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“Edward!”
Mum’s voice. Mum’s Upset Voice. That is the Mum’s Upset Voice. Edward is very good at recognising it. In fact, he is best at recognising it, as compared to any other voices, so even though it is an Upset Voice, Edward likes to hear it just so he can recognise it.
Edward puts his hands down from where he has been flapping them at beside his chest, lets them settle like raptor claws. “Yes, Mum?”
“Put your hands down,” Mum says, now in the Sharp Voice. Sharp Voice is different from Upset Voice. Edward has gotten good at distinguishing between the two, which - not to brag - is quite difficult. Edward hears Sharp Voice just a little bit less than he hears Upset Voice, which is good, because it makes his temples hurt when Mum uses it for too long. “You’ll never finish your maths at this rate.”
Edward puts his hands down.
Life at the duchy is good, mostly. Edward Keystone is good too. He was a healthy baby, right on time, and he was always able to copy his brothers in their games, even if he was a bit clumsy. He has a warm belly laugh and pudgy hands. Life at the duchy is good, and Edward is a good child, the youngest son in a line of flaxen-haired beauties with big smiles and bright futures.
Life at the duchy is good, and it stays like this, but Edward is only a good child until he’s not.
Edward copies his brothers’ success right until the tutors come knocking. He’s a quiet toddler, and he would rather help the gardeners line up the seeds in perfect rows than kick up piles of manure, which delights his parents. Edward is a perfect child, right until the tutors come knocking.
At first he does excellently in his studies— he’s got a real penchant for the arts, with a wonderfully visual mind, and a knack for sketching the sunflowers that grow in the duchy gardens with stunning accuracy— but a duke’s son can’t be an artist, and so the glowing teachers move their pupil onto maths, and sciences, and reading.
Or, rather, they try to. Edward’s good with science, that’s all pictures. He’s good with diagrams. He can understand concepts, and can understand them with ease, but something within Edward doesn’t translate. His script is atrocious and his print is worse, despite his artistic ability; his grasp on idioms is nonexistent and the chance of him understanding hyperbole is one in a million. Edward is, to put it politely, not the brightest. He understands very little, and retains less. He is, by all accounts, not worth teaching.
That’s what the tutors say, anyway, when they quit.
The hush money that a duchy gives for keeping quiet the news of their illiterate son is substantial, and word gets around, among educators. No one can say why all the tutors leave, not in so many terms, but there are allusions, coded words, slips of the tongue. The public hears a rumour that Edward is bad-tempered, mischievous, arrogant, and rude, and he bullies his teachers until they go away. The money, it is said, is recompense for the split lips and bruised temples and shed tears.
Meanwhile, Eddie learns to tend the sunflowers and pray to the morning. He asks his maid, Anna, to read stories aloud to him when she has free time. Eddie doesn’t have any money to give her, hush or otherwise, but she does it anyway, if only to see that big, broad smile.
Eddie can read. He knows how. He’s just not worth the effort of being taught to get any better than stumbling, caught-in-the-back-of-his-throat phonetics that nearly bring him to tears when he has to read from the prayer books. He spends most of his childhood adrift and lost in an ocean he was never given the tools to navigate. The only direction Eddie knows is up.
And so he looks to the sun.
“Ed,” says his second-eldest brother, Harrison. Ed blinks, and becomes acutely aware that he has been sitting under a bough, rubbing an apple against his knee, and rocking back and forth. “Ed, what are you doing?”
“Oh,” says Ed, remembering, and then a smile splits his face. “I was prayin’.”
Ed does not think he misses the way that disgust rests on Harrison’s face. It would make sense. Harrison is using the Slick Voice, which sometimes means he is drunk and sometimes means he is at a dinner party, but the Slick Voice is most commonly used on political enemies and second most commonly used on Ed.
“Praying is for holy people,” says Harrison, in the Flat Voice. The Flat Voice means that Ed Is Wrong. Ed is very used to the Flat Voice because Harrison rarely uses any other voice when in Ed’s presence. Harrison is very used to the idea that Ed Is Wrong, so Ed is very used to the Flat Voice.
“I could be a holy person,” says Ed, making sure the apple is shiny enough before taking a bite out of it.
Harrison makes a noise. Ed does not think it is a nice noise because when he speaks again the Slick Voice is back. Harrison must be in a particularly bad mood today. “No.”
“Why not?” asks Ed, a bit petulantly.
“You’re not going to be a holy person,” Harrison says, and messes up Ed’s hair before walking away altogether.
Ed finishes his apple, and goes back to rocking beneath the tree. Oh, Apollo, he thinks, Lord of Light, show me the way. Light me in the darkness and help me find the path. No, darn, he kind of said that already. Maybe he should try something different. Light me in the darkness, he thinks, concentrating, and… and… He comes up with nothing, really, except, Keep the good in the world safe.
When Eddie looks up, there is a double rainbow flung crystal-clear across the evening sky, burning a divine brand on the horizon. When Eddie stands, he finds that he himself is glowing, a warmth radiating from his hands, his body, his chest, his kind, clear eyes. The farmhands who saw him that day say that he looked Vitruvian, perfect, bright but never blinding.
He was Edward Keystone, and he was chosen.
Oh, Apollo, Lord of Light, show me the way. Light me in the darkness and keep the good in the world safe. All the people who do good are light-makers and they are your people. God of the Sun, please help me protect them.
Edward has always liked routines. The Cult of Apollo is big on that: up with the sun, prayer at a designated time each morning, then helping the poor and the needy, the sick and the dying, bringing light wherever they go. Edward has always liked routines, and this is no exception.
Also, he doesn’t have to read anything here. No one cares that he is word-blind, they care that he is a proper devotee of the God of the Sun, Apollo, May He Keep And Care For Us. Ed likes that. He likes it a lot. He likes that he may be judged upon his virtues.
He is not judged upon his virtues. He is laughed at. He is Ed, The Dim Paladin-In-Training. It is the first new tone of voice he must become familiar with in his new home. No one tells him this outright, but everyone begins to develop a Talking To Ed voice, which is a bit louder and a bit slower than normal, with constant, awful eye contact. Ed does not like the eye contact at all.
Ed is smaller than most of the others in the temple, so he tries to give up his space in exchange for a genuine kind word. It doesn’t work; no one will accept the offer, so Ed is for the first time given independence. His own room. It is bittersweet. He knows it is because no one wanted to share with Ed The Dim Paladin-In-Training.
Sometimes Ed practices reading. He’s still not very good and it makes his head hurt and he doesn’t know which one is ‘b’ or ‘d’ sometimes, but he wants to read the Apollo scripture. He wants to learn about Good and Evil. He wants to Smite Evil and Bring Good. Ed is not very good at reading but he reads aloud to himself, one finger on the page, tracing his path.
Eventually he learns that people do care that he is word-blind. It is not that they want to force him to be a good reader, it is that they want him to stop entirely. Ed is not allowed to read from the prayer books at dinner. Ed is not allowed to do any of the activities where he may encounter reading. The head cleric says that this is Bringing Good, because Ed is not in distress anymore, but Ed can’t find the words to explain that he is in distress, simply a different kind.
He spends the three days before his pilgrimage to Rome without saying a word. The others call it meditation. Eddie simply cannot bring himself to speak. He wants to rock under a tree, but the Temple of Apollo is in a city, so there are no trees.
Instead, he weeps softly, alone in his big room, and prays to Apollo for guidance.
“Eddie,” says Tjelvar. Eddie looks up from where he has been dragging his feet in the snow and feeling like rubbish. Sir Bertrand was Bringing Evil when he disrespected the snow leopard, and Eddie does not like that one bit. He does not like travelling in a party with people who deliberately Bring Evil.
And not just that, either. That leopard was a part of nature, and had they not come along, it would have continued being a part of nature. Nature, by the word of the Sun Scriptures, is a vector (that is a fancy word for ‘thing,’ Eddie learned) of Bringing Good, and killing nature is an act of Smiting Good. Sir Bertrand was both Smiting Good and Bringing Evil, which is the opposite of everything Eddie stands for.
“Mm?” says Eddie, with a frown.
Tjelvar clears his throat emphatically. It is the only time Eddie can read Tjelvar’s body language, because he does it so often. The only issue is that it can mean many things, but Eddie has it down to embarrassment, annoyance, and anger, but quiet anger. This one, Eddie is pretty sure, is the embarrassment one. “It’s gotten a bit— cold,” Tjelvar says, and his tone is an Annoyed Voice, which Eddie remembers from all of his travels with Friedrich, but his cough was an Embarrassment Cough. Eddie continues listening. “I was— wondering,” Tjelvar continues, sounding equally irritated, “if we could shack up soon for the night?”
It is close to evening, but the sun hasn’t even begun to lower in the sky. Eddie knows that sometimes when people are needy, they are prideful. “We could make a fire?” he suggests, a bit sluggish from his wounds. “It would only take a minute.”
Tjelvar’s expression sours and he removes his hand from his armpit in a manner that suggests he can barely move it, then stuffs it back in his coat. “It’s fine.”
“Really, Tjelvar—” Eddie says, eking closer. “It would only take a minute.”
Tjelvar looks at him. Eddie smiles warmly, because it is the only way he knows how. There is not disgust in Tjelvar’s gaze, or at least Eddie doesn’t think there is, and he is very good at identifying disgust. There is, however, disbelief. Shock, even. Eddie can’t conceive of why. All he did was what anyone Bringing Good would do. Eddie wonders how many people have Brought Good to Tjelvar’s life.
“I— it’s fine,” Tjelvar repeats with a huff, hunching over within his jacket, and Eddie lets him forge ahead.
He prays to Apollo to keep Tjelvar warm.
In his studies for his pilgrimage, the members of the Temple of Apollo taught Ed about Rome. He knew that Rome had Brought Evil to the world— so much, in fact, that the Meritocrats had been forced to Smite it, in order to restore Good. The Temple taught him about before Rome was Evil, though, about how it was an empire unlike any other.
It was an empire started when a man named Brutus stopped a corrupt king. Ed can’t remember how, exactly, but he can remember that Brutus was a man who everyone believed was simple and slow. Brutus was mild and ambling and everyone loved him anyway. Brutus was always Ed’s favourite, even though it turned out that he was smart all along, and that he was just pretending to struggle with understanding so that people would tell him things.
Ed wishes he could tell Brutus some things too. He wishes he could tell Brutus that being dim won’t get him anywhere most of the time. All it will result in is being alone.
Those people in Rome must have been more Good people than the people now. Or maybe Brutus was just better at dealing with it than Ed is. Maybe if Ed worked a bit harder, Apollo could fix him, and then he could pretend that he, like Brutus, had simply been pretending to be slow the whole time.
Ed hopes that maybe, even if he cannot be smart, he can be liked. He is not often liked, even if he is Good. Apollo does not ever respond to Eddie’s prayers to be better, and he cannot find the reassuring warmth of his god when he asks to save himself.
Eddie has never been liked. Not by his parents, or his brothers, or his church. Sometimes Eddie nestles into his misunderstanding, so he doesn’t notice. If he doesn’t notice, he won’t understand.
“Edward,” Friedrich says, in a Sharp Voice that sounds much like Edward’s mum. He looks up.
“Yes?”
Friedrich nods to the magic-scorched wasteland ahead of them, stretching out as far as the eye can see. It chars at the lush greenery nearby, a jagged scar that spills into the hills and stops right before their feet. A hot wind blows at Edward’s hair, rattles the fasteners on his pack. “You’ll have to go alone from here,” Friedrich says, crisp and efficient.
Eddie’s brow furrows. “Always have,” he says under his breath, adjusting the bag on his shoulders.
“What’s that?”
Rome spans for years ahead of them, and Eddie stares into it, sighing. “‘S nothing, Friedrich,” he mumbles, words lost in a screaming gust of air. He does not flap his hands because Friedrich does not like it, and Friedrich has just told him to stop only five minutes ago. “‘S nothing.”