We are eternally learning to live with fire in the belly and darkness in the soul.
It took many years to reconcile the two, but when I finally did, I began, at least in part, to find peace. War had come to my homelands as I grew up, and though I had the luxury of a well accustomed lifestyle, slick in the homestead of my father’s keep, seeing the kingdom set ablaze in the name of patriarchy skewed my perceptions of Rodham’s beauty.
A city like ours requires tentative care. Leave it too long, like a flower, and it will grow wild and unfettered. Let it lose with a short temper, and its people grow weary and fiery. Balancing those two extremes had been my father’s gift before the unexpected birth of his second son. Until that day the lineage was settled, and he had financial obligations to only one protégée. With my arrival, or so I am told, things became complicated. Though I was trueborn, and not a bastard of alcoholic stupor born, I was every bit unintended and the love I received during my upbringing was of the unfrequented variety, half felt and humdrum.
Rodham swiftly fell into chaos as my father lost his focus, torn between a weary marriage with a wife who requested children of her husband when he had no spirit to sire another weakness, and between ever stringent borders with the Farrier’s to the North, and the Masonite to the East. All the furry of his wrath could not abate the storm that was coming, not only from his allies, political ties and enemies, but from nature itself as winter rode in. Together, they formed a metaphorical dagger that was his undoing, and my tool of inadvertent ascension.
It is sick to consider even daring to profit from such times. That is what I have been dually raised to believe. I do not think so now, looking back through time and forward to the pile of gold at my feet. On the one hand, my father used to say, one should always take advantage of opportunity, whereas on the other, when she dared speak to me, my mother suggested advantage only came when one learnt to turn a blind eye to those moments. A drunk in a tavern said years later, that true man learnt to do both. So I did, and my profiteering became paramount to dragging me from the long hard years of misery I was subjected to in the nobility of my father’s keep, and the sodden earth works that bedded my namesake.
Very quickly, I lost the name Adderbough Rodham, son of King Lucca Rodham, and took the swain’s name Gavel. Unto this day there is no Curtongue with a greater reputation through the burning remnants of those sorrowed days.