The Isendel Tops
18 Autumn, 10 months after Garbon’s death
Ethan
A stone’s throw from the Painted Swans’ main barracks, the Isendel Tops became the exclusive domain of Swan soldiers. Over time, the commoners of Northgate were crowded out from the tavern until, at some point, the army decided to make it official, replacing the bouncers out front with their own soldiers. Being a bouncer was typically a punishment or ‘bitch duty’ for the youngest and greenest Swan soldiers; the army ran the city and no one was stupid enough to ‘stick their dick in the hornets’ nest.’
The barkeep, Jebediah Whitman, had little say in the decision and he wisely kept his feelings on the matter to himself. He lived comfortably on the top floor above the establishment with his partner Carl Sanders. The two men, both tall, thin and grey haired, were most distinguished by their differing facial hair - Jebediah sported a thick beard, Carl a long, braided goatee. Carl helped to serve on some nights, but he preferred to stay out of sight, brewing the taverns ale in the basement. For years, he also carted full casks up and carried the empty casks back down (an impressive feat of strength for a relatively small man) but as age crept up on both men, they had installed a dumbwaiter for convenience. Working the pulleys was much easier on Carl’s back and knees.
They supported a small staff: Charlotte Sanders (Carl’s younger sister) served as bartender for the first floor. Her husband and daughter, both named Sam, waited tables.
That it was a family business served as another reason The Tops was ultimately annexed by the Painted Swans - the civilians employed there had too much to lose to allow something bad to happen to any of their Swan guests.
Over time, the split level establishment formed a two-tiered cast system that mimicked the city at large - officers were served on the second floor, while enlisted men stayed on the floor below.
The mood was festive, as it usually was towards the end of the week, with raucous shouts rattling the walls below and rowdy banter filling the room above. Except for the empty tables near the back, where a giant of a man sat eating and drinking alone…
The Wolf
The murmuring drone of soldiers’ voices punctuated by bursts of laughter and the staccato clang of tin drinking mugs were an intrusion in The Tops. It was a place that was meant for more quiet voices and the lamentations of the cello and the harp, where those of discerning company kept in quiet conversation and close leaning smiles, but instead now the foreign noise of soldiers was the clamor of an overly friendly house guest who’d never been welcome and stayed too long.
What might had been the slow beckoning of a violin was instead the discordant ringing of the thick fingers of a Painted Swan soldier trying his hand at the ivories of a piano far older than its player, where around gathered his friends in swells of laughter and encouragement - a fraternal joy fueled by drink stoked to burn away the cold of an autumn wanting to be winter.
It was a levity that drifted up like candle smoke to the second level of The Tops, where the more quiet and more tired conversations of Painted Swan officers found some amusement in the frivolity of those younger in either skin or spirit. It was a boisterous tenor that spread with the hearth’s warmth to fill the odd angles of that place, but seemed to fall shy of reaching the dimly lit tables near the back of the second floor largely empty — save for their one occupant.
It was a part of The Tops which had become soaked with the scent of cigar smoke and remembered the weight of wine. The hooded lamp above the round topped table dripped a narrow pool of copper light, which illuminated an array of porcelain plates and bowls, a wide goblet, a bottle of wine, and the corpse of the bottle that had come before it. There was a knife made for cutting the thick beef steaks The Tops was renowned in serving and a three pronged fork with a broad wooden handle — and there at the edge of the light was a helmet dull and scarred which bore the visage of a wolf’s head.
There as a beast left to his bones and bathed in umbra of a dangerous thing, neglected by those wary at the warning of his attention, the man chewed behind the bandages that wrapped him. The knife and teeth tore alike at meat and gristle and he drank heavily from the goblet that sloshed with the sanguine bite of bitter wine. Where heavy gauntlets lay removed and resting on the table’s wood, the back of a bare hand thick in callous, scar, and vein wiped at his mouth and smeared grease at the linen that wrapped him.
He pulled closer a plate which bore a broader bounty of food and from it speared a bit of roasted potato and chewed on it, before turning the plate and pinning a new piece of thick steak with his fork and dragging the knife across it. Something red poured across the still-white of the plate and began to pool against the near lip — the man paused.
It was with pale eyes he stared at the trickle of blood that ran from the gash in the flesh of that steak, the red so distinct against the perfect white of that plate — a plate so white as snow thick on cobbled streets, the lamp light dancing on the polished porcelain like the flames of a burning tavern.
The Wolf leaned back slowly into the cushioned bench seat built against the rear wall of the building’s second floor, and the wood groaned beneath him. His movements were slow when he reached for the goblet and dragged it toward himself and drank from it and washed the salt and grease and meat further down his throat.
The goblet clanked against the table and the man stared for a moment longer at the plate, before he pushed it away and his eyes closed while his fingers tightened around the stem of the wine goblet. There was — something — that began to build, a knot in his chest and a tightness in his throat, an uncertain and nameless anxiety, a rope that was being wound tighter and tighter, until…
The sound of a fork scraping against the pottery of a plate at the opposite side of his table pulled him from those shapeless thoughts and he opened his eyes, a frown slowly turning the edges of his mouth while beneath the bandages his brow furrowed.
Ethan
A soldier sat across from him, helping himself to one of the few plates left untouched. His hair was black, swept back. His face was dominated by a moustache thick enough to carry a drink of water.
The man’s uniform, old and weathered, revealed him to be a lieutenant. He didn’t belong at the table. His rank barely qualified the man enough privilege to drink on the second level. His very presence had an air of insubordination and his etiquette would offend most animals.
He sucked a bit of gristle from his teeth, a repugnant noise that grated the ears, straining hard enough for the tendons to protrude from his neck.
The name on the armor read “Peters.”
“This is really good,” Peters said, his mouth filled with food. “I should come here more often.”
The Wolf
There was something so particular and peculiar about a hand that reached toward an animal known to bite — an animal that had long become accustomed to the scent of uncertainty and fear — that when one so seeming unwitting reached without a care to take a bone from its jaws it was a thing so curious as not to be met with any immediate reaction.
So it seemed to be as across the table stared eyes kept still from the light — pale and neither blue or gray, but slowly they became things narrow in something between curiosity and suspicion at the absurdity of what was being seen.
The Wolf offered no words of course — he so rarely did. There was instead the slow lean forward from what had been a recline against the seat’s cushions so that a bit of his weight came to his arms folded on the table top at the edge of the light that pooled atop it.
Ethan
Peters chewed a mouthful of the sumptuous steak, allowing the juices to swirl around his tongue. He gazed absently at the air between the two men as he began to speak.
“You ever have dreams? Some people swear they never have ‘em. Lots more seem to have ‘em but forget ‘em soon as they wake up.” Taking a drink of ale, he glances around the tavern as though nothing at the table currently interests him.
“Me? I dream all the time!” the fake lieutenant said.
He let the conversation hang there, returning his attention fully to the steak in front of him. He acted as though the assertion was a thing of profound revelation, a miracle worthy of awe, testing the patience of his fellow patron. He had years of practice to know how far he could push a line of absurdity with this man.
Using his pinky, Peters cleared a bit of snot from his nose, rolling the substance on his fingers before flicking it dismissively to the floor.
Just as he sensed the air beginning to shift, the subtlest of changes that his spotlight was about to be seized and destroyed by an audience no longer amused by his act, he began to speak again.
“I had this one dream… like for months. Just one dream, over and over. A nightmare, I thought. I kept seeing my friend die.” He took another drink of ale and cleared his throat. The flippant attitude fell away from his face and his tone became serious, his eyes more focused.
“In the dream, I was kneeling over him. Trying to help. And he kept pointing to this… evil looking, black sword that I got in my hand.”
“Another man was the one who stabbed him – in real life, I mean. But in the dream, I’m holding the sword. I don’t know why, but I am.”
“And he’s bleeding. And I’m crying. And he just keeps pointing at this sword, mouthing words I can’t hear. He keeps trying to tell me something but… he can’t breathe.” As joyless laugh escaped his lips. Ethan stared into empty space; his eyes fixed on the image from his dreams. “…all this blood just pouring out of his stomach. And he couldn’t breathe…”
He shook the vision from his mind, offering a weak smile before taking another bite.
“Anyway, it took me months to figure it out what that dream meant. Why I kept having it, night after night…”
“He was trying to tell me something that should have been obvious. Something I should have figured out a long time ago.” He finished chewing so that his mouth was clear and the words could carry the entirety of the message they needed to deliver. “See, the sword was the key. The sword told me about the man who carried it.”
Ethan leaned across the table slightly so that their eyes could meet. “It told me about the man who killed my friend…”
The Wolf
It was a subtle thing, a moment as ephemeral as the the dusk becoming evening or the lingering hope of autumn giving way to the long winter — a moment that never quite happened until one came to realize that it simply was.
It began beneath the bandages while Peters talked in gestures so precise and perfect in their play-acting — the delicate muscles above the eyes were the first to release their tension, and then the longer muscles along his jaw. There had been a breath kept in the lungs that slowly slid from his nostrils over the course of a few other breaths and soon the suspicion and the irritation had drained so slowly from the man who sat across the table from Ethan that he had only noticed beneath the veneer of his own deception that it was gone and replaced by almost nothing at all.
The man across from Ethan had seemed somehow in some impossible way, perhaps a posture in the shoulders, perhaps something else, to become just a bit smaller than he had been, and by the time Ethan’s own eyes and his words had cut beyond the façade to what was at last a revelation of their truth, it was met by… nothing.
Roland Fairchild stared at the table between the two for a time, a moment longer than it should have been, before his eyes lifted to those finally familiar and green behind the moniker. The words were the same as they had always been, but where before they had been always singed with some mixture of disdain and arrogance, they were in that brief moment somehow different.
“Heya, Spud.”
Ethan
“Roland…” Ethan replied.
Suddenly, Ethan felt like he was somehow a child once again, just a skinny kid back in that small, dead village now so far away. He’d come to this tavern to confirm what his mind finally pieced together and to see if there was anything left of the older brother he once knew, admired, and usually feared. He always wanted to believe there was something good in that arrogant, often abusive man.
“I never assumed you were dead. Any of you. Not at first, anyway. You were too… strong. Too stubborn.
“But that was a long time ago.
“Life has taught me that those things don’t really matter. Death doesn’t care about strength or willfulness… It’s not fair. It doesn’t play by any rulebook. It takes everyone and everything when it wants, whether they’re ready or not. Whether they see it coming or they don’t.” Ethan thought briefly to all the lives he encountered and the ones he had ended. Most of them hadn’t seen their death coming.
“Is anyone else left? Dad? Erik? Victoria? …Ellie?”
The Wolf
There was no real indication that he was listening, but somehow Ethan knew that behind the dull stare in the eyes his older brother was drifting a fog of thoughts given shape by his words — there was a forest, a broad bridge above a river, and the sound of picks on stone. There was the sound of festival bells and a red ribbon against the green of familiar trees.
Roland seemed a thing that weigh a thousand stones, armor filled with sand that would never leave that seat. He had feared the words he spoke next. They were words he had pushed down into a place he had never meant to visit, had perhaps been keeping safe for this moment. He had thought in speaking them there was something that might break like the thin limb of a tree grown too tall.
“Dad and Erik are dead,” the words seemed to linger there above the table between them, and he waited for them to hurt — but was disappointed to find they didn’t.
“Three years ago. It was a skirmish with a minor lord set on rebellion. A grain silo — I think it was supposed to be important. They got medals.
Victoria and Ellie are on the front in Ithar. I got a letter from Victoria. She says Ellie is taller than you now, but I think she meant how tall you were back in…” Roland trailed off and was quiet for a time. “Ellie doesn’t know about the rest.”
The last conversation he’d had with their father found its way from some place forgotten, the hulking and bearded man ranting about Ethan — the words coward and deserter tangled in the scent of ale, but Roland kept that to himself.
Ethan
“You want to tell me how it came to pass that you would take up arms to kill friends? Family? Good people?”
The Wolf
There was for a moment of narrowing and a glimmer of something in Roland’s eyes — the roiling of a thousand things just beneath the surface and the brief hardening of his expression that left Ethan somehow with the impression of fangs.
There were words that tumbled in Roland’s mind in the softer tones of a woman’s voice — words like traitors and loyalty and love — but just as quickly as it began to emerge it seemed to drain away with the slightly movement of his eyes like a blink that almost was but wasn’t.
Roland glanced toward the steak knife he gripped in his hand there on the table top. He had thought he had put that down earlier. He slid his fingers back away from it and to the edge of the table.
He slid his eyes back toward Ethan again and in that moment it seemed as though there was an answer there on the edge, but it seemed to linger without becoming — like so many failed campfires their father had to start instead, scowling and disappointed.
There are some things you can never make someone understand no matter how hard you try, and sooner or later everyone learns it’s better to be quiet.
There came instead the other words — the words that would mean something to the man who sat across from him with hard eyes beneath a face now only some approximation of his own. There was nothing to the words that left his lips that were seeking understanding nor forgiveness, but offered instead something else — something Ethan needed.
“He knew it was me in the end. He knew what was waiting if they took him. I asked him what he would do to protect his friends,” Roland said, while his eyes seemed to study the plate on the table before him.
“There is nothing she can’t take from you. There is nothing you can keep safe. There is nothing,” he said in a voice Ethan could barely hear.
Ethan could see it begin. Something, whatever it was that had welled up within Roland at seeing Ethan — he could see it beginning to dwindle like a candle that had burned long through the night.
Something there, something that was real sliding back behind his eyes into a place that was water on iron and stone, a place that was cold, a place from which only one person had ever escaped — and it wasn’t Roland.
The change in the light was subtle — perhaps the way the lamps touched the wall. Ethan came to realize the other officers had stopped talking. He heard a footstep leave the carpet and touch the wood.
He didn’t have long.
Ethan
In spite of everything, Ethan did not want to part as enemies. Even if the man before him was just a shell, Ethan wanted to believe that a different path was possible for the two Fairchild boys from Aelorean’s Crossing.
It’s not too late! Ethan wanted to say. You can come with me. You’re not too far gone!
But he didn’t say this. The hollowness of the voice, the emptiness in the gaze… Whatever Roland once was, it was taken from him. All that remained was a dead man who barked commands in service to a woman he appeared to fear.
Instead, Ethan simply apologized.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “In another bar, in another life, we may sit as brothers, exchanging stories of hard lessons and empty regrets. In that other world, we take comfort that the burdens of life may be lessened by their telling, lightened by understanding, and absolved by another’s compassion.”
“If only life were so simple…” he began to slide out of from the booth. He did not have the time to spare, yet he hesitated anyway. What was life if you couldn’t find the humor in a little tragedy?
Ethan smiled.
“You realize this is the second time you assholes have ruined that business for me? You didn’t even try the food…” he looked to his brother, his eyes wet with sorrow.
The Wolf
There were, perhaps for a moment in another place, three boys, one much younger than the others, still not old enough to play on the far side of the river. They held sticks and swung them back and forth through the tall grass as they cut across Old-Man Heylin’s farm — howling like wolves.
Roland did not lift his eyes from the table to watch his brother as he stood to begin to leave, but beneath the bandages one of the corners of his mouth quirked at the boy’s joke. There was a part of Roland — something that still remained of a young man that had run among the woods, of a big brother that wanted too a thing that couldn’t be, that wanted too to cry — but he no longer could.
“Ethan… one more thing you need to know,” Roland said as the boy began to turn his back and make from The Tops while he still had the opportunity.
“The Grand Inquisitor. If she touches you — you die.”
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