The Conqueror

He didn’t turn.

“My lord?”

He angled his head slightly in her direction.

“Is all well?”

The question was so sweeping, the realm of possible answers so vast, he had a sudden urge to laugh. Instead, he nodded.

“Sometimes when I cannot sleep, I walk the walls.”

Her voice was quiet but her words had none of the indolence of sleep. He looked over his shoulder. “How often do you find the need to disturb the sentries?”

“Often.”

He turned the rest of his body and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Oft enough that they have told me I must bring them something from the kitchen each time I do,” she said softly. “Thus I pay for my disturbance.”

He flicked his eyes to the window again. “The storm does not come.”

He heard the soft rustle of furs. “Will you walk with me, my lord?”

She was standing in her rumpled green gown, her hair in utter disarray and falling down her back. He pushed off from the wall.

Wordlessly he picked up his shirt and tunic and threw them over his head, then sat on the edge of the bed and began pulling on his boots. Gwyn was sitting on the other side, putting on her own shoes. He could feel the bed dip and shift in small movements each time she bent over. His side of the mattress lowered more significantly when she rose, and he glanced over his shoulder.

Her back was to him. The loose sleeves of her tunic fell up around her shoulders when she bent her arms and fumbled with her hair to reassemble the mess of curls and knots.

“Don’t.”

Her hair spilled down over her shoulders as she simply dropped her hands and walked to the door. It was a brief climb to the doorway that led to the rooftop. The night was chilled, crisp and clear and full. Griffyn held the door for her, his arm stretched over her head as she ducked beneath him and stepped out onto the northern ramparts.

“God’s in His Heaven when I am up here,” she murmured, pulling her cape around her shoulders.

Griffyn ran his palm along the wall as they walked, feeling its cold solidness against his skin. It was a good castle, a good home. He let his gaze drift across the open plains. Curving in a smooth arc from west to east was a darkness that heralded the forests. But the trees were far ahead, and closer to hand stretched open fields and meadows, brown and russet in the darkness.

Further down, below the crest his army camped on, he could see the darkened humps of village buildings. He thought he could make out the farthest one, the apothecary shop. It was one of two places he had most loved as a boy. The stables and the leech, he mused. Horses and herbs.

A sudden memory leapt to mind. He’d been young, wandering on horseback on a lazy autumn evening after a hard day’s ride, his beloved pony Rebel under him, his dog Tor at his side. The smells of heather, dying evergreen needles, and the distant sea had been pungent, making him linger in the woods even when the sky began to turn purple. His father would be furious, his mother worried, but Griffyn didn’t turn his pony back yet. He was eight years old and set free upon the world. His father might have spawned him, his mother might have borned him, but ’twas this land that pulsed through his blood.

He’d paused his pony in the river. He could still feel the bones of Rebel’s withers between his legs, the flat, firm feel of equine shoulder blades under his knees as the pony bent his muzzle into the cold water. Tor did the same, lunging into the water and splashing his reluctant playmate, barking and leaping in circles around the snow-white pony. Angling a dark, liquid brown eye at the nuisance, the pony swept her hoof through the burbling creek, drowning the puppy in an unexpected wave of water. The dog squeaked in amazement and sat down in the middle of the stream, puppy face dripping with water, utterly brought to heel. Griffyn had laughed aloud. He remembered knowing, even as a child, his life, at that moment, was as perfect as it might ever be.

“I used to feel that way too,” he finally said.

The longing in his words drew Gwyn’s gaze, but she didn’t speak. They walked across the ramparts from west to east, silent. The sentries they passed nodded wordlessly, and the only sound was the wind sighing at the stones and an owl winging down from a tree branch to chase a hare racing across the field.

By unspoken agreement, they stopped near a merlon and let the wind pull at their capes. The moon was close to setting. Potent energy crouched both in the night and in the man beside her. Gwyn looked out over the distant hills, hills that she’d always thought of as her own.

Upon a time, there had been no question of what had gone before her, of how many other eyes had once passed over the lands and seen what she saw, felt what she felt. There had been no past, no connection to anything larger or other. What was had always been. But now everything was changed.

Griffyn had haunted these ramparts too, perhaps balanced on the stones in a perilous display of courageous idiocy as she had at seven years old, until her mother had pulled her down, holding Gwyn with one hand, her heart with the other.

Griffyn had walked these ramparts long before she had, ridden across the moors and felt the breeze at his back, just like she had.

Griffyn had surely watched sunrises from here, and laughed at thunderstorms, feeling secure in the bulwark of solid stone that lay underfoot. Just like she had.

What a sad place the world was, spinning itself out while people played at God. If she were taken from this place, her heart would break into a hundred jagged pieces, sharp edges of sorrow that would poke at her forever. This was her home.