I was born in the seventh moon of a wet year, when the Northern Provinces wore their winter rains like a cloak of glass beads. Third son to Aaron deArthis, I arrived late to the feast of inheritance: close enough to see the golden plates but far enough that no one expected me to reach for them. This was my first blessing, though I wouldn't understand it as such for many years.
The moors of our estate stretched endless as a child's summer day. They rolled beneath clouded skies like the breathing of some vast, sleeping creature: rising into gentle hills crowned with limestone teeth, falling into valleys where mist gathered thick as wool. In spring, the heather bloomed purple across those hills. Come autumn, the bracken turned the color of rusted swords. But it was in the rain-washed mornings of early summer that the moors showed their truest face: emerald and jade and every shade of green that had a name, and some that didn't.
I knew every fold of that land. Every sheep path that wound between the tors, every stream that chuckled its way down from the heights. My bare feet had memorized each stone, each tussock of grass, every place where the earth grew soft enough to swallow an unwary boot to the ankle. The shepherds who worked our flocks would see me running wild across those hills, neck brown as a nut from the sun, clothes more often wet than dry, and I think they recognized something familiar in me—a kinship with the land that had nothing to do with owning it.
Ten years separated me from Aldwin, my eldest brother. While those gulfs have a way of closing as they stretch into adulthood, at five and fifteen, the chasm was insurmountable. Eight years lay between myself and Corrin, who had already begun to pattern himself after our father: all sharp angles and sharper words. In the great stone halls of our keep, I was the afterthought, the spare's spare. But on the moors, I was sovereign of all I surveyed.
Our family's line takes its name from a flower. The Arthis grows wild among those hills, though you need to know where to look. The plant itself is modest: a spread of soft green leaves that hug the ground in a rosette, from which rises a single stem no thicker than a child's littlest finger. At its crown blooms a flower of five white petals, each no larger than a thumbnail. Pretty enough, but the Northern Provinces grow prettier flowers in abundance.
What made the Arthis remarkable was not its beauty but its behavior. From dawn to dusk, the bloom follows the sun's path across the sky with the devotion of a penitent. But at the slightest touch: a fingertip, a raindrop, even too strong a breeze, those petals would fold inward quick as thought, and the stem would bow until the flower nearly touched the ground. There it would remain, closed tight as a secret, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.
My father despised our namesake. "The coward's bloom," he would call it, usually after his third cup of wine. "Hiding at the first sign of trouble. Thank the Emperor we've bred that tendency out of the bloodline." He would look at Aldwin when he said this, occasionally at Corrin. Never at me. I was too young, too small, too inconsequential to bear any expectations or disappointments.
If I was ignored by my father, I was the singular scrutiny of my mother, and she held a different view.
She would take me walking in the walled garden where she cultivated a patch of Arthis with the patience of a saint. "See how they protect what is precious," she would say, her fingers hovering just above the blooms, never quite touching. "They know that some things, once bruised, never heal quite the same. There is wisdom in knowing who to follow, when to open and when to close. The deArthis line has survived five hundred years, not through brute strength, but through understanding the proper moment to reveal ourselves and the proper moment to protect what matters most."
I was young and more interested in the frogs that lived in the garden pond than in metaphors of flowers.
My education, such as it was in those early years, came in strange fragments. My brothers received proper tutoring: Aldwin in the arts of governance, numbers, and the management of estates; Corrin in warfare. I was deemed too young for such formal learning, too wild to sit still for lessons. Instead, my mother claimed sole custody of my instruction in a maternal way. While my father, when he deigned to notice me, called me Elenden, and my brothers called me El, my mother called me Elen.
"You're six now, a grown deArthis. You must never let the common folk touch you," she told me one morning, pushing the hair away from my eyes. I had my father's fair hair and blue eyes, but something in my features favored her. "We are deArthis. We must remain apart. Do you understand, Elen?"
I didn't, not truly. In the great hall, I had seen my brothers roughhouse with the sons of our bannermen, had watched my father clap his soldiers on the shoulder after a successful hunt. But when I asked about this, my mother's face grew a quick storm like the ones that rolled in from the sea.
"Your brothers are older. They must learn to lead men, and some men only follow what they can touch. But you, Elen"—making my name soft as a lullaby—"you are youngest and last. I would keep you perfect a little longer."
The kitchen staff learned this lesson when Marta, the cook's assistant, made the mistake of patting my head after slipping me a honeyed pastry. My mother entered the kitchens just as Marta's flour-dusted hand touched my hair, and the temperature in the room dropped like a stone down a well.
"Pack your things," my mother said, her voice solid as winter ice. "You'll have a reference and a month's wages."
"My lady," Marta stammered, "I meant no harm. The young lord, he was hungry, and I only—"
"You touched him." My mother's words fell like an executioner's axe. "I was quite clear about the rules regarding Elen. You chose to ignore them."
By evening, Marta was gone, and the remaining kitchen staff looked at me with eyes full of wary distance. My only hope for casual companionship was denied to me in that act. Word spread quickly through the keep, and I became a figure of whispered caution. "Don't touch 'em," they would say, "or you'll end up like Marta."
"It's for your own good," my mother told me that night, working to justify any guilt she was feeling. "The world is full of brokenness, my heart. Let me keep them from you a little longer."
That was how I came to find myself lonely and curious enough to follow the sound of a girl's voice carrying out over the moors, and how I came to meet my first real friend at the start of my seventh summer.
One heartbeat. Two. Three... five.
Merauve found himself suspended in the peculiar limbo of a man who has opened a symphony only to discover he is no longer its conductor. The silence stretched between them like a held breath, and he began to catalogue his options.
Should he prompt? The flower presented itself as an obvious avenue; he could ask about the estate, the current state of the family holdings. Or perhaps approach from another angle: inquire about the brothers, about the moors, about anything that might restart this unprecedented flow of confession. His instinct screamed at him to fill the void.
But Elenden's stillness made interruption feel like vandalism. He sat gazing through the barred window like a man reading scripture in a language only he understood. The morning light carved his profile in thoughtful stillness, and Merauve found himself reluctant to shatter whatever delicate mechanism had begun to turn.
Just as the Inquisitor was preparing to test the waters with a subtle shift of posture, a casual gesture that might draw attention without words, Elenden spoke again.
"Someone is coming."
Merauve's hand, halfway to repositioning his tobacco pouch, froze in midair. His eyes darted to the door, then to the windows, searching for whatever prompted this observation. The corridor beyond remained silent, the courtyard visible through the window showed no unusual movement.
"Food, perhaps?" Elenden spoke with gentle amusement, as though he found Merauve's somewhat frantic confusion endearing rather than concerning.
The Inquisitor felt heat rise in his cheeks, a sensation he had not experienced in professional circumstances for longer than he cared to remember. Here he was, a man who prided himself on orchestrating every variable, every pause, every seemingly casual gesture, blown about like autumn leaves in the wind of this prisoner's unexpected proclamations. A two-meal schedule with brunch at three bells had been calculated precisely. He had calculated it: late enough to induce genuine hunger.
A knock trembled against the iron-bound oak, so tentative it might have been a bird testing for bugs in the wood. Had the room not been wrapped in attentive silence, Merauve might never have heard it.
"Excuse me one moment," he said, rising. The formal mask slipped over his features: controlled, sophisticated, utterly in command.
The serving girl in the corridor held a tray bearing three covered dishes, her posture radiating the brittle tension of someone who understood that mistakes in this assignment carried consequences beyond mere embarrassment. Merauve lifted each heat shield with ritualistic precision, evaluating the offerings like a general inspecting troops. The pheasant was too elaborate. The bread and cheese too simple. But the stew... yes, mutton stew struck the proper note. Humble enough to suggest consideration for a man recently emerged from deprivation, rich enough to demonstrate genuine care.
"The stew," he pronounced. "You may dispose of the others. Bring it in with a serving table and proper dishes. We will take it immediately."
The staff bustled about their preparations. Merauve took considerable care to communicate their instructions: the True was not to be interacted with, all orders were to be followed without question or comment, their continued employment, and more, depended upon invisible competence.
Elenden had other plans.
"Thank you," he said to the woman ladling stew into his bowl, the easy warmth of genuine gratitude threading through his words. "And what, may I ask, is your name?"
The serving girl went rigid as a bowstring. Her eyes flicked toward Merauve in a silent plea. Merauve managed what he hoped was a subtle 'proceed' gesture, though his mind was racing through the implications of this departure from script.
"Maudalia, sir," she managed, attempting a curtsy while maintaining her grip on the ladle. Each word emerged with the clipped precision of someone desperately trying to say no more than exactly enough.
Elenden persisted.
"Maudy, then? Among your friends?"
The poor girl went pale as cream. Another desperate glance toward Merauve. He gestured permission with growing irritation while internally cursing the complete dissolution of his precisely orchestrated meal scene. First the window, now this? Was he to be reduced to a mere spectator in his own interrogation?
"Yes, m'lord. And my mum calls me that too." The words spilled out in one breath, and she retreated a half-step, hands trembling against the serving spoon.
Elenden's shoulders dropped. His fingers found the edge of the table and held there. When he spoke again, his words came slow and reluctant.
"I'm so sorry, Maudy." He paused, and the serving girl, caught despite herself, looked directly at him. He averted his gaze as if the directness was too much to bear. "Perhaps it would be good to visit her soon. Your mother. Before winter comes."
Maudalia's confusion was written clearly across her features. She looked to Merauve with questions she dared not voice. A sharp gesture of dismissal, a clear 'no' to whatever unspoken request her eyes contained, and the staff made their hurried exit. The door bolt slid shut with a sound that seemed unnaturally loud in the sudden quiet.
Merauve turned to find Elenden leaning back into his chair, hands folded in his lap. The moment felt poised on the edge of return: back to the story, back to the slow but methodical revelation of secrets, back to something resembling the interrogation Merauve had planned.
Instead, Elenden's next words sent them in an entirely different direction.
"I don't always know if I should say anything," he began, his voice soft with uncertainty. "With good news, it's easy. Bringing light and hope to people's hearts. But with the difficult tidings..." He trailed off, leaving the sentence suspended.
Merauve felt the familiar ground of professional interrogation shifting beneath his feet. Here was information, the very thing he had been positioned to extract. Yet it came wrapped in something that felt less like intelligence gathering and more like... confession?
"Difficult news about..." He weighed each possibility before selecting the safest option. "Maudy?"
Elenden lifted his eyes to meet Merauve's directly, sorrow plainly written.
"About her mother. She'll pass before the year turns. Winter will be too late for farewells."
Silence rushed to fill the space. Merauve felt a peculiar discomfort, as though expected to offer absolution rather than extract information. He didn't care about Maudy, didn't care about any of the staff beyond their utility. And staff relations were nothing to him, less than nothing. A stranger who would live or die without affecting any of his plans whatsoever.
Yet Elenden spoke of her death with the gentle sorrow of someone discussing the passing of a beloved aunt. The casual intimacy of it was deeply unsettling.
"Ahh," Merauve managed, a noncommittal sound that bought him time to think while reaching for his bowl. A few spoonfuls of stew might provide the buffer he needed to redirect this conversation toward more productive channels.
As if the gesture had been an invitation, Elenden also, after bowing his head in silence for a time, took up a spoon and followed suit.
They ate in silence, each lost in thoughts that seemed to pull in opposite directions. Merauve found his mind cycling between frustration and fascination. Prophecies about dying mothers? Casual intimacy with serving staff? Beyond the bizarre, lay something more unsettling: a creeping awareness that he was afraid. Not of Elenden himself, the man was clearly no physical threat in his current state, but of the way their conversation kept sliding away from his grasp. He was handling Elenden with the same care he might use approaching one of those Arthis flowers: afraid that too direct a touch, too forceful a question, might cause him to fold inward and disappear into silence for days.
The realization offended him. He was the one being cautious? He was the one tiptoeing around his subject's sensibilities? But then, wasn't this what he had schemed for? A prisoner who would talk, who would share his secrets freely?
Beside him, Elenden seemed to inhabit an entirely different space: one where the simple act of sharing a meal held its own quiet meaning, where even a stranger's mortality was worthy of gentle sorrow. He was fully present: enjoying the warmth of broth, the texture of bread, the play of light on the steam.
The stew was excellent: rich with herbs and tender meat. Merauve didn't taste it.
Elenden's spoon gentle clicked against the bowl's rim as he set it aside. His hands found each other in his lap, and something danced in his eyes when he met Merauve's gaze.
"That was delicious; thank you. Shall I continue?" he asked, though it felt less like a question and more like an invitation. "I believe I was about to tell you how I met my first real friend."
The day I first saw her, the morning dawned grey as pewter, with the kind of mist that turned a familiar landscape into the start of an adventure. I escaped the keep early, mostly to avoid my mother's fussing ministrations. My breakfast was tucked into a leather pouch, my shoes abandoned by the garden gate. The wet grass stained my bare feet green and bathed them in silver dew.
I was following a stream I knew well to see if the otter kits had learned to swim yet. It was a stream that began high in the hills and wound its way down through a dozen small waterfalls before joining the larger River Thane. The mist was so thick I could barely see ten paces ahead, and the world shrunk to just the chuckling water and the soft squelching earth beneath my feet.
That's when I heard the singing.
It wasn't like the songs in our great hall, booming epics of conquest and glory... not a rousing sea shanty like my father favored. Nor was it like my mother's lullabies, sweet and secret as honey in a tree. This was something else: melody that seemed to rise from the earth itself, wordless, wild; sure of who it was and what it should be.
I followed the sound like a fish follows the current. The stream led me to a pool I knew well, where the water gathered in a natural basin before spilling over smooth stones. But today, someone else invaded my secret place.
She sat on my favorite rock of the bunch—the flat one that jutted over the deepest part of the pool and could usually be counted on to be warm with sunlight in the afternoons—with her bare feet dangling in the water. Her hair was the color of peat, dark and rich with hidden depths. She was older than I was, probably by about two summers. At those ages it starts to make a difference. Her skin had the browning of someone who lived beneath the sky, not sheltered under roofs. And she was still singing, though now I could hear it was less singing than humming, a bit of a haunting tune.
I must have made some sound, because she turned to look at me, and her humming stopped as suddenly as if someone had closed a music box. Her eyes were the green of deep forests, flecked with gold like sunlight through leaves. We stared at each other across the water, two children caught in a moment of mutual trespass.
"This is my pool," I said finally, because even at seven, I had learned something of my father's certainty about ownership.
She tilted her head, considering me with those forest eyes. "The water told me it belonged to itself," she said, and her voice had the same quality as her humming: wild, but certain and utterly unmoved by my declaration.
I had no answer for that. In all my short life, no one had ever contradicted my claim to anything. I was a deArthis. The land was ours by right of blood, paper and the Emperor's seal, according to father. I was ill-prepared for any dispute.
"But I suppose," she continued, swinging her feet in the water, "it might not mind sharing. Water's good at that. It's the stones that get particular about staying in one place."
There was a logic to this that my seven-year-old mind found irrefutable. I edged closer, still wary but drawn by a curiosity stronger than my mother's warnings. Perhaps pushed due to my mother's warnings.
"I'm Elenden," I offered finally.
"I know," she said, which startled me. "You're the lordling who runs the moors barefoot. The shepherds talk about you."
"They do?"
"Mm." She pulled her feet from the water and stood in a single graceful movement. "Said you musn't be touched. Said you probably would know where all the best blackberries grow. Is that true?"
Pride swelled in my chest. "I know where everything grows."
She smiled, and it was like watching the sun break through clouds. "Prove it."
And just like that, the protective walls my mother built around me crumbled like sand before the tide. She became my secret, my rebellion, my first real friend. Thinking back, I believe the shepherds must have kept our secret too.
She was the daughter of traveling folk, I learned, those wanderers who followed the old roads and older ways. Her people had made camp in the valley beyond our borders, and she strayed onto our lands following birdsong and curiosity. She knew nothing of the rules that governed my world, or perhaps she knew and simply didn't care.
That first day, I showed her some of my secret places: where the wild strawberries grew, sweet and small, where the fox had her den, where you could find stones that sparked when struck together. She showed me things too: how to find north by the moss on trees, how to whistle like a curlew so perfectly that the real birds would answer. And how to dance with the wind.
She was at that innocent age when girls are still young enough to crave an audience, but not old enough to be self-conscious about their joy. She would dance in the heather, barefoot and wild, her arms sweeping through the air like branches in a storm. I just sat on a rock and watched, entranced, as she moved with the grace of dandelion seeds floating on summer breezes.
Whenever the sun began to sink low, coloring the land rose and silver, she would stand to leave.
"Will you come back?" I asked that first day, and heard the naked hope in my voice.
She studied me with those green eyes.
I thought of my mother, of her rules and her guarded distances, but I thought more of the loneliness that had lived in my chest like a stone until that morning.
"Please?"
She nodded, satisfied. "Spirit willing."
And she did come back. Not every day; her people moved according to rhythms I didn't understand. But all through that wonderful, mist-wrapped summer, I would look for her. Sometimes I would find her waiting at our pool. Sometimes she would appear as if from the earth itself while I wandered the hills.
She taught me to see my own land with new eyes. What I had known as ownership, she knew as relationship. The streams, the stones, the trees weren't just obstacles or landmarks: they were ancient things, living things, full of stories. The moors themselves breathed, she said, and if you were very quiet and very still, you could feel it.
"All nature is True," she told me one day, lying on her back in the heather, watching clouds paint themselves across the sky. "The water, the stones, the growing things, the wind. They're true to themselves. It's only us that aren't. We forget who we are, and then we forget that we forgot. But the Spirit remembers. The Spirit knows."
I didn't understand what she meant. Kids say all sorts of profound or silly things without the sense to know the difference. But I remembered her words, kept them like smooth stones in my pocket to turn over in quiet moments.
The last day I saw her that summer, the rains came early. The moors were shrouded in veils of water, and the streams ran high and wild. I almost didn't go out, but something drew me to our pool.
She was there, but she wasn't alone. A man stood beside her, tall and lean with the same dark hair, the same forest eyes. Her father, I knew at once, and my heart clenched with the certainty that our secret was discovered.
But he only looked at me, this weather-worn wanderer, and something passed between us that I had no words for. Recognition, perhaps. Or warning. Or blessing. Even now, I cannot say which.
"Time to go, little fish," he said to her, though his eyes never left mine. His voice carried the length of roads that run forever, never twice the same way.
She had known this was coming. "The deArthis boy," she said to her father, formal as a presentation. "The one I told you about."
He nodded slowly, studying me as one might study the sky for signs of storm. "I see it. The spirit is strong on this one." A pause, weighted with meaning I couldn't grasp. "Perhaps one day he'll learn to dance with truth instead of just watching it."
Then he touched her shoulder, gentle but final. She made a strange gesture, two fingers touching over her heart, and they turned away. I wanted to call out. But I was only eight by then, and the words dammed up in my throat behind a massive lump. The water was already washing away their footsteps, but I could still hear the echo of those words I didn't understand.
I stood there long after they'd gone, rain and tears making no distinction on my face, until the cold finally drove me home.
When I finally returned to the keep, my mother took one look at me, bare feet blue with cold, and knew something had changed. She asked no questions, only drew me a hot bath. I let her fuss over me because it felt good, the warmth and care of it. If I had been wiser, perhaps I would have bid my time and asked one of my brothers, but I was heartbroken and felt like I had nothing left in the whole world to lose...
My question spilled out like water through cupped hands: "Mom, what's a truth dancer?"