A Tale of Bastard

Chapter: 01 Why Chain Them?

The mountain held the last of the light the way a hand holds something it knows it's about to lose.

Two figures stood at its edge, young enough that the valley spreading below them still looked like something they were looking at rather than something they belonged to. The sky had gone the color of embers — orange bleeding into the first uncertain violet of evening — and the air at that altitude was cool in the way mountain air gets after the sun abandons it. Neither of them spoke. That had been the comfortable part. Not the empty kind of quiet — the kind that forms between two people who have stopped needing to fill it.

The boy spoke first."Would you marry me," he said, "and live a normal life?"The girl looked at him. The phrasing was strange enough that she almost laughed — normal,as if that were the smaller ask. As if the first part were the easy one.

"Yes," she said.

He pulled her close. One arm loose around her shoulders. She went without hesitation. He pressed his lips to her hair first, and then, when she looked up, properly. The mountain held them both for a moment before the last of the sun gave up on the day and disappeared.

Neither of them looked back at where they'd come from.

---

Some years later.---

The table was not built for jumping. The two girls had discovered this early in life and continued to do it anyway — which said something about them both that no amount of lecturing had yet managed to change. The elder had developed a method: land on the outer edge, absorb through the knees, use the wobble as momentum for the next jump. The younger had not developed a method. She had simply decided the wobble was part of the experience and kept jumping harder.

They were mid-competition — in what, exactly, had stopped being clear — when the front door opened.Both of them froze.

Their father stepped inside, ducking slightly out of habit even though the doorframe cleared him by a full inch, and took in the scene the way he took in most things: without surprise, with a brief cataloging expression, and then a decision to let it go. A leather satchel over one shoulder. Boots still on. Something on the left heel.
He put the satchel down.

"Either you two stop," he said, "or your mother kills all of us. Including me. I have done nothing."

Hyledd dropped off the table with the efficiency of someone who had already calculated the odds and found them unfavorable. Ffraid jumped down after, landing on both feet.

Their father sat in the chair by the hearth — not the nicest chair, not the warmest position, always this one, always the same one, with a clear line of sight to the front door — and stretched his legs out. He looked up at both of them.

"What are you giving your mother for her birthday?"

"A pumpkin cake." Ffraid folded her hands behind her back with the gravity of someone announcing military strategy. "I already know the recipe."

He considered this for one second.

"Too much work," he said. "I'm giving her nothing."

Hyledd turned on him the expression she had been developing and refining since she was approximately eight years old — the one that communicated disappointment, the complete absence of surprise, and the effort required to remain civil while experiencing both at once.

"You're too lazy to do anything," she said. "I cannot understand how mother agreed to marry you."

"Same," Ffraid said, nodding. "Everything Hyledd said. Same."