136 - Splintered Champion and His Rodent Son

I don’t know who I am any longer.  Once I was the honourable warrior.  My honour, my uprightness, my squeaky clean reputation only drew the attention of an old bush dragon who slavered to gorge himself on me, ruin me for his appetites.

It was enough to be crushed under the talons of a retreat, left in the snow, Nivika with me, our blood pouring out and turning the snow into red slush under us.  The cold saved us.  Who would have thought that in the tsingy we would find more snow and cold than any Lainz or Trovian had ever dreamed of?  Deep enough to kill you, even if you weren’t flayed apart by armoured warbird claws of our own?  D’molfe had charge of us.  He ran me down.

Then Ilax.  I was supposed to hate him but he was as squeaky clean mander warrior as Milar could get.  Brilliant and we’d fought across his country, his razor sharp mountains with soft terran pockets.  The old ones... Nivi knowing he was dying, the Unity baying for proof of my execution... They were more blood-thirsty than they accused us of being.

Grieving him as he took my armour and my place.  Ilax actually sat with me the night after as I howled my grieving and my rage at d’Molf for killing him in his attack on me.  All because I would not sleep with him, lie down for him, kneel for him.  Why couldn’t I have just humbled myself, let him spend his watery seed into my body and forgotten it?  How many wives and zardukar are joined to one they dislike?  How different would that have been?

I was a stiff-necked idiot with strange ideas about what sex meant.  It meant nothing but control to the general.  It meant surrender and destruction for me.  Destruction.  I wanted to die and even though I was so gravely injured the great fall would not come for me.  Like the myth of the doctor treating the First Owner, who flung himself from so great a height that he burned in the air like a falling star; the glittering ice melting and burning in, every day.

Now I have a son and a deovar.  Ilax.  Milar have such loose ideas about sex.  Really. But I’m comfortable enough to marry the man. At least now I am.  I’ve not been happier.  It’s like I’ve found my wholeness, able to dispense with secrets. Then these Hive Birds show up just as I’ve found out the harm one of my secrets did.  My boy.  My Dag and my boy alone.  I never thought in an eon that my cursed father would fling her off without recourse. I still miss Water’s Hope.  Mama... she and grandmother have been the quiet, gentle backbone of our family.  I miss them more than the place.  I want to see Dag again.  I was such a coward, running from her.  I owe her.  I owe her more than a mere apology, more than reparations.

Champion my endarkened, shamed ass.  My son is more honourable than I.  He’d make a better Kraghanz than I would but I know the slime he’d be heading into, at least the edges of it.  His running with Basin rats will stand him in better stead than he knows.

His Radiance just cannot understand what he is getting with the two of us.  A shattered and splinted, splintered champion and his rodent son.  We cannot be the hope of the Empire, my son and I.   

Ilax and I... we are married.  Neither of us can abandon our homes, though I do not want to go back.  This whole journey is torture for me because I am walking back into my destruction lead by the Amir.

Who is close enough to his Radiance to have fought with him, I am certain.  The young Emir-al is doing well enough with the Amir to wipe his nose and rear for him but it is the Amir who knows what is going on.

Well, everyone knows what is going on now.  Everyone is speaking to everyone else an secrets are falling out of the capped hives where they were stored in wax as if someone had taken a hive knife and cut them free.  This Amir is almost laughing at the amount of information being linned around.

The Amir, who handed me the title ‘Brilliance’ in front of someone else, threw me into deep desert to survive or not, trotted me out like a prize stud bird or a rare horse to dung the fields for the fecbees. I need to talk to him in private, while this storm rages, find out exactly how close his Radiance and he are.  I am starting to realize that my life... and the life of my son and Dag may depend on it.