It’s a Boy! / Fear of William
Outside the air looked falsely calm. The misty hills reigned in their gentleness and assured everyone that everything was going to be all right.
Just a perfect view for a father soon to be...
Gwydion still chewed the last bits of available nails from his fingertips.
Women were gathered in a chamber nearby, but the shouting that the heavy doors let pass kept him out there more firmly than any tradition would have ever had. He just kept clanging the mountains from the window.
Behind them laid more than enough harm for his young years, more than he thought anyone could bare.
What was good in childbirth was that after few hours it would be done and over. In good or worse, his life’s fortunes might either triumph or fail, but altogether, the millwheel in his neck would be taken away and that hopeless state of utter helplessness would be gone.
Wilhelm the Conqueror would not.
No matter how long he waited, that Norman Shadow would eat his entire little realm into its darkness. Not perhaps today, not this year, but eventually...bit by bit, count after count would fall.
In the darkness of the night, the evil often spoke to him and whispered if he could change his firstborn child for Wilhelm’s capitulation and that though had haunted him constantly and painstakingly.
It was perhaps his fortune that he had bit all the nail ends away as the clasp he gave to his own head would have left scratches and wounds in his forehead.
Gentle touch lit bit of light into his personal gloom.
It was Dôn. His mother stepped little aside and looked outside. “Everything is going just as it should...everything will be all right”
She – perhaps unintentionally repeated the message of the landscape that opened to the hall – or perhaps not. After all, Queen of the Otherside might have had something to do about it... the air, the lack of wind...the gentle mist that cloaked the forests and mountains into calming haze. If the birds sang, they did it so that the sound faded away into the almost numbing comfortably that the nature seemed to offer today.
“You let your worries aside my son. Everything will be all right. The child will be healthy and strong.”
Dôn slowly faded into the shadows of the hall, but her presence...or the essence of the presence remained. Gwydion didn’t felt all that calm that she might had planned, but the weary side of politics stepped bit aside in his mind when his mother’s word echoed:
healthy and strong
Etain, his nephew, Gillfaethwy’s son was already a growing toddler, a pride not only their mother but to the entire family but sometimes Gwydion couldn’t bear to take part in celebrating the child...so much had changed since his brother had become a father, at the age of 19. Whereas some amount of seriousness and responsibility suited rather well for his bailiff, Gwydion couldn’t help to think that it had also made everyone thinking something less of himself...something more irresponsible and immature, a boy among the grown men ...like he was suddenly the little brother.
No your both exactly the same age; so therefore you either share the realm or decide which one has the right to rule it
Their mother’s voice still bare its vivid strength in Gwydion’s thoughts, despite there was more than decade of years since they had last argued over these things.
Fortune had made Gwydion to win the throne...perhaps it was their mother again “influencing” their fortunes by letting Gillfaethwy to get back at him by becoming a man before him.
Who knew? Between themselves, they never spoke about these things. But Still, the sense of getting back into the level of his brother remained among the huge list of enjoyable thoughts that his own yet-to-born child brought him. Indeed. Who knew?
At the age of sixteen he was a married man
And at the age of seventeen a father to a son
And at the age of eighteen his grave it did grow green
Cruel death had put an end to his growing
Immortality passed in his mind. The everlasting bitterness of their life. If their petty rivalry about succession had been long gone, the knowledge of mortal life, for children of Dôn, a Fairy Queen in her full regal, was something not so easily forgotten.
Another early childhood memory haunted him that day. A shameful event where another child had beat them both in a fight and the bitterness of that defeat...Gwydion couldn’t even remember who that kid had been, but her mother’s eyes he would never forget.
Why can’t we be like you and above the mortal men? either one of them had pressed. Mother had said nothing, just looked them with sorrow and yearning in her eyes that reached the far most depths of the Otherside...pouring the weigth of the entire tragedy of the fair folk upon such young lads they had been was probably bit unfair, but neither of them ever asked about those things ever again.
Just when Gwydion was stretching his memory to seek the solution their mother had gave them to deal with that kid who had so boldly defeated them, the door slang ajar.
if you can’t beat them join them echoed in his toughs when the housemaid manifested: It’s a Boy! I’ts a boy!
For reward: Remove rebellious trait from one-tenth of my vassals, rounding up