Derwyn felt torn. He was his father’s son, and even if he had not loved his father, which he did, despite his harshness, he would have owed him a son’s obedience. And the Duchy of Boeruine was his birthright. He had to fight to protect it. But to protect it from the rightful emperor, by whose ancestors’ grace they had the holding? That was treason.
Yet he was caught in a situation not of his own choosing, in circumstances he could not control. Be loyal to his father, and he would be a traitor to the emperor. Or else loyal to the emperor and a traitor to his father. Damned for a dishonored traitor either way.
Derwyn was tired of the civil war, though no one save the common people called it that. Michael called it a rebellion, which Derwyn supposed it was, in fact. His father called Michael a usurper and a pretender and called it a struggle against tyranny and referred to the forces under his command as “freedom fighters.” He would never admit to the truth, that in his bid for power, he had underestimated Tieran. Though they had never spoken about it directly, Derwyn realized … now … what his father had intended.
Back when it all started, eight years ago at Summer Court, he had not really understood any of it.
But now that he was older, looking back, he recalled how solicitous his father had been toward the empress, how he had tried to ingratiate himself to her, to charm her, taking every opportunity to do her some little service and express his sympathy for all she had been going through. He recalled being puzzled by his father’s manner toward the empress.
He had not acted that way with anyone else, not even Derwyn’s departed mother. Back then, Derwyn had assumed his father was merely being a gracious host and doing his duty to the empress. Still, there had always been a tension in the manner of the empress when his father was around. Now, of course, Derwyn knew why.
His father had been trying to court her. Derwyn supposed he might have been able to excuse it if it had been love, but he knew his father did not love the empress, no more than he had loved his mother when she was still alive. Arwyn of Boeruine did not love women. He possessed them.
What his father loved was power … and the fighting. That was where they differed. Arwyn of Boeruine loved war.
His son was sick to death of it.
How things had changed since he and Michael were both children, Derwyn thought. He was only a few years older, but eight years of ceaseless campaigning had made a lot of difference. He had grown up hard and fast. He imagined Michael had, as well. That expression on his face when they had met on the field of battle that time had spoken volumes.
They were no longer children who dressed up in toy suits of armor and played at war with wooden swords, thinking it was grand and glorious.
They had learned the truth, that war was terrible and sickening and ate away at a man’s soul. So why, then, did his father love it so? What made him different? Derwyn couldn’t understand it.
They would never have thought that war was some noble and wonderful adventure if, as children, they had seen a battlefield in the aftermath of conflict. The ground torn up and littered with the bodies of the dead and dying, men with wounds so terrible that it made the gorge rise in one’s throat to look upon the sight, the moans and groans and screams of agony, the horrid buzzing of the flies attracted by the blood and the smell … the smell!
Nothing could possibly be worse, thought Derwyn, than the putrid smell of war. When a man died in combat, his bowels let loose, and after a battle had been fought, the smell of human excrement and as?
bodies rotting in the sun was so overpowering it brought tears to the eyes.
All those times when they had “killed” each other in their play and clutched at imaginary mortal wounds, each trying to outdo the other in the dramatic manner of his “death” . . . Would we have found death so dramatic, Derwyn thought, if we had actually seen it? He had seen more of it than he could ever have imagined, and there was nothing even remotely dramatic about it. Except, perhaps, its ugliness and pathos.
And the soldiers were not the only ones to suffer.
Derwyn had seen the tormented faces of the families as they waited on the streets along the route of the army’s return, watching anxiously, fearfully, for their husbands and fathers and sons. He had heard the walls and screams of wives and mothers when the men that they were waiting for did not return, or came back maimed and crippled. He had heard and seen the crying of the children when they saw the broken bodies of their fathers or learned that they were never coming back.
And each time he went through such a terrible experience, he felt as if another part of him had died. How could any man in his right mind love such an
