Soldiers lived in ways no others had, or could hope to, unless they too found the truths of war. Veterans returned home with all illusions scoured from their eyes, their minds. They looked out from a different place, but there was nothing healthy in that, nothing worthy. They had lived their days of skinning, and now all that they looked upon was duly exposed: gristle and sinew, bone and meat and the trembling frailty of organs.
Her husband had confessed as much to her, the night before he took his own life, the night before he abandoned them all, leaving only a legacy of shame. The hero who returned — what cause had he to kill himself? Returned to his beloved wife — the woman he had talked about, and longed for, each and every day while on the march — returned, rewarded, honoured, invited into a well-earned retirement far from strife and rigour. Home for less than a month, and then he drives a dagger into his own heart.
When the shock passed; when the horror faded; when eyes settled upon Nerys, the veiled widow… then came the first whispers.
What did she do to him?
She had done nothing. He had arrived home already dead. No, that was not it. When he had come home, it was she who was dead. To him. Out on those marches, on those fields of battle, on those miserable, cold nights under indifferent stars, he had fallen in love with the idea of her: that ageless, perfect idea, and against that she could not compete. No mortal woman could.
Her husband had been a fool, susceptible to delusion.
The truth was, the bloodline was already weak, almost fatally so. And things would only get worse. It had been some other soldier, a youth who’d lost an arm to a horse bite long before he drew blade against an enemy, who’d come to Abara drunk and bitter — oh, he’d told his share of lies, but after it had happened, Nerys had made inquiries, had discovered the truth. No, he had not lost his arm defending a Son of Darkness. No, he had not been recognized for his bravery. But it was too late. He had found Nerys’s daughter. He had found Sandalath, just a young girl still, too young to regard him with proper scepticism, and his slurred words seduced her easily, his calloused hand found the parts of her just awakened, and he stole from them all their future.
Bastard son.
Nerys kept him — that pathetic father — in coin, in the village. Enough to ensure that he stayed drunk, drunk and useless. She had made him the offer, made clear the only bargain available to him, and of course he accepted. He would never see his son, never see Sandalath, never come up to the house, nor walk the estate’s grounds. He had his corner of the root cellar in Abara Tavern, and all the wine he could pour down his numb throat. She even arranged to send him whores, not that he could manage much with them any more, according to their reports. The wine had stolen everything; he had the face of an old man and eyes that belonged to the condemned.