Chapter Text
Stellas Keep, Northern Lands of Ellinon, roughly ten hours after the bizzare and abrupt appearance of the Queen and her consort in the Blue Hall with one teenager in tow.
It was…strange.
It was a long way from the small, plain house he’d grown up in. It was a long way further still from starving slowly in the close lightless confines of a salt mine. But Arden had become at least sort of accustomed to fine living, since he’d been plucked out of that suffocating lightless place.
Stellas Keep, however, was very different from even the apartments of the Ubar in the Great Tower of Ar. It was difficult to put into words; there was a sort of…weight to it.
The rich and powerful on Gor…or at least those who lived on the plains of the Vosk… liked their homes to be light and airy. Stellas Keep was not. Oh, the rooms were large and roomy, but Arden had suddenly understood why Systlin and Foicatch had taken such a dim view of the fortification of most Gorean palaces.
Stellas Keep was a fortress. He had been here for only a scant day, on this strange world where such people as the Great Ubara were born, but he’d very quickly realized that no fortification he’d seen on Gor could touch the monster of stone that was Stellas Keep. It was a vast forbidding thing of gray granite, an unlovely blocky beast that hulked above the city that had grown up on the lower plains below the hill the Keep had been built on. Its windows on the lower floors were narrow slits that closed with thick wooden shutters. The windows on the upper floors were larger and paned in glass, but were smaller than the windows of the Great Tower of Ar. That, Arden had been told, was because it got much colder here than it ever did in Ar.
A Gorean would have derided it as unlovely. Until, of course, one took a closer look.
The ceiling of the entry hall that they’d appeared in….well. He hadn’t noticed it at first, because there had been yelling and tears and more yelling, bewilderment from the armored, armed, and alarmed guards, and watching Systlin and Foicatch vanish again only to reappear a few confused moments later, wearing entirely different outer clothes. That had lasted only a moment of disorientation; they’d both taken off at a dead sprint and with an air of desperation for one side of the hall, trailing confused Bloodguards and servants and Arden himself.
(He’d caught up with them in a library that made his head spin, where Systlin and Foicatch both were clinging to a very bewildered black haired girl who looked a few years older than Arden himself and openly sobbing. Things had been very confused for a time after that.)
Eventually, though, things had been sorted out, and eventually Arden had found himself back in that entrance hall, and that time he’d stared.
The ceiling, twenty feet above, was painted a deep lapis blue. It was studded with glittering crystals, set into a facsimile of a night sky. Under his feet the tiles of the floor were of white marble, with tiles of green marble making a pattern of twining vines. Those massive granite walls had been whitewashed, and hung with tapestries. The scenes on them, he puzzled out after a bit, were a story. There was a great towering figure of a pale man in black who made Arden uneasy. There were battles against strange scaled creatures that somewhat resembled more slender, serpentine thalarion, led by a man wearing the eight pointed gold-edged scarlet star that Arden knew was the crest of the Stellas family. There were images of desperate battle, woven bit by careful bit. The people who had woven the tapestries had not skimped on the red dye, or shirked from the portrayal of death.
There was one of the man wearing the crest of the Stellas family, facing down that terrible towering figure in black. The one after that, both the Stellas man and the terrible figure lay wounded.
“Has her majesty told you the story?”
Arden startled. He’d nearly forgotten the guard…Bloodguard…who was trailing him. A Bloodguard! He’d been told of them on Gor, of course, but it was one thing to have them described and another to see them, and to, apparently, now fall under their protection as well. She was as stern in her enameled armor as a statue, a thing carved of steel and stone, and it made more sense now how Systlin was what she was, if the women of her world could all be like this.
“I…” He trailed off, unsure. It had all been so much, so quickly, and it was unsettling, to have a woman wearing the armor of a Bloodguard eyeing him that way, as if she were assessing him. “A little.”
The woman nodded. Her hair was blonde, her eyes brown, and it was still so strange. He’d never before seen women who seemed…at ease. Even on Gor, even after Systlin had swept through an area…even those soldiers who had been freed from chains and who fought for the Great Ubara had not ever quite seemed at ease. There had always been a prickly sort of edge there.
“Here.” She led him back to the first. Arden still could not quite get over many things here, and now was caught again by the sheer quality of the tapestries. Details had been picked out in silk, and the weapons in thread of silver. “That.” She indicated the forbidding pale figure in black, and as she glanced at it Arden saw her jaw tighten for a moment. “The Fallen God. When he rose, before the First King was the First King.”
Godslayer. Arden knew that well. He’d never really pictured such a feat though, not really. The only things close to gods he’d been raised knowing of were Priest Kings, and those had ended up being nothing more than great insects with high technology. Systlin had smashed them like so many ants.
“He would have destroyed us all.” The woman’s voice was soft. “No one could stop him. Wraithen are not intelligent, thank the Lady. Not unless they fight with him commanding them.” That muscle in her jaw twitched again. “In the south, earth witches raised the walls of Myr, to shelter behind, and he had not even properly struck there yet. Here in the north, many died. By the tens of thousands, people died, and no one could stop him.”
She turned away, went to the next tapestry. Looked up at the woven figure of the Stellas man that must be the First King. “No one but him. He was born with the Breaker’s curse, you know, like our Queen now. But like our Queen now, he did not fall to it. He was just a minor lord, then. But he made of himself and his curse a shield for those who looked to him for protection, and the forces of the Fallen God broke against him.”
Arden understood that. He’d seen exactly that, on Gor. “She does that too.” He said.
The woman glanced at him, and smiled, just slightly. “She does.” She agreed. “There is a reason the Bloodguard swears to them, and a reason they’ve kept the throne.” She looked back up at the tapestry. “Others came to him, of course. He never said that he could not protect more, that it was too much for him to bear. This Keep was raised to shelter those he took under his protection, and the old inner city walls to shelter more when the Keep overflowed soon after. People came to him, and he put himself between them and death, and so they fought for him. Then the kings and queens came, of all the little kingdoms, with their armies or at least what was left of them, and he took those too.” The ghost of a smile. “He’s not really the very first king. There were others. But he was the first that everyone bowed to.”
Arden looked up at the image of the man again. He’d been rendered a fierce figure, with a sword in hand, raised to strike. The helm had been worked in thread of silver, but even with the helmet the person who’d woven the tapestry had caught something in the long-dead king’s face that Arden recognized. He knew that gleam in the eye, that set of the jaw. The blue that his eyes had been worked in was familiar as well. “She looks like him.”
“The Stellas nose does tend to stick around, aye.”
“Not that. Well. Not just that. The way he’s looking.” He struggled for the words in the Northron he’d learned from Systlin and Foicatch; they’d been teaching him on and off since they took him in, but he wasn’t yet fluent. “His…the way his face is.”
“Expression. Yes, that too.” She moved to the next tapestry, which was one of the great battle scenes. “There was hard fighting, for a long time. More died, but the Fallen God couldn’t overrun everything. The forces of the Northern Lands and King Brynan held him; even at the worst of the war, the Fallen God never made it to a proper assault on Myr or the south. Two years, the Northern Lands and King Brynan fought a god to a standstill.”
Arden tried to imagine. Couldn’t.
“But.” Her voice had dropped. “Well. When a primal god has his hand on them and is pushing, wraithen breed fast, and it was a war of attrition. So long as the Fallen was directing them, the Northern Lands would have been ground down eventually. So King Brynan did what only a Breaker could, and when the god appeared on a battlefield he rode to meet the Fallen himself.” She walked to the tapestry of the two figures locked in combat, and stared at it in silence for a long moment.
Arden looked too. After a moment asked “was he really twice as tall as a man?”
“He was a god.” She said this as if it was an answer in itself. She saw his lack of comprehension, and took pity. “He could be any size he liked. He could tower above mountains, if he wished. But when he fought the First King, yes, he stood twice as tall. The Lady, bless her, could confine him to that at least.” She looked back at the tapestry, but Arden could tell she wasn’t really seeing it.
“You were there.” He said. “When she killed him.”
She gave him a sharp look. Looked at the tapestry again. “I was. Most of the Bloodguard were, those of us who were already sworn at the time.” The muscle in her jaw worked again, and she turned abruptly to the next tapestry.
A wounded god and a wounded king had been picked out in exquisite detail. The king held a stone in his hand, an enormous drop of bloody red, as red as the blood soaking the ground underneath him. Arden didn’t need to ask what had happened.
“He died there.” He said, quietly.
“He wounded the Fallen enough to drive him off, but yes. He died doing it. The first drop of blood the god shed was found in King Brynan’s hand, crystallized into a star ruby.”
“The one in the crown.” Arden had seen the crown. It was kept in a case of crystal next to the throne. It was a huge thing, a sullen angry red, set in a knotwork circlet of black wrought iron.
“The one in the crown. His son Trystan was only ten. Queen Alliendra served as regent until he came of age. The Stellas line has held the throne of the Northern Lands since. Our Queen is the twenty-second Stellas to wear the crown.”
Arden stared up at the tapestry. Stared at the image of a man bleeding out with a god’s lifeblood in one hand, picked out carefully in silk and silver. Up at the lapis-painted ceiling, at the glittering cut rock crystal stars, down at the marble of the floors. At the spotless enamel of the Bloodguard’s breastplate, at his own clothes. The tunic was silk, and not just silk. He’d never, it seemed, really known proper silk. The hem was embroidered in silver; the cloth was the darkest green. His belt had tooling of a complicated endless knot picked out in silver leaf, and the buckle was silver as well.
“I think that I’d like to go back to my room.” He said at last. He was still learning the layout of the vast Keep, and the Bloodguard woman understood and led him across the hall and up the spiraling stairs to the upper floors.
The stairs were carpeted in scarlet. So was the hallway on the third floor, where the living quarters of the royal family proper were. He stared at the paintings hung along the walls, at the tapestries, at the candles that burned in holders of gold and silver in wall niches. The ceiling here was painted as well, but here it was painted a paler blue, and with clouds that mimicked a pleasant summer sky.
In his room, it was not any better, but at least he was alone to chew over his thoughts. He eyed the bed, which was big and elaborately carved of some hard dark wood. The mattress was, apparently, stuffed with goose down, and the sheets were of a linen more finely spun and woven than he’d ever seen before. The coverlet was of quilted silk, in a dark blue.
He ran his fingertips over the drawers of the chest of drawers against one wall. It was carved like the bed, the wood polished as smooth as the silk of his tunic. The carpet near the bed was deep and lush. There was a silver-backed glass mirror in one corner that stood taller than he did, and the room was larger as a whole than the entire house where he’d spent his youngest years.
It was, apparently, very early autumn here on this strange world. He wandered over to the windows…as tall as he was, glazed in diamond shaped panes of glass held in place with strips of lead…and sat down on the window seat, feeling rather dazed.
Below the royal gardens sprawled. The edges of the leaves were going gold, but flowers were still blooming. Beyond the vast gardens was a wall, that same weighty gray granite as the Keep, and beyond it was a stretch of grass that then turned, quite suddenly, into a vast forest.
He felt heavier here. At night, there was only one moon in the sky. He felt out of place, unmoored. People looked at him strangely, as if they didn’t quite know what to make of him.
And everywhere, everywhere he looked, he saw the eight pointed scarlet star. And it wasn’t that which made him feel so off balance and confused; it was the fact that it wasn’t just her.
The Keep was old. Old in a way nothing on Gor had been. He’d wandered through one hall, when being shown around by a seemingly wrung-out and half-awake Systlin, where portraits of stern faced men and women in gilded frames stared down at him from the walls. Each wore that crown of ruby and iron he’d seen Systlin touch in the throne room.
She… she… had touched the thing with reverence. Arden, in that moment, looking at that crown and at the way everyone else in the room had looked at her, had felt a hint of history he didn’t understand, of years upon years weighing on this place that he had no idea of. He’d felt out of place, lost, a commoner’s son standing in this place soaked in centuries upon centuries of history he knew little of. A commoner’s son, sent to die in a salt mine, but now standing here, because one of the people born to this strange place had taken pity on him.
They’d missed their daughter. He knew that. Perhaps he’d been someone to turn that on, for a time. Maybe having him around had blunted that pain a bit. But now they were here, where they belonged, in the world that was theirs and so strange to him.
What use was he, then? No ancestor of his had fought a god, after all. He wondered what Dina was doing, if Elizabeth was all right…
A knock at the door. He blinked at it for a moment, startled out of his thoughts.
Another knock, and then a woman’s voice. “Arden, isn’t it?”
“I. Ah.” He blinked several times, realizing that his eyes were stinging. “Come in.”
The person who came through the door was a woman of perhaps middling years. She was blonde, green-eyed. Arden did not really feel any particular attraction towards women, but he could tell that she was beautiful. She was wearing pale orange silk, and it would be a bit yet before he got used to the gowns women wore here if they wished. They were nothing like the shapeless concealing Robes of Concealment he knew; this gown, indeed, had been very carefully tailored to show a fair amount of cleavage.
She was wearing probably a small fortune in gold and pearls in her necklace and bracelets and rings. Arden knew her; she was Systlin’s mother, the queen mother of the Northern Lands. It was strange to think of Systlin having a mother. She’d always seemed more…a force of nature, after all. And she had walked out of the thin air.
She examined him for a moment. He felt a sudden desire to shrink under her gaze, and hunched his shoulders up a bit.
“Oh, child.” She said at once, and quite suddenly he was in a warm embrace that smelled faintly of lilies. “Oh, you poor thing. None of that, now. None of that.”
Arden blinked, bewildered and startled. Was, quite suddenly, being held out at arms length by a hand on each shoulder, and then the Queen Mother Melvra Stellas was making noises like a fussing hen and was tilting his chin up, turning his face side to side.
“You’re too thin yet.” She announced. “Of course boys your age always look half-starved, but still. Poor thing. Sys and ‘Catch have told me, of course.”
“Told you.” Arden echoed, still too bewildered to know what to do.
“Yes, everything that’s happened.” She clucked again. “If you had told me at age thirty that my eldest would be pulled around by the Lady herself…well. I’d have told you not to spin such nonsense.” She brushed her skirts out of her way and sat on the other end of the window seat, and looked at him. Her eyes were warm, and he didn’t know how to deal with any of this. “They’ll be up to see you later. My poor girl and ‘Catch spent most of last night having a breakdown in Serra’s room, to be quite honest, and I still had to pull the card of being her mother to get her to cancel some of her schedule for today and sleep in for once, even though I don’t think she slept until near dawn.. They’ve not forgotten you.”
Arden hunched again. “I mean.” He said quietly. “She’s their daughter. I’m…well. I’m no one.”
The Queen Mother looked at him for a long moment. Put out her hand, quite suddenly. He took it, not knowing what else to do, and she pulled him to his feet and towed him along behind her. As they left his room, two Bloodguards fell into step behind them. Queen Melvra did not seem to notice this.
She led him down a hall, around a turn, down another hall, down some stairs, down another hall. They passed servants and Bloodguards and visiting nobles, all of whom nodded or bowed their heads as they passed. The Queen Mother did not seem to notice this either, but then she was the daughter of a High Lord and had been Queen Consort, and was now Queen Mother.
Another turn, and they were in the long hall of portraits. Blue eyes and that slightly aquiline nose stared down from face after face, from under that impossibly red star ruby in that forbidding knotwork crown of black iron.
“Brynan.” The Queen Mother said, touching the nameplate of the first portrait. “The First King, who died to save us from the Fallen God. This portrait was painted when he was still living; the crown was painted in later. it's probably the best likeness of him that we have.”
The painting was of a man with black hair, blue eyes. Grim-faced, wearing armor and holding a sword. Well built and handsome, in a sharp-edged sort of way, and clean-shaven. That nose had come through all the generations after him, as had those sharp blue eyes.
“Trystan.” The Queen Mother moved to the next portrait. “His son. He looks very like his father, doesn’t he? Save for the curly hair. He got that from his mother.” She nodded across the hall from the painting of the First King, where a portrait of a woman with curly red hair and blue eyes looked out. She was more pretty than beautiful, with a sort of impishness to her smile that the long ago painter had captured. “The one next to her is Trystan’s wife, Neryana. She was from Eastwatch, and always wore her hair in that braid. Women in Eastwatch still favor a long plait for dressing their hair. Here, this is their eldest daughter, Meria. She was Queen after her father. Her king consort, Tarnis. He was a noble’s son from the Olive Coast. Kieran, their son, king after Meria. He married Lady Synna, who was said to be the loveliest woman of her time…”
She led him down the line, past face after face. Some were smiling for their portraits. Some were stone-faced, some were scowling. Arden followed her in a daze, wondering why she was telling him all this.
And then he blinked, as the Queen Mother touched a frame with a strange sort of tender sorrow in her face.
“Teurmech.” She said, very softly, and Arden shot a glance across the hall and saw that the face in the consort’s portrait was Queen Mother Melvra’s own. “The second, actually, of course, though no one calls him that. You saw his great great great great great grandfather up the hall; He was of course named for him. No, they call him the Hermit King.” She touched the name plate very gently, lingering for a moment.
The man in the portrait was rawboned and not at all what Arden had pictured the father of the Great Ubara as. His eyes were kind, and he was smiling slightly. He did not have the look of a man who spent much time with steel in his hand. But Arden had seen those cheekbones and that exact shade of brown hair every time he looked at Systlin.
“He was a good man.” Melvra said, softly. “A good husband, and a good father. A poor king, perhaps; he was too gentle-hearted and trusting for it. But I would have loved him less had he been anything else. Ahh, love.” She touched the name plate again. “He broke an engagement to marry me instead, and Saryuis bled the Northern Lands for that later. I’d have married him were the Stellas family still a family of shepherds with nothing to their name but wool, to tell the truth; I don’t think my brother ever really understood.” She sighed, and dropped her hand. “We were both young and foolish, to tell the truth, but even for all the pain it brought later I cannot be sorry for it. And in the end, I do suppose it saved us all.”
She turned to the last portrait in the row. And there was a face Arden knew very well, because it had pulled him from a salt mine and struck off his chains. He looked across the hall, and there, in the portrait of the consort, was another face he knew well.
“My girl is her father’s daughter in some ways.” The Queen Mother said, fondly. “I remember when she told me she was marrying her Bloodguard before she went to war; I did caution her, but she didn’t care. But she has never had a gentle or trusting heart; she was a fierce little thing from the moment she was laid squalling in my arms. She only grew fiercer as she grew. She’s had to face so much, my girl, and she’s eclipsed even Brynan now. Three thousand years from now, I think, it will still be her name that is said first in the litany of the great rulers the Stellas line has given us, and not Brynan.”
She walked a step down the hall, and touched the empty wall. “Serra’s portrait will hang here someday; she’s crown princess now, and a portrait for the hall of the crown is not painted until a king or queen is crowned. There is another hall with the portraits of the princes and princesses of the Stellas line.” She gave him a long look. “We will have to arrange to have yours done.”
Arden blinked at her for a moment, stupidly. Very gently, she took his hands.
“Arden.” She said, gently. “I do not quite think you understand. My daughter is Queen of the Northern Lands, a queen from a line of queens and kings.” She nodded to the portrait of Systlin, staring down from the wall. “Her word is law. I show you this because I want you to understand something of the power the Stellas line has held. My girl reasserted that power when she re-took the Northern Lands. And she has given and signed the order that you are a Stellas as well. Not by birth, perhaps, but you are, legally, her son and my grandson, and a prince.” She smiled at him. “I do like spoiling grandchildren.”
Arden opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again, but just managed a dry little croaking noise. Stammered something, and at last managed “I’m a cloth worker’s son!”
“My son by marriage and the father of my granddaughter, the heir to the throne, is the son of woodworker.” The Queen Mother nodded to Foicatch’s portrait. “Before the Stellas family was anything else, they were shepherds. If you don’t wish it, speak to her, and I’m sure she’ll rescind the order, but even then you would have a place here. She cares for you, as does he. A great deal. And no one I know of is about to gainsay the Iron Bitch of the Northern Lands if she wishes to adopt a child.” She smiled at him. “Least of all me. I have someone else to spoil aside from Serra, so far as I’m concerned.”
Arden’s eyes were stinging and getting hot. He gritted his teeth, but it wasn’t working, and a second later he was being pulled into another hug. The Queen Mother was shorter than Systlin by a couple of inches, and Arden was taller than her, but it was still…nice. It was…it was very nice, and she did not seem to mind that he was getting tear stains on the silk of her gown.
“I know.” She said. “I know, child. You’ve had a rough time, they told me where they found you, it’s all right.”
“I can stay?”
The Queen Mother laughed. “Anyone who tried to take you from us would have to face the Iron Bitch in her full fury, and you’ll not find anyone on Ellinon who wishes that. This is your home, dear, for as long as you want it to be. Come.” She took him by the hand. “Let’s take you to meet your new sister.”
Finis