Drowning man

The court was filled with murmurs. All around Nuada, courtiers murmured,  men in gleaming bronze and women in dye-bright linens, clustered in groups, whispering in pettiness as his father sat on a carved throne.
“Our farmlands need expanding, and the forest in the southern shadow of the fort is treacherous.” Nuada listened with his jaw clenched, leaning against a beam, arms crossed in an attempt at temperance. “It harbors creatures unnatural. Spirits. Spies. My scouts speak of a glade deep within it where no mortal dares linger long.” The king spoke to all the court gathered in the longhouse, but at his next words, his eyes fell to Nuada. “Burn it.”

“No.”

Nuada said it before his breath even caught.
When the whispers died down, the sound of the crackling braziers echoed the rage they both felt.
The king stood on a raised platform, glaring down at his son. “You defy me? Openly?”
Nuada clenched his jaw. He looked about the room, took in the faces of the nobles that bore witness. There would be no turning back if he continued, and he did. Without hesitation. “I defy ignorance.” He said, dropping his arms to his sides and walking forward. “That glade is sacred.”
The king sneered. “Sacred to what? The trees and rocks? Or half-seen boys with light behind their eyes?”
Nuada’s heart screamed… but his face was still. He had kept Lasair a secret all this time... Or he thought he had. Did those boys finally speak of the day they threw rocks at innocence? Or maybe… he had been discovered without his knowing.
The king filled the silence in the wake of his surprise. “My son would break bread with spirits. Perhaps worse.”
Nuadas’ face darkened. “What dwells in that glade is hope, and I will not stand by while you torch it for pride.” He did not speak Lasair’s name. He did not say: He’s kinder than anyone here. He’s gentler than your priests, faster than your guards, and softer than anything I thought could survive this world.
“Feeding our people is not pride.”
“Our people know no famine. You aim to expand your dominion, not the stocks.”
“Enough!” The king screamed. “You are my heir, I will not have your consorting with spirits and worshipping their thresholds like some haggard druid.”
Nuada’s voice cracked like cold thunder. “Then crown yourself another.”

He was watched at nearly all times of the day after that, and he wasn’t able to safely get to the glade. Some days passed, and every time the king held court he became more and more obsessed, more incensed.
 The fear he felt as his fathers words carried into the hearts of the people was darker than anything he wanted to admit. He just needed to get away long enough to tell Lasair to stop showing up, find another glade… another mortal to drape in flowers and hope. He wandered the country he’d forgotten slightly in the months he’s spent preferring the glade to throw off his trackers, and create distance from where Lasair waited for him while he thought of what to do.

It was an eerie night, the sky was too bright and on the far horizon from where the moon still hadn’t risen…
Nuada knew what it meant. All too well.
He arrived at the scene too late to stop it; the fire consumed the small grove of hazels too quickly. Many of the druids and residents had already perished in smoke and despair, and Nuada offered what aid he could. The grove was beyond saving, but the people were not.
In rain they stood later, soot-covered ground sticky underfoot.
“Where will we go?” Asked the new leader of the rootless grove, having stepped into her role this very day when the elder was slain by a dagger before the first torch left hateful hands.
“To the south.” Nuada responded.
“You’re banishing us?”
Nuada opened his mouth to argue, to explain… but he didn’t see the point in this moment. As this leader even younger than himself looked up at him from beneath brows stained with the dried blood of her kin, he felt despair, dark and hollow, carve a place in his ribs for the first time in his life. “Yes.” He said solemnly, firmly.
He didn’t move as he watched the new refugees walk away, defeated, singing no songs for the dead he wouldn’t even let them bury.

They were gone, and he was alone with the grey rain falling down as smoke still rose  from the embers behind him. He wanted to cry, or scream… he just stood. Numb.
His horse bumped his shoulder, and still he didn’t move.

“Is this where you keep it?”

The men had surrounded him while Nuada was lost in himself. He settled into form and fell into his breath.
“I thought it was in the forest south of the dún?”
“There’s no way of knowing how many of them have corrupted him by this point.”
Nuada didn’t move as he made note of where each of them stood in relation to himself, and each other.
“Maybe the fallen prince would be so good as to share? A sídhe must feel pretty good, as long as you gag it first so it can’t bewitch you.”
His mind flashed to the muffled screams of his mother he would sometimes hear in the past, the solemn stillness she would compose herself with for days afterward, the tear stains that spoke what she couldn’t.

Outside of the battlefield, Nuada had never killed unless provoked, and even then he would aim to disarm rather than fell. In this moment the place of temperance from which he always unsheathed his sword… was buried under burned bodies, scorched earth, and harrowing cries of resistance..

His sword sunk into skin and was free again before any of them could move, and was arcing back to its next target in a movement paired with his second breath.
He moved without any flourish.
He took their lives with precision and speed, and he stood panting, holding form under shaking shoulders as the last body slumped to the muddy ground.

He saw his reflection in the puddles below him, heaving for breath, for meaning… and he dropped his sword with an unceremonious splash. His blood soaked hands were shaking.
Stilling his heart and mind, he brought the bodies he had stolen the life from to the bodies of the druids he’d failed to protect… There were too many dead for one man to bury, but he closed their eyes, and spoke words of mourning, before mounting his horse and riding in a desperate fury to the glade where love couldn’t stay safe anymore.