16.9
Smithson wandered through the dead of the night, the sun had begun to rise. The pyre long left behind him, gone dark hours ago, but he had held vigil well past that. Then when the coals were too dim to see he had simply begun walking, he was the last to remain, the embers glow burnt into his eyes, autumn night’s chill nothing to him.
Nothing so simple as icy wind could hurt against how his heart was splitting open inside his chest. Every time he looked at his feet he was surprised there was no blood covering them from a wound. He felt like he was draining away into nothing and a walking corpse. Where had the years slipped away?
It was like she had been gone before she started.
The gossip and tales made jest that Gem was his daughter, that he had sired her with Jewel before her marriage, all of those stories were lies. Yet in so many other ways it was the honest truth.
His heart certainly assured him he was her father.
It was written in his aching chest, beating him black and blue with every shuddering breath. Agony rising and falling up and down his arms, sinking into his hands. His voice dead in his throat for how tightly clenched it was and yet he could still hear the ghost of the scream he dared not release.
The gold and orange of the sunrise was fading away, sliding back behind the clouds after only a brief stab over the Rochford Valley. He felt the threat of rain or snow in the air, but Smithson kept walking, marching without thought or sight for what he was doing or where he intended to go.
Gem was dead, barely a woman, still as small as a child, he’d raised her, strange as that seemed with the nature of Jewel and all the Wyrmish nonsense.
Yet despite it all, he could no longer deny that she was his daughter, and now she was dead.
He tried to think of her eyes, they were not really as black as they appeared, there was a glint within them if you looked close, a blue green so dark you could only see it if Gem let you get close enough to touch your brow to hers.
Like a well with glittering water at night.
Gone now.
Gem was gone, and yet she wasn't, that was the worst part of it, what had driven him to stand until all others had left and stare at the embers of her burnt corpse until they dimmed beyond his sight. That was the knife in his gut and the poison in his veins keeping him in the dark, what had then driven him to walk, to march, wander the village he had been a boy in. Out in the cold that no sane man or woman would have braved but he could not stand to leave.
The child he had raised, had proudly seen grow into a diminutive woman, that he had fed and cleaned and tended too?
She was dead, and yet she lived on as she always had in her Mother.
More than just the eyes, more than words or features or any reminder, but deeply and wholly as he could have wished.
He thought he’d understood what it would mean for the dead souls to be kept. Of what it meant, but with Jewel it seemed so much more real than a whispered voice around a fire, the consoling tones of the Veles on the longest night.
Gem was not some distant soul who he might hear the words of in the night if invoked by a Priest, she was right there inside of Jewel.
And she was dead.
Gwenn and he had spoken of it before, he had thought then it would make it better, but now the truth of it was somehow worse than if she had fully been gone! He’d watched her corpse burn, had listened to the priest speak of her soul being honored and departed and kept by the Veles, and then at the same time had to see her eyes looking back at him from her Mother and Sister’s faces!
The same eyes, not just in their darkness and depths, but in what was looking back at him.
The warmth of the sheltered stable air burned as he found himself in a place that was both familiar and strange.
“O-oh! Captain! Uh, do y-you need a charger? It’s a bit early for them but I c-”
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“No” He spoke and the sound barely sounded human, a croaking rasp of a thing. He cleared his throat, the thickness of a sob painful before he forced himself to find words that didn't resemble the growl of a gryphon.
“No, boy, don’t trouble the horses, it's ill weather for them.”
The boy nervously looked around, he had one arm wrapped around a bundle of fall fodder.
“Oh, uh, well what can I do for you then your lordship, it's mighty early isn't it?”
What was Smithson doing here? In the stables he’d started in, frightening this poor boy. Before he fully realized what he was saying the words had found their way into the chill air.
“I actually came to care for the horses with you.”
The boy gaped up at him, which Smithson supposed was a bit fair, if he’d seen the old Captain of the Rochford Footmen wander into the stables at the crack of dawn when he had been less than a year into his duties?
He honestly might have dropped the animal’s feed in the mud.
Brave boy this one.
“Y-you came to work with me?”
He nodded, moved past the boy, made a familiar turn and without even needing to look found his fingers closing on the familiar shape of a comb. It wasn't one of the ones he had carved as a boy, but the shape was familiar anyway.
“You get them fed and I’ll brush them down, then I’ll help you muck out the stalls, it's too early for the stablemaster to be up for it right? Left it to you and maybe another boy?”
Dumbfounded, the stablehand could only nod and follow behind him and do as he’d been ordered, Smithson only realized when he was gently running the wood back and forth through the winter coat of one of the nags that he was still wearing his finest dress armor.
The boots had built up splatters of brown from marching through the night, more finding its way to his knee as he lowered himself to work gently down the side of the old mare. Not one he knew but old lessons came through to watch what she was comfortable with. To mind the legs in case the mare felt the need to make her displeasure sharply known with hooves.
“You know boy? I once had to do the very same as you every morning.”
A gasp of astonishment was followed by quiet hiss of disbelief.
“No japes! You're a full knight! The captain of the Shining Countess herself! No way you mucked stalls at dawn!”
Smithson could only laugh as he gently ran his finger through the mane of the mare being tended by them.
“Just so, then one day the late Lord Rochford came over to me and said, ‘My Daughter needs some one who knows leather and tack, will you be her squire?’ and after that I had twice the work of any of you, double the chores!”
The gasp of horror of something so awful brought a smile to Smithson’s lips. It hurt his face, it made his eyes sting, it made the sparse shelter of the stable burn even worse to his cheeks. But he found he was chuckling through the pain.
“Yeah I didn't think that was proper fair either, but later, there was a war, and the Countess, still gangly and all over like a weasel and only half as long as she is now? She needed me to attend to her on the march- ah think this gal is done, whose next.”
The boy gawked at him then started to hurry back to get more fodder.
“Over here! Over here! So then you went to war and fought a dozen men and got the honor of being a knight?!”
Smithson laughed as he stood up and moved to go help the boy with his work.
“Not yet I didn't! No, in fact they left me at camp for the whole war! Didn't hardly see a glint of steel or more than an echo of battle the entire campaign! And I still had to shovel shit for the horses and the Gryphons!”
The disgusted horror from that got another chuckle out of Smithson. His chest still felt like it had to be cracking in two, he hadn't slept all night and he was starting to suspect maybe he had properly gone mad under the dark and the stars.
But at the same time here he was, in the warmth and the light of the stables he’d been a boy in getting to taunt and tease some youth that might as well be himself decades past.
“That’s just awful! They call you to war and then have you do the same job as here?! Worse they make you clean up the Gryphon Pen?! Gryphon Fewmets are the worst!”
Smithson could only belt back.
“Oh, you have no idea! Lord Rochford only has one Gryphon after all! The army had over twenty!”
He didn't know how to feel about Jewel, about his daughter haunting him from behind the Wyrm’s eyes, but this morning?
He could at least make a boy laugh and fume at the injustice and path the nurse knight’s life had taken.
Bring joy and wonder to a child and tend to the horses.