HARRY BOLTMORE

The hall had grown deserted, the loud mutters faded along with the clattering of spoons on trenchers and platters. There was nothing now, only silence echoing restlessly. Silence he greatly appreciated over the clamours and bickering that had dwelled in this hall just a few moments ago.

He had been seated with his kind, the lowborns, stableboys, squires, and stewards. That was his place, where the shadows of the hall resigned, and there he stayed, but even from there he had a good idea of what had been happening up front. The spot in the Kingsknight he had fought as valiant as he could for had been given to Ser Maurin Lockeheart, the winner of the tourney, and shortly after it seemed the king had spilled some wine or something, then there was a tussle of words that followed in the wake of the wine spilled, that one he could not hear much of from where he had been seating, but he had been able to catch glimpses of the royal family and no doubt feel the tension.

He was glad it had all ceased now, the tension he felt, but not long after, it returned when the queen summoned him before he had been able to leave the hall. At the moment, he stood at the foot of the high table with a tightened chest and tightened lips. What was he doing here? Why had he been summoned? Her guard looked scary too. Broad and wide even in metals, and his face hidden beneath the visors of his armet. If this was the way the guards in this castle were, then he must have been stupid to think he could make it into a higher rank than them. He, a Kingsknight? A cackling folly.

The queen sat there staring at him in all her regal and… sourness. It was not he she was sour at, he could feel it, or so he hoped, but it left a taste of fright nevertheless on his lips. They were all that were left in the hall. The queen, her guard, and he, a mere squire. The silence was messing with his mind.

The queen suddenly exhaled, and Harry tightened jarringly. He braced up for words and they doubtless came. “You have given your face no treatment?” She asked him, her voice gentle and filled with age, and the sourness that had been on her face a moment ago nowhere to be found. The youngness she bore was undeniable and for a split moment he thought of his mother. If she had still been alive then they might have not been much apart in age, her and the queen.

He saw wrinkles slowly showing their way to the queen’s snow pale face at the edge of her eyes, and maybe for a moment he thought it was his mother sitting up there, for his mouth opened to say something that should not have been meant for someone with the title of a queen. He had shifted his head forward slightly. “Wrinkles on your face,” he had whispered softly in something akin to awe, his hands tightly folded together beneath his tunic then, but one of them had loosened sharply after he had spoken and flown to cover his mouth. It had been too late though, the queen had heard.

“Yes, more and more have been coming lately,” she smiled and the wrinkles folded further. “They are rude little things. But your face has more worries. I can request the grand savant to patch you up.” She nudged her head slightly to the side with a graceful and queenly shrug of her shoulders.

Harry felt a momentary dismay. Had his impression of the way King’s City worked been wrong? A mere peasant like him at the gate had scolded him for being concerned for her child, but here, the queen was… she was different. She was gentle and her smile bore no irk for what he had said. It was… it was—

“Do you care for what I have offered?” The queen cut Harry’s thoughts away, splitting it into two halves that scurried off in haste.

Harry found out he had been gaping. “Pardon me, Your Grace. I… I seemed to have been carried away.” His fingers were biting into each other where he folded them.

“Well, you have returned, have you not? So?”

“Thank you for your offer, but maybe I should see to it myself?” He said, a reply or a question, he the speaker did not even know.

“You’re not sure?” The queen asked him. He was never sure. Ever since he had stepped his foot through the gates of this city his surety had been left somewhere to be forgotten. It seemed he had dropped it along with the coins he had used to pay his gate fee. The sense of being sure was now lost to him.

His head was lowered. It had been since he had stopped his gaping. “I think the grand savant might be asleep by this time. It’s just a swollen eye and some cuts, I should be able to see to it myself. Thank you for the kind offer, Your Grace.” He lowered his head further than it was already, imitating a bow.

“How old are you?” The queen questioned from high up, unseen to his eyes. He wanted no more mishap from himself.

“My sixteenth name day just passed a while back.” Harry cleared his throat stiffly and silently.

“You’re young,” she said. “How’s your father, the former lord of Boltmore? What does he do now?”

“He’s fine, Your Grace,” Harry told a lie. “We own a little cottage outside of Oldtown and try to sell whatever crop we can grow.”

“And your mother?”

That one stung him, so hard that his breathing went shallow. He found a voice to answer though, a cracked one. “She’s… dead, Your Grace.”

He heard the queen sigh. “You have my condolences. It’s quite a shame what happened, I hope you do not hate the throne for that?”

“My dream is to become a Kingsknight. I would never think to serve the throne if I hated it. What is happened is happened. My father paid for his sins, it was his fault.” Harry almost let his anger slip. His bitterness. If the man had never poached, they would still be nobles and he would not be living the way he was now. It hurt him more that this was the life he had been born into. He had not even gotten to have a feel of how growing up in the gardens of a castle felt. How the sun was warmer beneath the walls of a dome. He never felt all that and more. The only thing he grew up doing was sit in a brush of grasses, imagining himself warm beneath the canopies of the kind of trees that grew in a noble’s garden, while he gazed upon the tall, wide and great walls of Goldenstone, a castle his mother had told him used to be theirs. Used to. He was a lord, what could have made him resort to poaching in the Kingswood?

“Do not hate your father,” he heard the queen say, and it drew him from his boiling thoughts. “He must have had his reasons, only they did him no good.” He took his eyes up at her. Wrinkled and all, she was a fair grace nevertheless, and her smile still had its gentility. “You must be wondering why I summoned you,” she continued. “That sword,” she pointed at Crescent moon which was strapped around his waist, “where did you get it?”

Harry instinctively put his hand atop the sword’s hilt prior to shuddering a reply, “From Ser Gale, Your Grace.” He had spoken before he had had a chance to think of his words. The queen’s question had shaken him slightly. Did she even know who Ser Gale was? He began to wonder fervently, questioning the way he had phrased his answer. “Ser Gale is—” Harry was upon his bridge of explanation when the queen broke it down with her trebuchet.

“Ser Gale Mormont?” She interrupted him. “You’re sure?”

Harry almost smacked his forehead for his foolishness. Of course she did know. Ser Gale was once a Kingsknight and she was the queen, there was no way she did not know who he was. Is that why she’s asking of the sword…? Harry had a small wonder. “Yes, Your Grace,” he replied.

“Now that I think about it…” she sighed. “And he gave the sword to you? Of his own will?”

“Yes… yes, Your Grace,” Harry stuttered.

“What is your relationship with Ser Gale?” He saw the queen’s face narrow further in curiosity.

“He sells me medicine,” Harry told her.

“Medicine?” The queen began to laugh softly. “What does he know about medicine?” Harry watched the queen in reverence as she laughed herself away heartily. It came to a halt soon enough. “And you? Who do you buy these medicines for? You look pretty much healthy, despite your face.” Harry noticed then that he now had to deal with the lie he had told her of his father. His father’s illness was none of her concern, he could not bother her with it.

“My…” he stumbled, “Myself, Your Grace. I used to be so sick just until recently.”

“It’s good you feel better,” she said. “That was all I wanted to know. You may have your leave.”

Harry understood now. If he had not mentioned that it was the former Kingsknight that had given him the crescent moon of his own accord, the queen would have had it off his hands. He was lucky. What would he have told Ser Gale if he had returned without the sword? The man would snap him in half if that happened. But… “You do not think I lie?” He wondered about that too.

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The queen shrugged then smiled. “No, I do not think you did,” she told him. “And now that I think about it… again, there’s no way you could have gotten ahold of the sword without Gale’s will. You see he loves that sword, it was given to him by his king, it’s not something he’d mislay in a place where you’d be able to find it randomly and pick it up, and there are very few people in the realm that bear the confidence to fight him for it, you’re not one…” she smiled again, “I hope.”

Harry just stared, neither a word nor a thought came to him nor left him.

“You may leave,” the queen said again. And this time, with a bow, he took to leave the hall.

By the time he escaped the holdfast, the moon had gone to hide, leaving the sky devoid of its grey light. The chilly air of night swept through his body, almost freezing him cold as he shivered, bones and teeth rattling. His tunic was not strong enough to keep him from the nippy bite of the air, and he began to rub his hands upon his arms to solve that problem, only it did not work so much.

“Harry, if I remember correctly?” A voice said from his left. Harry turned to it and found a familiar face, one he did not know if he was happy to see or not. But he did know he was confused, and his face did not hide that. “Cut me some slack, will you? Don’t stare at me in such a way.” The man waddled closer to him, Ser Maurin clad in the gilded armour of the Kingsknight Harry wanted to be so much.

“What…” Harry stammered, “what do you want, Ser?” It seemed ever since he stepped his foot in this city he had grown prone to letting words come forth from his lips before he had had a chance to think of them. He should have at least greeted him first. No matter their history, this man was a lordling, and a Kingsknight.

“You could have at least given me some sort of greeting first,” Ser Maurin Lockeheart smiled, confirming Harry’s thoughts. “Let’s have a drink. It’s cold, nothing better than warm wine to replace broth.”

Harry lessened whatever ignorant emotions he had let well up within him. “But I do not drink, my lord. I’ve never tasted alcohol,” he answered with a tone of courtesy, one his earlier voice had lacked. His arms were still wrapped about each other, the cold was not relenting.

“Even at the feast?” Ser Maurin was baffled.

“Yes. I only took water.”

“Then what better time to start than now?” The man would not have rejection. He threw his arm, gauntlet and all, over Harry’s shoulder. “Let’s ride into the city. You were headed there before already, were you not?”

“Ride?” Harry went feeble for a moment. “I do not own a horse.”

Ser Maurin went baffled again. “Then how were you hoping to return to the city?”

“By foot?” Harry shrugged.

Ser Maurin laughed. “Let’s go to the stables, there are horses there.”

Harry shivered, but not from the cold. “It’s the royal stable, my lord, I can’t ride one of the royal horses.”

Maurin Lockeheart scoffed. “They don’t shit gold, you know? And besides, you are the king’s squire, you can surely ride a horse from the stables. It’s just a horse after all.”

Harry was about to say something, but the Kingsknight gave him no time to do so. He dragged Harry through the Great Yard, his arms across the boy’s neck as they made their way to the stables, pushing against the cold. The stables were warm, devoid of all the cold they had felt come against their bodies, but the only thing that would make them not take shelter here was the erratic smell of the horses’ dung. Well, Harry would in truth not mind, he had slept in worse, but Ser Maurin was a different case. Harry could not imagine someone so noble to prefer to take shelter in a place filled with this sort of smell.

Harry saw Ser Maurin ruffle some of the stable straw. “If only I did not want a drink, I would have loved to sleep here,” the knight said while smiling, and Harry’s previous presumption shattered into countless pieces. He was more than bemused, if there existed any emotion greater, that would explain his stiff gaping. This man was too plain to be a lordling. “Know how to saddle?” The knight called Harry back.

“No, my lord. Not yet,” Harry answered.

The knight scoffed. “You can wield a lance but you can’t saddle a horse?” The man laughed next. “I’ll saddle one for you.” And so he did. They mounted next, Harry on a deep brown mare and Ser Maurin on his destrier. They rode out of the stables, and made their way through a postern gate and into the city.

The sky had gone dark, but not the city. It bustled ardently. Dim yellow-orange lights from the windows of the houses lined closely together, filled the streets teeming with people ruffling about. Some were fighting, some were begging for scraps and coins, and some were whoring in the corners and even on the streets. Harry was still a year younger to see such, but his manly desires stopped him from looking away whenever he saw such an unusual scenario before him. He only managed to peel his gaze away when the mare he mounted had trotted him so far a distance that all he could hear were the whispers of the moans drowning in the ruckus of the street crowds, and even then his mind would still replay the events for him. His body tingled.

It took not so much of a long time before they arrived. Ser Maurin stopped his horse before a facade inscribed with the sensual image of a siren, and as Harry reined his horse to a stop too he at once knew where they were. He glanced up and saw a wooden board bearing the name of where they had stopped. The Red Siren, it had engraved on it.

“A brothel?” Harry commented as he swung off his horse.

“A brothel,” Ser Maurin confirmed with a grin as he handed the reins of his horse to one of the groomboys that had run up to him. “Keep the horses safe and I might toss you a tip,” he told the boy then turned back to Harry. “No better place to have a good drink than a brothel. Hand him the reins, let’s go in.”

Harry did as he was bid and handed the reins to the boy, gapped teeth and lanky, and he had done so without reluctance. He would have called it weird, but right now his sense of such a reasoning was a thing of the past. His desires had taken over. He knew what was in a brothel, and he wanted to see.

Harry had felt disappointment a lot of times in his life, but this night was not one of them. It was all he had expected a brothel to be and more. The noise filled his ears, the moans especially. Wines splattered from their tankards, tables shook, chairs fell, and hips moved. His breathing increased rapidly and his body began to feel colder than when he was riding through the city. It was as though he was bare the same as the men and women doing the deed. He began to feel his legs weaken and his jewel stiffen. “This is…” he started to say.

“A brothel,” the knight completed for him, then tapped Harry across his back. “Do well to hold it in, the ladies here are lecherous.”

It was not long he called the leeches what they were before five sprung upon them, all without a dress of any sort. Harry shut his eyes.

“Care for a drink, m’lord,” one said, Harry could not see who. The world was dark to him.

“We’d like a table,” he heard Ser Maurin say.

And then… Harry inhaled sharply. Something he would call a hand was wolfing his breeches. “M’lord’s agile I see,” a whisper came upon his ear, and now he knew. They were leeching on him. Another hand wrapped him across the shoulders. “Is it a drink, m’lord wants, or something else.”

“Who hurt m’lord so?” He heard another one say.

“A bad person I’ll say,” another voiced. “Gilly will take care of m’lord and soothe his pain.”

Harry made sure to keep his eyes closed despite the advances. He was trying, but he doubted he could last any longer, and when he was about to give up all hope, then came Ser Maurin’s knightley but gentle voice, “He’ll have a drink, only a drink. Take us to the table.” And then the leeches let go of him and his eyes came open with a sigh.

Ser Maurin had requested for a table at the end of the room, and there they sat, a safe distance from all the moans and pleasuring embrace. Harry had calmed down now.

It was not long after they sat that their wine came. A lady clothed in a brown roughspun gown of cheap wool had brought it. Harry was glad the lady had something on. She had his height, Harry saw, and a brown hair rough and tousled. The tray in her hands held a ewer she had now placed before them, following up with her setting their goblets and beginning to fill them shortly after.

Harry was still looking at the tender hand the serving lady poured his wine with until he heard Ser Maurin’s voice. “What’s your name?” He had heard the knight question, and he looked up to see him with a smile for the young serving lady.

“Cicily,” she added. Harry saw her eyes then. It had swollen bags that looked like she had either been crying or she had not just gotten any sleep.

“Cicily… Uhm… Cily. Yeah, Cily.” Ser Maurin had seemed to have been lost in his thoughts for a while. “I’ll call you Cily, you don’t mind do you?”

“Call me whatever you please, my lord.” The girl faked a smile, and Maurin Lockeheart’s own hearty smile faded.

“Get one more ewer and a goblet,” he began to tell her, “and tell your lady that I want you to sit and serve me all through the night. I have the coins.”

The lady bowed weakly and went on her way. With sullen tired eyes and exhausted moving legs, she took one step at a time.

“You want her to rest?” Harry asked the knight seated opposite from him.

“She’s tired.”

Harry looked around. “Are they all the same too?” He wondered about the rest of the serving girls. “They look happy.”

“Some are,” Maurin Lockeheart answered, “most aren’t.” Harry turned back to him. “I am sorry about what I did to your face. I should have—”

“It’s not a problem,” Harry cut in, “I should have yielded and I didn’t. You did what you had to.” His face bruises suddenly began to hurt and itch once again.

“I’d like to make it up to you,” Ser Maurin said.

“I have enough coins as the forerunner, you don’t need to give me anymore—”

“I’d like to teach you,” the knight infringed upon Harry’s speaking moment, inciting the boy to look up from his wine sharply.

“Teach me… what?” It couldn’t be… Harry was aghast deep within. There was no way…

The knight smiled and pointed at the sword strapped around Harry’s waist, the Crescent Moon. “How to use a sword such as that.”

And Harry’s itches disappeared.