BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW
from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.
No, he tells me, but not without a hint of confusion that I barely notice for the disappointment that wells up in me immediately at his response. Really, I should have expected it. Even in my homeland, where we so often become the creatures that drift among the leaves and the underbrush, we never retain the ability to speak to them when we no longer wear their skins. Still – what I know of magic is here is that it is something different from what magic was like in my homeland, and I thought, for a moment…
It wasn’t worth thinking of. He is silent for what feels like a while, and then he turns to me with a grin that means nothing at all, and says, Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately. He walks without waiting for me to answer, strides out into the fields, a darkness about the pale-golden strands of glass and autumn’s last blush of flowers; and I find myself following in his wake without even thinking about it.
“Believe you me,” I say, “I understand that completely.” I’ve felt, for my past several lifetimes, like I know quite a lot about the world and the way that it moves – shouldn’t I understand its nature, having been so many different things? But the only thing that I have learned, having spent so little time in Novus, is that all my knowledge amounts to nothing at all when juxtaposed against the vastness of the universe. I didn’t know that there was so much of it left outside of the Gold. I suppose that I was wrong; I have been wrong about a lot of things, lately.
I don’t think that I know where I’m going. I’d like to be going anywhere at all.
He tells me that he is from a place called the wilds. I nod; I think that it is strange, by the naming conventions that I have seen outsiders use for their nations, but I’m sure, too, that it is no stranger in title than the Wynding Gold. What kind of place would it have to be, to garner such a name? He doesn’t speak much of it; and what he does is dismissive, and it tells me nothing at all. (I wonder if he meant it that way, or if he simply considers it to be of so little significance.) My ears swivel to face him, and I tilt my head, pulling strands of chestnut hair out of my face.
“The wilds,” I repeat, “Were they like – the plain? Or like Novus?” Not, I suppose, that I know much of either.
He asks me why I left my forest. There is an impulse to say nothing at all; there always is. Outsiders have stolen our heir once, and I am never sure how much I can trust them with knowledge of their existence. Regardless, there is only so much you can gather from a scant admittance of who I am searching for – it is not the same as describing the sigil, or why our people are so utterly dependent on the heir, why my people’s fate – continuation or ruination – is a matter entirely of whether or not I can bring them home.
“There is someone I’m searching for,” I admit, my voice softening with something like reluctance, “but I’m not sure who. I only know that they are the heir to my kingdom’s throne, and I must bring them home.” Whatever the cost may be goes unspoken, but I can hear the dark undertones of it in my voice, like a current running below the surface of a river.
Before I was made my king’s Green Knight, I was sent to see the High Priestess. She was older than either of us, and wiser by measures than me, and, when I stepped into the temple, she was standing at the altar, lighting candles, her coat painted a thousand colors by the light of the stained-glass windows. She turned to me, slowly, and she looked at me with an expression that was nearly vicious. “Do you know,” she said, with a voice like the edge of a knife, “what the role of the Green Knight is?” I was not naïve; I knew that I had stepped into a test the moment that I opened the doors of the temple.
I swallowed, but I could not get rid of the sudden dryness that had taken root in my throat. “The Green Knight,” I said, very carefully, though I was practically reciting the description from memory, “is the sword and the shield of the sovereign. They should be absolutely loyal, and-“
She cut me off, her eyes narrowing to serpentine slits. “What need does the sovereign have for an absolutely loyal vassal?” I gritted my jaw, shifting my weight; she was right, of course. The sovereign could demand absolute loyalty from anyone, and it would not matter if they were absolutely loyal or not. “What need does the sovereign have for a sword, or for a shield? I think, my dear, that you have severely misunderstood the nature of this relationship.” Despite her gentle wording, there was nothing tender in her tone. I remained rooted to the spot, unwilling to back away, but unsure of what to say.
Finally, I licked my lips, and I asked, “What is the role of the Green Knight, then?” That was the first time I saw her smile – it spread across her lips like a flower in bloom, but it was somehow terrible. She gave a soft sigh, and she looked at me with something that was almost pity, but the pity you have for a lamb with a knife to its throat. Not a pity that means salvation. Not a pity that will change a thing.
“It is the job of the Green Knight,” she says, “to die.”
So what my destiny means is: bring the heir home, or die trying. If you do not die trying, become the heir’s knight, when they ascend the throne, and die for them if it ever becomes necessary, and all the names of long-dead Green Knights listed on pages and pages and pages of a thick tome of obituaries they keep in the temple suggest that it will become necessary. Maybe not soon. Maybe you will fool yourself into thinking that you are safe. (I served at my king’s side for years, before I was struck down.) You will always be wrong. You will never be safe, especially not on the battlefield, no matter how experienced you are.
However you die – it will always be bent-double, choking on your own blood.
The priestess strode down from the altar, carrying an emerald blade, and she thrust it out to me, the blade only inches from my skin. It was not the same as being knighted – it was some twisted mockery of the ceremony, even. “Do you think that you can do it?”
I did not know who could answer easily if someone asked them to die. I did not know what trained knight would rise the ranks without thinking, sometimes, of dying. I did not hesitate when I answered, “Yes,” and this seemed to please her, though her stare was still cutting and half-skeptical, and it would take some time for her to warm to me.
She settled, then, and sheathed the sword. “Consider it your oath to me, then,” she said, “and never forget it, no matter how much he would like you to.”
To tell you the truth – as I was dying, a blade slipped between my ribs as easy as carving meat, I didn’t forget it.
“And you,” I say, and force all my thoughts of the past down somewhere deep inside of me, where they won’t itch, “why did you leave your wilds?” There must have been a reason for it – and I really am curious, though part of me is asking as a distraction from thought of heirs or kings, or of Green Knights, or of Priestesses.
Lingering too long on a half-remembered past will do me little good in the present.
@Erasmus || <3 <3 <3
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
