Red God's Choice

Spring had been bad. Talair knew the red priest wouldn’t be pleased at what he was bringing him, but it wasn’t like there was an option. 

Cruach Donn, the priest’s tor, was the only rise in the ground for three or four days’ trek. A teetering pile of wind-carved rocks, it stuck up from the moor like the upper half of an ancient giant king floundering in the bogs. The stone door at the top was the jewel in the giant’s crown from some angles of approach, the hilt of a sword buried in his hunched back from others. Talair was coming at it from one of the first. He felt marginally better about the trip that way. 

He’d brought two goats with him, first to help pull the bog sled and then as the first part of what the priest was owed. The animals needed constant attention, bribes of heather clumps torn from the tufty soil or an occasional neep from his sack, otherwise they’d stop dead, stamp their feet and stare over the moor, boss-eyed and stubborn as the cantankerous old priest would doubtless be. Talair had to drag them almost as much as they dragged the sled, but it was still easier than pulling the broad wooden thing himself. It hissed as they slid through the heather, the runners kept well wide of the platform by the long rigs. That kept the weight spread out so they could get over the boggier parts of the moor without sinking. The goats could hop across on marshy grass tufts and still pull it pretty well. 

He’d be dragging it back himself on the way home, he knew that.  No chance the sour old henger would turn down the goats. Or, well, you never knew with a Sagart Dorais, there was always a chance he’d turn the whole lot down to prove a point. Most likely, Talair expected to be hauling his cargo back over the heather himself, sweating up a lather in the early summer heat. The clouds of mire midges already seething over the goats would be giving him all their attention later, he didn’t doubt. His feet were blistered and sore from the long walk, rubbed raw by his new boots. 

Carefully packed in leather sacks and cradled on beds of tough heather stalks on the back of the sled was the rest of the bounty he had for the door keeper. Four earthenware jugs of potcheen, stoppered with cloth and clay bungs. A side of cured salmon from the loch. Twenty neatly-tied bundles of kindling, each ready to get a fragrant peat hearth burning. Two ells of dark red flax cloth to make himself new garb from, or patch holes. A new steel blade for a tairsgear, bought at great expense from the smithy on the far edge of the moor. 

Four that should have been ten, one instead of three, twenty that was short of two score, two where four were expected. At least the steel might make up some of the shortfall. The old gravekeeper might not shut the door to them altogether, Talair hoped. But by Donn’s red horse, he wasn’t going to be happy about it. 

Certainly not when he saw the last two pieces of cargo.

A dead man, wrapped in red blankets and bound by sinew thongs at neck, wrist and ankle, as was decree. 

And, drugged into a dark sleep but trussed perhaps even more securely than the corpse, the boy. 

-

“Where’s the rest?”

Feardorr, the only Sagart Dorais you could find for forty days around the high moor and so the only one of Donn’s red priests you could expect to help send your kin and kith to their final home in the high hall of death, wasn’t happy. His squinting eyes were hard to read, you could never tell exactly what he was looking at, but he’d taken in Talair and the sled with one bug-eyed glower and didn’t seem pleased with any of it.

Talair tried to look apologetic, although what he wanted to do was kick the stubby old bastard in his fork and ride the goat sled home, drinking the offertory potcheen all the way. 

“Spring’s been bad. Raiders twice since the thaw, once just before. Not a lot left, I’m sorry to say.”

The priest had seen him coming over the heather and come down from his tor. Talair found him waiting at the outcrop’s bottom, his red breeches a single bright spot on the mottled brown moor. How old was he? He seemed of an age with the stone door he kept, squat and solid. Shaved bald, naked to the waist, heavy muscles on heavy bone. His skin was so tanned you could barely see the black tattoos stamped all over him. Not fat, exactly, but old enough that his muscle seemed to have run down from his shoulders and chest and gathered in his belly in a formidable mass, a black iron cauldron. Same with his fleshy earlobes, gravity and time had pulled them as low as the angle of his brutal jaw. His lips were clamped in a scowl at the best of times, which this was not. He looked like he’d tasted his own foul tongue and found it too bitter, but couldn’t quite bring himself to spit it out.

What you noticed most, though, was the squint. If he was looking at you, he was also looking past you. Or vice versa, of course. 

“I thought the Muntirnamoir kept better watch than that,” the priest said eventually. “Letting raiders get the jump on you?”

“Crailcough. Half of us were down with it. One of the winter traders brought it with her from the south.”

“South traders as well, now, are you?”

“No, we’d never! We turned her away like always. Never stops them trying, you know that.”

“Bought the crailcough, did you, then?”

“Mally, my sister’s niece. She went and bought honey when nobody was looking. Spread it round the whole family with her cakes.”

“Poor watching again. Mally’s the younger one, aye? She get through it?”

“She’s not on the sled,” Talair pointed out irritably. 

“So who is?”

“Brallach. Raider’s arrow.”

For the first time, the priest’s mouth pursed briefly in a shape other than disapproval. “Brallach’s in the blankets?”

“Aye,” Talair said. “It’s a hard load I’ve brought you, no mistake. He was a good chief.”

Feardorr stared hard at the load on the sled for a long moment. Then he relaxed his frown long enough to spit before screwing it back into its customary knot of displeasure. 

“I’ll see Brallach through the door. But the rest isn’t enough.”

“It’s all we’ve got!” And you haven’t even asked about the boy, you joyless mudgob, Talair thought. 

“Not enough. You can carry it up yourself.” 

And he’d turned on his booted heel and started stamping back up the tor on the narrow rocky path he’d come down on, banging the steel-shod end of his ceremonial tairsgear at every step. Talair stared after him, heart sinking. He’d be up and down the tor for the rest of a long weary afternoon, and he was already tired. Would wrangling the goats up, restless after the harness, be the worst? Or Brallach’s dead weight? Then it struck him, what the Sagart had said.

“So you’ll take it?” Talair called after him, but he was already out of sight. 

-

The evening was still and hot. Even on top of Cruach Donn there was no breeze to lift the lid of early summer’s heat off the moorland. The priest’s peat fire, flickering in the pit by the door of his turf hut, was small but still intensified the sweaty evening worse.

Talair sprawled by the fire, shattered. The goats had been as bad as he’d feared. Brallach slightly less so after the priest had at least deigned to show him two oak branches bound in an a-frame with tarred twine, a rough wheel at the point of the crude one-man stretcher. It hadn’t helped much on the rockier parts of the tor’s spiral ascent, but it was very slightly better than nothing. 

When he’d managed to drop one of the potcheen jugs on his fifth trip up, the smooth clay vessel slipping through his exhausted fingers, the priest hadn’t even needed to look at him to convey the depths of his condemnation. 

The worst had been the boy, of course

The sleeping draught Talair had forced down his throat back at the camp had worn off by then. Tied, gagged and still small enough to carry over one aching shoulder, he’d still managed to bite Talair in the neck, batter the small of his back blue with his sharp little knees and finally nearly shove the pair of them over the edge of a cliff near the top by getting his feet braced against the rock wall and pushing unexpectedly. 

At least he wasn’t still thrashing about in a rage or trying to scream through his gag. There was a big peat stack by the side of the priest’s hut, the sods arranged in an unusual pattern of concentric zigzags. Talair had jammed the two arms of the stretcher deep into the bottom of it, then tied the boy to them. Good tight knots that wouldn’t give. The boy had tested them well enough for long enough, and now lay quiet and still, probably as worn out as Talair. Feardorr hadn’t acknowledged his presence at all yet. 

Brallach lay at the foot of the great door, red blankets turning black in the fading light. The three stones of the tolmen were all etched deep by the priest’s chisel and deeper still by time. Set at the highest point of the tor, they glowed a ruddy orange in the failing sunlight. The carvings, tangled stags, rams and goats, each represented one family of the Muntirnamuir. They made deep shadows in the rock, but not as deep as the shadow within the doorway. The night sky looked different if you looked at it through the megalith. Blacker. 

The Sagart Dorais sat by the fire, boiling a broth from dried meat that smelt rank but still set Talair’s mouth watering every time he got a whiff of it. Feardorr’s back was turned, and he’d said nothing since their conversation at the foot of the tor. Talair knew better than to waste his breath trying to start another one. 

What was there to say, anyway? Brallach would be sent through the door that midnight, his soul sent home at last to Tech Duinn. Old Red would welcome his newest guest, and the priest would shut the door again afterwards. They would haul the empty body up to the lintel stone (well, Talair would, and his back already ached at the prospect of more hard labour), then the priest would burn it so Brallach wouldn’t pine after his old frame and try and get back in it. 

That was what they were paying the priest for. Nobody wanted the chance of a riser. Not after an already-bad spring. There hadn’t been one for a few years now. Talair had never seen one himself, but his da had, and everyone knew that a violent death made for a restless spirit. So if they couldn’t afford the full price for the Sagart’s services, when all was said and done, they still agreed they’d have to try. 

And everyone knew he’d be interested in the boy. 

Talair tugged his boots off and tried to examine his feet. His blisters looked pretty bad, just as bad as they felt. Maybe he could see if a bit of the potcheen was still there where he’d dropped it, rub a bit in to clean them up. 

“You never said about the rest,” Feardorr said, still tending his soup.

Talair looked up. “I told you, I brought all we could spare.”

“The rest of the family. One was all you had spare there too?”

“Pretty much, aye. Seogha and Creigh are only just over the cough. Drebbidh took a wound in the raid, she can’t walk. Someone’s got to look after the herds, so it was just me could bring you your tithe.”

“You’d have dropped less if you’d had more help,” the priest grunted. 

“Well, I didn’t, did I,” Talair said. “I made do. I got here, Brallach got here, job done. I’m no more happy about it than you are,” he added, seeing the priest shake his head. “You lost out on a jar of the potcheen, I lost my uncle. Who’s worse off?”

“Not the Red God,” Feardorr said, looking round at Talair. With one eye, anyway, the other peered off into the gathering gloom. “You’ll be missing him now he’s gone, I take it? You never saw eye to eye with him much before.”

Much like you and everyone, Talair thought, trying to meet the priest’s squint. “Family’s difficult. Doesn’t mean they’re not family,” he said. 

“I wouldn’t know,” the priest said. 

That was true enough, Talair thought. The Sagart Dorais all lived alone. There weren’t more than three or four across the entire high moor, scattered about. As far as he knew, they didn’t get together or hold much contact with each other. You’d sometimes get asked if you were moving your herd on, and if you were going in the right direction, the Sagart might ask you to take a message to the next one. What they told each other was anyone’s guess. Lists of who’d died lately? 

Sometimes they trained apprentices. Hengeguards they were called, fighters that trained with the cogagh-tairsgear, the war spade, and were only allowed spoke to the dead. Until they’d learned enough of the Red God’s secrets from them to be a Sagart Dorais themselves, so Talair had heard. He’d never seen one himself, Feardorr didn’t have one and their family had never roamed far enough from Cruach Donn to visit any of the other Sagarts.

“How long you been Sagart here?” Talair asked. 

“Long enough. Sent your da through the door. And your ma, and hers before her. That’s her carve there.” Feardorr shifted his eerie gaze to the tolmen. Talair looked to the etched figure of a weasel that he knew represented his mother. “First I did.”

“So, what, twenty five years?”

“What of it?” the priest asked, his crooked stare switching back to Talair. 

“Just asking. Just that with the raiding and all.”

Feardorr chuckled dryly. “Worrying after me, are you? Rest your mind. Raiders won’t come up here. The Crom Cruannacha don’t like the doors. Lord Donn scares them. No coming back in a cauldron once you’re through the door, they don’t like that.”

“Is it true they do that? Brew their dead in a witch-stew and bring them back?””

“The pot-rite? How else do you think there’s always more of them and fewer of the Muntirnamuir?”

Talair pulled a face. “That’s because they’re south traders. Buying in all the food they need, paying for it with our flocks. Breeding with the south folk too, I hear. And they all look the same. Those who say they’ve killed the same one twice are just talking.”

“So you say,” the priest said darkly. “You bring your dead to my lord’s door so they don’t rise, you’re just following tradition, I suppose.”

“It’s true I’ve never seen a riser,” Talair said. 

“Aye, but your family’s always paid me properly before,” the priest said, turning back to his soup. 

The raiders who lived around the edges of the high moors were getting more numerous all the time, Talair had to admit. Just not out loud so the priest would have the satisfaction. Probably because the living out there was a lot easier, off the barren moorlands. You could grow crops instead of moving your sheep and goat herds from one bleak pasture to another. Support bigger families. Settle, not roam all year like the Muntirnamuir did, carting the bog oak roofbones for their turf huts from one grazing ground to another, digging out a new hole to shiver in every season. Eating dried mutton and berries. Seeing mist, muck and mire all year long, cracked dry plates of it in summer and wallowing through the moorland slurry through the rest of the year. 

“There’s a lot of us thinking of moving on,” Talair said. 

“Oh aye?”

“Hard to keep the herds safe when you’re watching for raiders all the time. Even Bralloch was starting to consider moving deeper in.”

“So?”

So what are you going to do without any of us about to bring you food, you red toad? Talair thought. Eat sods? You must know why I brought the boy, so bloody well ask about him! “So a few of us wondered what you’ll do.”

“What I’ll do?”

“If there’s nobody needs sending through the door. If you’re here by yourself.”

“Your itchy feet are no concern to me,” the priest said, flicking an eye down at Talair’s bare and blistered toes. 

“Look, we worry for you, that’s all. The raids haven’t been as bad as this in years. Creigh even said he saw a bodach. Thought he saw, anyway. And you know Criegh, he doesn’t even believe in them.”

“And?” 

“And so maybe you might be needing a Hengeguard.”

Feardorr stared emotionlessly at both Talair and the wider night simultaneously. There wasn’t a flicker of feeling in the old man’s face, half-lit in dirty orange by his little cookfire. The pause got long, then longer. Talair shifted uncomfortably. 

“Your feet are a mess,” the Sagart said, abruptly. “You need a poultice.” He got up stiffly, walked towards his hut. Talair made to move after him, but the old man waved him down. 

“Sit and watch the soup,” he said. Talair waited until the priest was inside, then shuffled himself over to the pot. It was brown and it bubbled. More than that, he wouldn’t like to say. The tin spoon had cloth tightly wrapped round the end of its handle. He gave it a stir, pulled it out, blew on it and tasted. 

Even sourer than the cook, but still good. Mushrooms, some kind of meat. He supped a cautious couple of spoonfuls, then took another, cradled it over his hand and got to his feet. Red god’s bollocks, but his blisters were bad. Those new boots were too tight. He hobbled over to where the boy sat. 

“You awake?”

Lank black hair thrown over a thin face, the boy was slumped next to the stretcher with his eyes shut. Not sleeping, though, Talair knew well enough.

“I know you’re awake, I saw you trying to twist the cords. You’re wasting your time. I’d save your strength.”

The boy opened his eyes. Grey and wild with hate, as they’d been since his da had died. He hissed through his gag, lunged forwards at Talair, but the bonds hadn’t given an inch since they’d been tied. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Hate me all you want, I’ll be gone in the morning. Are you hungry?”

More hissing. 

“You must be hungry, you’ve not eaten since yesterday. Don’t know what the Sagart calls this stuff, but it’s not as bad as it smells. Yours if you want it. I’ll take the gag out if you lie still.” He reached down, and the boy started thrashing about again. “Ah, look, you’ll spill it if you do that!” 

Talair stood up again, frustrated. 

“Fine. Look, the priest’s going to take you. You don’t want it, I know, but it’s the best I can do for you. We can’t keep you with the family, there’s not enough food. And we both know you’re not going to listen to me now I’m chief.”

The boy screamed at him, or tried to. It was a good gag, wadded cloth and a good thong keeping it on. It kept the sound well bottled up. The rage too. 

“Come on, stop screaming and take the stew. Anger’s not going to bring your da back.”

The scream changed tone, the thrashing lessened. More like sobs, now, great heaving ones, but the boy’s eyes were dry, blazing only rage. Talair looked back at the hut, but the priest was still inside preparing the poultice. Turning back, he reached down and slapped the boy’s face once, quickly, hard enough to shut him up for a moment. 

“I’m doing you a favour,” Talair said quietly. “I know it doesn’t seem like it. I know he’s not your da, I know he’s not family. But the Sagart will look after you better than we can. Look at him, fatter than any of us. You’ll be fine.” 

He stood, swallowed the stew and grimaced. “Maybe you missed out there, maybe not. I can’t quite decide.” He hobbled back over to the pot and dropped the spoon back in, and ignored the renewed hissing screams from over by the turf stack. 

The Sagart came back out after a while. 

“Give me your feet,” he ordered, standing in front of Talair. He was holding a pad of dark moss smeared with some kind of fatty unguent. Talair eyed it suspiciously.

“What’s that?” 

“That’s good for blisters. Your boots are too small. You’ll be half lame before you’re back to your kin if you keep on with them.”

“They’re just new,” Talair said. “I’m breaking them in.”

The priest stared for a moment. “New boots? From where?”

“Made them,” Talair said. “Slipped on a rock last week, tore through the heel of the old ones.”

“Made them not bought them?”

“I’m not a south trader! I told you!”

“So you’re just clumsy and a poor cobbler?” the priest said. “Quite the chief you’ll make.”

“Who says I’m chief?”

“Who says you’re not?”

Talair clenched his teeth, then sighed. “Fine, I’m chief now. The others agreed. Bralloch was my ma’s brother, Seogha didn’t want the responsibility, Creigh can’t think for goatshit.”

“True, that,” said the priest, squatting down. “Now give us your feet.”

Talair submitted. The priest grabbed one ankle and smeared the moss over Talair’s foot. It hurt, but he wouldn’t flinch. Possibly couldn’t, the priest’s gnarled grip was pretty strong. Feardorr did his other foot, stared at it a moment, then dropped it, stood up and went back into the hut with the clump of moss. 

Talair pulled a face at his tattooed back. The pain of the blisters was already less, in fairness, but he’d be damned before he said thank you to the Sagart. 

Feardorr came back out almost immediately. He sat back by his cookpot and stirred it. 

“How long until midnight?” Talair asked. 

“When I beat my drum,” the Sagart said. 

“So when’ll that be?” 

“What’s your hurry?”

“I’m tired. I’d like to sleep.”

“You can sleep after I close the door,” the priest said, scowling. “And after you’ve burned Bralloch on the lintel.”

Talair had had enough. “I’m going to sleep now,” he said. “You can wake me when it’s time.”

The priest just stared at him. Well, let him, Talair thought as he lay down on his back on the stony ground. He closed his eyes, let his exhaustion wash through him. 

-

He woke. 

It was later. Night had crept over the bare head of the tor, the fire was burning low. The priest was standing over him, had just kicked him gently in the ankle. 

“Time,” the Sagart said. 

Talair blinked. His eyes were sticky and sore. He felt terrible all over, in fact, his mouth dry and his head pounding. 

“Look there,” the Sagart said. 

“What?”

The priest turned and walked away from the fire, fading into the darkness. Talair sat upright, every muscle in his over-used body aching, and tried to follow him. 

What was happening to the door? Was it glowing? He could barely see it, but he somehow knew exactly where it was, as though it was pressing into his mind through the close night air. 

“Do you see it?” asked the priest. 

“See what?” Talair asked back, fighting off a sudden nervousness. 

“Keep looking. You’ll see.”

Talair peered into the darkness. He couldn’t see anything out there. 

“I can’t see anything. Is there… Donn’s cock!”

He was up on his feet, stepping back and feeling for the knife at his belt before he knew it, a pit of ice in his stomach and the sweat cold on his back despite the closeness of the night. Something flew out of the night and slapped against his shoulder. He yelped and flinched, lashing out. It clattered against the rocks out in the ring of darkness that had closed in round the little fire. Something metal.

The cooking spoon from the priest’s pot.

The Sagart snorted. “Watch your mouth, you. Donn listens, even through a closed door. Don’t want to catch his ear. Not when there’s a riser.”

Talair stared in disbelief at Bralloch, who sat upright beneath the door.  

A lumpen shape in his red blanket, black stripes across it where the ropes of sinew bound him. His head was slowly turning to and fro, searching for something. 

Strange colours gathered in Talair’s vision. Crimson streaks and gold, as though he’d pressed his thumbs against his closed eyelids. They pulsed around the tolmen, beating with his racing heart. But his eyes were open. He felt sick, a gathering knot in his stomach. His palm was slick with sweat against the haft of his knife.

Slowly, Bralloch’s blanketed head swivelled towards him.

“There, he’s found you,” the priest said. “Remembers his nephew, I’d say. What else does he remember?” 

Talair’s legs felt weak. He stumbled backwards, sat down hard on the rocks.

From somewhere, the priest had produced a small tabor. He was beating it slowly, a steady but sinister rhythm. 

“Open the door,” Talair croaked. “Open…” Then his stomach heaved, he doubled over and threw up. 

Calmly playing his drum, Feardorr walked over to the riser and stood just behind it, framed by the black square mouth of the stone gateway. He waited for a pause in Talair’s vomiting. 

Bralloch started to pull himself closer. He couldn’t rise, he was still bound in his blankets, so he dragged himself like an inchworm, feet first, head cocked up to keep a fix on Talair.

“I’ve got two choices here,” the old man said. The beat of his drum was relentless. “You want me to open the door, I know. Send old Bralloch through it like you wanted. And that’s my duty as a Sagart Dorais, right enough. 

“Or I could just let him have you. Cut his bonds, see if what they say about a riser is true. They love their family,” he added, sourly. “Don’t like to leave them behind. Eternity in the feasthalls of the Red God without your kin? Even in heaven, there’s always something you’ll miss.”

Talair couldn’t get up, his legs were numb. He’d dropped his knife, he felt like a little boy with the crail cough, sick and frightened.

“But I’m an old man, like you said,” the priest went on. “Not sure I could handle a riser all by myself. Once it’s finished with you, it might decide I’d be good company in Teach Duinn too. So I’d rather you told me the truth. Do that, for me and I’ll send him through the door.”

“What…?” Talair’s stomach clenched, but there was nothing left to spew. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been lying since you got here,” the priest snapped. “Death has you now, one way or another. But I’m giving you a choice. Tell me the truth, and I’ll send you on cleanly, that I can promise. Or sit there and lie, and I let the riser tear you to pieces.”

“What have you done?” Talair sobbed. “What have you…” The retching took him again.

“You thought I wouldn’t know? Thought I wouldn’t recognise Bralloch’s boots on your feet? Thought I’d believe a raider’s arrow took him? Easy enough to look, while you were dragging the goats up. Those were knife holes, I’d say. And in his back, too.”

“You poisoned me!” Talair managed to say through the spasms.

“Aye, I did. Don’t eat a Sagart’s stew behind his back, I’d say, but it’s a bit late for advice now. The poultice was just to make sure you wouldn’t go running off. Not safe, these rocks in the dark. Helped you sleep, too. I use it for my knees in the winter, but not quite so much as I gave you. Takes away the pain but it makes you weak. Lesson in that as well, just not for you, as I say.”

The priest beat a sudden flourish on his drum, then hung it back on his belt. In two steps, he was at Bralloch’s back, a short knife in his hand now. He grabbed the riser by the thong round his neck, sliced through it with a quick snap of his wrist. 

“No,” Talair croaked. 

The priest cut the thongs round Bralloch’s arms, then his ankles. With a swift movement, he threw open the blanket, unveiling the figure beneath. 

The boy. 

“Fearglash here told me while you slept,” Feardorr said. The boy’s pale face blazed in the dark, eyes flaming with rage and hate. “Times have been hard, sure. How you and a few of the others wanted to move the family south, maybe leave the moor. How the life of the Muntirnamuir was too hard for you. How you’d argued with your uncle time and time over. How he caught you trading, not Mally. It was you that bought them crailcough, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Talair whispered. 

“But it was, though. You wanted the honey for the girl, maybe try and win her over to your idea of an easier life. When Bralloch found out, it was luck for you the raiders came when they did. Easy enough to kill him in the fight. 

“But little Fearglash saw it happen, eh? That was bad luck. You killed the father, but you couldn’t quite kill the boy, though, that it? Thought you’d fob him off on me. Pay me with whatever you could steal from your family, get the boy out of the way, tell your sob story to others and be chief after. 

“Hengeguard are sworn to silence, right enough. But they have to speak to swear, and they have to do it of their own will. No chance I’d not have heard all this the minute you were gone.” The priest puffed his cheeks out, rolled his squinting eyes. “Donn spare me your stupidity. Wait there,” he told the boy, and strode off into the darkness. 

He came back with a stout pole in his hands, glinting steel at one end. He’d already put the new blade on the tairsgear, the peat-cutting spade from the stack, and he held it out to the the boy. 

“Hengeguard are killers and outcasts,” he said. ”We all are, who serve the Red God. No prisons up here on the moor. We’re what the Muntirnamuir have no other use for. It’s a shit life, know that. No kin, no comfort, no love, no rest. Death and death alone.

“Your choice, so. Let the poison do its work and go back to your family tomorrow. Or avenge your father, stay here and be Sagart after me.”

Fearglash-i, little Fearglash, took the tairsgear and walked towards his uncle.

Context: I'm playing DnD again, for the first time in years! Not as a GM this time, unusually. This is the backstory for the barbarian I'm playing, not that anybody needs to know. Fun to write, though!