Work Text:
The prince held one clear memory of Solus zos Galvus, the looming, glowering figure who had never smiled and seemed to him more mannequin than man. Like a stag that had fallen through ice and froze beneath it, the memory remained clear and inviolate as the years passed.
Volucer was a gift. When a senator aimed to ingratiate himself with three generations of Garlean rule, he decided the youngest heir would be the best recipient of the jewel of his stables. Decades of breeding, and years of training beneath a gentle hand, all channeled into a high-necked mare with eyes as dark as pitch. An equipares fit for the prince. That the heir apparent permitted his firstborn child to keep the animal had been unexpected. But then, Varis zos Galvus had always been a poor rider.
Within a fortnight, Zenos dreamt of taking her hunting. Volucer was swift and sure footed, responsive to the slightest touch of his heel. No harshness was needed with her. She was an extension of himself, as natural as a blade in his palm, flaxen-maned and silver-coated. When he grew tired of his lessons, he went to Volucer. When he grew tired of his books, he went to Volucer. When he grew tired of the inane conversations of the people placed around him like dolls, he went to Volucer.
Two weeks following the prince’s eleventh nameday, in the sixth year after the mare’s arrival, Volucer died.
An accident. Or a sudden illness. Or simply the product of an animal growing old. The memory of the moment wavered and grew unclear as he aged, a tarnished silver looking glass only revealing fogged remnants of the holder’s face. All he recalled was that in one instant, he was astride Volucer, the snow-laden forest racing by them in a blur. In the next, she was fallen, his leg injured, and her great sides heaving with labored breaths casting steam into the cold air. No amount of insisting had gotten the beast to clamber back to her feet. No amount of pleading had encouraged some secret strength in her. No amount of demanding in a child’s approximation of his father’s harshness had been enough to give him more than a twitch of grey ears. The mare grew still and heaved a final shuddering breath. His attendants brought him back to the palace, stony faced and silent.
It had been an ignoble death. Volucer deserved better than thrashing about in the snow.
Zenos did not cry over her. Even when he did, he told himself he did not. Men do not weep . His father had said so to him once after striking him across the face. Zenos learned quickly. So he did not allow himself to believe he wept.
The following morning, he left the palace intent to retrace his steps. Refusing to believe his Volucer had died, had suffered the indignity of being left behind in the ice and mud off of a bridle path. Bundled against the cold, he snuck to the stables and took a horse who would not be missed, threatening the groom coldly before he swung up over the bay’s back and put his heels to his side.
Despite the eager gait of the gelding, his choice of mount only made him feel Volucer’s absence more keenly. This was no extension of himself. The animal felt foreign and ungainly, unresponsive to his hand and slow to react. Where Volucer had once flown, this one ambled at best.
The sun had barely crested the treeline when he found the place. He pulled up harshly on the reins as the bay balked, eyes rolling.
Zenos, at first, did not see what the horse had smelled. Red blood seeping into the snow beside the bulk of Volucer’s body.
He swung his leg over the horse's back and left his borrowed mount with reins tethered around a small tree. Snow slipped beneath the rim of his boot, uncomfortably cold against his skin as he trudged onward until what remained came into view. He stopped, rooted where he stood at the edge of the blood.
Stiff, still, and unfamiliar. When the attendants took him away the day before, Volucer looked like a doll tossed to the floor. Limbs at odd angles, and body inanimate, but whole. As if the right word might be enough to coax her back to her feet, an imperial command to raise the dead. The scene before him now was…different. The doll was broken. Hoarfrost covered the mare’s body, glittering in the sun against the terrible mess that had been made of her.
Wolves had to have found her in the night. The softness of her belly was torn open, red snakes of entrails half frozen to the ground. His stomach pitched, not with disgust, but something else. Like the feeling he felt when the servants moved the bookshelf seven ilms left of the window. This was wrong. He breathed out shakily, the fog of his breath rising in the early morning air, and he blinked. Once. Twice. Men do not weep . He reminded himself. I will not weep .
Years later, Zenos still did not know how his senses so failed him in that moment. Caught before the amalgam of frost and blood and the memory of something once alive, he did not hear the sound of creaking tack and jingling metal of an approaching rider. Nor did he hear the sound of a man swinging off of his horse, or the crunch of boots against snow.
“Ah, what a pity.”
Only when Solus zos Galvus’ voice sounded near his shoulder was he shaken from his reverie, blue eyes meeting the figure looming at his side.
“That mare was a fine horse.”
The Emperor had been ancient for so long as he could remember. A yellow-eyed man who never smiled and spoke in a voice that held no music. The history books spoke of how the Ala Mhigans left the bodies of their kings to lie in state on stone slabs, a garish, pagan rite that left sallow faced bodies draped in raiment and gold to dry in the salt-lapped caverns that riddled their land. Solus zos Galvus reminded him of how those kings were illustrated in the well-worn pages.
Zenos wiped at the dampness on his face that could not be tears with the back of a gloved hand, still staring. He did not speak. All he had not noticed over the din of realizing what had become of Volucer rushed into focus. The Emperor was not wearing any ornament of his position; a plain black coat trimmed with fur was a guard against the cold, as was the hat fixed firmly on his head. It did little to make him feel any closer to the earth than he had in all other times he saw him. Some paces back, he had tied his own horse beside the bay. Cirratus. A fine-boned, finely bred animal with a surly temperament. Small by the standards of the Imperial stable, but a favorite of the ruler.
“Such fragile things they are. Prone to finding their end from any twist in the path that comes their way, be it illness or injury or the plain exhaustion of the heart in their chests.” The old man pulled one dark glove from his hand. Slowly, with evident effort on his part, he knelt down near the dead mare’s head. Solus pressed his bare palm to her cheek. Zenos watched a weathered hand brush her ice coated forelock away from a dark eye staring sightlessly outward.
“You ought to forgive her.” He sounded tired. “It is not as though she asked to be made the way she was.”
Zenos frowned. “I will.” His voice remained high, no matter how much he wished it might break at last and give him some modicum of his father’s weighty, rumbling voice. “She was a beast of prey.” He paused, and he thought. “I shall forgive her for the wolves, as well.”
“Good lad.” Solus did not look up from the dead mare. The sight of her still unsettled the prince, even as he tried to tell himself it did not.
“You will find in life that most things end as this has. Suddenly, without warning, and without fairness.” There were birds somewhere in the forest around them, calling to each other as the sun crept higher above the treeline. Faint songs trailed above the stench of entrails and cold blood. “Verily everyone you know, everything you touch, will fall broken and dead before its time.” The old man’s voice no longer commanded the resonance it once held. It wavered, and was punctuated by rheumy breath, as it did in all the doddering old fools who the boy had known. “What you make of that remains to be seen. But you’d do well to remember it all the same.”
A final brush of his hand, as if he was scratching the whorl at the front of the mare’s brow. She had liked to be scratched there. Zenos recalled how the fine little gray hairs would stick to the fabric of his gloves and felt again the strangeness of her lying there.
The Emperor moved to his feet with only a grunt to betray his age, though he seemed to flag as he stood, catching his breath in the cold air. “Tell the guard you would have a cairn built for her. Or leave her lie as she does. The decision is your own; they’ve enough free time on their hands to do as you bid.”
Without another word, or so much as a wave, Solus zos Galvus returned to his horse. By the time Zenos looked up from what remained of Volucer, he saw him mounted on Cirratus, the beast’s tail swishing as they vanished down the path.
He sat with his words, and the mare, for a long time before he made his way back to the palace.
It was the most the man ever spoke to him in his life.