>>5937480>>5937469Anaraut's horn is the only thing that still glitters in your hall. You stare at it, hanging over the door, silver flickering with the firelight in the hearth. Your cousins and kinsmen talk among themselves. Your youngest nephew, Hywel, slight in frame but a skilled wielder of the sling, sings the tale of Brychein and the Great Boar from his seat on the stone floor by the hearth, as your twin cousins Murkath and Heort wrestle by the door.
There are few women here - your mother has not left her tower since your father's passing, your only sister Eada was married many years ago and dispatched to a distant hall. Only a few cousins sit to spin and weave among the menfolk. It shames you to watch noble women of your own blood at their spindle-whorls at your great table, like the wives of shepherds.
You were raised in the poverty and wildness of Brenh's Hall, climbing through the broken ceilings and shattered walls as you grew. You hunted rabbits through their tunnels in the collapsed remains of your great, great grandfather's armoury, you collected windberries in the great patches of gorse that have swallowed the old gatehouse, scarfing them down in your hunger. You remember you first saw a foreigner one morning as you sat in the sun on the jagged ruin of the north tower, a merchant come to buy your father's wind-steed, the great beast of black and silver-white pawned for wine.
You remember spitting as the foreigner passed, and looking at your father like he was little more than a drunken beggar. You burn with every indignity you and your line have ever suffered. Every ruined hall, every heirloom sold off, every insolence from the lesser men of the world. More than most, even, you have let these slights shape you - but to what end?
>You took out the frustration upon the open hillside - you wrestled and contested with your cousins every day, until you had to drag them up each morning for the chance of a foe. You are stronger, even, than most born of royal blood, and your cousins have long since learned to do as you tell them in battle.>You focused your energies on the hunt and the woodland - on giving quarry in sacrifice to the heavens, on keeping yourself, your sister, your mother fed by your own merits. You are a skilled huntsman, tracker and know your lands, and your place before heaven, better than most.>You went among the Gohren, the low-men of the villages. You spoke law and took tribute. You learned from them the ways of the wider world, the arts of word and silver by which little men turn the earth. Many called it beneath your blood, but you have made yourself world-wise, and ready to lead the little men. 