![]() ![]() The Legion taught him command, camaraderie, tactics. His mother taught him to read, to love the meaning and the music of the words. My father taught me life’s most important lessons, he writes. There is precious little, Ulfric has learned, that cannot be taken from him – not even the contents of his mind and memory – but still he cannot bring himself to give it away so freely, to mourners he does not know at a funeral he will not see. Two days later, he finally succeeded in shooting a rabbit. You can slay your enemy with a blade, but you can’t fight on an empty stomach. A thing is not less worth doing because it is hard, Ulfric, he’d said. It was only after they made camp and roasted the meat – after they had tasted the practical reward for their labor – that the Bear of Eastmarch revealed that he had indeed brought his son’s own bow along, unstrung and hidden in the saddlebags of his horse. He recalls his father showing him how dress the beast, not looking much the jarl with the sleeves of his rough wool shirt shoved up past the elbows and his hands in the animal’s steaming ribcage. He merely followed while his father stalked a big elk among the sulfur pools, stiff with excitement and fear that some mistake on his part might alert their prey. His father took him out on the Aalto for a hunting trip, with his great ebony-braced recurve too tall for Ulfric to lift, let alone draw. He hated to fail, at anything, and when he could not strike the targets he learned to hate the lessons. Ulfric took to the axe and the sword like a born warrior, but he struggled with archery, and his weapons master struggled to teach him. My father taught me how to shoot a bow, he writes. It makes him wonder if he is losing his mind.īut there is nothing else to do in prison, no way to escape from himself, and when he wakes he forces himself to try again – because if he is not mad already, having this duty hanging over his head will certainly drive him so. After all he has endured, this frightens him: finding himself bereft of what has always flowed so naturally. He cannot construct even inadequate phrases, and it frightens him. Now, as he grasps for some fitting tribute, his head and his heart feel hollow. Even the dragon tongue came easily, in relative terms. The narrow sunbeam drips down the dungeon wall, trickles slowly across the parchment, and finally beads in a droplet on the edge of the desk and then falls away, into nothing. He watches the iron in the inkblot darken slowly to black. The ink blots and he lifts his hand, sets it down again more lightly. He does not like to be beholden to his captors. He thinks they will probably continue to provide him with replacements, as they have when previous quills became useless. He cannot trim the pen nib because he has no knife, but he has managed to keep it fairly sharp through careful scraping on the stone walls. There is another hour of light before the sun sinks too low to edge through the slice of window – an old arrowslit, really – and slant across the desk. He has papers, a quill they allow him these at least. The convulsive clench of his fists makes the parchment crumple. The words that follow are more curt than courtly. ![]() At the bottom of the page is a splatter of ink, a violent dark line as though the man was struggling to phrase himself properly. It is my painful duty to inform you.rule of the hold will be managed until your return by.with all honors in the Hall of the Dead.await your reply. The hand is spidery and spiked like a forest of conifer trees, and he might have recognized it as Wuunferth’s even without the signature. ![]() They read all his mail – not that he receives much of it. The seal was already broken when they gave it to him. His thumb skates over blue wax, half a bear’s-head in relief. Only when the hasty slap of soft boots on stone fades to a distant echo does Ulfric put his back to a wall and open the letter again, fine vellum rustling in his hands. Keep it, I mean.” He flees down the corridor. He lifts his chin, fixes the guard with a gaze like the stalhrim blades of ancient Nordic legend. Either possibility sets him alight with rage. Ulfric wonders if it is gloating or pity that keeps him in place. One of his jailers, some smooth-faced boy still wet behind the ears. Reins his breathing to a walk, with the practice of a man brutally schooled in silent endurance. With a steady hand he folds the missive in thirds along its creases and then lets it drop to his side, grasping the parchment between loose fingers. ![]() Ulfric’s heart is beating slow and heavy in his chest, a plodding thump like a mammoth’s stride or the tortuous limp of a wounded man. ![]()
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