who put next morning’s chores on you last night?” Erhardt pushed, generally curious who the bastard was.

“Let’s see,” said Olberic, peering at the blade in his hands. “Sir ___,” he said, and then turned his eyes to the pile beside him. “Sir ___, Sir ____,” and one by one he rattled off their names, blade by blade, tipping each in the faint light with the edge of a finger.

They had all offloaded a few daily chores, then. Lazy bastards. “And why agree to do all this work for able-bodied men?” Erhardt asked, knowing full well it was cruel to make a green recruit explain why he couldn’t say no to his superiors.

But Olberic didn’t flinch or look down; he didn’t seem to read any power structure into the sentence at all. “I get a fine look at the blades this way,” he said, using his considerable strength to slowly turn the longsword currently clutched in his hands. His palms and knuckles were greyed and shimmering with oil, but that grip was fierce. “I have been wanting to get a good look at their make. The question to me is why the men offered. I could not fathom giving another man mine in the same way.”

“No?” asked Erhardt, leaning on the wall to get a little closer to the man seated on the steps.

“How would I know that someone wouldn’t sharpen it wrongly? Why would I have any trust that another man could handle it better than I can? Besides, it’s the most expensive and important thing I own, excepting my skin,” he huffed, settling the weapon back into place in front of him, and picking up his whetstone. “I don’t know how they went to bed without their skins crawling when all their swords were by my side.”

Interesting, country lad, thought Erhardt, a little unfairly. “You don’t trust them?”

“Well enough,” Olberic hedged. “I know I don’t have to fear for my life with the King’s Men. I also know it never benefits a man to bear his throat anyway.”

Spoken less like a country lad and more like a county goat, thought Erhardt. The wisdom of someone particularly close to animal.

Perhaps this is where most knights would assure Olberic that they are all brothers here. “It reminds me that I meant to ask you something,” Erhardt said instead, his back curving so he could look down at the man on the steps.

Olberic turned his face to him, eyebrows up. He looked surprised that Erhardt intended to ask him, in particular, anything. “Go on.”

“The make of your sword does stand out from all those you just tended for the knights, doesn’t it?” he asked with an effort to sound casual that was not quite natural to him. “Olberic, why do you wield an executioner’s sword?”

(It had been something of a curiosity among the ranks. Not such a novelty it needed to be pointed out, but definitely unusual, a point of interest. Wide sides. Heavy blade. Dull, plain, well-worn hilt. But it was the very sharp edges and blunt, short tip that identified it beyond doubt as a neck-cutter. ‘Why’ was the question no one had a ready answer to.)

Olberic spared a half-eye over his shoulder, as if examining his own sword, as if doubting Erhardt’s estimation of it. But he wasn’t wrong. “An executioner of sheep,” he shrugged, with the slightest thread of self-deprecation in his voice. “Money wasn’t to be spent on spare blades or training-swords where I came from. Every blade had to have a practical use as well. A hunting knife was also your self-defense. Your thresher was your scythe. This,” he said, slipping one greasy hand briefly over the hilt, “is my only blade. Rest assured, it’s been the terror of herd animals, but hasn’t seen many men.”

“When it does see them,” Erhardt saying, knowing full well a little something was creeping into his voice, “it won’t be pretty, don’t you think?”

“How’s that?”

“Other blades have the option to slice open a thin would, stab, score; yours doesn’t have an option other than decapitation. Or blunt force trauma. It’s how an executioner’s blade is made.”

“Well, yes, that’s right,” said Olberic, either not seeing a problem with that or feigning nonchalance so well Erhardt couldn’t tell. “I didn’t intend to be gentle in combat.”

 A grin split Erhardt’s face, one had hadn’t asked for. “Well now,” he said, “I hope you’re skilled with it as well, or else you might quickly find yourself with a reputation that is hard to uphold.”

“And what kind is that?” he asked him.

“Of being a harder hitter than the rest of us.”

“Surely not,” Olberic deflected automatically.

“If you have a blade that says so, you should have the arm as well,” Erhardt teased him.

Olberic acted predictably, and yet it threw Erhardt for a second; with practiced slowness, deliberate ease, he curled the fingers of his right hand into a fist around the heavy sword he had been treated, and lifted it from the ground, one-handed, holding it steady to his own eyes. He didn’t look up to see if Erhardt was watching the feat of strength; he kept his eyes on the steady blade, held evenly, unshakingly aloft, like it was a shaft of straw. The slick of its edge stuck in his eyes like it cut the air between them. To hold a heavy sword is not too hard; to keep it still as a statue says something about a man. To regard it like Olberic did; there was something in it. Like he had begun to ask the sword his questions instead, and held Erhardt irrelevant to that conversation.

He lowered it again. “I’ve begun to enjoy sparring men,” he said, with a lightness that Erhardt could tell was false. “If I prove to be good at it, all the better.”

“Do you find it more or less enjoyable than killing sheep?” asked Erhardt, not really needling anymore. What he was doing, though, he wasn’t totally sure.

“Killing sheep is never enjoyable,” Olberic informed him, turning round a blade so he could assure himself it was of killing sharpness. “Though finishing one in a single blow brings some satisfaction.”

Erhardt felt the tiniest shiver between his shoulder blades. One he didn’t define.

It would nonetheless become familiar to him.

--

You can’t live your life reminiscing on how many men around you are dead men walking. You can’t be constantly calculating how many of them you think you’ll kill when you betray them.

It all registers somewhere; he sees it when they slip, he sees which ones grow tired, frustrated, and cross easily, he keeps track of who had a bad knee, a stiff back, or knobby fingers. A tendency to flinch. A short fuse. Who pries, who doesn’t, who plays the game of power and control well, who plays badly, who won’t even play.

Olberic is one of the rare, enviable breed who seems to walk alongside the pack; he knows about power dynamics, and he doesn’t much care for them. Despite that, he will not fall behind; what invisible, intangible thing he does to assure his place in line without even having to barter it, Erhardt will never be able to tell you. He delights in the vicissitudes, the minute moods and shifts, the miniature dominations and submissions that makes up the cramped lives of the men of war. Olberic seems to not have to engage in it.

Maybe he’s getting away with it, so far, because many think (erroneously) that he’s stupid.

Erhardt accounts for these things subconsciously and could recite them as needed; nonetheless, one can’t live every day and every night with the awareness that you are here to kill some, maybe all, of these men. He knows that he had the specter of death hanging onto his neck, but he can’t be bowed down by it every single day. He has to get on. There’s salting, harvesting, threshing, brewing, walking, sparring, examining, analyzing, planning to be done. You can’t even think about killing the men when plotting their deaths. You have to crunch the numbers. You have to plan a route. Keep noticing who stocks which supplies where, who is in whose good favor, how many of these louts will actually get up and running when the alarm sounds in the night. He doesn’t want to have time in front of the fire to think about being a good man.

It’s work. It’s hard. It’s tiring. It keeps him occupied. It distracts him from the work. Can’t think about it if he has to think about it so hard.

--

It’s not often that his power plays involve sex, because it’s risky. He can’t afford to not look like a ‘real’ man. And the minutiae of what does and does not make a man in the cold mountains, where they play war hot and heavy with each other every day in the barracks, would make a scholar’s head just spin. And each of these men simply assumed he was the absolute expert on his own version of the rulebook of what made a man and what unmade him, held in his heart, in a thousand slightly different versions.

So, it was typically too risky to play games in bed. The wrong man would turn him into a laughingstock, undermine him, slowly erode away the respect he had won. But the advantage it could give him, with the right man, in the right place, in the right time, is very valuable. He just can’t let rumors spread. Best to depend on every other man’s fear of being seen as too much of a woman, best to depend on men who can keep their own mouths shut about dirty deeds.

He can think about sex as power all night, and manage to not really think about sex. A power play. Performance. Gambit. Skill. And he actually does try not to think about it, too aware of how quickly bonded attachment makes for a weakness. He’s confident that he’s good at making another man tremble. He tries to only consider when that would benefit him.

He assured that a certain general will never look him in the eyes again. An uncle to the Queen can be depended upon to put in a good word for him. That was all he needed.

Power is won in tokens, in spoonfuls. And he likes to focus on the work, whatever it is that has to be done today, just ahead of death. Butchering a bird, plucking apples, sharpening swords, mending, winnowing, washing, carving, tying his hair to the back of his head so that can slip like a knife between his lordships’s legs without getting the strands in his mouth.

--

It was agreed in the mind of the Knights in general that Eisenberg (already called ‘Berg’ by some others their age) had gone too far when he was found doing laundry. Surrounded, as if on accident, by giggling maids, he hefted heavy quilts enduring a twice a year washing onto a taught line to dry in the white summer sunlight. While Olberic was both useful and odd for his unflinching approach to dull and backbreaking work, laundry was a step too far into women’s work.

And having not even intended to be part of this, indeed having had no clue his oath today would take him across Olberic at all, Erhardt was surprised to witness, for the first time he had seen, Olberic actually getting defensive about something. He was a remarkably unfazeable man; he hadn’t heard about or seen his rise to jabs before, through some combination of his incredibly steady constitution and his slow uptake on city speak. But this time, a group of his superiors mocking him for being elbows-deep in a soap-frothed flowering quilt crossed some line Erhardt didn’t immediately divine.

“Women’s work!” he snapped, and Erhardt didn’t know if the disdain was for the concept or the work itself. He cast the quilt back into the greying soapy brew it had been pulled out of. “If you would rather have some men’s work, then, you needn’t ask!”

Like most knights, it seemed he went from being insulted directly into scrapping. Erhardt had conformed to that culture, for the most part. The men he had been waling were hesitant; after all, there were about six of them, and a knight in-training wanted to take them on for having his manliness insulted. Still, the nearest to him decided, after a few second’s pause, that he was willing to take the lead; laughingly, old Sir _____ put a hand on his hilt, prepared to defuse the situation into the friendly spar.

He was shit out of luck. (As Erhardt might say if he were allowed to use his native speech.) Olberic slid one hand down his left arm (left) and came up swinging. He struck the elder knight square on the jaw, unprepared, and snapped his head back.

Going right into fists was a sort of unspoken taboo. Surely, no one had told him. Things began to go badly immediately; the men around Erhardt startled, wasted precious time being shocked, and started to intervene when Olberic, his the tight muscles of his upper body gone hard, clocked the Knight right back around on the other cheek.

Things moved fast, as they always did when someone decided this was a real fight; Erhardt went back on one foot to observe as a man came to Olberic’s right side badly and was knocked back with a pretty impressive elbow cut. One man had the good sense to pull back the knight who had been knocked around twice; another had the good sense to come at Olberic low, where he wasn’t expecting a quick jab.

A few thrown fists and shouted words later, Erhardt came to a conclusion he didn’t expect—he was on Olberic’s side. And he came to the conclusion without the use of his whole brain, and he knew that, because it registered at all when he found himself throwing a guy he had never particularly liked anyway to get closer to Olberic. In the time it had taken Erhardt to spin his own head in a circle and come out on a different fighting side than he started on, Olberic had knocked three of his peers aside, who were winded, surprised, and wondering when, exactly, this had started happening. Erhardt took a few steps up; he could see the reddened skin of the broad knuckles of Olberic’s curled fist. The red of rage on his cheeks. All of it flashing like skirts twirling in a dance.

Erhardt grabbed the man nearest to Olberic, turned him around just so that he could see his eyes; never striking out once, he threw the man aside. In a couple movements like clockwork, gears twitching up, down, a little out of sight, suddenly, he was about face to face with Olberic, realizing by being a few inches from him how absolutely massive the young man was, watching him slowly turn closer to take a shot at Erhardt himself. The blood had gone to his head between heartbeats; the swing of his fist was slow and clear, just a hand reaching out to him.

Keeping his eyes on Olberic’s face (a poor move, and yet, he wanted to see it) Erhardt reached to the side to grip the wrist of the man who might have made the next best shot at Olberic. He twisted that wrist and he said, “Hold.”

Olberic’s fist never quite met his face.

Olberic had to overcorrect to stop his strike. He wheeled his body back, an uncharacteristic (so he thought) snarl cutting up his face. His eyes caught Erhardt because he was stuck having to focus on the fighter who stood in his way, and Erhardt was stuck fixing Olberic so that he would stop fighting, and they had to keep their eyes fixed on each other for the other man’s next move, and the seconds skipped such, quickly, then began to slow, as standing still slowed their heartbeats.

Erhardt stared Olberic down.

He watched Olberic exhaled a quick, but full breath, and with a release of pressure in the back of his head he knew the tension as diffused, by now. Olberic’s eyes were still tight, his coiled body was still ready for violence, but Erhardt’s stillness, the stillness he had forced them both into, his fingers around his grip like around the neck of a winebottle, had made something in him accept that he was done. As Erhardt waited to see if he would try something anyway, as Olberic waited to see if punishment was coming, they shared that stillness unbidden, unexpected, like being asked on the road to listen to a stranger’s tale.

“Well then!” said Erhardt, in what he was told was his signature unspoken judgement, releasing Olberic’s arm. He did not turn his back to him; he pivoted half-way to the side to make sure the others knew he was including them in his next statement. “That’s enough of careless insults to each other! Come on, now, we’re all swamped in work with harvest and slaughter.” Having started to diffuse the tension, he swept his eyes and saw something that would benefit him well—the sudden violence had startled the women Olberic had been helping, and they were gathered some feet away now, holding wadded-up, wet fabric bundles, ready to run or go feral, each to their own preference.

“See this?” he chastised his fellows. “I think the lot of you shall finish hanging up their baskets now, and,” with a final turn to Olberic who, after all, had started this, “Mayhaps with an apology for turning their work into a brawl.”

Olberic did not become indignant, nor did he really seem to become chastised. He studied Erhardt for a second after being chagrined with a blank intensity that somewhat concerned him; then he turned back to observe the work that had not yet been done with a pinched brow and a low breath. “Wasting time,” he agreed, very gruffly.

“Then I’m on to the slaughter-yard,” Erhardt declared. “When—”

“What,” asked one of the knights, half good-natured, “only you get out of the hanging-up of laundry?”

“Yes, idiot, as I broke up your stupid fight,” Erhardt snapped it, with the same half-humor. “And are you that jealous that I get to clean raw hides? You can join when you’re done if you like.”

With that he left, and got to his work lower down on the mountain, the pungent slippery skin of newly-dead sleep clinging to him, sticking, as he cleaned them, like they were trying to find new flesh to wrap around. Peeling, washing the dilute layers of blood off his forearms, speckled with goosebumps, again and again, he looked back and recognized the look on young Olberic’s face.

That is, the look that had been on his face instead of anger or embarrassment after Erhardt chastised him. Frustration. Self-frustration. At no point before had he seen Olberic get emotional over a social transgression, and he hadn’t now, either. He was disappointed in himself, and only himself, for failing some invisible self-standard that typically kept him from brawling in the streets. Self-regulated, entirely, totally at odds with group regulation. Their laws were secondary to some code of action inside himself he had developed in the hot rocky foothills of his removed homeland, herding the goats through almost-barren terrains, swift to travel and often alone.

That was why Erhardt had defaulted to his side in a fight, and what had been so charming him about the young man in their handful of conversations. He was a self-contained person, making his own choices, considering his own judgements and his own code of ethics tantamount to that of any social group, hierarchy, or opinion outside of him. Solid. Frozen. Mountainous. Erhardt considered himself that way too.

He so stands out to me, Erhardt realized with uncomfortable insight looking too far into the twisted and clotted insides of what was once alive, because he is a knight, among men who think they are. Self-conviction and self-dedication hammered into his bones, without pretense. Without a secret, hidden agenda. A man of the code, innately.

--

He had a bad night that night, while all the hall stunk of slaughtered sheep. Couldn’t sleep.

--

The great beams of the hall above him seemed to forest like trees, lengthen and snap like bones above his head, bleary in the witching-hour.

--

All of them.

Do you understand? Can anyone? All of them.

Grandmother whose fingers had been slowly losing the abilities to pluck the stem of a tulip, Cassidy the baker’s daughter who hated the dough under her nails, Fletcher the iron-smith who had just lost his second wife to childbirth, Aariyana the six-month-old infant, Dame Lily who became the only school-teacher for three villages when she admitted she couldn’t take city life and moved back, old Yusef who had built half the farmer’s barns bearing felled trees on his bent back, Chrysanthemum who was touched in the head and spoke no clear words, Mehytabil who had been carrying on an almost-forgotten style of traditional embroidery by herself, with her sharp eyes, her talented patience, her rare and overworked genius.

All of them. All of them except for Erhardt the miller’s son, who kept asking these stupid questions, kept puking names from his sore throat like stones; what about Grenna the priestess, what about Himmel who lost his mother, what about Grethe, his friend, what about his father who heaved heavy sacks of buckwheat flour on the tendon-snapping threshing floor from dawn to dusk, what about his mother who hurled them into the sagging cart after tying them off, what about his brother who baked and cooked and cleaned and complained while mom and dad worked.

All of them. Every one. Except Erhardt, who kept asking these stupid questions. All of them were dead.

He came to understand, after living revenge long enough, that balancing numbers, killing as many of the killers to revenge the killed, didn’t ‘satisfy him’ or ‘bring them back’ or any other such platitude. But it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work at all. He’s not plotting revenge to ‘fix’ himself. He’s not trying to burn down a city to avenge his town. There’s no resolution he’s building to.

He’s just broken this way now. He’s just going to kill them. It’s not about how he feels. It’s that a man bloated with the hundreds of souls he alone carries, he alone remembers, cannot shed them, cannot vomit them all back out. His end goal is not revenge, he knows in the dark, as nightjars call lonely in the brush. The sentence is broken. Revenge is still deep in him, but an ‘end goal’ is not. There’s no sense of getting these hundred sagging swollen corpses off his back. It’s that he can’t get out from under him. It’s that dead men is all he sees.

All of them.

--

The purpose and clarity of drills are, as always, a relief. Erhardt became a great swordsman through loving what he does. He’s quick, he’s inventive, he’s unforgiving. He’s known for skinning knuckles and snapping little bones. Common accidents in training men; he’s been accused of causing a high amount of them before. He winnows; men who know they aren’t up to dodging his blows won’t fight him. Those who are looking for a challenge will. And he gets better, and the chaff curls away. He gains a reputation for causing little injuries and as such doesn’t have to focus on being careful and not causing them. His mind goes quiet and the blade flashes like a night’s lone candleflame. He drifts into a serene, violent dream, where things don’t quite make sense, beautifully.  

He will always remember the day they first sparred with great fondness, like finding himself curled up to a good night’s warm acquisition. He may have ensnared him that day he stopped him from brawling with the knights; he might have compelled Olberic to fight him already. Maybe he had been thinking about it, about the hand the held fast his wrist. Maybe it rested on his enigmatic mind or maybe not, maybe he simply saw Erhardt deep in battle with another man that morning, and decided he wanted a go. Who was to say? He saw Olberic suddenly floating before him, his warm blood skipping from moment to moment just like a dream shifts around you from idea to idea, a new topic, a new idea, a new body.

“Well then,” he heard himself saying, and he sounded very cheerful. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Eisenberg?”

 “We’re sparring,” said Olberic, both as a fact, as if reminding him that’s what everyone in the yard was doing, and as an offer.

“So we are,” said Erhardt, after a half-pause, more than too much of a gap in his conversational defense. Olberic was holding the executioner’s sword. His sword, his only sword. And it wasn’t a threat, it was a fact, a fact he wielded like a man carries his own weight.

Erhardt half-turned his sword in his grip. It was practice in the mountains, a practice they were unaware was idiosyncratic, to keep one’s blades sharp and in use for training and play. His own was light, single-handed, understated, the initially undervalued handsword that had surprised him by outlasting a dozen better weapons. He would be parrying Olberic, not blocking him, which suited him well. To stand strong and take the hit was not his style.

(At no point would it occur to him to just decline. It would have been odder than accepting. They would be fellow men at arms eventually.)

“Shall we begin, Sir Adleig?” asked Olberic to Erhardt’s silence. He was already poised; he had approached Erhardt poised to fight. It seemed his mood was good, his look was almost a smile.

“At your leisure,” Erhardt countered.

He felt light, blissfully light, as he parried and turned Olberic’s first blow, which came for him like a hurtling hawk. The art of battle had first been written in his heart as deflection. He decided to start simple, exploratory, as he turned Olberic’s blade away and replied with the expected comeback, like small talk. A strike to his upper right. Olberic easily blocked it; blocked, not deflected. Blunt, end of sentence. Erhardt let him blade fall down the sudden stop and slip under his hilt; Olberic avoided the sudden hit to his knuckles that many men had not. And he didn’t quite expect Erhardt to passively allow the block and fall down below it, but he blocked that, too, windmilling the big throat-cutter with a slight movement that was really an impressive display of arm strength.

Even so, Olberic’s impressive block was understated and humble, like waving away a compliment. With polite respect Erhardt backed up a half-step, conceding the point, making it clear he would attack Olberic’s other side now. He seemed to wait patiently for it, though really, it was the time he needed to pull the big blade back and ready himself again, the weight of it balanced on his forearms and levelling the bulk of his body like the ox by the yoke. Erhardt wanted to see how he chose to block a solid hit when he had he time to decide how.

He wasn’t disappointed; Olberic turned it into his own attack. As Erhardt came to his left side he effectively stopped the hit by lunging forward with the whole blade. Erhardt’s strike smacked right off of it and the tip of Olberic’s blade came harrowingly close to knocking into his side. It couldn’t kill him, since the tip was dull. It would be foolish to seriously use that sword as a piercing weapon. He COULD knock someone flat with it if he wanted, though.

That would not happen today. They were neither of them in the business of destruction this morning and, inexorably, the tone of something else crept into the simple spar as it sped up, growing past an introductory explanation, the background of their skills, the proof they could both handle a simple hit. After they had exchanged light words for half a minute Erhardt began to hit twice as fast, a surprise, like he had embarked on something of interest for him. It detracted Olberic’s ability to avoid his strikes not at all; his defense was admirable for his age and level of experience. It did stymie somewhat his ability to make good, reasoned attempts to strike at Erhardt, he noticed.

Olberic defended himself from each strike, properly parrying a few (just shutting down most) and his eyes followed them too closely, not too closely. Never should you be especially interested in anything but your own skin when fighting someone. Erhardt is a big fan of diffused attention; a portion of his mind for every little thing going around him. Olberic was interested indeed in Erhardt’s style and skill, his body following the movements of his blade, blatantly so, distracted from his own half of his fight by watching Erhardt’s.

He was less flattered than amused; Olberic may not have been much younger than him but he was sorely less tried, not used to fighting men by his own admission. He could kill Olberic, he decided, as he judged every one of the King’s Men he had met. At least, as he was now.

So separated from his cognizance of the situation, floating in the room between both swords, the sounds around him, this move and the next (and being entirely sleep-deprived) he cannot know for sure but he believes he made a mistake; Olberic’s eyes suddenly caught him hard like a leg in a trap. He had seen something; something had shown on Erhardt’s face. Or in the tension of his body, too tightly coiled to pounce. Or maybe nothing at all. Maybe it was a coincidence, that Erhardt thought, I could kill you, untried squire, and in the next, Olberic’s eyes went like stone on him.

Anyway, threw the sword blunt-sided into his shoulder and knocked him halfway to the ground. Erhardt stumbled to the side, twisting an ankle for a brief painful second, and just barely got his balance. It was a foul shot, and someone who gave a damn about foul or legitimate sparring might have starting blustering. As it was, a small part of Erhardt buried deep was frightened it had just been caught staring; a bit of leftover assassin that hadn’t been quite polished over, a disgusting thing that hated to be noticed. The ugly, ugly truth raw and red, like a demon glaring out from within the sockets of his skull. He raised his sword over his body as if to shield it, to cover up its eyes again.  

But it was over. Olberic was wincing, pulling his sword back and setting it on the ground. He was rolling his shoulder experimentally; he might have pulled something with that stunt. More importantly, Erhardt realized, as he used significant willpower to start lowering his own sword, Olberic again had the same tightness in his eyes he had had after starting a fight in the street. He was ashamed of himself. He hadn’t meant to do that. He had failed to hold that blow back.

An unreasoned and unknowing reaction to what he had seen, likely just out of the corner in his eye, lurking under Erhardt’s skin. Good instincts. And here he was, quickly, adeptly blaming the wrong person.

An almost unfaked smile of gracious acceptance blossomed on his face as he walked the two steps back to Olberic (all the while rushing to put his skin back on, his years of practice being a loyal and honorable knight). “Pushed it a bit hard?” he asked, using breathlessness to excuse the strain in his voice.

“Yes,” said Olberic flatly, rolling the shoulder one more time with a wince. “Ahh, I know better,” he reprimanded himself, “especially to not use a stupid hit like that—Sir Adleig, I didn’t hurt you?” he asked hopefully. There was a shimmer in his eyes, that sense of honor wanting Erhardt to stroke it.

And so he did. It was an easy out. “Not at all,” he assured him, easily swinging his sword back into sheathe to show his arm moving naturally. “A bruise at most.”

It seemed the pain in Olberic’s shoulder disappeared with the concern that he had misstepped when he lost control (again) disappeared. He stood straighter; his face relaxed somewhat. (It was disproportionately rewarding.) “Good, I don’t have the stomach for injuries this early in the morning.”

“Well, try not to be pulling checks like that on more breakable men, then,” said Erhardt, flattering himself just a hair distastefully. Olberic, however, seemed to like it, breaking out the most charming little chuckle. “And rest that shoulder, get it into shape,” he told him, and when Olberic looked like he had half a mind to protest, he said, “I’d like to polish that form of yours, and I won’t do it when you’re out of shape.”

Olberic looked happy when he said it, not a kind of happy, not like he was having his ego stoked, or triumphant like he had planned this, or any other kind of happy but the one that surprised a man, and put a pink flush on his cheeks.

--

The year that went by before Olberic’s knighting saw him feed his impoverished social skills, never getting rid of his charmingly simple conversationalism, in which he expressed what he meant and meant what he expressed, but he developed his taste for proper small talk, the correct responses to greetings, his comprehension of city humor. Erhardt would like to say he helped with that immensely; going through the process of bringing Olberic to his side meant that older or meaner men were less likely to verbally fuck with him. Erhardt was well known to not take shit; he was polite as a fucking Dame and would polite you right out of the room if he had to. He was proper, and he could out-proper you blindfolded. He could play games and he could fucking play them better than any man in this room, so people tended to get light on Olberic when he was there, to avoid drawing his ire. As such Olberic finally had opportunities to observe the banter, listen to someone do it proper, and decide which parts he wanted to emulate, which to discard. He was taught a run of card games, dice games, dances, poems, the things you say at ceremonies here; most by osmosis, some, Erhardt or another, more elderly knights pulled him aside for. Erhardt watched this progress because he couldn’t help noticing it; Olberic was simple in his tastes but intelligent, quick to absorb, and confident, easy with taking up a game, a round of tall tales around drinks, a custom he didn’t know about before today. People slowly realized he couldn’t be mocked because he simply wouldn’t be ashamed of himself; if he spoke out of turn, he apologized, sat back, moved on. He faltered if, and only if (as Erhardt found himself keeping a more than casually interested on) he crossed some laws internal to his body, that personal code he had sensed inside him.

These were the elements of Olberic’s code, perhaps the social norms of his clan, perhaps imparted on him by a family matron, perhaps gathered by his observations of the natural world, perhaps the influence of some impressive role model (who knew): he was to do work without complaining, and not ask for breaks in work. He was to fight without flinching or faltering, and not ask for mercy in battle. He was not to refuse a request for help unless he knew it was made in bad faith. He was not to make his own requests unless the task couldn’t reasonably be done by one man. He was not to ask questions of others; for the most part, he was to keep his thoughts to himself as well. He was to stand up for and defend the weak; it was on this point he could sometimes become contentious, too quick to defend civilians against his fellows. Some strict adherence to deferent treatment to women was followed, but it barely different from his politeness to men excepting that he would argue with men and women, it seemed, were not to be told no. He was not to question another man’s motives, encroach on his space or possessions, or remove his work or honor from him. And, it seemed, he was not hesitant to reproach an insult or even bring it to blows, but it was a tantamount sin to lose control of his temper.

From this, Erhardt could piece together that he came from a hospitality culture; family was first in life, clan second, and the stranger in the home was king. This explained why he was so unprepared for barracks life; whose home was it, who was the family, and who was the guest? It must have seemed like an insane breakdown of social norms to him at first, but he was adapting well.

Most these internal rules he followed as a man of the city knew to take his shoes off in the home, greet a person when in speaking range but not before, and to not touch women’s work. But there was some kind of personal stake in his determination to not lose his temper, some sting from the past.

Erhardt never intended to wonder about Olberic, but he really lent himself to it. When one spent enough time with him, he would eventually fall silent, his eyes on the fire, the hilt of his sword in his hands, occasional unexpressed emotions crossing the surface of his eyes. With his silence, Erhardt had nothing to do but wonder.

--

 

 

And so, a year and a half after Olberic first came to the capital that he was set to be knighted. And it was the night before his ceremony—and it should have been the night after—that he first called Erhardt ‘friend.’

A more blustering knight would have been insulted to be called ‘friend’ by a man in training, even if he was set to be knighted tomorrow. One has to stand on ceremony. One had to uphold the ceremonies, or else one is forced to wonder what separates them from the young men being knighted tomorrow, or w month from now, or next year, or when they grow up at all. Olberic is now aware it’s a misstep, because he says it quietly, in an earthy rumble which sinks just below the others laughing and chattering in a hall.

“It’s yours, friend,” he said, handing Erhardt a horn of beer. He had a pleased, lightly drunken smile on his face, surrounded by a soft flush.

The nature of drinking-horns is that even the largest is not very big. Erhardt wrapped his hand around it and consequently around Olberic’s and he was shocked by how warm it was—even the back of his hand. Of course, Olberic being such a he man, he must be generating some heat.

“It’s your party,” Erhardt said in the same low tone (nearly the same, Olberic possessed a natural bass which he nor most men could not quite stoop to) as he pulled the drinking horn away. “You’re the one being knighted tomorrow.”

“I am,” Olberic agreed, turning minutely away so his eyes could run appraisingly up and down the great hall, witness the men at their food and drink, his peers enjoying hard liquor, sweet cakes, expensive cuts of mat they surely barely tasted. “Which means I am the one who wants to be straight on two feet tomorrow.”

“Tonight’s the night to remember,” Erhardt teased, meant at a jab at the young men getting absolutely blasted just down the way.

Olberic either missed the humor or didn’t care for it. “Tomorrow’s the day I want to remember,” he said quietly. “When I truly come into this hall as one of them.”

Erhardt takes a careful, steady breath. He smiles. He intensely, vividly hates Olberic, with a hate that is physical like a blade, stuck in him. He hates how he loves this den of wolves; he hates this den of wolves. He hates the murdering king, he hates his men, he hates their loyalty, he hates being outside of it.

He’s known men perceptive enough to catch a fake grin like this. Olberic is not. “Catch me tomorrow night, once I’m not nerves and hot blood, and then I’ll have a party,” he said, taking a conservative drink from his own horn. “Drinking the night before,” he groused.

Erhardt snickered almost despite himself. Someone—his mother, actually, he hard learned in the past year of getting to know him—has instilled in him the terror of being caught flat-footed. He would never drink and unwind before a big day, only after. “Al this time, and you are still very nearly the goat-herder,” Erhardt whispered to him, taking care to not say that so loudly as to embarrass him. He’s a dead man like the rest of them, he reminded himself—what harm is there in preserving his pride?

He wasn’t embarrassed, either. He laughed and had to cover his mouth as he swallowed his sip of beer. “In truth I have realized now that I will always be,” he admitted with a quietness that matched Erhardt’s. “What changes I thought would come to make me into a King’s man—I realize now they are superficial. We all learn and imitate them, and often we feel them, but we are ourselves underneath, as our mothers made us.”

Erhardt blinked. He was reminded occasionally that, while oblivious to social cues, Olberic was smart, and had a piercing inward gaze on his own actions and intentions whose judgements he rarely divulged aloud. Such reminders were often uncomfortable, sometimes sharp. Erhardt liked to subtly discourage the possibility of having that gaze turned on him. “It’s true that there are things which can change a man… learning the exact etiquette rules for the three kinds of honor dules isn’t one of those things.”

Olberic laughed, as intended. “Sir Adlieg!” he said, as appreciation. “Now, on the cusp of it; of course this is when I wonder about my choice of staying with the King’s Guard.”

“Oh?” asked Erhardt, interest piqued. He would prefer that Olberic leave the capital; he tried to convince men he thought were good men to go far away.

“I might become more if I go somewhere where there is actual fighting!—but there is no true fighting anywhere, now, and I have no taste for becoming garrison-lord of a border town. I’ll stay here; here at least we’re useful keeping the city fed and clothed, even if we’re preparing for combat in theory.”

Lovely. He couldn’t remember hearing that my empathy from the rest of these men condensed. His hand clutched around the drinking-horn; he fought a grimace. Lovely. “You’re afraid of boredom,” he accused him.

“All men should be,” he replied. “Have you seen what a bored man will do?”

He once saw a group of young brigands see who could get the closed to tease a ___ who couldn’t quite reach them in the trees. ___, leaning his long arms down with a  sneer, as if reaching for a beloved, certain he was just out of reach, was snapped between the beast’s jaws and devoured. “I’ve played strange games,” he said evenly.

“Or we could do something of some use,” Olberic agreed, and argued. He was staring, not at Erhardt, but around him, at his nearly-brothers-in-arms. “So many men here will get skittish of work, or not doing the right work, of working overmuch. The richest and most corrupt of men do not work, they notice; they strive to emulate them in hopes of gaining their jewel-shine. I would be disgusted to realize that was my legacy. Being of use as a grain-thresher is better. We can at least feed some mouths.”

“Now, all of that is far outside of the party spirit,” Erhardt chided him, taking a long drink to wash down the bit of nervous sourness that had started rising in his throat. It sounded—it sounded too much like himself. “Go; fraternize a little. You’ve been training with these men for over a year, act—go act your age for once.”

Olberic grinned in his periphery. “We are nearly the same age,” he reminded him.

“Go,” Erhardt insisted, pushing his shoulder away.

--

Erhardt was being careful. He needed to join the Ling’s personal guard, and had been working toward that goal for some time—a little longer than he would have liked. He wouldn’t say that the waiting had made him impatient, but he was beginning to bear special grudges for the men who had made it into the guard.

Recognizing that in himself, he purposefully put a distance between his person and the inner court for a little while. If his machinations weren’t getting him where he needed to be, perhaps instead he could prepare to challenge one of the King’s personals to single combat. It was brash, and it could backfire on him, but he thought he could pull it off.

This was how he ended up in a cemetery with Sir Olberic Eisenberg, knight of six months. Well, the cemetery was incidental. Erhardt wanted to be seen less by his fellow knights for a while. He wanted them to forget his battle prowess, and not notice it increasing. Quiet places being few, the choice of the cemetery was mostly incidental. It was simply where he had found Olberic the first time.

What had Olberic been doing in the cemetery? Erhardt never asked. He hadn’t been mourning, he had looked content and calm in the foggy morning when Erhardt found him among the weathered gravestones. Olberic had asked him what he was looking for; Erhardt replied, some quiet. Olberic suggested that the cemetery was a fine place. Thus invited, Erhardt stepped over the ring of flat stones that marked the unhallowed land’s entrance; a word led to word and the place became the place he and Olberic met.

Erhardt did still detest Olberic for his innate and real loyalty, honestly, and goodness.