Chapter one: Home coming

Book I: Two brothers of Amlor

All was gray.

An observation that struck Ely only when his boots struck the moist gang plank to the dock at Edmund Harbor, the rippled sails of the old ship already fading into the mist behind him after a few steps. He could hear the creaking timbers as if the ship ached to escape to warmer, friendly ports.

A cloud had grown in his mind for last hours on the high seas like a spreading storm, making this something far chillier than the home coming he’d hoped for.

A tall lean man, he fit in well enough with those who looked up at him on shore, his features as grim as theirs, save with one distinction. They all looked as gray as the landscape, dark hair, dark eyes, stone-like complexions, where he – as tall and broad-shoulders, with black hair and black eyes like theirs, had a complexion soothed by the sun of the more southern clime from which he had just come.

He clutched his cloak – which had been too warm when setting sail weeks earlier – against the wet biting air of a place he once considered home, as if telling him how much of a mistake this trip was.

Yet not until his boots struck the cold, hard ground, did he fully comprehend, what he knew already, he no longer belonged here.

The coach waited for him as lost in mist at first ahead as the ship had become behind, steeds stamping, their silvery breathe adding to the haze.

“This way, lord,” the coach driver said, motioning him to the open door and a dark interior that appeared as dismal as the ship’s cabin he had spent countless days in.

Like a prison, he thought, but put his boot onto the step and propelled his tall figure in, finding the inside as austere as the outside.

This was a place of practical men who did not tolerate unnecessary niceties, the way men in the south did, no plush cushions, no elaborate curtains, just a hard wooden seat and dark practical drapes to keep out the wind.

The driver stirred up the steeds and the coach abruptly started. Despite the chill, Ely held back the curtain, viewing the passing landscape, the dismal gray warehouses and the sagging market booths fading away as the cobble stone road led into the city beyond – though city did not fit this place that in the south might have served as a large village, single-floor hovels with thick stone walls, and deep holes for windows on either side of a deep doors, wooden shudders closed all but for that briefest of seasons when the air warmed enough to keep them open.

A few taller buildings stood beyond these, temples and government buildings, staples for the king’s horses and beyond those the barracks for all the king’s men. A heavy mist hovered over the roof tops, too, engulfing them, weighing down on them and on the lives of the people who occupied them.

Smoke rose from chimneys hinting of people huddled around hearths inside, the faint scent of fish stew or broiled meat carried on the cold wind, reminding Ely more firmly of home than all else.

The coach rattled on, metal and wood groaning as the road rose, winding slowly up into the highlands and the dark shape of the castle that stood at the peak, glints of metal and polished stone caught in the brief peeking of the midday sun, a sun men saw rarely as more than a hazy disk, and often not as much as that in dead of winter.

The shape of the castle became clearer the closer the coach came, emerging like a memory out of the fog of Ely’s upbringing, the recollections of an unhappy boy who had returned to it as an unhappy man.

As the coach approached, the gates opened, the wheels rolling over a draw bridge that hadn’t been raised in generations, the vibrations shaking Ely with another childhood recollection, stirring him from the inside, if not from pain, then something deeply sad.

Guards in dull armor halted the coach inside the court yard, driver scrambling down from his seat to the ground to pull open the door for Ely to climb out.

The sharp scent of burning wood struck Ely first, green wood still spitting in one of the many castle hearths and spilling their sweet smell out into the cool air, yet one more memory stirring, bringing up childhood when this served as his small world for a time, where instructors gave him lessons, knights teaching him to fight, horse men teaching him how to ride, these stone walls with their many dark windows staring down, his classroom.

“Welcome, Lord!” the captain of the guard said, a broad-shouldered man with a large scar above his upper lip, making his kindly smile look like a sneer.

Ely nodded, aware of the odd stares he received from the others in the company, dark gazes studying the rumor of him, comparing the man who had stepped into their midst to the name they’d heard all their lives, the prince spoken about but never seen, the heir to the throne that seemed as much an outsider as those they held guard against.

Their dull helms fit into the landscape as if each of those who bore them had been cut from the same stone as the castle and its keep, the King’s crest above each man’s forehead as enduring a reminder of the sun they rarely saw, and the old gods they still secretly prayed to each night.

They bowed their heads to him, applying the proper ritual due to their returning price, but the truth showed deep in their gazes. Ely had stayed away too long, his deeply tanned flesh as foreign as those invaders these soldiers had to at times fight off at Land Gate, that single spine of mountains that connected Amlor with the southern regions, especially to the tribes of the Dzfars, whose hostility the men of Amlor always feared, even knowing the horse people’s steeds could not easily navigate those narrow paths, and against which troops of soldiers kept constant watch.

But Ely’s blood was Amlorian blood, regardless of the tint of his skin, as they reluctantly acknowledged as they led him from the court yard under the tall arch into the belly of the castle itself.

The great hall, with its parade of statues depicting the long line of Amlorian kings dating back to its foundation, looked less great than Ely remembered, especially after his wandering through the towering halls of other capitals in other more grandiose cities to the south, the roof less lofty, the walls endowed with the same gray as the land itself, a feeling of heaviness that weighed down on his shoulders in a way he hadn’t recalled it doing as a youth – perhaps because he’d seen no other and found this the pinnacle of greatness.

No cheer greeted him the way the halls in now-distant Taffar had, and the guards that preceded him through the hall looked as if they had been molded from the same stones at the statues, given by some magic Ely did not understand power of motion, breathing out gray plumes of air before them to prove they somehow differed from the unmoving statues to either side.

So colorless, cheerless, a dour home for a dour people, grim, determined, full of pride, but without the soul Ely had found elsewhere in his travels, coming home to find a land far stranger than any of the lands he’d wandered and found full of wonder and light.

“The king will want to see you, of course,” the guard with the scarred face said, the echoes of his deep voice stirring up the dust in the deepest shadows.

“Of course,” Ely said. “That’s why I came.”

The guards surrounded him as he walked towards one of the hallways to the left, a lesser arch hovering over him, but no less stern, the center of it bearing again the emblem of a sun, Through the gaps to either side of this hall, Ely saw the sky again, filled with gray clouds, suggesting yet not quite ready to deliver cold rain or even snow.

Clink of the guards’ armor hurried ahead of them in the echoes, announcing his arrival better than the hounds the old king kept, or crows that clung to the pointed towards, or the messenger birds with which the king kept tabs with the rest of his kingdom.

Ely strode ahead, through a world he never thought he would visit again, even though his birth right promised him the crown when the old man died.

“I don’t want the crown,” Ely once told the old wizard that sometimes occupied one of the towers here.

“You have no choice,” the wizard said. “When the comes, you must be ready.”

The call when it came, had startled him, because it had not announced his father’s dying, but his father summoning him home, a king’s command even Ely could not ignore, and a summons not entirely unwelcome, since Ely had his own reasons for returning, if not to take the crown, then to beg his father for his army, a mighty gift the king was unlikely to bestow him, though he needed to ask.

The crows cawed from the battlements outside, a sound as sharp as stone striking stone, a fearful warning of ill ahead, if not evil, then ill will. He expected to find no warmth or welcome from his father, who had opposed his leaving when he did, though the old man’s gray eyes had seemed relieved as well, putting at a distance his least favorite son, perhaps even wishing Ely might come to harm and clear the way for his other son to inherit the throne.

Had his father not summoned him, Ely might have remained in the south.

War was marching up the coast from Htam, its dark clouds sweeping towards Taffar as well as the many smaller communities that dotted the coast, fishing villages mostly, or ports for the produce coming out of the bread basket farms further inland, war burning as it came, sending hordes of refugees ahead of it, a homeless mass nearly as threatening to the peace as an invading army.

But walking here now, hearing the empty echo of the chambers of his youth, Ely began to doubt, began to believe his journey would be for naught, began already to hear his father’s angry voice offering no relief.

“I should have stayed in the south,” Ely thought again amid the echo of his footsteps and the clatter of the guards’ armor.

These gray men would not go to war for southern people they did not know or need, not while Amlor – which for the most part was an island nation – remained immune. Its navy could ward off any sea attack from Htam. Its army could hold Land Gate from any invasion from land.

Ely also anticipated the king’s rage over previous less urgent summons to come home, requests rather than commands that Ely take his proper place among his own people, rather than waste them among people of different blood.

“So, why did you decide to come this time?” the king would ask. “Does it have anything to do with that sorceress people claim have ensnared your heart?”

Ely knew better than to dismiss the resourcefulness of his father’s spies, eyes and ears in every port from the most distant lands beyond Htam to even the western most coast of the great sea. They gathered such tales and sent their winged messengers back, where the king – perhaps with the help of the wizard – put the pieces of the puzzle together, aware of what went on far enough in advance to ward off any future threat.

Each step closer to the King increased the beat of Ely’s heart, a man who could face death without fear, but not his father.

The hall to the king’s chamber bore heavy, dark tapestries, each embroidered with images of war – the great victors other, long dead knights of a long distant Amlor had won in preserving the independence of the northern most kingdom, all dim with age and dust, thread-worn of once bright color on the verge of also turning gray.

Of these, one stood out, something new since Ely’s departure, still fresh with recent color and the all-too-familiar face of his twin brother Ajax engaged in a conflict in the mountains of Land Gate, looking every bit as heroic as the king father could wish, the warrior’s face grimacing in outrage or perhaps glory, to Ely, these were one in the same.

Land Gate remained one of the few places in Amlor where a figure so angry as Ajax could still find glory, all else had sunken into the sad dreariness of the hard, cold north, the inglorious duties on the fishing fleet, the bitter toil of scrubbing crops from an unyielding soil in too short a season, and even less glorious duty of raising and slaughtering of herds for meat, weary, back-breaking labor of digging ditches, building roads, banging metal into shapes men could use, endless dawn to dusk that left men too exhausted for even those brief moments of cheer the pubs might provide – yet, all enamored with the concept of glory, admiring those knights who managed to achieve it, whose posted images filled the lesser halls of lesser houses, or even the walls of drinking halls, where many of the soldiers spent their off duty days.

Of all these, Ajax was admired most, whose face even the weariest laborer could recognize, whose arrival and departure for the king’s castle on the hill drew cheers and salutations, a face that many hoped would find immorality in the great hall when carved into stone.

Only, it never would, at least as long as Ely lived.

Only the figures of kings stood in that hall, made immortal, and only the first born of the king could inherit the throne – one more reason among many why the king despised Ely, who had emerged from the queen’s birth canal minutes for Ajax did.

The king also distrusted Ely, seeing him as too closely aligned to the old wizard, who occupied a tower on a hill north of the castle, where Ely went frequently for education other than what the king saw as suitable for a knight.

“Why don’t you like my brother?” a younger Ely once asked the wizard during one of these sessions.

“What’s that?” the wizard asked, looking up from a scroll, his gray eyebrows rising high onto his wrinkled forehead. “Who says I don’t like him.”

“You don’t invite him here to study the way you invite me,” Ely said.

The wizard mumbled, “Ajax wouldn’t appreciate it the way you do.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s too much like your father,” the wizard said.

“Why did you invite me?”

This time, the wizard’s pause lasted longer, his gray gaze rising up above the ragged edge of the scroll to study Ely over it, eyes that looked gray at first glance, but endowed with many sparkling colors, hidden by the reflection of the gray world around him, hiding something far deeper than Ely could ever comprehend.

“You’re different,” the wizard finally said. “It is as if you and your brother came out of different wombs, or something touched you while in your mother than shaped you in a different way.”

“I don’t understand,” Ely – still too young to understand such thoughts – said.

“You see things others don’t,” the wizard said, “things others may never see.”

Even now, all these years later, Ely hardly comprehended, except in that he knew Ajax, as boy and later a man, took much more pride in physical prowess than in anything the wizard might teach, seeing no merit in old scrolls or ancient tales. Ajax’s fingers ached to grasp the hilt of a sword, more than they ever did a quill.

The wizard understood Ely could grasp the sword in one hand and the quill in the other and had a sense of foresight that rivaled his own.

The king, although too much like Ajax, knew to rely on the wizard’s foresight, but sharpy resented such foresight in his eldest son.

When the wizard raised alarm about the dangers rising from the far south, especially the military ambitions of the warrior city of Htam, Ely supported him, and the king, rather than being grateful for the intelligence grew enraged, accusing the wizard of turning his heir against him.

Had the king listened and sent his army south to support the small kingdoms in opposition, Htam’s ambitions might have remained in check.

Out of resentment, perhaps, the king chose to do nothing, and Htam’s reach increased, slowly at first, seizing one small kingdom, then the next, until finally, even Ely saw how that reach might eventually threaten Amlor itself.

Ely had urged his father to give him an army with which he might battle on behalf of the besieged kingdoms Htam had since conquered.

And still the king refused.

“I will not spill Amlorian blood for strangers,” he said.

“Amlorian blood will spill whether there or later when Htam’s armies come here,” Ely argued.

“Let them come,” the king said. “And they will get a taste of Amlorian steel.”

Even Ajax with his own unbridled hunger for glory could not sway the King to this end.

So, Ely – over the protests of his father – vowed to go south himself, to see for himself how true the warnings the messenger birds foretold, and arriving there, walking among the foreign armies, through the nervous market places and the terrified harbors, Ely learned how far worse the situation was.

For this reason, he abided by his father’s latest summons, to urge his father finally to commit troops to the last opportunity to stop Htam before Htam’s armies invaded Amlor itself.