#brenneth was genuinely so happy with her life

[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.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I'd like to thank you for the Legend of the Sword au you promised in the tags of that Alleirat post, I may not be good at coming up with them but I sure do love them

LISTEN MY DUDE, YOU SAID “KING ARTHUR AU” IN YOUR REPLY TO THIS POST AND I IMMEDIATELY SMASHED MY NOVEL INTO MY FAVORITE MOVIE AND NOW WE ARE HERE.  

Brenneth! Is! Arthur!  Not a discussion!  Obviously!  Come on, people!  

She’s set adrift on the river after the murder of her parents, and her boat washes up on the poorest sector of the Londinium docks, where she’s found and taken in by a profoundly broke blacksmith who rents his shop from the same building as the local brothel.  Brenneth’s story of where she came from is basically “My name’s Brenneth, my mom and dad were murdered” and like, there’s a lot of that going around, so the blacksmith gives her a pat on the head and she grows up getting into trouble with his daughter.  

Officially speaking, Brenneth takes over the smithy after the blacksmith dies of a fever when she’s sixteen, and his daughter runs her books and arranges most of their jobs.  Unofficially speaking, Brenneth, the blacksmith’s daughter, and a handful of other teens/twenty-somethings start out by shaking down the occasional arrogant merchant.  By the time Brenneth is twenty she’s running a protection game for most of their district–she’s the person to contact if the Blacklegs are giving you trouble, and honestly God save the couple of stupidly cocky SOBs who try to move in on her turf because, well, what’s a teenage girl going to do to stop them?  When the movie starts, she’s twenty-four and honestly pretty happy with her life.  Like, fuck the king, etc etc, but she takes good care of her people, no one dares to lay a malicious finger on the girls in the brothel, and the tax collectors haven’t arrested anyone in the poorest district of Londinium in three years.  Brenneth’s okay with the way things are.  She shook down a Viking this morning.  She’s happy.

Crispin is…complicated.  Crispin is the Mage, obviously, complete with golden eagle familiar, but instead of being Merlin or Guinevere or whomever the fuck, the Mage is Mordred.  Vortigern (I’m not actually using the appropriate book character because spoilers, okay) played a very clever game, slow but surely turned the king’s mage against all of Albion, and then–

It’s Brenneth that snaps him out of it.  He’s never really seen much of her, children not being commonly allowed in his tower where they might accidentally shove a fistful of nightshade in their mouths.  But he’s realizing, in a sudden flash of insight, that he’s been used, he’s been manipulated into launching an attack on Camelot so that Vortigern can kill the ruling family and take the throne.  When Crispin finds Vortigern, ready to kill him in a rage, instead he finds a king turned to stone, and a creature made of fire and armor and shadow, and a little girl with cuts on her hands unconscious in a boat.  Instead of doing a murder, Crispin throws lightning at the monster and uses the distraction of the flash to cut the rope holding the boat to the dock.  Brenneth drifts down the river without ever knowing that her life was saved by the man who destroyed her home, and Crispin, for the first time in his life, runs away.  

Brenneth is almost eleven by the time he finds her again.  Too old to be taken away and raised as a king in hiding–because Albion must have a king, and Brenneth is the last survivor, and that makes her a king–but too young to take her birthright.  Crispin wavers for a year.  Then he casts the single most dangerous spell he’s ever done, and gambles his memories and his magic against his life, and when the spell is complete Crispin is twelve years old, and he proceeds to carefully insinuate himself into Brenneth’s life while his familiar watches over them from above.

He can’t leave her alone, is the thing.  He’s so, so worried about her.  He never uses magic on her, never uses magic on anyone unless Brenneth’s life is in immediate danger, but he becomes her best friend to protect her.  Every hurt and trauma she’s ever survived is ultimately on him, and he can’t bear to leave her unprotected even if he never cared for Uther, so–

And she’s funny, and she’s sharp and clever and angry, and she swings a blacksmith’s hammer like a god of old, and she swings a sword like a hero of legend, and by the time Crispin realizes he’s gone and gotten genuinely attached to this girl, it’s way too late to do anything about it.

By the time the water recedes to reveal an old sword in a stone, and Vortigern starts dragging in women of the right age to test it, Crispin is physically twenty four, the same age as when he stopped getting older last time, and he’s gone and fallen in love with the Born King, and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do to save her from her fate.

When the Blacklegs drag Brenneth away, she doesn’t expect anything to come of it, but sure, whatever, she grabs the sword and gives it a yank and–

The group of people who stage a rescue at Brenneth’s execution is…stressed about working together, a little, and they look like this:

Crispin, ex-marauding warlord, ex-court sorcerer, Brenneth’s best friend of over a decade, extraordinarily powerful de-aged mage, and accomplished liar

Torei, ex-knight, ex-adviser to the king, ex-personal guard of the queen, mother of stubborn daughter, currently in hiding and delighted beyond belief at the prospect of murdering Vortigern’s ass

Krei, aforementioned stubborn daughter, would-be-knight, part-time street thug, full time voice of reason, who was sixteen when she bucked her mother’s orders to stay in hiding–she’s four years older than Brenneth–and went to find the lost princess and happened to show up within two months of Brenneth’s other self-appointed protector, with whom she has an occasionally tense relationship

Rada, ex-knight, current proprietor of the bathhouse in the poor sector of Londinium and local trainer-in-various-forms-of-combat for angry young blacksmiths with destinies about to bite them in the ass

Various other survivors of the old regime, mixed in with angry youngins who want to overturn the current regime

Unbeknownst to the others, Vortigern’s personal mage, a foreigner who rarely speaks, who spooked the Blacklegs’ horses and bought Brenneth thirty seconds to jump off a cliff

Brenneth spends an hour screaming herself hoarse at Crispin for lying to her while they ride back to the hideout, and then cold-shoulders him for the rest of the trip.  Krei is smart enough to take Brenneth’s recriminating glare with a guilty look and no attempt to defend herself, but Crispin–Crispin is the one Brenneth is really ready to kill, especially once he confesses the whole ugly mess to her.  

Then, of course, upon arriving at the hideout, someone tries to shoot him, and Brenneth starts her new career of shouting down attempts to denounce Crispin as a murderer.

After that, basically run canon, except that Shiko is Vortigern’s pet mage and manages to get a message to Crispin via her fox familiar begging them to free her and therefore they have a woman on the inside when they hit the citadel like the fist of God.  It ends with Brenneth crowned King, and she knights Torei, Rada, and Krei with Excalibur before announcing Shiko as her new Court Sorcerer and Crispin as her consort.  Also, she gets to terrorize some Vikings.