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The morning glows pale gold, holding the line against late-autumn grimness. A chill crisps the clean air; red leaf-litter shimmers with dew.
The soles of Oscar's boots go slick with it, but he is a sure-footed man. Beside him, Rolf learns that equilibrium.
The boy's breaths come in brisk little clouds; the end of his nose blooms like a poppy.
"Are you cold?" Oscar levels his voice like he might a cup of flour; not a grain out of place.
"No," chimes Rolf. Nonetheless, skepticism flickers in Oscar. The tenth month is ending, and his brother wears no cloak. The thing is outgrown, now, after fifteen years and three brothers; it has earned its rest atop Oscar's basket of scraps.
"But if you were worried I'd get cold, why not give me the new one now?"
Rolf's words are so often like fish-scales. Their cutting edge is never intentional, but they slip so swiftly through the skin.
The child is not wrong. There is another cloak, of Oscar's, long ago--it lies gingerly folded at the bottom of a chest. To have exhumed the thing before they left this morning... it is only sensible.
Still.
"We've got to dye it first," Oscar explains, and gestures to the empty basket in his hands. "Acorn shells and iron water will make it black as coal."
Rolf purses his lips. "I told you," he wheedles, "I don't care what color it is."
It is only natural, what Oscar says next. Ingrained, like chopping vegetables, like the heft of a halberd. Like love.
"You'd look so dashing in black."
The words sour as they spill from Oscar's tongue. He knows, marrow-deep, that he will never coddle Rolf like this again.
He breathes. Carries on, inexorable, toward that little copse of oaks.
He resolves to tell the truth.
"We need black dye," says Oscar, carefully, "because the cloak is striped."
Rolf wrinkles his red nose. For an instant, for a fumbled beat of Oscar's heart, it looks so like disgust.
"What's the problem with stripes?"
Oscar's belly unfurls. He loves his brother's innocence, always has. Even now, as it sloughs from him in horrid bloody sheets.
"Do you remember," he says. It is not a question, not yet.
Still, Rolf walks on at his side. They slip beneath the canopy of oak leaves, fiery in the morning light.
Oscar swallows.
"Rolf--do you remember the boarding house we lived in? The months after Father died?"
A nod. Slow, suspicious. Oscar seals his eyes.
"Do you remember how I came home in the mornings? I wore that cloak when I was working."
"So? You were a nightwatchman. At the gate."
Oscar's next words come out like ribs, wrenched slowly from his chest.
"I lied to you."
He does not need to look. He knows Rolf's eyes like this--like the sky pressing down on the moor. Wide, dull, lost.
"But you never lie," Rolf murmurs. Slowly, like the words are sharp and broken, like he is afraid to cut his lips.
He pretends so ably that he's excised the fear of pain. Oscar has never believed him.
That dread lives on within himself.
"You..." breathes Oscar, "you were a child of six. You'd lost your mother and father."
Oscar cannot forget the slump of Rolf's tiny frame against his chest, sobbing deep enough to shake them both apart.
"How could I have told you... that that cloak was the mark of a whore?"
Rolf's breath goes thick, coagulating in his mouth.
"What?"
"I had you and Boyd to look after. The money was good with the knights, but staying in the barracks meant I couldn't watch over you."
Oscar cannot meet Rolf’s eye, cannot tread across that shattered glass.
Still, there is no other way.
"I knew no other trade, it was only later that I learned to cook. My only other choice was to become a brigand, but... I couldn't hurt defenseless people."
Rolf swallows, stumbles to steady himself.
"So you hurt yourself?" There is an edge there like knapped flint, like accusation. It pierces.
"No--"
"I'm sorry, you know."
There is a fault, a fracture in Rolf's hard voice. He is only a boy.
"I'm sorry you had to raise me. That you had to give everything up 'cause I was so small, I--I've always been a burden and now you tell me--!?"
Slowly, Oscar lifts one hand. He reaches out for Rolf's slim shoulder. Remember that I've always been willing to hold you. Remember that I've always kept you safe.
Nonetheless, Rolf ebbs away.
Oscar scrubs at the ache in his chest. He carves out the truth underneath.
"Rolf," he whispers, and his voice is soft, sodden with tears he won't shed. "You've never been a burden. You're my brother--you have brought me so much joy."
"Anything I gave up for your sake, for the sake of my duty to protect you... it was nothing at all."
His duty to protect Rolf... in the years since, he has failed in it. The child took his first life at the raw-edged age of twelve.
Oscar didn't know the heft of a wooden lance until he was fourteen. It wasn't 'til eighteen that he first labored lying on his back.
A better life for Rolf, for Boyd--had that not been his tether? His guiding star, last bloody fingerhold in the cloying choke of the bathhouse?
And still, he could not...
Oscar sighs the way he sweeps the floor of his kitchen--brisk, cleansing. Nothing left to fester.
Rolf is here, lips bruise-colored with the chill. Eyes seeking.
Oscar tends to him.
"You... don't need to feel responsible. The choice was mine, and..."
And you were just a child.
You are just a child now, Oscar does not say.
"You don't need to feel that I suffered for your sake, Rolf--in a heartbeat, I would do the same again."
What Oscar does not say is that he has. In the knife-twist of the Mad King's War, when Boyd's bright edges dulled, when Rolf went dim and cold and hard.
Oscar sold his blood-warmth to a lonely soldier, then, no different from mercenary work. Better, even. Safer.
On that bedraggled bedroll, Oscar thought only of safety.
The man plied him with coin to run on--to spirit his family away, to hope against hope that there was some place in wretched Tellius where war could never touch them.
What Oscar does not say is that he couldn't. That when he huddled his brothers at the margin of the camp, when he whispered that he was ready to desert... Boyd and Rolf hissed, named him traitor.
The scorn, forlornness on Rolf's face... is very like the way it was that night.
Oscar cannot breathe. He feels the old cloak now, dragging at his back. Coiled around his neck, and the leers, the jeering in the streets--!
And then–slowly, like the surrender of autumn to winter, like the reddening of leaves–Rolf softens.
“Why did you tell me?”
There’s a tenderness to his voice. Something young, like milk teeth, that Oscar feared he’d never find again.
“Not to make you feel… like this,” he says, the smallest of self-flagellations.
He gathers himself, after that. Strives for strength, grace, the unbreakable bend of a willow.
Something better for his brothers. This is what he always tries to be.
“I want to be honest with you. In everything.”
Rolf nods. There is a stoicism to it, too wide for coltish shoulders.
He will grow into it. Oscar knows.
“And… it really would be economical for you to use my old cloak. But I won’t make you wear it, if you don’t want. I’ll buy you a new one, I’ll make ends meet.”
Just like he always has, for his brothers.
But Rolf–Rolf only sighs. Only steps to the side, and bends, and when he rises again… he smiles.
His cupped palm cradles acorn shells.