1.
Golden Hands
She had been younger than the Queen who now stood sovereign over her lands and her mountain from her beloved winter fortress when war came to the kingdom that was then called Goldengate, having, as all golden regents must, just undergone the Honing of the Blade three springtides earlier - she could remember the high, sharp scent of poplar, wide golden leaves falling from the sky like a ship at sail or a shower of coins striking wrought stone, the whisper of a song sung by the breeze which called her name; that name being Queen and rightful and chosen by fate.
Prince Alcuin Gildestag Guildestek, the Yellow Stag of Greenruine, the Westlands, Duke of Feverfir and Firstborn of the Black Alder Court, was taken by the sleeping sickness the harvest prior, leaving their father the Tannestag, King Angthelme without his prize foal to take the throne of Goldengate, Greenruine, Feverfir, et all - it was then that Anthelme Zliverstag and his Queen, the Sulverdoe, Argentea of Goldengate, turned to their last hope: the Guldendoe, little Angharad Friscenii who loved her people and her mountain with all her wild, gilded heart.
Even then, with the fate of all on her shoulders, she had had no desire to be Tannendoe.
It had been Alcuin destined to rule, chosen by the Sedemaiden Sedehenna Greenruine herself and blessed with head and shoulders strong enough to bear the Antler Anadem of Kin and Country and she destined to run wild as the Meuse, her body and blood given to the land that birthed her, or so she had believed, but it was never to be. The sleep had taken him so quickly and drawn him down so deeply that even their greatest healers could not synthesize a cure and before the first frost kissed the dying blades of grass, they were chanting sacred songs for the god of peaceful passing and planting Alcuin beneath it, sure to bloom again with the flowers only to be plucked and braided into a wreathed coronet worthy of Memmetaal’s stony brow. For three risings of the sun she had waited in a clearing carpeted with leaves of gold to consult the wisdom of the pines, pausing neither for food nor for rest. When the sun rose on the fourth day, her path was clear: she would go on in his stead and undergo the Honing.
To be sovereign is to be both weapon and wielder, as the old Goldengate family adage said. Each Afterfawn sovereign has made for them a weapon of incredible quality and the shape and form which they find most pleasing to them - the finest metals and the rarest jewels served to forge the sharpest blades, those maces and mauls best suited for crumpling armor like cooling slag and pounding bone back into meal, those spears that flew the farthest and highest and fastest: weapons fit for kings and worthy of queens. Before the Afterfawn may wield the weapon, whatever shape it may take, they must be the first to taste its might and hone it against their own body so they may know the damage of which they are capable.
The Widow’s Brain Grief was a sickle the length of a greatsword, its blade forged from lightning glass and as wide and flat as any folded steel but for the reverse curved blade with its mean and elegant hook, which when exposed to shed blood reveals runes of mercy and temperance, spelling out the phrase
GALLAF RHYDU CYN GWELD DEFNYDD.
May I rust before I see use.
The unusual blade lay seated upon a crossguard of horn taken from the very head of the Firstfawn as the Anadem before them, furnished with hilt of finished alabaster shell and pure platinum - it would have been laughably easy to mistake the hunk of polished garnet at its end for a pommel, and therein lay its brilliance: it was in fact the hilt of Act of Mercy, a hidden crystal misericorde which sprang from within the greater blade, its hilt in turn more roughly etched with the words
MAE TRUGAREDD YN CYMRYD LLAWER O SIAPIAU.
Mercy takes many shapes.
When the sun was high and its light dripped slowly through the canopy, she could still see the glint of the blade as her father held it aloft, the coming of doom in his quicksilver eyes. The blade slid in with a whisper of precious metal and flesh, the quarrel between the two forgotten entirely.
It had surprised her, the complete absence of friction as grief slid through tissue down to bone, the ages of the world that passed between piercing and pain - kingdoms and entire oceans rose and fell in the time it took for her mind to equate the stream of gore pouring from her shoulder where the blow had stopped precisely short of severing tendon from bone and limb from body with the rush of blood in her ears, the sweat gathering on her brow, the buckle in her knees that had forced her to hit the dirt as if her strings had been cut, bent in supplication to the head that bore the crown; stars were birthed and set fully ablaze and burnt out overhead before the sudden thickness of her tongue in her mouth, the sleep-clumsiness of her limbs, and the roar of something that reeked of ancient ancestral fire at the base of her neck, before pain registered itself under its true name.
Even now she could not say how long it had taken her to regain her footing. She had, of course, as was expected, and if one does not count the ease with which a stiff wind might have blown her back down again, and steadied herself, for the trial was not yet complete. As was custom, it was the Queen who took up the misericorde in hands dripping with jewelry of finest gold and brightest platinum and bestowed upon the Afterfawn a royal act of mercy.
Argentea Zulverdoe brimmed with pride beholding her daughter delirious with pain and bleeding steadily, body loose and open to the blow as her lessons demanded, golden eyes glassy, lit from within with some unvoiced determination and she not yet 20 in her years. Wrapping one hand around the hilt and the other about the nape of her daughter’s neck, she had brought their foreheads together and so reduced the world to none but one another and its own gilded edges before driving the point of the Act of Mercy up, in, and parallel to her ribcage. She had been prepared to catch her, too, when the pain had shifted subtly to suffering before speeding straight on to agony, aware of the scratch of the fabric of her ceremonial gown against her own scar, nearly as old now as the Afterfawn, but she shook off any and all attempts at aid in favor of drawing herself up to the pinnacle of her 6 feet and some odd inches, spine straight as folded steel, sans any trace of previous structural damage.
Angharad’s feet carried her as in a dream. She could not recall pulling the blade from her own side and holding it aloft so all could see that she, too, bled Merovingian garnet, but according to the epics and her own parents much later, she had; nor could she recall carrying it across the floor to lay it at the King’s feet; nor could she recall him gently urging him to rise, but she could remember with perfect clarify the moment she bent her head and received the Antler Anadem and her royal name, Tannendoe Angharheda Goldenhand, the Guldendoe of Greenruine and the Westlands, Regent Chosen of Feverfir and the Black Alder Court, Wardeness of the Westling Herd, Blessed Blackmaiden of the Widowswatch.
Widow’s Brain Grief laid lovingly in her outstretched hands, Act of Mercy once again safely stowed within the Widow’s heart, she swore the ancestral oaths; to keep the sacred secrets of all young and growing things and always to seek the wisdom of the pines, to reach for mercy above all other weapons and practice daily at its craft, remembering through the scars she bears its lethal efficacy when wielded wisely. But she had sworn her own, too:
When warriors perish bravely in their keep
Shall Fiád Angharad determine what shape mercy takes
When at the golden gates the widows weep
Shall the Widow’s Brain Grief seek justice for the loving heart that breaks
Before the orphan aches with early loss
Shall Freastalaí Angharad sing a song of hope that springs
Before their forebears’ barrows are thick with moss
Shall an Act of Mercy rule the day and with it victory bring
If the Anadem of Ancients is to be that which breaks the bough
Shall Angharad Makke fan Metaal test her mettle and her nerves of steel
If ever Guldendoe forgets her solemn vow
Shall Angharad Barrowbound at the altar of the people kneel.
In the wisdom of the pines she had heard the whispers of the poplars, which contained the souls of her ancestors, and their ancestors and theirs. Her mother’s mother’s mother, Alica of Iceni, revealed to her there her solemn duty as sovereign as dictated by Sedemaiden long before her birth when Greenruine was still growing: it is for the Guldendoe alone to tend the garden of widowsweed inevitably planted by wars fought in Goldengate’s name carefully, closely, mixing sorrow into the soil and feeding it with eternal sunshine to grow an army that wants for no mother or father.
There had, of course, then been the matter of selecting her Folkmoetsje, who would advise her in all matters great and small until death or dishonor ended her reign. The role of Adimirande, the Tannendoe’s most trusted advisor, went to Askitreia Fredebringt of Echen, eldest friend of Angharad and already the Black Alder Court’s ambassador to Bellum and Aremorica; Algemien of the army of Goldengate went to Astyrian Hierax of Bellum, a red-blooded Scythian as her father and her most loyal protector, Royal Argivaris and Teller of Tales was Taleia Goriel who could neither read nor write but never forgot a single sordid detail of a single storytelling from that day to this; Royal Ironmonger and Izerensmid Halygast Gneiss of Ostrogotha would oversee the crafting of all specialty arms while Royal Jeweler and Glimmasmid became the honor of Enoguen Styr.
Lantmätare of the kingdom of Goldengate could go to none other than another childhood friend, though this choice drew a chorus of whispers - Tjur Eistir Elge of the neighboring kingdom to the east: Wynwallow, the jewel of Mount Meus, as well as Alloy Keep, the electrum mines beneath, and the Evergreen Sea that lay beyond it (not that anyone was bragging).
So began a time of peace and great prosperity, though the sun would not rise on Angharhede Goldenhand’s reign officially until the first bloom in the spring of that, the 4th year since Inket Bjirk Pergament, He Who Opened The Gates of Time and Memory, had brought writing to their lands. In the months that preceded her ascension there was a great deal of work to be done, a great number of plans to be first drafted and then enacted, the first of which would be selecting a king to bear her heirs.
Where she had once been free to wed or not wed as so pleased her, the future of Goldengate rested now on her back and she must see the line of the Pinestag and the First Fawn continue on unbroken. Suitors came from as far as Scandza in their royal delegations sailing along the Meuse, which was called Sedehenna’s Tears by her people, their brilliantly colored banners ribboning in the light, carrying spices and strange ore and stranger people from lands she could not even hope to fathom: Ciecierado Torchitorio, a Vastergot who politely absconded from their welcoming rituals, citing sickness as though he could hide the queer sort of disdain that twisted his dark, handsome features; and one of the Petrified Folk out of Fersteane from whom many kept a wide berth, having heard the longstanding rumors that his people were so innately attuned to the poisons of the Petrified Valley that they secreted them in their very flesh but whose welcome to Goldengate was as warm as any fireside; none who so nearly turned her head as Drannen Domesday, the disgraced son and former heir of Saxon Domesday.
He had been polite, charming, even flirtatious at turns as their friendship quickly blossomed, but lacked the passion and fervor of some of her more eager pursuers, avoiding the usual overtures performed by hopeful lovers as deftly as questions about his past and his home. It was only after several weeks of mystery that she’d drawn him deep into the Feverwood where only the birds and her ancestors could hear them, armed with a bottle of strawberry mead whose vintage predated the coming of Inket, prised the truth from him at last.
Out had come the whole sad, sordid story of how he’d come to lose his title: his staid refusal to wed a woman from a neighboring tribe of Celts had been less than ideal, certainly, but was not what had assured the stripping away of his title as successor - his intimate relationship with Thys, his second in battle, prevented him from giving his heart, body, and soul to another, even if it meant sacrificing his ability to produce an heir to his bloodline. Thys had been banished on pain of death and he, exiled, the title gone to his younger brother who more than anything a soul could want wanted power.
He had boarded his little ship, slept beneath the cold winter stars, and let it carry him where the river thought he ought to go - it carried him into the Meuse and onto God’s Fists, as the mountains Meus and Maor were called by the Saxons and Celts, and into the procession headed for her very kingdom, and so they found themselves drinking illicit mead in the deep wood. It was as simple, he said, and as complicated as that. And it was. Although it could not be he that she wedded, the two had grown close over the course of their confusing courtship and she welcomed him into her court as an esteemed guest.
In the end, the answer had been under her nose all the while - or, perhaps more accurately, across the valley. It would be the Tjur of Wynwallow and her own trusted Lantmätare, Eistir Elge. As it happened, neither of them had any particular interest in marrying one another (or anyone at all, for that matter), but Eistir was a prince who needed to wed as she was a future queen who needed to wed and their longstanding friendship at least promised a future that held some measure of comfort and a sort of love, if not the kind the poets sang about in their halls, and their union would be sure to bear a generation of strong, hearty children - it wouldn’t be perfect, but it was more than most in their positions could expect to have, Drannen not least among them.
With the blessings of her father and his, she had descended Maor as he had descended Meus and the two had met in the very center of the valley between, where their mothers bound their hands together in a warrior’s clasp around the thorny stem of a white wild mountain rose with braided lengths of sun-bleached white wool and looked on proudly as they’d each pricked their thumbs on the thick protrusions that looked for tooth than thorn from a distance. She’d worn a circlet of birch, black bryony, and white violet and her favorite golden festival dress from girlhood and carried mountain roses while he stood tall and regal in the lurid, bewitching blue-green and the antlered crown of House Elge.
They had watched as their blood traveled from either side of the knot that held them fast to meet in the middle, mixing and blending and their lineages would in short order if the gods were good to them, and when the sun hit the horizon line, antiquing the world around them in the golden patina of its setting, the knot was dark and filled enough with their blood to see clearly as it was cut from them. A hole was dug in the front directly beneath the rose and in it went once their hands were freed, the cord safely spirited away to the Foarâlder Sanctuary deep in the heart of the Feverwood where it would hang beside her mother and father’s and, when the rose was fully concealed by the overturned soil, a single electrum stake was hammered into the ground as a marker, for their union was more than that of two hearts - it was a promise to join their two great houses and kingdoms and bring forth a new age of exploration and joy. Where that stake gleamed like a coin left for the dead they would one day lay the first of the foundations for the physical product of the match: a new city between the mountains on whose slopes their forebears were raised.
They would call it Hjärtat. The Heartland.
Less than a week later had seen Greenruine and the Evergreen Sea awash with color as seemingly every flower for 10,000 leagues opened its petals to watch her coronation. A new golden gown was made, this one of fine yellow velvet befitting her new station and paired with electrum jewelry from the kingdom’s newly adjoined mines, Widow’s Brain Grief, Act of Mercy, and at last, the Antler Anadem.
Eistir, the first of the Electrestags, looked as if he had been born to stand at her side, resplendent in black velvet with gold trim and the new crest of their joined houses, a set of moose antlers and deer antlers interlocked above a field of mountain roses, embroidered on the breast. In another week she would stand beside him at his coronation in black and the shade of evergreen the Elges loved so dearly, adorned in violet and chamomile and lily of the valley, and all that would be left then was the minor matter of rushing to produce an heir to their joint holdings, but in the moment she had thought of nothing but the love of her people which washed over her in waves and was returned to them tenfold like the tide.
They welcomed their first son, Eon Eliatz Elge Goldengate, future king of Hjärtat, Heir of all Greenruine, on the coldest night of winter. He was a rosy-cheeked baby boy with wisps of spun gold for hair and his mother’s golden eyes, though he was sure to grow into Eistir’s double with time and had his pronounced, angular nose to prove it, and if she had thought the love she bore her people was great it was eclipsed by the burning sun of raging affection that had taken Eon’s place in her belly once he vacated it.
Huddled deep within the earth beneath where Hjärtat would one day lie by way of their separate mountain homes, they had kept him warm between their own bodies beside the fire on a lush bed of furs a safe distance away from errant sparks and had known such delirious happiness it made her smile even now to remember them marveling at their little prince, his 8 tiny fingers and 2 tiny thumbs, all 10 perfect toes.
In the spring, when the frost thawed and the earth was once again soft and forgiving, they pulled their electrum stake from the earth and officially broke ground on the village of Hjärtat, the planning, construction, and raising of which would be overseen by none other than friend of the crown, Lord Drannen Domesday of the Black Alder Court.
The high, bright days of her marriage are hallmarked by the same strange alchemy which sweetens the berry and turns it into mead with time and heat and luck. She had not intended or expected to fall in love with Eistir in earnest, but somewhere between the birth of their second and third children, the princess Eleveth Zuana, heiritrix of Goldengate, and the prince Drannen Thys Perside (despite the modest protestations of the man from whom he gleaned his name), heir of Wynwallow, she had looked first at her growing family and then at the stolid man by her side, broad shoulders no less sturdy for bearing the weight of the world upon them and realized she had achieved that which few royals may say in earnest they have achieved: power and contentment.
This revelation was quickly followed by the births of the princesses Arsendis Mascarose, heiritrix of the Evergreen Sea, and Alica Kharitania, heiritrix of Feverfir, though all but Lord Drannen and Lady Askitreia were too polite to do more than pass knowing looks amongst themselves.
That is not to say, of course, that the rule of Angharhede and Eistir had been without its trials to face.
Approaching what would have been Eon’s 10th springtide and Eleveth’s 9th, when the town of Hjärtat and its capital of Godswallow were still new, the god of murder came to stay. Rådbråka, which is and means to break upon the wheel, is neither male nor female, young nor old, good nor evil, though the whispers amongst the lowborn folk would have told you otherwise. Rådbråka had come carried on the backs of their followers, the Slaktare - the Butchers, themselves carried into the valley on bearback, their faces painted with the ceremonial ashes of their ancestors, their clothes the dull rusted color of dried blood, the low, eerie chorus of voices chanting sacred dirges to the rhythm of their mounts’ great steps like birdsong which led only to the barrows where her people lay their lost.
Rådbråka had waited patiently, too, as their followers carried them single file through the silent, suspicious kingdom and all the way to the feet of the Queen and the King where the Strychmästare, Riefge Roth of Scandza knelt in armor of bear hide and petrified black pine and broke the vow of silence she had kept tirelessly since devoting herself to Rådbråka 9 years earlier to speak on behalf of her people.
Some of the rumors were true, said Riefge, though not all: while they were not, in fact, the resurrected souls of the vengeful dead, as some had heard, they were vengeful and they were intimately acquainted with death - both those passings that were peaceful and those passings which more closely resembled a violent shove from the world of the living.
They had become this in the face of what they called the Romans, an army they wagered large enough to surround the entirety of the kingdom 3, perhaps 4 times before a single gap in their ranks could be noted, a golden tidal wave which crashed into villages and places of divine worship and the dark, secret places for which only those born to and of the land knew the name like the wrath of a thousand gods, replacing whatever ancestral gods they encountered along the way with their own as they went. No one knew when the murder god had entered their midst, but for 100 years her people had stood strong, though the boot of Rome would have pressed their faces into the very mud it tried to claim, making offerings all the while to great impartial Rådbråka who is also called Hyulbrytare the Wheelbreaker.
These offerings were a greater honor than the Romans deserved, for the release of a soul was a holy act traditionally accompanied by ritual and tradition and there was no greater calling than to set even those spirits of their greatest enemies free. For a decade now the Slaktare had moved across their lands, weary of the endless cycle of subjugation barely tempered by bloodshed, though no less devoted for their fatigue, carrying with them the Tabernak Bloedige Blede (which in the common tongue of Goldengate and Wynwallow could be translated as the Tabernacle of the Bloodied Blade) and following closely its teachings.
The way the Butchers saw it aggression, violence, brutality, these things are natural and innate and must be reasonably and periodically appeased for the good of all, lest our baser urges drive us to shed blood when it is neither holy nor necessary. Their devotion represented the ruthless brutality of the natural world, which unlike men could not be tamed or intimidated, was not subject to bribe or of a mind to bargain, and paid no mind to where on a map they chose to draw and redraw their silly little lines. They were a gentle, devout folk in search of refuge in a region becoming known the world over for its stability and prosperity and they would be no trouble at all if they were allowed to stay, of that they could be sure.
Here Angharad rose from her throne after some murmured consideration with Eistir, crossed the room, and extended a hand to Riefge so she might rise from the floor and meet the Queen as an equal - one leader with the safety of those who relied upon her judgment to another. Standing eye to eye, the Black Alder Court held its breath around them as the two women remained locked in some silent exchange for a minute, two minutes, perhaps even two and a half before Angharad had grinned like to light up the entirety of the throne room.
The Wisdom of the Pines contained the knowledge of many things and she knew their god well not through her worship of him, but of his wife Voica Vaste, goddess of peaceful passings, and his sons Scalli and Solt, the Libbendea, their souls split at the exact moment that life becomes death. Slaktarism and Ruination were beloved cousins of one another, though they had perhaps not seen one another in a while, and the Slaktare, too, would be welcomed as cousins.
Riefge was made warden of parcel of land at the north end of Hjärtat which they called Askadamme, or Ashes and Dust, and after a few unflattering years of continued distrust the Butchers also found their place in the Heartland. Over those years of negotiating Angharad and Riefge shifted from colleagues to friends to close confidantes, and so it was that Angharad had no real course but to believe the foretelling when Strychmästare Roth came to her late one summer evening to relay a rare message from the Wheelbreaker. Though she did not have Taleia’s head for stories, she could recall with perfect clarity the words spoken to her in the warm, sap-scented dark:
"I have seen a vision, Angharhede of Greenruine. The Evergreen Sea shall roil and burn to the west, Meus and Maor shall crumble back into the earth from whence they rose, and death shall haunt this valley for 1000 years. Goldengate will fall, and Wynwallow, and Hjärtat. Hjuylbrytare has foreseen the golden wave of Rome swelling and turning its tides toward Greenruine, Feverfir, et all and issues this warning: if the golden tide meets Sedehenna’s Tears and marches upon the Golden Kingdom, it will wash away all the free peoples of this land and the next.
Pict, Gaul, Saxon, Goth, these titles will be erased and all will be as Rome, for where Rome stands is Rome. You must prepare to unsheathe Widow’s Brain Grief, its blade doomed never to rust but to be quenched in blood.
You must prepare for war. "
They had begun construction on the great fastness of Greenruine atop Mount Maor at dawn the next day.
