winter solstice (vera)
The steps that led into Gerard Hall were obviously designed by a lord, or someone with a great deal of money to spare. Eragos couldn't help but eye the lines stitched together by careful chisel shots with an eye for the beauty of the detail, even if he'd seen them before. And on this cold winter night while he waited for Vargis to appear Eragos didn't have anything else of particular importance to do. Unlike many of the other White Riders arriving for the Solstice Ball he'd disdained the brown cloak and kept his white tunic at the fore. Although the hood was down, and his mask was nowhere in sight, it still made him feel as though he was on duty in some way. He wasn't of course. Even if the falchion had the heaviness that triggered his alertness, he was not on duty. Buckler was left in his room. As was the flambard. Neither one of them would be needed on this night. A soft pale snow was falling and dusting the stair with powder, but so far the storm was little more than a warning of things to come. All of them were glad to be in Simanel tonight. Those who were just back from assignment, or those preparing to leave, or those who never did leave.
A long winter, a chilled spring and a hot summer in the northern land of Kenyon had removed any immediate desire on his part to see a foreign section of the world again. Without too much complaint at all they'd given him the post in Oisea, and now all he had to do was watch the younglings practice and deal with the day to day operations of a small circle of cottages. It sounded like just the thing. Smell of foul orc flesh being ignited and burned as offering to the god of war still lingered in his nostrils. Maybe it would never disappear. That was his first true 'war', in the way that one defined such things. Eragos didn't know if he had it in him to face another one. Battle was one thing, but war was pure slaughter for no good purpose. Orcs could not be reasoned with, but they could be defeated, and if the cost of that defeat in lives was too high to contemplate rationally he could at least be thankful that he was not the one who had to contemplate such things. Especially in a rational frame of mind. The chill had penetrated his high boots, with the trousers stuff inside to shield his calves from the worst of the cold, but he ignored it.
It was easy to ignore, now.
"Don't tell me," a hard voice barked. "You were waiting for me to go inside."
Vargis Bartha was perhaps the only White Rider who had earned Eragos' full and complete trust, other than the Lady Vera. The difference was that Vargis had fought alongside him all throughout that eternity of combat known as the Kenyon Campaign by those who had survived it. There were two other White Riders who'd gone along, but both had been injured early on and sent home after recovering. For his part Eragos would not have gone home at any price. Fighting abroad in the name of the White Riders was worth the personal risk. Vargis had agreed. He was cut from the same cloth as Captain Agrippa. The two had passed upward in the ranks together, but Vargis had a knack for making enemies and a skill at being honest which Eragos sometimes envied. Agrippa was more a politician, and though he was ferocious in battle he couldn't equal the pure death which Vargis seemed ready to distribute in an instant.k They had saved each others' lives, and Vargis had played guitar to Eragos' flute. That made them friends so long as both men were alive, and as far as Eragos was concerned even after.
"I didn't want you to get lost," Eragos retorted.
"If I turned around and went home, it wouldn't happen because I was lost."
"Don't want to attend your own retirement speech? I hear the Captain wrote it himself."
"Agrippa is a lazy cur, young man. He wouldn't write his own mother's eulogy if he thought he could get away with it."
A pair of younger White Riders, who apparently did not share Vargis' sarcastic and dubious sentiment, glared at the pair of them as they passed. They must have been of the new school. Eragos found that his falchion and his short hair marked him to anyone who cared to inspect his appearance as 'that one'. Which meant, usually, that he was inexorably linked to the expansionist policy for which the Lady Vera had become a figurehead. Seldom did someone actually hate Eragos for something he'd done. It was more often than not the simple fact that he spent time in the company of vagabonds and seeming troublemakers. Persons like the Lady Vera and Vargis, who from first to last was wholly incapable of keeping his mouth shut. Everyone would be sad to see the barrel-chested Rider retire, Eragos most of all, but there was more than one who wouldn't miss him. The dichotomy of thought was amazing to him. But it was bound to happen sooner or later, that someone might not respect him in the way he deserved to be respected. If it bothered Vargis, the old man never let it show. He went on being himself.
"You really ought to be careful what you say."
"If a day passed and Agrippa didn't hear a rumor I started about him, he'd think I was dead."
"He can probably hear you no matter what you say."
"I see your boots have beads on them. Isn't that a lady's fashion, boy?"
The 'beads' he was referring to were actually droplets of ice, but Erags refrained from correcting him. In the first place Vargis did not care if he was wrong, and in the second place Vargis knew he was wrong. The old man had brought his brown cloak, a sign of the battle with age which they all lost eventually. And most important of all was the sword he wore. It had been a gift from Eragos when they returned, a copy of the falchion which Eragos wore religiously. Hard not to smile at it. But he wasn't going to smile, because if he did smile, Vargis would harass and harangue him with one statement after another for years on end about how he smiled when he thought of how he wore lady's fashions.
It wasn't worth the headaches.
"Oh, there's the one."
"The one?"
But he already knew. It had been at least a year and a half since he'd seen Lady Vera. In that time the gods had seen fit to grace her with even more beauty, and more poise, than she'd possessed on their last meeting. Eragos had written steady letters at the rate of one a week, though he'd talked of nothing that one might consider important. The replies, when he'd received them, were usually very short. He never could tell if she'd actually read the letters he'd sent her or if she'd replied only because she thought he needed some contact to stay sane. And maybe he did. Maybe he did. It never seemed right, some of the curiosity he felt toward her. Improper somehow. And Vargis knew all about it, or thought he did, so the old man was prone to go on and on at great length about how much Eragos worshiped her. If he knew how wrong and how right he was simultaneously he might have shut up. Then again, there were very few things on this earth which could shut Vargis up. That was when the old man noticed the rose wound through the laces of Eragos' tunic, and he fought back a laugh as the Lady Vera ascended the stairs.
"Did you bring that for her?"
"Shut up," Eragos whispered out of the side of his mouth.
"I think she's going to love it."
"Shut up."
"Hard to find roses, this time of year."
"Shut up."
"Maybe she'll give you a peck on the cheek."
"Shut up."
"Or something equally chaste. I'm not a vulgar man, Lord Feareborne."
"Lady Vera," and Eragos flourished a bow from the waist; when he straightened, he offered her the rose smoothly. "It's good to see you again."
"Lady Vera," Vargis echoed with a bow of his own; the greeting was not as smooth in that husky voice soured by age and drink.
He was going to beat Vargis senseless if she'd overheard a word of that.