"Your father was a murderer. They put him to death because he killed lots of people." Cheradenine sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the stone bulwark. It was a beautiful day in the garden and the trees sighed in the wind. The sisters were laughing and giggling in the background, collecting flowers from the beds in the centre of the stone boat. The stone ship sat in the west lake, joined to the garden by a short stone causeway. They had played pirates for a while, and then started investigating the flower beds on the upper of the boat's two decks. Cheradenine had a collection of pebbles by his side, and was throwing them, one at a time, down into the calm water, producing ripples that looked like an archery target as he tried always to hit the same place.
"He didn't do any of those things," Elethiomel said, kicking the stone bulwark, looking down. "He was a good man."
"If he was good, why did the King have him killed?"
"I don't know. People must have told tales about him. Told lies."
"But the King's clever," Cheradenine said triumphantly, throwing another pebble into the spreading circles of waves. "Cleverer than anybody. That's why he's king. He'd know if they were telling lies."
"I don't care," Elethiomel insisted. "My father wasn't a bad man."
"He was, and your mother must have been extremely naughty too, or they wouldn't have made her stay in her room all this time."
"She hasn't been bad!" Elethiomel looked up at the other boy, and felt something build up inside his head, behind his nose and eyes. "She's ill. She can't leave her room!"
"That's what she says," Cheradenine said.
"Look! Millions of flowers! Look; we're going to make perfume! Do you want to help?" The two sisters ran up behind them, arms full of flowers. "Elly…" Darckense tried to take Elethiomel's arm.
He pushed her away.
"Oh, Elly… Sheri, please don't," Livueta said.
"She hasn't been bad!" he shouted at the other boy's back.
"Yes she ha-as," Cheradenine said, in a sing-song voice, and flicked another pebble into the lake.
"She hasn't!" Elethiomel screamed, and ran forward, pushing the other boy hard in the back.
Cheradenine yelled and fell off the carved bulwark; his head struck the stonework as he fell. The two girls screamed.
Elethiomel leant over the parapet and saw Cheradenine splash into the centre of his many-layered circle of waves. He disappeared, came back up again, and floated face down.
Darckense screamed.
"Oh, Elly, no!" Livueta dropped all her flowers and ran towards the steps. Darckense kept on screaming and squatted down on her haunches, back against the stone bulwark, crushing her flowers to her chest. "Darkle! Run to the house!" Livueta cried from the staircase.
Elethiomel watched the figure in the water move weakly, producing bubbles, as Livueta's steps sounded slapping on the deck underneath.
A few seconds before the girl jumped into the shallow water to haul her brother out, and while Darckense screamed on, Elethiomel swept the remaining pebbles off the parapet, sending them pattering and plopping into the water around the boy.
No, that wasn't it. It had to be something worse than that, didn't it? He was sure he remembered something about a chair (he remembered something about a boat too, but that didn't seem to be quite it either). He tried to think of all the nastiest things that could happen in a chair, dismissed them one by one as they hadn't happened to him or to anybody he knew — at least as far as he could remember — and finally concluded that his fixation on the idea of a chair was a random thing; it just so happened to be a chair and that was all there was to it.
Then there were the names; names that he'd used; pretend names that didn't really belong to him. Imagine calling himself after a ship! What a silly person, what a naughty boy; that was what he was trying to forget. He didn't know, he didn't understand how he could have been so stupid; now it all seemed so clear, so obvious. He wanted to forget about the ship; he wanted to bury the thing, so he shouldn't go calling himself after it.
Now he realised, now he understood, now when it was too late to do anything about it.
Ah, he made himself want to be sick.
A chair, a ship, a… something else; he forgot.
The boys learned metalwork, the girls pottery.
"But we're not peasants, or… or…"
"Artisans," Elethiomel provided.
"You will not argue, and you shall learn something of what it is to work with materials," Cheradenine's father told the two boys.
"But it's common!"
"So is learning how to write, and to work with numbers. Proficiency in those skills will not make you clerks any more than working with iron will make you blacksmiths."
"But…"
"You will do as you are told. If it is more in accord with the martial ambitions you both lay claim to, you may attempt to construct blades and armour in the course of your lessons."
The boys looked at each other.
"You might also care to tell your language tutor that I instructed you to ask him whether it is acceptable for young men of breeding to begin almost every sentence with the unfortunate word, «But». That is all."
"Thank you, sir."
"Thank you, sir."
Outside, they agreed that metalwork might not be so bad after all. "But we've got to tell Big-nose about saying «But». We'll get lines!"
"No we won't. Your old man said that we might care to tell Big-nose; that's not the same as actually telling us to tell him."
"Ha. Yeah."
Livueta wanted to take up metalwork too, but her father would not allow her to; it was not seemly. She persevered. He would not relent. She sulked. They compromised, on carpentry.
The boys made knives and swords, Darckense pots, and Livueta the furniture for a summerhouse, deep in the estate. It was in that summerhouse where Cheradenine discovered…
No no no, he didn't want to think about that, thank you. He knew what was coming.
Dammit, he'd rather think about the other bad time, the day with the gun they'd taken from the armoury…
Na; he didn't want to think at all. He tried to stop thinking about it all by bashing his head up and down, staring at the mad blue sky and hitting his head up-down, up-down off the pale scaly rocks beneath his head where the guano pellets had been swept away, but it hurt too much and the rocks just gave and he didn't have the strength seriously to threaten a determined speckfly anyway, so he stopped.
Where was he?
Ah yes, the crater, the drowned volcano… we're in a crater; an old crater in an old volcano, long dead and filled with water. And in the middle of the crater there was a little island and he was on the little island, and he was looking off the little island at the crater walls and he was a man wasn't he children, and he was a nice man and he was dying on the little island and…
"Scream?" he said.
Doubtfully, the sky looked down.
It was blue.
It had been Elethiomel's idea to take the gun. The armoury was unlocked but guarded at the moment; the adults seemed busy and worried all the time, and there was talk of sending the children away. The summer had passed and still they hadn't gone to the city. They were getting bored.
"We could run away."
They were scuffing through the fallen leaves on a path through the estate. Elethiomel talked quietly. They couldn't even walk out here now without guards. The men kept thirty paces ahead and twenty behind. How could you play properly with all these guards around? Back nearer the house they were allowed out without guards, but that was even more boring.