The Broken Crown

Chapter 20

Thomas

While the eastern part of the North, from the coast of the Warm Sea to the parting of the Sister, was covered in dark, volcanic rocks, the longer you rode to the west, the more fertile the lands grew. The mountains still stood high around them; to the south, they guarded the old borderlines between the North and Etheron and to the north, they kept the raiders of the unmapped wilderness beyond at a distance. To the west… who knew what they guarded.

Small, clear streams of melted ice broke the landscape now and great woods of dark green sheltered the travellers from the worst of winds. Rich grasses grew, too, on which aurochs grassed. The large beasts Thomas had to admit frightened him. Their horns alone were longer than he was high and they were known to be short of temper.

You wouldn’t have thought him to have grown up there, and he hadn’t, not really. His father had frequented the southern court of his King as much as the household he kept himself. For all his faults and condescending, at least his father had had the sense to see that Thomas would not be of much use in the harsh north where all usable abilities included not being a dwarf. Thomas knew that it took a great amount of pride on his father’s part not to kill him the moment he left the womb – the womb of the already cold body, as the lord Bonney had often had the urge to remind him.

Around the Pinelands, the evergreens grew tall, up against hillsides and cliffs alike. Here, in the midst of the wilderness, the holdfast was placed. It had grown large over the years, much larger than back when the Renells held it, before their treason to the kings of the North.

If you crawled up the mountains west of the holdfast, you could see why this treason had been such an epic thing. You’d see the South stretch below you, see far, far away. You’d see how the row of mountains on which you were standing stretched like a wall, both to the south and the north, with a sea of green at its foot. And across this sea, you’d see the western mountains, creating the second wall of the tunnel through which the armies of Etheron had crossed. Thomas had stood there once, legs paining him half to death, chilled to the bone by the cold winds as well as the experience of seeing the map of his childhood stories stretched out beneath him.

But that had been years before, before so many things had happened. He wondered then if he would be able to make the journey once more. Age had never meant much to him – he had always thought it just a number, like that of wealth and money, which held only the meaning you gave it. To him, the meaning was small. He had always been useless, and age would not change that.

 When they arrived at the holdfast in the woods, Thomas felt no thrill of seeing his home again. The chill that went down his back was not related to anticipation of meeting his parents or family again, nor was it particularly related to the cold.

In front of the gates stood the household, even smaller than any other Thomas had seen so far. His father stood beside his oldest brother, Jacob, surrounded by advisors and highborn visitors. There was more grey in Jon’s hair than Thomas remembered from the last time he saw him and the deep wrinkles of worry that Thomas dreaded he might inherit had grown deeper. Other than that, he was the same stern man who had left his son at the royal court of Etheron decades past.

He didn’t bow very deeply for the King or the Queen, although Jacob’s appreciative glance towards the latter was unmistakable, and when Thomas walked by, there was no recognition in their eyes. Or, well, perhaps there was, but Thomas almost hoped there wasn’t.

The nonchalance of his father carried on through dinner. He was not a man prone to laughter and when he smiled, it was usually not from a joke; it was as though the entire rest of the court seemed like a mere jest to him, something which he could laugh at in the privacy of his northern home, too frightening for anyone to approach.