Just Like You Said It Would Be
Nuada of the Silverarm was born on a quarter waning moon.
His cry was a choked and quiet thing. He was pale, and small, and his mother beamed down at him with love while the half-moon smiled on them both.
The druids of the grove lined with willows had sensed something powerful coming, but they had not expected their leader - their former leader; kidnapped and forced to marry the local barbarian that called himself a king - to return to them to bear his child.
At first they refused… but for barely a breath really. In response to their audacity, she needed only to stare them down to put them in their places. They understood at once she had risked her life to get here in this state to deliver them on sacred ground.
When the king stormed into the peaceful grove, surrounded by armed men, harsh morning sunlight casting long shadows, she didn’t even look up.
“That child is mine, as are you.” He said with cruelty, waking Nuada from a peaceful sleep.
Her voice was as powerful as it was soft. “We shall return with you, but we are not yours. Neither him, nor I.”
He spat insults at her as she rose gracefully and walked past him without heed, bowing to the midwives in thanks, and walking back to her imprisonment called Queenhood.
She bore no children after Nuada, and she showed him as much love as the king did ownership. She was determined to instill hope and kindness in him, and in that way, defeat the king through his own lineage. He had forced marriage upon her from a culture she didn’t even follow, to control her people, not understanding that she didn’t lead them the same way he led his, and their loyalty was not to her, but the spirits she communed with, and the land that bore them all.
“It’s witchcraft.” He decried it. “And you’re a queen now, and he’s a prince. So stop with all this heresy, before I kill you for it myself.”
He was a quiet and thoughtful child. He preferred the company of animals to other children, and even then he chose to gather berries and mushrooms with the girls his age, than to roughhousing with other boys. Nuada wasn’t particularly strong, nor naturally skilled, but his mother instilled gentle tenacity in him. “When you take to something, do it wholly, and for yourself. Not for anyone else.”
“What about when someone asks you to do something you don’t want to?”
She was pensive before answering. “That can be difficult.” She said. “I think whether you choose to do something, do it with your whole-heart, and if you choose not to, then be free of it entirely.”
“How will I know whether to do something or not?” He asked in worry.
“Sometimes you will just know, others you will have to sit with it, and those are the moments that make you you, Nuada.”
He was five when his father first put a sword in his hand, and Nuada dropped it immediately.
“What are you doing, you brat?” The king shouted down at him.
“Swords kill. I won’t kill.”
His father laughed. “You will.”
He struck him with a closed fist, and Nuada fell to the ground, but he still didn’t pick up the sword. He was kicked, and hit again, and he cried, and the king just beat him harder.
His mother tended to him afterwards with trembling hands. She felt the guilt of her lesson gone awry, but she didn’t hold it.
“Sometimes people take our choices from us. It’s not right… but it can’t always be changed. In those times, we have to make choices where we can. Let him teach you the sword, Nuada. Let him teach you to hunt, and ride for speed, but choose how you use all of it.” She dabbed his face, wiping away tears and blood at the same time.
So he did.
Nothing really came easy to him, but he would practice, commit, and work towards his own satisfaction, not perfection. Some things came with less resistance, like writing, and tracking, and at these he truly excelled, the combination of the latent ability and his work ethic pushing him to scholarly levels unheard of in those times, but other things he could even be described as clumsy, like fighting. He didn’t let talent be his guide, however, and he went from fumbling spears and tripping through stances to a renowned warrior… with time. His first fight in a tournament was at twelve, and he lost so badly that his father beat him in front of the other kings while they laughed. His fourth tournament, he advanced twice. At his seventh, he won.
He applied his principle the other way as well; he was exceedingly fast on a horse, but he never raced. Not once.
It was the first time his father tried to force him to do something that he adamantly refused, because he saw no smaller choice in the act that could justify it.
It wasn’t the races that marked the king's decision. It was the refusal. The no.
“His mothers’ influence has gone on long enough. If she refuses to change, but also take my heir down her rotten path, my hand is forced.”
On a cold spring day, in his fourteenth year, he returned from a morning and afternoon of exploring the wilderness. He liked to learn the land that had perhaps been traversed, but not yet mapped.
The blood was already washed away when he arrived.
“Your mother was a traitor. Consorting with a king of the south, sharing his bed, and secrets of our borders.” There was no remorse or comfort in his words. “I felled the axe myself.”
Nuada was silent as the tears seemed to fall endlessly.
He ran away. Was brought back. Beaten.
Six times.
By the seventh, he had finally learned to out manoeuvre his fathers men, but the king knew no bedrock of depravity, and he simply had his men capture a druid instead.
Nuada returned before another life was lost.
His father continued trying to force him into his idea of what power looked like, and every lesson he passed down, Nuada received in wisdom, and used against him.
He taught the Creideamh Sí followers within his borders to better conceal their sacred spaces. The ones that had no relevance in place, he convinced them to abandon. “If it’s not the place you’re protecting, protect yourselves, and in doing so, you protect your practice, and your stories.” Some of them took more convincing than others, and some refused to listen at all.
Those were the ones that burned.
He mourned his losses, and turned his grief to conviction.
With time, he grew into a man who was unknowingly carrying a myth, though perhaps he could feel the weight of it.
By his twentieth year, he earned a title passed in secret places in hushed tones;
Nuada Flaith Druí;
…Nuada, the Prince Druid.
It was some time before the title reached his own ears, and when it did… it sat in the shadow of something else; wild, new, and unfamiliar to Nuada at the time.
Love.