ISEULT
i
In a great hinterland of the Silver Marches there lived a man and his daughter. It was the late fringes of autumn, when the wind began to swell with cold promise, where the animals of every distinction retreated from their mortal clambering, where the green became amber, then brown, then nothing at all. It was the breath before the sigh, the writhe before the fall, the last rush of light before the midnight moon, and it could be felt for miles round. It was in this northmark, in this imponderable taiga of faded lichen green that these two lived, between mighty, eternal poplars that peered forgotten saints and kings and queens of folklore myth, among the ferns and phandars and ugly, twisted felsul that had roots that remembered. It was the late afternoon on this day, so the slough of crickets had begun their chorus amid the thrill and gust of dusky wind.
The father's name is unimportant. He had gone into his latter years with a robust dignity, with an arching chest, a breadth of shoulder, with a face tanned and dried by the sun. He was the sort accustomed to lonely self-exile: the quiet stoic who toiled without protest, who spoke little, who would accept labour with a ruddy-hand another might not, who was, with a sinewy honesty, the most trust-worthy and dependable sort of friend, but the one you'd remember last. He was not crafted for any great ambition and in some ways he was perfectly conscious of this. There was, however something in his eyes. They were bright and searching like a fox. Among his firm and well-marked features, there was a glimmer of menace and authority, of cruelty and sorrow, of fatherhood and inadequacy.
His daughter's name was Iseult. She was a waif: small and precious and utterly dependent on her inarticulate father, her existence casting a great selfishness over the idea of his self exile. She was as pale as a ghost save for her streak of grey-green hair, and as quiet as a dormouse; she went with a pitter patter in her step like lazy rain. By day she would play by a neighboring stream under the surveillance of her father; who, when he was being critically overbearing, would prepare tinder for his furnace and forge, and then, with what'd seem to young Iseult to be a feat of titan exertion, beat and fold and pull swords and spears and armours into form in a great argument of steel. He was a blacksmith of some repute – a repute enough that a pitiful merchant's page would brave the alpine passage every second month to this lonely place in order to do business. This was not a place where a father would raise his daughter.
They lived in a small cottage made of hewn stone and boreal wood, built by a steep, wooded ridge. Within was tidy and angular in its own sort of way, filled with a constant fragrance of cardamoms and wooded smoke. Barrels of metal yet without a mould lined the wall. A hog's head taxidermy lived above the bed like a house spirit. A pile of brigandines and fresh gambesons lay on the drawer by the door. There was the touch of an absent mother all around: though it was felt, not seen. Felt every time the door was opened, the wind whispered through an open window, or the last candle of the day was snuffed.
Bees murmured in the thyme by the shade. A flair of morning glory crept up the side like a brilliant honey-purple snake whose scales were trumpet bells. There was the constant drumming creak and groan of distant trees. The mid-morn light would hit the windows of the cottage and exalt it in the most brilliant way. Often there was heard the shrill of a fox, the howl of a tundra wolf. A single path lead off and up into a fantastic silence, where thick trees forbade the light there-on with strict governance. It was like the maw of a dead, forgotten god and Iseult nigh worshiped it so: judicial and ancient it was, as though petrified amid a final celestial command. It was from this dark, uttering mouth that he came, on a day like any other.
He was a man atop his horse. It took only a brief observation to know something was awry. He sat with an inhumanely slouch and his reins ensnared his thighs only just enough to keep him from falling. His horse was a brown palfrey, and the duteous, beautiful, complex beast was wholly aware she carried her master for the last time. It was by the small stream that Iseult had been frolicking, and for this moment her father was strangely absent. That was not all that was amiss: as the horse trotted into sight along the pebbled path, it was as though the wind itself had stopped.
It would be wrong to say the girl Iseult was not scared, but for the first time in her long, she realized she had a strength in her. Not the sort of her father, it was different than that. She was not strong in her arms or her voice. She did not have the strength to rouse an army or lead or charge. She was not strong there. She was strong in her heart.
The horse had by now approached her, and her hands trembled with great, overwhelming possibility. The literature in her father's cabin was limited to naturalist exposition and provincial poetry- this wounded man now slouched upon a saddle on a horse was the third, perhaps the fourth person she had ever seen in her life, and he was about to die right before her eyes.
Something snapped and the fleeting rider slipped rather unceremoniously onto the ground at Iseult's feet. A few things became abundantly clear. He was a knight, clad in a dirty ironwrought silver. His mortal wounds were by way of a volley of orc arrows. Above all-- and which was of everything most striking to the girl-- he was young. Barely twice her age. He was still a boy.
So this young, dying boy knight began to cry and croak in his mother tongue. Compelled by some phantom agency deep in her bones, Iseult forsook her fears and crept over to his side, and tried to fold his dumb, limp, iron limbs over his chest. This struggle had the knight take notice of the girl, who in her vain efforts had herself begun to whimper. He grasped for a few words and failed, and instead grasped for what appeared to be a holy talisman at his neck of some sort, of undecipherable age, of which was no doubt about to outlive yet another bearer. The young knight took it straight from his neck and put it around Iseult's, which seemed so small and fragile to his hands. He coughed and spluttered, and soon was no more.
In that moment that her father disappeared and the wind had stopped, she knew exactly what she had to do- what must be done. She closed the dead knight's eyes and intertwined his fingers as instructed a ballad she had somewhere read, climbed atop the palfrey steed, said her prayers, and when the gallop met the earth, Iseult rode into the mouth of a god.
She did not stop until she reached the door of Silverymoon.