#anyway this spiraled a little bit into my feelings about brenneth and crispin's idyll being destroyed

[words-writ-in-starlight]

hey I was wondering. what kinds of friendships did brenneth have when she was growing up as a blacksmith? did she go to neighborhood parties? did a nice baker's apprentice invite her to alleirat prom? (did they smooch?) did she go to the alleirat mall with the other kids her age and hang out near the food court? did she sit with the elders and listen to their stories? did she chase the neighborhood children around, roaring like a fearsome monster, and die dramatically when they slew her?

It’s not–it’s not like Brenneth’s master thinks.  She’s not lonely.  She sees their customers, and she sees people at the market who might be more than acquaintances, and Crispin sneaks out of the scholar’s quarter to come hang around the forge like a particularly persistent spirit until his teachers come to collect him.  She kisses girls and boys and neither and both and sometimes more than one, and she doesn’t really mind that they’re never something more than a few touches and maybe a night.  She trains to fight with the lathan, with the guards, and they like her, this strange world-wandering child with her fire-hot skin, and it helps that one of their own is really rather attached.  (Torei doesn’t declare her feelings for two years, but everyone knows why she’s stopped using the lathan armories in exchange for a teenaged blacksmith who’s only just set up her business.)  Even after Brenneth is out on her own, holding up her own smithy rather than working out of her master’s, she eats meals with him and with his daughter Kessen and eventually with her wife every few nights.

She’s happy.  Her master worries that she’s lonely, never keeping a partner for long and working alone and sleeping alone, but she’s happy.  Brenneth is a quiet person–not literally, Brenneth sings while she works and sometimes when you bring the singing smith a new tune, she’ll give you a discount, but in terms of people, Brenneth is happy with her handful.

Alleirat believes in community, Brenneth knows this.  People have friends and family and amdrin and amiasan and children and business partners and spouses and–Brenneth has Crispin, and she has her regular customers, and she has her master, and she’s happy with that. 

She indulges in a rather wild few years between sixteen and twenty.  Many people do–Alleirat believes in experimenting–and Brenneth tumbles as wide a variety of people as she’s kissed.  Kessen, with her lethally pretty blue eyes and her carpenter’s hands, is the longest lived of those matches, and the two of them sneak through dark shadows and kiss in the closet and sneak into each other’s cots for all of two weeks before Kessen pecks Brenneth on the cheek and says she’s glad they’re friends, a painless parting.  Brenneth has a big heart, falls a little in love with all the people she kisses, loves them in the curve of their collarbones or the muscles of their thighs, but never more than that.  She doesn’t know how to fit them in, around the rest.

Ultimately, Brenneth is more at ease with children.  They don’t know to treat her differently, they don’t remember hearing her stumble over Alleirai or seeing her have to resort to pantomime in order to be understood.  They don’t look at her with reverence or wariness or anything else that people direct at children from another world, nothing except fondness.  The local kids learn that she won’t kick them out–her master will, but Brenneth doesn’t mind having them there as long as they don’t do anything stupid–and they show up in droves.  They get over their awe of Crispin’s fine clothes and status within an hour of meeting him, and Crispin is startlingly good with kids, happy to sit on the floor and join a clapping game while Brenneth works.  

When Brenneth isn’t working, she and Crispin play Unification War with the children, and they lead opposite sides, city-states at war, or they play pirates and Crispin is the roguish pirate captain while Brenneth’s guards try to capture him and his intrepid crew.  Sometimes Brenneth and Crispin are mad dragons, ultimately slain by the brave warriors of Alleirat, or even gods, summoned to settle a debate–when they’re summoned, Crispin is the Wanderer and Brenneth is the Lady of Stars, a mismatch of their patrons, but they imagine the gods don’t mind too much.

Brenneth is twenty years old, holding a little girl on her shoulders (a “sacrifice” to the dragon) as she and Crispin chase the others through an alley, and she looks at her life, and it’s good.  This is what she wants.  She wants her work, and she wants children, and she has the strangest flash of a little girl with aristocratic features and skin a few shades lighter than her own, dark hair and a scholar’s sharp eyes.  Then the flash fades and she’s watching Crispin jump out at a kid and snatch him up and grin at Brenneth as the boy laughs.

It’s good to see him smile.  Something’s been wrong with Crispin lately, something he won’t tell her about, but the kids make him smile, erase some of the strange cracks in his eyes.  She wants him to have this, too, she wants him to have this easy happiness with kids who think he hung the morning star.  She can picture herself with children, but she can never picture those children with anyone, and Brenneth thinks that this might be okay, having Crispin to raise kids with her and sit in her forge and just be.

Three weeks later, the city center is destroyed by an explosion of lightning, and the whole of Alleirat looks to Brenneth for a savior.

The boy she had seen Crispin playing with that day catches Brenneth’s hand as she leaves the council’s hastily assembled meeting, her sword at her side and armor on her back.

“It’s not true, right?” the boy whispers as Brenneth looks down at him.  (The boy has never thought of Brenneth as tall before, but now she’s miles above him, as if he doesn’t even reach her knee.  He’ll tell people this story, heavily edited, and he’ll always remember her as towering.)  “Pesaruld would never hurt anyone.”

Brenneth has been given carte blanche to recruit anyone she sees fit to her…hunting party, for lack of a better word.  Over two dozen people are dead, and more on the road out of Dase, left with rapier wounds and throats cut with a dagger and lightning burns lacing over their skin.

Brenneth kneels down in front of the ruined citadel, hand on the boy’s shoulder.  “I’m so sorry, meimare,” she whispers back.  “I’m so sorry.”

This is a moment that will be remembered, although incorrectly.  The hero with her hair spilling loose over her shoulders, arm and chest armored and one hand on her sword, kneeling in the sunlight to comfort a child–the stuff of legends.  The Fireheart, the legends all agree, is good with children.  

They linger there for a moment, and then the boy throws his arms around Brenneth’s neck without a thought for her armor and sobs.

This is the last child that will cry for Crispin.  This is not, however, the last time that Brenneth will hold a child in the ruins of Crispin’s destruction and let them ruin her shirt with tears.