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But always there was that underlying strain: being apart from his family, from his boyhood friends. Games had been replaced with exercises; flights of fancy for learning well the weight of armor. They wore mail shirts, gods-awful heavy even if they were boy-sized. And after meals, they scrubbed the wooden bowls and spoons, cleared and waxed the long tables where they ate; banked the fires and raked the hard-packed dirt floors. His life was half sword practice and half maid duty, and it became routine. Became normal and inescapable.
But then he turned ten. And the reigning Corpse Lord died.
A coronation day was announced for the heir, newly born. Master Sigismund brought him a new tunic and trousers in fine gray wool, and he shaved his head for him; braided his hair in the single long tail that was the style of proper Dead Guardsmen. Mattias’s pulse beat drum-quick on the long cart ride around the mountain, to the base of the palatial Naus Keep, home of their lord and master.
Mattias was overwhelmed by the crowded, switchback labyrinth of the Keep, studded here and there with pockets of soaring opulence. All in shades of gray. All of it glittering with diamonds. He struggled to keep his gaze level and his mouth shut, filled with a ten-year-old’s amazement. He’d never seen such wonders as this, the palace of his duke.
But then he was led into a room carpeted with furs and kept warm by two roaring fireplaces. And a bundle was lowered into his arms, swaddled all in gray silk and linen. A baby, small and pink, wrinkled and fussy.
“This,” Master Sigismund said, voice gone grave and heavy, “is Náli, Corpse Lord of the Fault Lands. His life is yours to guard and serve, Captain.”
The other boys were named to the Guard: his strong second, Klemens, and Einrih, the cousins Danski and Darri. All strong, all quick, all loyal and trustworthy. But from that first moment, when a tiny hand batted Mattia’s nose, and newborn blue eyes peeped up at him, it was Mattias who became the steward of the new lord’s every need and want.
Náli was twelve when, one late afternoon over cooling cups of tea and a detailed map of the Great War cavalry charges, he glanced up, crude joke on his lips, the evening’s weak sun striking sparks in his bright blue eyes, that Mattias felt something like a kick beneath his ribs. When Náli shifted, with one sideways grin, tongue poking against the inside of his cheek, from beloved little brother figure to something else entirely. When Mattias thought, Gods, he’s beautiful, and spent the whole rest of the day and night trying to will the notion out of his head.
It was too late, though. The flint had struck, the kindling had caught, and Mattias hated himself a little more each time he noticed the graceful arch of a neck, or the dexterous play of long fingers on a twirled quill. Silken pale hair chased him into his dreams.
So much of it was an innocent longing; an admiration for beauty and a love borne of years of dedicated service.
But by the time they’d arrived in Aeres for the Yuletide festivities, Náli seventeen, grown, limber and wicked and strong, wit and mouth as sharp as his blade, Mattias was well and truly lost to him. To fantasy. A shame he’d resigned himself to endure for the rest of his days.
Watching him go down into the well had always been painful: when he was a boy, clutching at Mattias’s trouser leg and trying to hide the tears on his cheeks, little chin wobbling; and when he was older, chin lifted, eyes closed, seemingly heedless save the fine tremors down his back as he glided deeper and deeper and finally disappeared.
It was worse, though, watching it now – now that he knew the taste of lavender from his lips, and the fragile narrowness of his waist, the way it fit so perfectly in his own big hands. He wanted more. Wanted so very much. Wanted everything. But always, Náli must return to the well, not so much as a bubble breaking the surface where he’d slipped away. And later, when he emerged refreshed, crackling with magic, he would go up to the ballroom, to one of his mother’s parties, and pick a bride so that the next Corpse Lord might be handed into a boy captain’s arms when the magic finally wrung every last drop of beauty from the current one.
And Mattias would always be this inert, useless thing, standing in the shallows, clutching a poor substitute for the flesh-and-blood boy that he wanted to hold instead.
“Mattias,” Klemens said quietly behind him. Beseeching. Don’t do this to yourself. Come out of the water.
But Mattias couldn’t get his feet to work.
A loud splash from across the cavern shook him from his maudlin thoughts. He blinked, and saw that the young drake, Valgrind, was batting at the water with one clawed forefoot.
“What’s it doing?” Darri asked.
Mattias cleared his throat. “Hey, now. No. Stop that.”
Valgrind bleated at him in clear defiance, and slapped the whole of his tail down into the water with a great plume of white spray. The ripples ran out in fast, overlapping rings, and the water seemed to brighten; it hurt to look at.
“Hey,” Mattias said sharply. “No. Stop it.”
But the drake squealed unhappily, ducked his head, and dove straight down into the pool.
~*~
The worst part about entering the Nágrindr was that the seemingly-worst part was not as dangerous as the actual-worst part. When the icy breath fractured and multiplied in his lungs, Náli’s vision whited out completely…and then returned in a soft palette of grays and browns very like his house colors. The dreaded, endless white of the well water was gone, and in its place a field of rippling gray grass, softly hilled and dotted with little white flowers like starbursts. When he turned around, he faced a settlement: rudimentary timber and sod houses set into the hillsides, fenced with split rails, cows and horses and sheep moving amongst barefoot humans toting baskets, and harvesting potatoes, and drinking blueberry wine in the shade of rough porches.
Here were the first Northerners. The first to spread out from the early, nomadic settlements of the Waste and establish permanent homesteads; the ones who’d taken up farming, and created long, arduous, though prosperous trade routes to the South. It wasn’t a time for kings, or dukes, or palaces. Small-scale lords, generally shamans, had acted as mayors and priests both for the people of their villages.
That was who Náli was here to see.
The villagers regarded him with friendly curiosity. A few lifted waves that he didn’t return. When he glanced down at his own hands, he saw they rippled and blurred like smoke, same as they always did beyond the veil.
Overhead, the rustle of wind in the aspen leaves, and the call of birds. He heard children laughing and cows lowing; somewhere distant, the laughing bark of a fox.
This was the worst part of reaching this plane: the way it felt so very real, and soft, and pleasant. The way it felt like a safe place to stop and rest.
This must have been what Dreki Hörgr looked like at its inception: the start of a civilization that none could have predicted would lead to the palace at Aeres, to a king draped in jewels and fine furs. Here was how it had started, humbly and gently.
