Chapter 115: Volume 3 - CH 2.7

The son of House Buckmann: a castaway cadet… and a soul spurned of holy communion with the Deiva. Such was his lot, and Estelle dared no argument against it. But for the baron to brand his abandoned son a “hound unfanged”, feeble and haggard—in that, Estelle found fault.

This “hound”, as they called him, had fangs enough. A wolf of valour, winter-worn and well-fought, with a will of steel forged in fires of resolve. Of this, Estelle’s eyes have seen, her ears have heard, her heart has felt.

To think, that this son’s merits were fast forgotten by his own begetters—nay, were as yet unknown to them, served only to stoke further the hero-dame’s displeasure. Though the wine she had been sipping, too, might have had a hand in fanning her flames.

“Lord and Lady both. Your lips seem loath to whisper even the name of your son. Allow me, then, if you will,” Estelle continued, her anger eloquent and unabated. “Your son, this ‘Rolf Buckmann’…”

There, clarion in the mareschal’s own voice: the gallant ungraced’s very name, and to Buckmann air, an anathema.

“…is most remarkable. A man of unmatched regard!”

Gaping open now was the baron’s mouth. “Howha…!?”

The mareschal’s was too puzzling a proclamation to him. The lamb unloved by Yoná, Most Divine; the apostate ill-suffered in the spans of this land—common sense makes clear that such a man deserves damnation wheresoever he wanders. And yet, here hurrying into the baron’s ears were Estelle’s stellar praises for the vauntless vagrant.

“Y-Your Mightiness?” the baron said breathlessly. “I-I fear I miss your meaning…”

Estelle stared with steel at the Buckmanns. “I meant exactly as you’ve heard: your son is a magnificent man. More so than you—than all of you.”

A remark to mar the mirth of any social function.

Not even the mareschal’s prestige could escape unscathed in vouching for the unvouchable like she did. Indeed, though she be the hero-dame of Londosius, unrivalled and unreachable, to veer so clearly away from creed and collective thought was sure to lay barbs and briars upon her path.

But it was a remark too long in the making. To leave it unaired sat most ill with Estelle.

His beaten and bloodied figure, fighting on and on for all he believed in.

His stout and unsung stature, unrelenting even aface uncountable scorn and contempt.

There was no shame in aught he shouldered. Yet shame was all his bloodkin knew of him. Shame was all they could speak of him. Shame was his one and only name to them. But well-knowing the truth of him and his trials, and hearing them challenged unjustly by his own parents, Estelle was taken very nearly to tears.

But no more. Hers would be the words that severed this silence.

“M… magnif… ficent?” the baron muttered. “That man, you say? More than I? Than us all?”

“M-Madame,” said the baroness, small and muted. “Might have you mistaken him for another, perchance?”

“Nay. Mine is no mistake,” Estelle answered. “Rolf Buckmann—a martial-devout! A mind of whetted wisdom! A man of golden gallantry! And you? What are yours but crumbs of an accomplishment, scattered in the shadow of his mountain of merits?”

“W… wh…”

Words were all but lost to the lord and lady. To be “below” an ungraced—an insult of unequalled slander! But that earned not the brunt of their disbelief; rather, it was in Estelle’s very speech. The hero-dame of Londosius, most renowned in all the realm, maundering on matters most mysterious to their ears. Was this some jest? A joust of words for dubious merriment? The Buckmanns could not know. The mareschal’s very demeanour, they could not comprehend.

And so their confusion remained neither mended upon their mien, nor paid any mind from the hero-dame.

“Long should I’ve been buried, if not for Rolf. I, along with a great many other knights and dames,” she confessed. “Hark, my good Baron. This very moment ought find you sobbing… upon the headstone of your pride! Your joy! Your dear daughter Felicia! Were Rolf any less of a man! For she, too, owes her living breath to her brother!”

“No…!” the baron grimaced. “Madness…!”

“Madness, indeed! That you scorn the truth!” Estelle countered. “Yet think you madness be my mien? Think you, Baron, these lips be given to lies?”

Lies? Not so. Felicia’s life was living proof. A twice-attested token of Rolf’s heroism, for not only at the Battle of Erbelde was she delivered by him, but in the grim mirk of Mt. Godrika, as well. And of the two feats, neither had escaped the mareschal’s ken.

“Nay, I… I… b-but… mmngh!” groaned the lord.

The Buckmanns were pale by this point. They could fathom none of the confusion afore them. Bludgeoned by balderdash, harried by this hogwash of a humiliation—them! The very lord and lady of this manor, this land!

Then, as though impelled by what pride he had in his position, the baron managed to open his mouth again.

“Y… yet he was damned by our Deiva, all the same. And that is the truth. Unchanging, unchallenged!” he cried. “If aught could be gleaned from so unglozed a truth, let it be this: that man, that thing is a fremd, foul and foreign!”

Ah, yes. Of course. The creed of Yonaism, ever the card-up-the-sleeve for any soul so cornered. Always reliable, never refutable, for exactly as the baron had broached, it was the common and unquestionable thought of all folk in this realm. And like a desperate dealer did he dangle his winning card, to which Estelle simply sighed.

“…Pardon,” she said softly, letting her shoulders settle. “This passion of mine—’twas a fire overfed.”

Incredible. Never had the mareschal lost her cool in the cacophonies of uncountable battlefields. But to have lost it here of all places?

Estelle inly chided herself for the irony. Though to be sure, she regretted naught she had aired thus far.

“Lord Buckmann,” she began again, newly calmed. “Oft in this noble sphere that we share is familial love left a forlorn second to the future of the house. Doling out disinheritance be your right as lord of your line, certainly; that, too, I concede.”

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Still, hers was no heart that could so condone the repudiation of one’s child and its very existence. But that was a thought Estelle was unfain to unfurl, not after having just collected her cool. Her mind, then, was to unmince the matter for the baron, that he might fully know the faults of his ways.

“But do heed this, Baron, and heed it well,” the mareschal went on. “Ever are we chained to the choices of our making. Thus should one day you find fangs bared your way by the very ‘hound’ you chose to abandon—and likewise behold him grown to a grandness far beyond your most fearsome fancies—say never that you had no other choice.”

“What is this…!?” the baron hissed, his veins vaulting asudden. “That thing? A hound soon to harry my way? My house? My line!? Is that your reckoning of him!? Of this ill affair!?”

“Perhaps,” Estelle answered, clear and quiet. “Or perhaps… not. Perhaps to him, you are the wayside stone.”

“…Waysi…!?”

The lord, worth not even a whim of attention? From the very hound he had cast from his house? A statement most unsought. His humiliation deepening by the moment, the baron at last began to bristle and quake—a sight savouring not a crumb of care from the mareschal as she turned her back to the Buckmanns.

“Most warm was your welcome,” she said, before starting her way out of the great hall, watched by every eye in attendance. “Thank you and good day, Lord and Lady.”

“Hold there…!” the baron barked, grinding his teeth, with his wife fuming beside him all the while. “Why? Why do you vouch for that vermin so!? Do you not think yourself imperilled by your present port? A port more beseeming a traitor than a strength of Londosius!?”

Estelle stopped. “Nay, Baron. For strength is my very charge. Its seeking, its scrying in other souls—I judge strength, that Londosius might live another day.”

The lord pointed at her. “Foolery fogs your eyes! If ‘strong’ be your measure of him!”

Hoarse was his howling by now, to which Estelle turned with a sidelong look upon the lord and his lady.

“I am strong,” she proclaimed, “more so than any other huddled in this hall.” A truth incontestable. And none present dared the deed. Next did The Strong slowly cast her stare from guest to guest, before partaking in another proclamation. “Such is why I know well of strength. And thus, of whom are strong and what worth they hide within.”

Collective silence answered her. In it, the Buckmanns remained ill-convinced. Indeed, Estelle’s words found only deeper disagreement from them.

“Unthinkable…” the lord’s wife uttered, barely above a whisper. “…Most unthinkable. That so unsightly a stain as he can—”

“‘Unsightly’?” Estelle cut in. “What of your son be unsightly, Lady Buckmann? Is it not sightly as the summer sun that so unlike his parents, he is a beauty most evident to all eyes beholding? ‘Tis so to mine, I say—indeed, his features grip me fast in fascination.”

A gasp from the baroness. “Fasci…!?”

“Yes, fascinating, those eyes of his, wouldn’t you say?” the mareschal smirked. “Calm as clouds, yet fierce like fires alive—oh! Nary a night do I bed unvisited by visions of his gaze.”

And his burly body besides, a masterwork of muscle. A body Estelle saw, knew, felt for herself in the waning throes of the Battle of Erbelde, where in his lumber-like arms was she embraced and bulwarked against an explosion. The memory was faded not in the faintest. Recalling it, the mareschal turned away once more. But as she did…

“Why, I ought offer him this very hand,” she added. “The hand of a hero-bride.”

With those whirlwind words and one last look, Estelle sauntered off.

“Wha…!” In her wake: the befuddled Buckmanns and their guests, all aghast, each and every one. Ringing through the air was naught but the footfalls of the mareschal’s silver heels.

♰

Wheeling away from the Buckmann manor now was a grand and guarded carriage. Within it was sat Francis Behrmann, Under-Mareschal to the 1st, who, with half-opened eyes as saintly as they were silent, looked on at his superior afore him. There she was, Estelle Tiselius, sword-maiden of Londosius—

—hunched with both hands over her face.

“Ughh…” she groaned, quite fain to faint at any moment, as her heart reeled with regret for her conduct just moments ago.

She had said all she needed to say and found no fault in that, for the most part. Whipping the Buckmanns, too, till they were seething at the seams did not bother her in the slightest. But as the curtains were closing was she taken by the moment—too taken, really, and curiously so, enough to have teased out of her word after word most unexpected and most unnecessary. The memory was faded not in the faintest. Recalling it, the mareschal moaned in misery.

“Mmnn…”

“‘Twas a maidenly line, mademoiselle,” came Francis’ remark, a merciless salt-massage upon the mareschal’s wound. He himself was in attendance, and with unoccluded eyes and ears both had witnessed the episode in full. “‘Calm as clouds,” he flatly recited, “yet fierce like fires alive. Oh. Nary a night do I bed unvisited by visions of his gaze.’”

“Hmmngh…!”

“‘I ought offer him this very hand: the hand of a hero-bride.’”

“Nnwaaah!”

‘I am strong,’ this hero-dame had declared. Yet here the contrary cut more clearly, to which Francis all but sighed and shook his head. And then, a thought happened.

His mademoiselle’s warning to the baron—that Rolf Buckmann could one day brandish the blade of betrayal… with his father being but one of many marks. Such was Estelle’s seeming meaning, Francis surmised. Oh, but it was only a hunch, one could say.

Yet it was one from Estelle Tiselius, and hers was never a hunch to go unheeded.

For some time, then, had the mareschal been foreseeing such a future, one now daring to flower.

“Ever fickle, the fates…” Francis murmured, turning his eyes to the window, where winding by was the dusking beauty of the Buckmann barony. But yonder, far, far yonder in the northern fringe, there blazed frays and fires yet unscried by both him and his mademoiselle.

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