Chapter Two #4
My stepmother’s father was one name that had been put forward.
King Archer, the Finian king, was my stepmother’s father, and grandfather to my two half-brothers.
Several of his advisors and mine had tried to dissuade him from making his spurious claim.
I was the eldest son of my father’s first wife and the only legitimate heir by law and by my father’s decree—and Archer was begged by his advisors to withdraw his challenge.
But he didn’t have the prudence or the wisdom to do so.
When he continued to refuse and then had the temerity to challenge me to a one-on-one battle between us, I had gone to Finias, rode right into his castle courtyard with my army to defend my throne.
I took off his head with my sword in his own courtyard.
I left a Warden there, one of my most trusted men, to govern in my place, and the last I’d heard, the new heir, a distant cousin of Archer’s, had still not brought forth his own claim or any challenging army to enforce it.
Perhaps, being fond of his own head, he was waiting to see what I would do next.
Unfortunately, Archer’s had not been the only claim I’d had to face.
I’d heard rumors of others. I was a popular choice with the vast majority of my people, but there were always those who would try to advance themselves and profit from any change in a regime.
In the past few months, I had needed to successfully defend myself against three more usurpers who had come forward to lay claim to what was undeniably and rightfully mine by birth, blood and law.
If I were to marry this halfling, I could conceivably consolidate my kingdom with that of Gorias, and go back to consolidate my claim to the Finian throne.
Turnabout was fair play, or so the saying goes.
At any rate, if I was successful in taking Gorias by marriage contract and then keeping Finias by the might of my newly combined armies, then taking Farlias would not be at all difficult.
Perhaps soon I could call myself the High King of Otherworld, as who would be left to challenge me or say otherwise?
I had to admit it was a very strong incentive to me to take the Gorian king up on his offer.
The boy had asked if my soldiers had been following him in the past few days, but we had only just arrived in Jorvik and had come immediately to find him. I had so many questions.
Like, who in this realm had been stalking Braden Wanderer before my men and I had arrived?
Had they been some of the same enemies of King Callum that he alleged had come from Finias and Falias to murder him?
Did they now hope to eliminate his only son or did one of them hope to marry him themselves and attempt to be Gorias’s new king?
Again, no Sídhe would let some minor issue like the gender of a person stop them from an advantageous marriage. Not even me.
And if someone else was planning their own takeover of all the kingdoms to become the High King, did that make Callum’s offer even more enticing to me?
Yes, indeed, it did. Was their presence related in any way to my own situation and the previous attempts on the throne of Murias? I intended to find out.
If my enemies had somehow gotten word of my plan to go have a look at the boy and had ascertained what I had planned, then they might have taken preemptive action.
A marriage between me and the halfling and my subsequent takeover of the Gorian tribe would be potentially catastrophic to them, after all, and to their hopes for my throne.
The question would probably need my close attention very soon.
(Reader, I’ll insert myself in here yet again in my Lord Fionn’s retelling of our story by saying that if you think the politics of the Aos Sídhe were complicated and complex, you’re absolutely right.
There’s an old Faery saying, ‘Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were also a politician.” But I repeat myself.
’ If that phrase seems in any way familiar, like the one my lord used above about ‘turnabout being fair play,’ it’s because mortals have visited our realm from time to time and brought them back to the mortal world because they loved a good phrase.
One mortal, in particular, by the name of Mark Twain, who lived with the Faeries for a short time, stole the one above about politics, and changed it to his own form of government—something he called Congress—seven or eight hundred years later.
Please refer to my comment above about mortals appreciating a good turn of phrase. And now I return you to my Faery Lord.)
As the Murian king, I needed to get back home and attend to my other duties as well.
It was now very close to Yule, the shortest day and the longest night of the year, when from this point on, the days would lengthen, and we would celebrate the return of the sun back to the earth with feasting and other ceremonial events.
In this hated realm of the mortals, they called Yule by the name “Yuletide”—I could never keep up exactly on what day it was on their calendar and why should I?
But I’d heard that their priests sang masses in their churches on that day and told stories from their holy book about the birth of their god and his virgin mother.
It was completely different from Yule, of course.
Yule had been usurped, like our other holidays, by their priests when they were first making converts in these parts of the “heathen” mortal world to get the people to celebrate with them.
As Christianity spread like a blight throughout Northern Europe, early Christian leaders overlaid the holidays with their own and merged the winter solstice festival of the Danes and north men with the celebration of the birth, in the hopes that Yule would simply be absorbed into their holiday and everyone would forget about the other, much older one.
But I had lain for too long thinking about all of it when I should have been sleeping.
The straw mattress left much to be desired, so it was still almost an hour later that I drifted off to sleep, lulled by soft snores, the crackling fire, and the sweetish smell of purple asters, mixed ever so slightly with the scent of forbidden indulgences.
I was coming to associate that scent with the boy named Braden, who was the halfling son of King Callum and not at all what he seemed to be.