Chapter Two: A Bastard, A Heretic

The second chapter of Other-Song, my serialized novel-in-progress

Other-Song is a serialized fantasy novel-in-progress. It’s a tale of disenchantment, of abusive technology, of heresy, and of a world hidden in plain sight.

Each Saturday, I’ll publish a new chapter until it is complete, along with a constantly-updated master page of chapter summaries.

This is the second chapter. In the first chapter, “The Last Party, The Last Song,” Lurian, bastard son of the Hornynal family, serves as a party hosted in honor of his brother, Trendal, attended by the Queen’s nephew, along with many other nobles. The Fel’lal musician he hired for the evening, his friend Tri’aln, plays “the last song” on the instrument, which destroys it. Just before it is destroyed, the lights in the hall suddenly flash brightly and every glass in each guests hand shatters as Lurian looks at them. He is then ushered out by the queen’s nephew through the darkness, who speaks cryptically of a heretic.

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Chapter Two: A Bastard and a Heretic

Lurian rightly guessed that the garden would be the only place his mother did not look for him. When her sobbing lament for the future of House Horynal subsided, she screamed her murderous threats into the chill night air, and through the stone-floored halls and chambers of the manse, but not into the tangle of bushes and vines where he sat, hiding.

He was sitting among the early spring herbs and the beginnings of leaves upon the fruit trees of the garden, listening to her shout. He almost thought to go to her, thinking to surprise her in her rage. He imagined a wail of shock, her hand slackening its grip on the sepia-stained glass wyrd-lamp she carried, dropping it upon the slate stones in horror at his sudden appearance. Echoes of broken glass were still resounding in his head, his memory replaying each crash relentlessly. Perhaps, if he could make her drop the lamp, the sound of its breaking might ease him out of the memories.

But he didn't go to her, nor did he move from his hiding place until he was certain he’d be unseen. At first untouched by the chill air, his blood trilling with excitement and his chest heaving, Lurian listened to the dying down of the night. By varying degrees his body calmed, the heat seeped from him, and the initial din of confused shouts and complaints trickled to only a few muttered conversations.

Lady Anadora was the first to depart. Lurian didn’t hear her leave, but he heard her absence. A certain edge to the din dulled, the mood of the crowd eased — a sure enough sign that Anadora was gone. Then another strain of the crowd begged off from the assemblage, embarrassed by their sudden recognition that they had briefly been part of a mob.

Carriages arrived and departed, leaving only a handful of voices, most of them the hunting men, laughing and cursing now that most of the women had left. Soon enough, the only female voice left was his mother's, speaking plaintively and a bit too apologetically to the Queen's nephew.

Lurian could make out only a little of what she said to him. Bad breeding, a piteous sister's marriage, an unfortunate orphan. “What could one do?” she wondered aloud, to which the man’s muted reply answered, “tonight won't reach her ears.”

Listening, hiding, Lurian plucked a few narrow leaves from the rosemary bush by which he sat. He had it planted four springs ago, and four days before he had reminded himself to prune it back. Now, remembering everything else, he did not imagine he would have the time. He crushed the leaves between his fingers, holding them close to his nose, inhaling while he listened.

Arun eventually managed to calm his mother with his repeated assurances. With his departure, however, her anger returned, her howling indictments against Lurian increasing ever louder. Then, they abruptly stopped. She’d tired herself out, finally, and the drunken laughter of his father's friends also ebbed and finally ceased.

Now, his teeth chattering, Lurian left the garden.

A few of the torches in the carriage circle still burned, giving him enough light by which to find his path to the servant's entrance of the kitchen, the only way though which he could be certain no-one would notice him sneaking back in. He entered quietly, seeing without surprise that the cook he’d hired for the night had already left.

He listened at the door into the banquet hall, but he couldn’t be certain his mother was not within, sobbing silently. He instead decided to go through the scullery, taking the narrow steps from there to the servant's quarters, dusty from disuse. It had been years since any servants lived at Horynal Manse, and not only because his mother had forbidden any more women servants after she found her father with a maid. They could no longer afford to pay servants, and since the rooms were windowless, no one was desperate enough to accept lodging as payment.

Lurian stumbled blindly through the darkness until he found the door to the back corridor. At this door he didn't bother to listen — only his father had ever bothered to come here, and only to be lecherous to the long-gone maid. Through the corridor it took a few more minutes to get to his room, pausing several times to listen for footsteps or muffled sobs. Hearing no one, he stepped in, locked the door behind him, and opened his wardrobe.

He’d not yet even made a plan to leave. He stared at his clothes, and then to his pack, and then back to his clothes. He didn’t know what to take, what he would need. He didn’t know where he’d go, only that he couldn’t stay here any longer, not after tonight.

He folded a shirt mindlessly and stuffed it into the bag just as he heard his mother's insistent rapping against the heavy oaken door.

The house had been so suddenly quiet Lurian almost imagined that she had possibly fallen asleep. But she rarely slept, or never for very long. Nerves, or anxiety, or some other reason she’d connect to him always prevented her.

He didn’t answer, and her knocking came again.

Lurian hated how much his mother needed him. She needed someone upon whom to displace all the suffering of her life, all the failure of her dreams and the nightmares of her own devising. Her unhappy marriage to a drunken nobleman, the deterioration of the manse, the dwindling money, a sudden slight from Anadora, or a misplaced invitation from a Council Elector: each thing, in her furious ravings, was somehow also his fault. All her successes belonged to her, to her own machinations, to her own hard work, to her own charm. For everything else, there was Lurian.

Only one night had she not blamed him, a moment so strange it made him uncomfortable even to remember it. He had long learned to move within her usual hatred, to deflect what he could, and absorb what he could not. A difficult but familiar dance, a habitual and comfortable hatred, more preferable then the night he found he actually cared for her.

Her tears that night had been real, as had been her bruises.

“He's still punishing me,” she had said, and when she had not followed those words with “because of you,” the floor beneath him felt unstable. He didn't know this dance, he didn't know these moves. He couldn't parry and riposte, either, because she hadn't drawn any weapon.

“It was all his idea — I was so stupid, Luri. I shouldn't have. I am so sorry.”

He had thought about comforting her. The closest he came was to fetch a cut of flank from the ice-room for her swollen face. Even then, he had felt that too much. She needed him still, but differently. Though she must have, in that moment, forgotten every other accusation, Lurian could not.

His mother was now knocking louder on the door, her shaking voice following the few short raps. “You've ruined me, Lurian. You've sabotaged me for the last time.”

“You're right,” he called back, stuffing shirts into his pack. “You'll have to find someone else to blame.”

A slight mechanical jig pulled his eyes to the door to check the chain-lock. His father could break past it, certainly, but it would take her a while to do so herself. So even if she had found the skeleton key— and he doubted this completely — he had a little more time. He ignored her continued protests to look instead at the more immediate of the problems before him: his bag was now full, and he had not yet packed any trousers, let alone a bed-roll.

The other problems, how to actually leave the house and where to actually go, could wait another few minutes.

“Your father won't let you leave, Lurian.” She jigged the lock a moment, and then cursed. She’d not found the right key.

“But I'm adopted, remember?” He pulled out a few shirts from the pack, and then stuffed a pair of trousers in.

“You're a bastard, Lurian.”

He scanned the rest of the wardrobe. “And that makes you a whore, you know. I didn't choose to sleep with my husband's brother, you did.”

She was now screaming. He could push past her through the door, but not through his father. If he were sober enough to hear her, Lurian was in trouble.

His cloth shoes would be useless in the rain and mud, so he laced up his boots with a little reluctance — the left heel cracked just last week. He then looked at his blankets and despaired. They wouldn’t fit in his pack, and he had no rope to tie them together. He could get rope from the stables, but since his only escape route was out the window, it would do no good to have loose blankets to carry while scaling the roof.

She had stopped screaming, and the silence at the door lasted a little too long. “Are you still there, mother?”

Her lack of response disturbed him. His left foot wobbling uncomfortably, he stepped awkwardly and unevenly to the door to listen. He expected sobs or angry mutterings, but he could hear nothing.

He rattled the door slightly, and then kicked it in response to her answer. “You are a heretic, Lurian. Darkness take your soul.”

He felt cold, colder than even the moment he'd finally understood what strange configurations of adult guilt and vengeance had birthed him different from his brother. Trendal was his father's son, his mother's son. Trendal was not a bastard, not the progeny of a dead man, not spawned from an absurd plot to enlarge a man's land at the expense of his brother's life.

The night his mother had cried and felt guilt, her face swollen, the raw meat held trembling under her eye, she had told him everything. Lurian had listened without emotion, without even much curiosity. Enough of the sordid story had already been intimated through sneers and chuckles that he could already guess most of it. He was not his father's son, he was his uncle's. His uncle, who was his father, was dead, executed for rape. With him gone, there was no other claim to the Horynal manse.

The man Lurian had once thought to be his father had urged it all on. “It was his idea,” his mother had said.

That she blamed Lurian or her husband and not herself enraged him then, and it enraged him still. He had told Tri'aln about it once, railing angrily against his mother's denials. But she had replied, unhelpfully, “No-one choose alone. No such song.”

Still, he had learned to maneuver his mother's denials and her relentless blame. She had given birth to him, at least in part to have some tangible, ever-present proof of what they’d called a rape. The older Lurian had gotten, however, the more his existence reminded her instead of her own crime. Little by little, and then more and more, she then enthroned him upon the seat of her ever-increasing misery.

She’d cursed him many times before, but this was the first time she’d ever accused him of being a heretic. That word hurt, felt acrid, gnawing into his mind through his ears. He was a bastard, yes, but he was no heretic. Why had she even said that?

Lurian felt his chest constrict, like he was being held and then crushed. After Arun had pulled him from the house, he’d used that word, heretic. And then, watch yourself. It’s dangerous.

Had Arun meant him?

Lurian tried to breathe, to push back against the feeling that his chest had collapsed in upon him, and heard again the echo of shattering glass. He’d seen the last song performed twice before, and never had anything like this happened. Never had any glass shattered. Never had any wyrd-lights flared and then burned out.

He tried to remember. Tri’aln hadn’t even finished the song when it all happened. He heard the notes again in his mind, still sounding as the glass shattered first in Lady Anadora’s hand, and then in his mother’s, and then in the hands of each person Lurian had looked at.

As in an unseen aggressor, a thought had gripped him, crushing him. He shuddered, fought it off, and then kicked the door and and shouted: “No. I’m not a heretic.”

He stormed away from the door, gathering his blankets in his arms and carrying them to the window. They would get wet on the grass below, still soaked by a month of heavy rain. He tossed them out anyway, and turned to his bed to close his pack.

He pull its straps tightly, and then pulled them again to make it more compact. It was still too big, he thought, but there was nothing else left to do. He slung it over his shoulders, and, fighting the urge to turn back towards the door, to fling it open and yell back at his mother, he instead stared out into the night.

He then pulled himself through the window on to the roof, and hoped he’d figure out where he was actually going.