The young swordsman had spent the last few weeks in the castle attending the King's council and living the life of a lord among the court. Still he had earned no name. What was frustrating was the King’s lack of urgency. A very important message had been delivered, and with great haste, but now they were simply feasting, training, and attending endless council meetings, listening to the plights of peoples whose lives meant little if there truly was some great darkness to be defeated. Foreboding filled the Swordsman's mind. He stripped off his clothes, revealing deep scars in his back and chest. His thoughts turned to the shadows rising throughout the bath chamber. For a moment he felt he could see beyond the Veil into the world just beyond the comprehension of human senses, where spirits reigned.
He slipped into the tub, letting the scalding hot water soothe his aching muscles. He and the King had spent a considerable amount of time in training, both with swords and in hand-to-hand combat. His recent full-on fight with the King had filled the castle and the city with considerable talk about the strength of both parties. Weeks after, guardsman would still ask him how it felt to be so close to the King's insane power. He would not tell them the truth, that the King's power was vast, but imprecise, unsharpened. He would not admit that he worried for the King's safety if the right opponents chose to attack. Yet, despite his worry, all that he wished for was a hot bath, a relaxing evening of meditation, and some well-earned sleep.
As he lay in the tub, eyes closed, in the bliss of warmth and solitude, a woman entered, almost noiselessly. He did not bother to open his eyes, he could smell the tell-tale perfume of the King's mistress, and knew that this was another "envoy of the King" to bid him hospitality. Or is it bed me hospitably? He would send her away as quickly as he had every other time. No thought for such inane pleasures could have crossed his mind, there was too much loss to think of love, and lust was, to him, a terrible detriment to one's strength. The young man's voice was strained with a slight level of annoyance. "Please go, Miss Emilia, I have said before and will say as many times as is needed, I have no wish to bed any woman here. I only wish for peace and quiet." It had been nearly every day that the King's mistress had come to him since their battle, and each time it was the same. He had hoped that by then she would have given up.
The young man opened his eyes so as to make very clear his wish that she depart. When his lids split he saw again her marvelous and savage beauty. Her hair was dark as a raven and her eyes an impossible blue. She stood totally nude before him, far more forward than all her previous attempts, smiling. He was, for a moment, stunned. He regained himself and spoke gently, "My Lady, your beauty is great, but I will not lie with you. Please, my robe is hanging behind you, put it on and come sit next to me. We will speak, and maybe you will understand."
Disappointed the woman turned and reached for the robe. Tossing it about her shoulders, she grudgingly tied it tight covering herself and took a stool next to the tub. She didn't say a word, but huffed as she sat down, crossing her legs away from the man who had snubbed her.
"Do monsters take lovers, miss?" He asked, eyes closed again as he reclined his head against the tub.
"Monsters?"
"I will tell you a story, beautiful, and I dare say you will comprehend."
The woman shifted, the young man's tone sending goosebumps up her arms, yet curiosity held her fast.
"A boy was born some nineteen years hence, or maybe more, he can no longer be sure, to a prestigious but private family in the East. Rarely did they leave their own lands and castle, a floating fortress set upon the Silent Sea, for any reason. He was trained from birth in all manner of arts: writing, painting, literature, poetry, sorcery, horse, bow, and swordsmanship. Among these skills were added stealth and posions. Mercy was thought a weakness beyond all thought and weakness itself was abhorred as more evil than death. The boy's life was consumed in learning and training. Love, or any emotion, was as foreign a concept as any lands or nations beyond the Silent Sea, or across the Nightmare Bridge to the southern continent. Discipline, strength, and honor bore the weight of the full scope of human goodness. Life was difficult for the boy, but difficulty breeds strength."
The woman interrupted, "Do you think deadly training makes you monstrous, then so too is my Lord the King. What makes you so different then?"
The swordsman continued his tale at pace. "At age seven the boy's father called him into the training room. He can still remember the simple wooden walls and the feeling of the thick mats of woven cloth - how they rubbed against the soles of his feet. He entered the room to find his mother and father standing next to one another with smiles on their faces; his father's sword hung at his side from a thin strip of leather and the smell of sweat hung on the room.
'Son,' the boy's father had said, almost with compassion, 'it is time you became what you were born to be. First, we must cut all ties.' The boy was confused as his father drew the curved blade of highland steel from its charcoal sheathe.
'I don't understand papa.'
The boy's voice was unwelcome, as the look on his father's face twisted into a rage. 'Silence, boy!' His father turned, his movements measured in every way, while his mother smiled in her floral dress, truly a beautiful young woman. The boy loved her very much, despite the stigma on powerful feeling. The blade rose high and fell in one clean stroke upon his mother's head. Only blood remained, the taste of salt in his mouth, and the fresh scent of death hovers still in the labyrinth of the boy's memories. With that event, he cast aside all feeling and started the firmer path towards becoming an assassin of the most renowned and feared family ever known to men. All of this he did under the direction of a father whom he could not help but loathe."
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The woman, moved by the Swordsman's painful honesty, leaned over the tub and gave him a kiss, long and deep. She thought that perhaps now she could have him, perhaps now he was vulnerable enough. As she kissed him she began to untie the single cord that held the robe in place, but he turned his head aside saying, "My story is not yet done, m'lady, you may soon regret that kiss." She slumped back onto the stool, angry again at being cast aside. Never had she had any trouble arousing men. What had started as a test for the young man had become a point of pride with Emilia. She left the robe untied as she sat back, wounded. The Swordsman did not give her a second glance returning to his tale as if nothing had happened, eyes fixed on some distant moment.
"The boy grew, in all respects, by measure each day. He became cold and unfeeling. He took his first contract at the tender age of eleven, drawing his blade across the throat of a fat sleeping lord in the southern desert who had drawn the ire of another to the extent that murder seemed a logical recourse. Even in such times of peace as this, m'lady, evil broods and breeds and waits to strike. The boy continued killing and fighting and training. So hard was his heart that nothing could move him to pity. He slew men, women, even children for the sake of the assassin's honor. Assassin's honor, what a pitiful, cruel joke it all seems to him now." The young man paused, a disgusted laugh just barely escaping his lips, and then continued.
"Then, at the very young age of fifteen, the boy took a wife. She was ravishing in every respect, a vision of beauty beyond what most men could ever dream, yet he did not love her, could not in truth. His years of slaughter and the tutelage of an insane father had slain his heart. He was little more than a a weapon. Out of an obligation to continue his family line he lay with his new wife, so young, so innocent, so lovely. She grew with child and he grew in stature among the assassins of the world, though no bards sing tales about those whose very existence relies on the shadows. Only whispers, screams and the empty sighs of souls departing give evidence to the life of a killer.
One night his father came to him, as the gathering dark enveloped the world and empowered ones such as them to have supernatural powers, and he told him what must be done. 'If your wife bears you a son, one day you will have to do to her as I did to your mother, to make him strong as I have made you. It is our family's law. To feel invites ignorance. To care invites folly. To love invites weakness, and weakness, my son, is worse than death.' The boy, then almost grown, understood and accepted this fate. When the day of his child's birth came, and a boy it was, the memory of his own mother's murder assaulted the young man's mind. The weight of grief internalized over the years gnawed at his soul like a wolf trying to free itself from a cage. He looked at his wife, holding their baby boy and love filled his heart."
Here the woman interjected again, "Surely it is a happy tale then, the boy learned to love and became a man and a father..." Her voice trailed off as she realized that he had not heard her interruption.
Horror was painted upon the canvas of the young man's face as he continued to speak his tale in a monotone and measured pace. "But his years of teaching, training, and cruelty twisted that love into an insane and maddening loathing. How interesting that love and hate so finely are distinguished, that one may give way to the other in a flurry and the man not be the wiser, that madness and sanity share a room, like twin brothers, in the household of the mind. The boy panicked as the rush of sudden emotion, so long bottled, drove him insane. He drew his sword. The screaming, the baby crying, the taste of copper mixing with salt in his mouth, the feel of warm liquid on his face and hands, the rank scent of sweat and blood, and her face, the contortion of terrifying surprise that bore both kindness and resentment, and then the silence. The wrathful silence."
Tears poured down the Swordsman's face and intermingled with the now-tepid water of the bath. He was no longer a knight lying in the bath in the King's palace spurning the advances of a beautiful woman, he was an adolescent boy and a man of deep regret trying desperately to escape himself. Bitter remorse took him hostage and rattled his frame with paroxysms of grief and self-loathing. The woman stood up and left to the maddened mutterings of, "Monster, just a monster, not a man at all..." and she regretted their kiss.
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The King's chambers, high in the Poet's Overlook, were just one level above the bathroom where the swordsman lay in anguish of soul. When Emilia returned to the King's chamber, he saw disgust and horror plainly in her eyes. "Come in come in and tell me what has happened, you look weary from deep pain. Did the young man harm you?"
Emilia could not or would not speak, she only stood, wearing the Swordsman's robe, and shook her head. She knew not what to feel. No remorse changes what he did. At last, she muttered, almost inaudibly, to the King, "He refused me. He's inhuman. A monster perhaps." She left the room, leaving the King in silence. As she did so, she touched two soft, pale fingers to her lips and let them linger there for a moment.
The King sat in silence on his massive bed enveloped in thought. A monster? The weeks of training and temptation that he had put this young man through had been a furnace of sorts, a metalworker's hammer stroke to hone an edge for one peculiar purpose. The King wished for a personal guard for his daughter whom he could trust implicitly to guard her when he left on this quest. Could a monster do this? Lord Kerras had served exceptionally well, but if the King were to finally undertake the quest that Mareth had assigned him, he would need to be absolutely certain of the safety of his beloved daughter. Who better than this man who had daily turned down one of the most beautiful women that the King had in his kingdom throwing herself at him? Who better than the man who had defeated the King of the land in single combat at the height of his power with ease? Truly his self-control would be something of legends, but the horror on Emilia's face still worried him.
The King's musings continued for some time, traveling through myriad possibilities and backgrounds that might be applied to the Swordsman until finally, his eyes gave way to weariness. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow I will ask for the truth of it all.
