Of Gods and Warriors ✓

Chapter 77

One of Alastair's earliest memories of his brother was of him saying that the woman in the portrait down at the parlour was not his mother.

Nor should he address her as such.

"Only I and Tassie get to call her that," Alfred said. "Not you."

There they stood before said portrait, holding a candle in their little fists. Midsummer's heat was still warm in the air, and afternoons stretched long, redolent with the scent of flowers. The day was Mother's death anniversary. They'd only just returned home with Father and Tassya after visiting her grave and having placed offerings at the shrine of Draedona. Tassya left to fetch a tinderbox to light the candles, telling her brothers to wait.

Alastair looked up with amazement in his big, bright eyes. "Why? What should I call her then?"

Above him loomed the silhouette of his big brother. Big he was indeed, and tall enough to ride a horse. Soon he would be fourteen, big enough to be a soldier, Father used to say. But Alfred didn't want that. On his left cheek was a big, purple bruise. His red nose ran and tears leaked out as he stared at the portrait.

"You'll call her nothing, because she is not your mother," Alfred said with an angry sniffle, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

"What?"

It couldn't be true. The lady in the painting looked just like Tassya; the same gentle eyes and soft smile. And Tassya was his sister, was she not? Alfred must be so stupid to say that.

"Your mother left you to die. My father found you in a gutter and brought you home, and now we've got to put up with you!" Alfred snapped, nursing his bruised face.

An aching lump formed at the back of his throat. Father or Tassya never spoke to him like this.

Alfred then reached down to snatch the wax candle from his hands. "Give it here, filthy bastard!"

Alastair didn't know what that was supposed to mean. But they seemed to be Alfred's favourite words for him, because he said them a lot.

"You lie!" screamed Alastair, punching at his knees with his feeble, tiny hands. He recalled hearing their father and Alfred quarrel and fight last night. Something about inheritance and property, too boring for Alastair to care. But he did hear a mighty scuffle.

"You're just angry because Father shouted at you, isn't it?" he said in defiance.

That was the first time Alfred hit him. It would not be the last.

He'd no clue why Alfred spoke such nonsense. Yet that nonsense would unravel to him in later years when Tassya would sit him down one day and tell him the truth he had the right to know. He was but the child of a maid employed long ago in the manor, whom their widower father had fallen in love with. He was not left in a gutter by his mother, if that was any consolation. She'd died not long after his birth.

━━━━━━⚔︎━━━━━━

Alastair slipped his hood on and pulled the bowstring taut. The ring of the ship bells and chattering pigeons up at the rooftops of warehouses snapped him back to the matter at hand.

There, only a few paces afar stood his half-brother, all grown up and still continuing to tear down his life despite never laying hand upon a weapon.

"Bait and switch," Linder was saying, "you must be familiar with games as such in your line of work."

Alfred stood rooted to his spot for a long moment before he spoke, a cold smile mirroring Linder's.

"I am indeed," he said, then spread his arms apart in an air of defiance. His rich, embroidered cloak billowed in the wind and he stood nearly as tall as the sergeant. "But my previous statement stands. I do not know what 'papers' you're talking about."