What news, what scandal, what heresy, what wisdom?You beg for it all and the edges of your world expand with every letter that returns, stretching far beyond the borders of your own kingdom.
And sometimes, when one of your barons questions a decision or your seneschal raises his eyebrow at a judgment, you doubt yourself, until you remember the knight who advocated for the life of the wolf that would kill him, and then you pick up yourpen again. There is brotherhood in this, a spiritual friendship, a connection that goes beyond the body. These men understand your desire for more than your father’s wars and skirmishes. They do not think you weak. They do not think you lacking.
‘I want to be a king of peace,’ you tell the chaplain, first, like a confession. ‘Not only of not-war. Of something bolder and brighter than that.’
Peace is a hard-won thing; respect is earned more slowly through farms and roads than through bloody victories. But farms need tending and roads need repairing nonetheless, and though there’s no glory in the work of building, each stone laid strengthens the foundations of your kingdom. Trade flourishes, goods more easily moved from the coast to the markets inland. Farmers thrive. Day by day, the land begins to blossom, and your reputation spreads.That young king, the peace-weaver, the road-builder, the letter-writer. No longer your father’s inadequate only son, the dismal heir. Now, the king of peace.
And as your reputation grows, so does that of your kingdom. For so long a rustic backwater to be ignored, it soon demands the attention of rulers who once saw it as beneath their notice. They send missives and envoys and merchants and thieves, and all of them have designs on you.
But strangest of all is the fact that these are not the only bargains they’re trying to strike with you – for now that you’re known as a careful king and a thoughtful man, they’ve set their sights higher.
They have started to send their daughters to pay you court.
30
Other
the mind of a man is difficult to lose:
it whispershuman, whispersI,
first person, self-absorbed, tangled up
with the gut instinct that pinpoints revenge.
farm animals are a small casualty
and the cousin (human again, remembering family)
deserves worse than the loss, but the wolf
pushes aside those parts of the mind that recall
–hands –lacing a shoe, a tunic, a mantle,
and in their place a simpler need:
RUN
no room left for abstract, no time for wondering.
but even now there are echoes
–I will be like this forever I think–
of a human kind of dread.
sometimes I cannot bear it
knowledge of forever is a dark thing,
drives a wolf into the shadowed forest
to howl heartbreak at the ancient trees
(if they hear it, the depth of longing,
they have no tongues to answer)
