hymns of hai.

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hymns of hai.

Postby Toli Armitage on February 23rd, 2012, 6:17 pm

7 Fall 492


Sir Galensar,

I write with great regret to inform you that my noble husband, Bayezid Hardai, is dead. He was murdered seven days hence on the eve of the Beaton’s battle, found with his throat slit like a dog's in his own temple. Pray forgive the brutality of my words, but my heart at this juncture feels brutal and mercilessly torn. You loved my husband well, and for that I offer you what I can at distance: honesty.

I know he thought highly of you all his days, and valued most dearly your friendship. He spoke of you fondly and often and expressed great hopes for the future in which you were included.

If it any way assauges (though how, I ask, can it? yet then I am not a man and mayhaps therein lies the difference), the mage scion has been brought to judgement and the forces of Armitage and my brother-by-law, the new regent, have won an indisputable victory. Peace, they say, shall come now again.

Is that what I am to tell Thaddeus of his father?

Timothy, I am sorry. Know that all of Kenash mourns with you the loss of our lord of Summer. We loved him well. Gods, how we tried.

Sivah keep you,
Treza Hardai
Widow of Summer

- - -

To Lady Treza Hardai:

Forgive the length that has endured between your letter and my receipt of it, I pray you. I confess I let it sit upon my desk for days, and have reread the words a hundred times, and find them lacking. Lacking, my lady, because ink and parchment seem such a pale, empty vessel for such a wealth of thought, of anger, of sadness.

It is perhaps inappropriate and no doubt offensive that the death of a Hardai lord has so shaken the staunch, unyielding bones of Galensar, but know that it has, and I in my seat have yet looked west and seen more darkness, and more regret, than any scion of Galensar before me. And it is not war that I look toward, my lady, only a vacancy in myself, rended and open in the wake of Bayezid’s passing.

If your husband was Summer and I am His Bidding, it was with laughter and friendship that his temples and my seas sat side by side, like two boys' shoulders meeting. I don't know who shall sit beside me now, if anyone, and perhaps it is unfair that I should express to you how honestly and awfully that frightens me. Bayezid and I were always men, Lady Treza, and always more than men, and it was within the parameters of our unique friendship that we truly grew to be the men we wanted to be, and settled firmly beneath the weight of our respective names. We did not become our fathers, because we had each other. Bayezid to cool the heat of the sun in my blood, and I to warm the blossoms of peace in his heart. I owe him what and who I am, as surely as I owe my own bones, my own flesh, my own mind.

Bayezid once said to me -- Timothy, a Triarch’s heart must only have room enough to love his god, his lady and his children, and yet we will always wish to love ever so many more, won't we? And it's true. He spoke of you to me often, and while I know that in him lived a bright and unstoppable passion, I know too that it was not for you, my lady. Only I feel justified in telling you (as I know he never could), that if he believed his heart could withstand breaking into quarters, he would have made it so, for you. No doubt he tried, and the results frightened him. Here at the last, I would share that one secret of his, with you, because I believe he will forgive me for having done so.

I turn my eyes ahead now, and look inevitably at a future that I have no desire to see come to pass, for it is emptier and more looming than any dark cloud in the sky. I cannot fathom what you must see -- if it be a cloud for me, surely it must seem a gaping stretch of empty field, flowerless. He used to threaten to populate my seas with his roses, and how I cursed him for the suggestion then, but now I harbor doubts that perhaps I should have let him, if only to let the scent of flowers linger. Memories will have to suffice, until Dira sees fit to sit us side by side once again. I have no fears for that time, and shall only hope that when it comes, he looks at me and tells me that I have not failed us, that I have not faltered in his absence, that our dreams and hopes have at least survived where we did not.

If you have need of me, my sword, my seat or my sunlight, please never hesitate to write me again. He and I were bound by blood and ink and more than those dissembling greeds, and I shall happily turn that bond to purpose in your name, should the need arise. All my hope, my sorrow, and my condolences.

Upon my sword,
Timothy Galensar
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hymns of hai.

Postby Toli Armitage on February 26th, 2012, 3:23 am

"You're the guys that scare me.

You're the people that make big wars."

"No, we make sure the wars are small ones."


- The Good Shepherd; Joseph Palmi & Ed Wilson.


9 Winter 503


They call him the Lord of Cats into their cups and wait for the next missive sealed with black wax, listening to waves break against the rocks or the summer wind whistling outside their walls. They hear in those songs all the secrets of the world that go unspoken. Rarely are their conversations long or their questions multitude, for it is their business to comprehend nuances, to hear the words that are not uttered, and if they aren't smart enough to translate their own tells from foreign faces then they never would have been tapped. They draw dreams in dirt and sow the earth and they are curious to learn his name, to see his face, and yet deep down hope they never will. He does not kid himself into thinking that none know his name, for he would be gravely disappointed in them did not at least one or two figure it out. He thinks that if they are smart enough to puzzle out that mystery then they are far too smart to let it slip.

Only it was let slip once, but he does not know whether he has one of his own people to blame or merely the gods. He is a man who could easily be assumed to know everything, even when he does not; and he does not know how his brother learned his name. He does, however, plan to find out.

Collin played us.

Other men will say that he was the one played. They will remember that it was Bayezid's own son who braided the rope to hang him, and that it was the dying Triarch who noosed him even while he sat a council seat with a turncoat guard and an embargo of messengers. Tales will be told of how Collin's cohort ultimately condemned him by presenting the crimes of the dead scion of Galensar and how his eldest friend swung the sword to sunder his head from his shoulders. The Lord of Cats, however, is cursed with the truth; and he was there, in the shadows of two long dead empires, watching as the first piece was moved over Collin Armitage board and he swears to me the last has yet to be played.

It is very simple how Collin managed to do it: Collin knew what we did not. He knew the things nobody wanted to learn, including my cat lord. Yet this is not what made Collin remarkable. What made him remarkable is that nobody, including us, figured it out until it was too late.

The Lord of Cats had hopes of Collin's escape, and was probably the only person to harbor such. Not even I wanted Collin to escape his execution, and I was his nephew. Collin had killed the beloved Bayezid, the brigt face of all Kenash, ruler and priest. Was it my cat lord alone then whose shoulders slumped to see Collin, that giant, fall? It is impossible to forget the day an iris arrived in the yard, tumbling out of a well weathered missive from Syliras mishandled by a page. I watched it be crushed beneath the heel of a passing stableman and could already hear in my mind the sigh of my cat lord. It was not long thereafter that Collin called our bluff and invited the new regent to take his head, tying our hands with our own web.

Now does it begin,Toli, the king of cats told me that day. He talks like that, sometimes, with words filled with sighs unspoken; and in his voice, there is bewitchment. It is said that our forefather, Sivah, possessed the same ability to enchant. Pity, considering that so few who would know to mark it have it bless their ears. Sly as a cat, patient as death, that's our cat lord. He laughs when he hears that nickname, and inevitably remarks that history must call the seat holder so not because spies are cats, but because all he ever seems to do is herd them. I think he has the loneliest job in the world, and I guess that's why he kept me around.

I could actually call him by name.

It is a name not even the black of Hai can snuff within me, the calling of a man even this city of the damned cannot make a corpse in my memory.

Jacobi Hardai.
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hymns of hai.

Postby Toli Armitage on February 26th, 2012, 3:40 am

3 Spring 498


To Anatoli, scion of Armitage, Sworn of Summer:


Dearest Toli,

There is an old serving woman who the cook lets sit near the ovens, rocking forward and back for hours a day. They tell me she is witless, that her memory fled with the pigment in her hair and the blush of her youth; and yet when I speak to her, she smiles this knowing, toothless smile at me as if she has seen me before. Certain, she has, for I steal through the kitchens once, sometimes twice a week to borrow the day old bread too broken for trenchers and take them to the rookery. You remember how Malwyn would set us to feeding the doves whenever we haunted his steps? It was always waiting in wonder when my father would return from this keep or that temple on some necessary journey or another. Yet Lena, the old woman, she cannot recall where she placed her shawl a moment before and there are times, my love, I too often feel as if I am going ever forward and back again and forward once more ceaseless and with no discernable destination.

Memory allows me to say here, here is where I was foolish and this, this is when I was free. There was I naive and over here I was proud as my parents raised me to be. There was that time when I was clever and another when I was silly and there, there in the back hiding behind the others is where I met terror that changed all my days.

I dislike it here so thoroughly, Toli. Even the sunlight in this place is shrewd! There is not a single unsullied soul and, yes, yes! I count myself among them. For every hand extended, another lies in wait and this city, this court has jaded me so completely that it feels sometimes as if I cannot hear even laughter without listening for the barb. Surely there is no place on earth so unlike home as this. Surely there is no people so infected with ambition, be it their own or another's, as these. All are vipers, and yet all are victims. I yearn to race through the corn fields and hear the wind carry the music of pipers across Mabel's Creek from the peristyle and know, know that though I am running, I am running home.

Every dawn I wake with memory of you. I find you in the looking glass when Cilla brushes my hair, hiding in the lines of my face, the tilt of my eyes. You are there when I disdain yet another day the gowns of cerulean and emerald, crimson and lilac and poppy and select a gown of ivory or bone or cream or white, grace white. I think of you in pine and bronze, donning riding leathers and hunting colors and I smile a secret smile. It is often the best smile of my day.

Mayhaps you have heard by now how I had to win my betrothed's affection with a pair of hounds. Mastiff puppies, they are, whom we named Kova and Galifer. The whole city must think me devastatingly ugly, a shrew without a single fair quality by which to redeem. Ah, yes, love, your sweetheart is an ambitious whore but the boy she is to wed? Gods. Gods, Toli, what I have learned. What have I done?

I ought cease here, but there are such terrible secrets they have implanted in my breast I fear they will poison me as it is so obvious, so! That they have long since poisoned others. It is true, I understand now why the Triarch's Regent requires me; but in this requirement I am shamed to dust, lover. They will wed me to a heartsick, vicious man who would rather molest an economy cowed by the temple's power than give an admiring glance to the woman who will ward this city with him. Nay, not with him, I fear, but from him. Those who claim a wish to aid, a like concern for the future, rave at me that I am foolish and foolhardy and then turn to say I am powerless while telling me with their eyes I'm their only hope.

I will go mad here, Toli. I am barely within reach of the temple's grace and already it cuts me to the quick and I bleed for this city, these people. Can no one here do right for right's sake? Can no one at least attempt to do so in the right way? I am told no, never or it all will crash down about my ears and my head find the stone on the green warmed for me by your uncle. I must play their game, I am constantly told, for I am of it will it or no and I have not the power to make the rules my own.

And so it is endless. So I see, now, how even should the power be grasped to do what is right that the right will be disallowed. How there are those who would bring down for that, and that alone.

I do not know what to do. I do not know how to do it even if I did. I know nothing, Toli, save that this is my life and shall remain my life so long as I have life left at all.

I miss you. I love you. I have always loved you and always will and however so very much I wish you at my side I could not bear it here. How foolish these men who name me fool! How self absorbed this city to think we would ever wish to control it. Court of vipers. Court of victims. I want nothing of it, and I never will.

I want you. Only you. I'll dream of you tonight, my love, and seek you in the looking glass on the morrow.

Yours,
Nuray, daughter of Meluc.
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hymns of hai.

Postby Toli Armitage on March 16th, 2012, 4:07 am

But break, my heart,

for I must hold my tongue.


-- W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, scene ii: Hamlet.


We murdered him.

Other men will say he was executed. They will toss around words such as "killed" and "slain" as if poetry can alter the truth of the matter. He himself would have likely used the same phrases, for he was well versed in the laws of this city, and in the law it is written that when a man's life is cut short for the committing of crimes then it is not murder. Murder is a crime, and seeking to reconcile another by the taking of a head is not. I, however, am cursed with truth; and I was there, in the front of the crowd that blistering morning with my brothers before me, to watch as we murdered the Conciliator of Armitage with his own sword.

It was the Hardai who wielded the sword, passed down from the hands of Sivah to the family for generations pass the end of the age of empires. The murder was done with one blow, quick and hard and sure. It is a difficult thing, to sever a man's head with one blowand one blade. It requires more than a mere excess of strength, but a clear eye and a true aim. I am sure that my father is grateful in his own way, even if the crowd had come, straining and eager, with hopes for more to witness the fall of a summer giant and the bright, brutal spill of his verdant blood.

An astounding clamor seethed through the streets of Kenash. It was constituted of vendors hawking cries and heralds complacent announcements, the shrieks of loose children and the shouts of observers. It was a thousand voices blending into one dulland dissonant roar, shoving up against the bricks and the wood, the dirt and the stone to echo over the scaffolding constructed upon the green with knuckles and knees and teeth full of blemished passion. It was the citizenry of summer, the leftover nobility of the border boys of old, the courtiers and the laborers, the crooks and the guards and priests and the whores. It was the audience for a traitor's death.

Unwashed masses shouldered up against educated fools. Forgotten skills and lost knowledge hummed within the bones of nameless souls. A guard of a great family's swift hand caught the arm of a child before it fell, laughing off the mother's gratitude. An orange was traded to a fencer for a tip. A young girl whose earliest memory was of the grasslands beyond the seawall made eyes at an Ahnatep merchant over the spill of her father's vending cart. A wench with green eyes flirted with an Imbolc who accidentally jostled the shoulder of an acolyte. A squire charmed up a harlot who had once sold the secrets of a wizard for her wares; and on the green in the middle of this maelstrom of humanity sat a headstone and waited a headsmen in Galensar blue while everything from copper rimmed mizas and skills to bread and blades were laid down for wagers in a dozen different dialects.

I watched as Omadia's hand slipped into her brother's, as she held her chin up and her expression distant and composed while her uncle was murdered. Alatriste did the same, only with a frown stamped on his mouth, and as unmoving as Fratchild in their defense of the city's next mother of summer and the thirty ninth Armitage, made head of the family the moment the sword cut into his uncle's neck.

The sky was as clear and blue as the hydrangeas that line the colonnade in Basolm's southernmost field, and the sun blazing. For once I was not cold north of Riverfall, but I watched others shiver with my head down and my eyes up, lips sealed and arms crossed. It was the least I could do, watch, and I tried not to care how many would believe I did so with relish and satisfaction. There were men who would know otherwise, men who were here even now, lost high and low in this audience, their eyes on my back and the back of their new primary scion of Armitage.

I am told that he said nothing in the face of questioning, that my father only smiled and spoke of Sivah to his nephew, of the past with his oldest friend, and of dreams to the priest. He held his tongue when he had nothing left to lose, and both irritated and confounded any number in the doing of it. Only I know that even on the eve of his death, Collin Armitage had something left to lose, one thing left to protect, and so allowed his name to be branded in heresy and dissembling, collusion and treason for the remainder of time.

My father was not innocent. That is not doubted; that is not my claim or what causes this to weigh all the more heavily upon my own soul. I know, perhaps better than anyone, just exactly how guilty he was. I have spent every hour of my adulthood collecting the evidence of his numerous crimes, and yet still I cannot watch this and call it anything less than outright murder. Yet I am the one with the knowledge of why he did all that he has, the thousands of little sins that led him to this scaffold with its headstone that he all too willingly laid his head upon.

Even the guilty can die with dignity.

Collin had his reasons, but they do not lie in the tangled web of evidence I delivered unto the triarch's regent. They are not buried in the mysteries of the Valterrian past or in the conflicts of Meluc warring against its own even if that is what he would have wished the city to believe. A pretty speech, he offered, at my trial when the tides so abruptly turned and made the trial his. A speech filled with words that answered nothing, revealed secrets of other things, and worked to bring him down hard and entirely.

Collin Armitage has never uttered a word without purpose, and those spoken by him at the trial had been carefully constructed. It kept the attention exactly where he wanted it: on him, and his guilt.

When I was five, I saw my death. My father found me, the first to come at the scream of my waking cry, and caught me up tight in his arms. I sobbed against his chest in the lantern-lit darkness all the secrets Tanroa in league with Avalis had unveiled for me in my dreams. He listened. I remember that now, how well he listened to the terrified tales of a child as if every syllable was precious, every sentence a treasure that ought not be forgotten. He listened, I know now, with the gravity of a seer who, too, had long ago been witness to his own end.

I helped murder that man. I did not help bring him to justice, but I helped bring justice to him. I share that sin with numerous others, but that makes it no less mine. I have committed patricide and the regent has named me the most loyal of summermen. The Order has instructed me to become their primary contact to the new head of Armitage, doubtless due to the fact that I am like to be the only one among them Devlin will be willing to trust. I am to offer our services to him and walk off of this green, out of this city, and never tell my father's tale.

I am to live it instead.

May Sivah's lantern light my path better than it did my father's.
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