Mace didn’t answer, immediately – these were rhetorical questions. You don’t know me, they meant. You don’t know anything. Tristan was, after all, still a teenager, and to him there was nobody in the world who understood him, nobody in history who had known grief like this. He had not yet learned that death touched everyone, and it was always a tragedy, whether it happened to young or old, in peace or violence.
And though it was a long time ago, Mace could remember thinking like that. Mace could remember losing his own father, in his mid twenties. Older than Tristan, in so many ways, though he suspected the boy was smarter. He’d gotten the call on a satellite phone, which was so unexpected that he’d laughed when they called him into the tent. “What? Who would be calling me?” He remembered the sand was lashing the canvas siding, sounding like pelting rain. He remembered the silence after he’d greeted her, “Mom?” Precious, dollar-colored seconds slipping into static. He remembered her telling him in a flat, factual rush: there was an accident. He remembered feeling, not sorrow or anger or even surprise, but emptiness. Because he hadn’t seen his father in years. They barely knew each other.
Later, he’d mourned what might have been, but never was.
It was not the same kind of relationship. Arthur was a hero to Tristan – Mace’s father was practically a stranger, to him. But loss was never simple, and it was never easy, and it never ceased. If you weren’t losing someone, you were the one being lost. The only family Mace had left to him was trapped in that castle, pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
He sheathed his sword and approached slowly, with the relaxed posture he’d use to greet a skittish horse. He thought easy, easy. “We weren’t finished,” the Prince was saying, and Mace felt his throat constrict. He crouched opposite the boy, resting his wrist on his knee, and listened. What he heard was guilt, and doubt, and fear. And the misconception that somehow, by refusing to accept Arthur’s death, Tristan could prevent it from being real. Mace shook his head, minutely. Released a long breath.
He wished he could take some of that burden from him. Knew he couldn’t.
“Here’s what I know about you, Tristan,” he finally answered. “The first time I met you, you’d run straight into an armed invasion, thinking nothing of your own safety, because your friend was in danger. I learned that wasn’t the first time you’d risked your life to save someone else’s, and it wouldn’t be the last. It was reckless, but it was brave as hell, too.” Mace smiled a little, wistfully, remembering that scrawny kid. Then he remembered it was the same day he’d met Morgana, and the smile faded.
“I know some of those friends of yours are the likely sort, and some of them are not – people that everyone else finds strange, or can’t understand. That’s why so many different kinds of people have gathered around you out here, willing to sleep in the dirt, willing to risk their lives for you. Not because they think you’re Arthur, but because they know you’d do the same for them. Because you have done it for them. You came for them when they were in trouble. You stood by your men when the Peaks were attacked. You don’t leave anyone behind – I had to force you to leave. And yes, as a leader you have to learn when to make that call, but it’s better to have to learn that than the alternative. There are plenty of people who think only of themselves.”
Mordred, for example. But this wasn’t a lecture about tyranny.
“And the thing is, you don’t have to be just like your dad to be a good king. I know you think that’s what people need, but it isn’t. I’m guessing it isn’t what your dad wanted for you, either – to be exactly like him. I’m guessing he didn’t tell you that the important thing would be to do everything exactly like he would.”
The sword was a line between them, like a glinting wall. Mace reached across it, squeezed Tristan’s shoulder.
“It hurts to lose people. It should hurt. That means your heart works.”
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