Seven days.\u00a0\u00a0 And I’ve been absent (mostly health-related) more than here–apologies for that.\u00a0\u00a0 However, here’s a snippet from Chapter 11 of Kings, which begins the unwrapping of a long-held secret: what really happened in Old Aare?<\/p>\n
This will be a fairly big chunk, and thus some of you might find it spoilerish.\u00a0 Hence, spoiler warning–don’t venture beyond the break if you want to know absolutely nothing about what’s coming.\u00a0\u00a0 For those who go on, there’s a several-paragraphs gap in the snippet, not to hide anything but to shorten it for blog use.<\/p>\n
Location:\u00a0 Cortes Andres, in Andressat<\/p>\n
Who:\u00a0 Jeddrin, Count of\u00a0 Andressat<\/p>\n
Jeddrin, Count of Andressat and the South Marches, sat in the cool of his loggia on the east side of his residence, overlooking the walls of Cortes Andres.\u00a0 He had a fine view of the pastures where his horses grazed, steep vineyards, and the walls of a village clinging to the slope, its white walls gleaming in the late afternoon sun.\u00a0 Though the day had been hot, on this side of the house he had a little breeze, and the damp cloths his servants had hung chilled the air just enough to make it pleasant.<\/p>\n
He had been up at dawn, as always, for a Count of Andressat (as he said daily to his sons and grandsons) must be diligent if he was to do the best for his people.\u00a0 He had duties, not merely privileges; it was in the performance of such duties that a true nobleman distinguished himself from pretenders, those who thought wealth alone or power could make gold from lead by painting it yellow.\u00a0 Ruling–ruling well–could never be easy, and was less easy now, though he had hoped–believed–that with Siniava gone, it would be easier.<\/p>\n
Now, having brought up another stack of documents from the family archives, he spread them on the table and began looking them over.<\/p>\n
He ran his eye down the pages of a bound book–very old, the leather binding flaking away; he preferred scrolls–recording the yields of wheat and the produce of vineyards in a time before his father’s father’s father’s father.\u00a0 Rainfall records, damaging storms–the same kinds of records he himself kept.\u00a0 Nothing in that one about families, politics, or even trade.\u00a0 He put it aside for a stack of flat sheets tied with a ribbon faded gray from its original color; it had left marks on the outer pages.\u00a0 He turned them one by one.<\/p>\n
One page had genealogy…he recognized his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s name at the bottom, in spidery writing.\u00a0 Up the page…he began jotting the names down; this was older than the Family Roll in which he’d listed his sons.<\/p>\n
The sheet beneath, the ink much faded, bore the inscription: “to the right honorable, the faithful, the most noble Va-Jeddrinal:\u00a0 This being the copy you asked for, the which I most humbly present for your pleasure, of the oldest known record in the north, of the Fall of Aare and the King’s Quest, as recorded by Mikeli himself in the fifth year of exile in the north.”<\/p>\n
Jeddrin stared.\u00a0 No one had a copy of the Fall of Aare, though the story was known…the lords of Aare suffered a defeat of some kind and came north across the sea…could this treasure have lain so long in his archives unrecognized?\u00a0 Apparently so.<\/p>\n
In another hand, the work began “I, Mikeli, heir of the kings of Aare, sing the lament of Aare’s fall, the Sandlord’s ruin, the towers that shattered and the waters that vanished, as a lament but also a warning to those who follow, that they may escape the ruin that still roams the world below.”<\/p>\n
That was plain enough.\u00a0 Ibbirun, the Sandlord, god of chaos, had sent waves of sand to swallow the cities of Aare.\u00a0 Jeddrin felt his skin prickle with awe and dread.\u00a0 He read on and on, as the light faded, and servants brought lamps and food and drink.\u00a0 He ate nothing, absorbed in the story he thought he knew, but had known wrong, from the start.\u00a0 Though the language was archaic, he had studied old texts before and few of the words puzzled him.<\/p>\n
When he finished at last, in the dark, silent hours, and lifted his gaze to the sky, the stars before morning hung before him, challenging.\u00a0 The men of Old Aare, the men he had thought of with respect–his ancestors, those who had survived the Fall and the hard journey north, the sea and its storms, to land on the shores of this land and conquer it, who had even–in attenuated blood, as he thought–gone over the pass of Valdaire to conquer the north–those man, those magelords, had not been, but for Mikeli and perhaps a few others the nobles of Aare.<\/p>\n
They had been servants, crafters, merchants, and–Mikeli made it clear–thieves and whores as well, the scum of the city, lifted on a tide of disaster and tossed away, while the nobles–nearly all of them–died.<\/p>\n
“For of the princes of Aare, and the princesses, the lords and ladies, all those of high degree, now so few are left that to populate one palace with those of pure blood is scarcely possible…”<\/p>\n
The nobility of Aarenis, Jeddrin read, had been created out of what was left–“As I was sent ahead, to be saved against my will while all around me knew their doom, so I must do what I can to redeem my guilt, and theirs, and make this story plain…and for Aare to continue in men’s hearts, I must create from nothing a semblance of its greatness.”\u00a0 Mikeli then explained how he had chosen this one and that to be duke or count or baron, and how he had striven to ensure that literacy survived, and arts and crafts.<\/p>\n
For a long bitter time Jeddrin stood looking out at the night, hands clenched on the railing of his loggia.\u00a0 So the despised mercenary captain proved a true king, the born son of a king and an elf-queen, while he–who had been so sure of his lineage–traced back, as the tale made clear, to a stonemason and a count’s bastard daughter.\u00a0 Kieri Phelan was royal, and he himself as common as dirt, all his pride of blood based on lies, on the accumulated wealth of a fellow–a great-father those many generations back–who was strong and honest–the qualities for which he was chosen–and whose wife, chosen for him by the prince, could read and write…<\/p>\n
…………………………………………………….<\/p>\n
What Andressat’s Count\u00a0 chooses to do with his discovery will have an effect far beyond the borders of Andressat.\u00a0\u00a0 You see the beginning of it in later chapters of Kings of the North<\/em>; more is coming in Crisis of Vision<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seven days.\u00a0\u00a0 And I’ve been absent (mostly health-related) more than here–apologies for that.\u00a0\u00a0 However, here’s a snippet from Chapter 11 of Kings, which begins the unwrapping of a long-held secret: what really happened in Old Aare? This will be a fairly big chunk, and thus some of you might find it spoilerish.\u00a0 Hence, spoiler warning–don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,115],"tags":[106,28],"class_list":["post-1099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kings-of-the-north","category-snippet","tag-contents","tag-snippet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1101,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions\/1101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}