Chapter 1359: New beginnings(3)

There was something in Enkilae’s eyes that stood amiss for the king.

Alpheo had laid out a grand, glorious future for the man’s people, a legacy restored, land of their own, and the crown’s own iron backing, and yet the ex-slave acted as if he had just been tasked with a crushing, unbearable labor he had zero desire to undertake. Though perhaps "labor" was the wrong word for it; it seemed more as if stepping into his dead brother’s shoes felt like a curse, a doom that would bring him nothing but ill.

Then again, who knew? Alpheo mused, watching the man shift uncomfortably in his seat. Perhaps it was simply the overwhelming novelty of it all. Alpheo had grown accustomed to royal halls and political maneuvers, but he was a king; a mere month ago, this man was sleeping in a muddy pig-pen, treated as a piece of property by whatever bastard son of a cunt, held his parchment. The King had hoped a full week of soft beds, fine wine, and warm hearths would be enough to soothe the man’s lingering anxieties.

Clearly, it had not even scratched the surface.

"Owe?" the King asked, his dark eyes narrowing as he studied the weathered face across from him. "I fear you have the wrong assumption of me. You do not owe me a single damn thing.You could spit at my brow, call me a bastard and leave the palace with all my gift in your hands.

What you and your people are receiving from my hand is merely the late payment of a heavy debt I owed your brother. I do not expect repayment from you. Not a grain of wheat, nor a drop of sweat."

Except, of course, Alpheo added in the quiet dark of his own mind, to finally find my own peace and purge the suffocating guilt from my chest.That was what he hoped for most.

"I searched for you for four long years," the King said at last, his voice dropping into a low, rasping cadence. "I spared no coin, held back no political favor, and leaned on every spy in my hands. For a long time, Enkilae, finding you was my sole obsession. I held onto this... this grand, foolish idea.’’ A chuckle that was not really one ’’ Yes, an idea that if I could just track you down in the dark of the pens and pull you out, I could somehow make things right."

He did not know whether that chuckle was at the sheer absurdity of the notion or the desperate foolishness behind it, he wasn’t entirely sure. Likely both.

"I thought that somehow, through you, I would be redeemed for what I did. For what I caused."

Enkilae looked up, his mismatched grief meeting the monarch’s gaze. "Did it work?"

"No."

Fat chance of that.

Alpheo may have learned to walk, talk, and rule with the ghost sitting on his shoulder, but that didn’t make the weight of it any more bearable. The hard, bleeding fact was that it sickened him to his very core. It sickened him to remember that he had killed his friend, his brother in everything but blood, if not by the stroke of his own blade, then by his own arrogant inaction.

But those who thought themselves able to fly above mountains had to stomach the fall too.

"Jarza, Clio,my son and the others can bring me another thousand well-crafted arguments about how it wasn’t my fault," Alpheo growled, leaning forward until the polished oak groaned beneath his weight. "But I know better. I ought to have known better then. But I was proud, foolish, and blind. I had grown soft and arrogant from a string of easy victories, and I arrived at the grandest, most dangerous delusion a warlord can suffer: that so long as a man has the will, there is always a way.That if he tries and hope hard enough, somehow the world will accomodate his wish"

The King turned his head toward the high arched window, watching the last bleeding rays of the sunset stain the evening sky in a deep, bruised crimson. Day was dying outside the Palace.

"But the world doesn’t care, it doesn’t move, it is what it just is, for me, for you and for everyone else.

When I held Egil’s limp, bleeding body in the mud," Alpheo murmured, staring into the red light, "I learned better. But by then, I had lost all real hope of ever finding his family. There is precious little a king can do with nothing more than a common name. It was like searching for a single silver needle in a hundred burning stables."

"My name was the very first thing they took from me," Enkilae replied, his tone flat, even, and entirely devoid of heat. "After the first year in the pens, I forgot the sound of my mother calling it. I simply learned to recognize the specific snap of the overseer’s voice when they meant me.There were dozens other slaves, but he had that tone only with me."

Alpheo’s eyes drifted back to the ex-slave, a dark, familiar phantom twisting in his gut.

Oh, I already know, the King thought. That was a song he listened at well.

Indeed.

He knew the biting kiss of the whip, the maddening silence of solitary isolation, the gnawing agony of a belly starved hollow, and the rot of the pens. He knew it all, down to the absolute bottom of his soul.

’’I think it is a miracle that you are here. What were the chances...for you to be among those?’’ he furrowed his brows ’’To think the only reason we found you, was the same reason your brother died. He would have rejoyced in seeing you all here.It was always his biggest dream, to have you all together. But it seemed dreams are called that, only because they can be dreamed, never lived.Are they a gift, our ability to dream of better lives?For if in the end they are destined to lay unmade, wouldn’t they be better fitted as curses? ’’

Enkilae did not reply to the philosophical matter.

"How did it happen?"

The King’s head snapped back toward him, his dark eyes searching and boring on a guarded face. The ex-slave shifted in his seat.

"Might I know... how my brother died?" Enkilae asked softly.

"Doing what he did best," Alpheo said, a small, terribly sad smile wrapping around his lips. "Making a bloody fool of his enemies. He would have laughed himself hoarse if he’d had the breath left for it. Imagine it... managing to rout a whole imperial host with nothing more than a band of donkeys, pack horses, and screaming women."

The King shook his head, his gaze drifting back out toward the bruised red twilight. "He roped long, leafy branches around the beasts’ tails to kick up a wall of dust, making the enemy think a fresh heavy host of knights was charging down the ridge. The bastards threw away their spears and fled in pure terror, abandoning their day of triumph. Imagine it! Their great victory becomign dust, all because a single man refused to lie abed and decided to ride with his wounds, no matter if that ended up killing him"

Alpheo’s knuckles turned white where they rested on the table. "He was always a stubborn bastard. Always.But that was why he was loved."

The phantom burn of old tears threatened to breach his eyes, but the King commanded them back with a harsh, ragged swallow.

"He died in my arms," Alpheo whispered, his voice cracking like dry timber under a roaring fire. "He had lost far too much blood on that ridge. His whole left leg was soaked a deep, crimson. It was an easy wound. A bloody simple nick. He could have made a full recovery!

Yarzat’s medicine is the finest in the world,our apothecaries would have washed it, stitched it, and had him drinking ale within a fortnight. He would have lived to a ripe old age. He would be standing right here in this solar today, weeping with joy to see you free and then drinking himself to an early grave, most likely."

The King smashed his fist against the table, the wood groaning beneath the blow. "But instead, the fool decided to ride! And so he bought hundreds of lives by paying with his own. A grand bargain at the end of the day, isn’t it? Easy, simple math. A hundred souls for one.Just one.But when are things so simple?What worth is there, when the love you bore a man cannot be quantified?Is it a well-meant bargain? Or a loss?’’

His shoulders trembled as the grief he had locked away for four years came pouring out in a dark, violent torrent.

"Somehow I felt as though I lost more that day than I ever have in my entire life. And I will carry that ruin until the day I draw my very last breath. I still see that final moment every time I close my eyes. I feel his warm blood coating my hands, slick and heavy. I see the tears cutting tracks through the mud on his cheeks... weeping, despairing like a frightened child. And begging. He was begging, the damn butcher, went out like that.I’ll go dying thinking of him."

He made a sound like choking.

"His last words... his last words were your name. He repeated it over and over, a dozen times into the dirt. ’I am sorry, Enkilae. I am sorry... I am so sorry...’ He kept weeping it out, repeating it as if you were standing right there beside him in the mud. Maybe he thought you were already dead, waiting for him in the dark."

Alpheo buried his face in his trembling, calloused hands, his scratched his face till it was sore.

"He... he never even recognized me," Alpheo moaned softly between fingers, the admission tearing through him like a rusted blade. It sickened him to know how much it hurt,"I held him tight against my chest in his final moments. Weeping as much as he did.

I had spent ten long years of my life bleeding beside him, starving beside him, calling him my family. And in the end... when the dark came for him, he didn’t see me at all."

He looked up, his dark eyes glittering."He didn’t feel my tears dropping onto his face. He didn’t feel my fingers growing sticky and cold in his lifeblood. He couldn’t hear my voice as I begged him, as I screamed like a madman for doctors who arrived far too late.’’

He swallowed.

’’A hundred times he called me his brother," the King whispered, the pain in his voice unbearable. "And yet, when the light left his eyes in that damn mud... it wasn’t the brother he had made in the fire that he reached for. It was you. It was always his blood.The same blood I felt washing through my hands. Always flowing down. Just like time. Down and down

Never , never, never, never, up.’’