“Another!” Akorth shouted to the bartender, who hurried over with three new casks of ale, the foam bubbling over, and slipped one into Godfrey’s hands.
Godfrey lifted it to his mouth and drank long and hard, gulping it all down, feeling it rush to his head. He looked around and noticed that they were the only three in the bar, and he was not surprised, given it was still morning. He already wanted this day to end.
Godfrey looked down, saw the soil on his shoes from his father’s burial, and felt the sadness re-igniting within him. He could not get the image out of his head of his father’s body being lowered into the earth. It made him think of his own mortality, of how he had spent his life, and how he would spend the rest of it. More than anything, it made him realize how he had wasted his life. He was still young, only eighteen, but a part of him felt it was too late, that he was who he was. Was it, really? Or was there still any hope for him to turn his life around? To become the son his father always wanted him to be?
“Do you think it’s too late for me?” he asked Akorth, turning towards him as he set down his cask. Akorth finished a cask with one hand then raised a fresh cask with another. He finally set it down and let out a loud belch.
“What do you mean?”
“To become an upstanding citizen. A warrior. Or anything worthwhile. If I ever wanted to. Something along those lines.”
“You mean, do something responsible and worthwhile with your life?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You mean, to become one of them?” Fulton chimed in.
“Yes,” Godfrey said. “If I wanted to. Do you think it’s too late?”
Akorth let out a huge laugh, shaking the bar with it, slamming his palm on the table.
“All this business really got to you boy, didn’t it?” Akorth bellowed. “It scares me to hear you speak this way. Why would you want to be one of them? I couldn’t think of anything more boring.”
“You live the good life in here, with us,” Fulton said. “We have our whole lives ahead of us. Why waste time being responsible, when you can waste time drinking?”
Fulton screamed with laughter at his own joke, and Akorth joined in.
Godfrey turned back, looked down at his cask, and wondered if they were right. A part of him agreed with them: after all, that was the line he had always taken, the way he had always rationalized his existence. But he could not deny that a new part of him was starting to wonder if maybe there was something else. If maybe he’d had enough of all of this.
Most of all, what burned inside him was a sense of anger. And, oddly, a desire for vengeance. Not just against his father, but against his father’s killer. Maybe it was just a desire to understand. He wanted—he needed—to know who killed his father. Who would want his father dead? Why? How had they got past all the guards? How could they not remain caught?
Godfrey turned over and over in his mind all the possibilities, all the people that might want him dead. For some reason, he kept thinking of his brother. Gareth. He kept thinking of that meeting, the one he had left so abruptly, with all his siblings, when his father had named a successor. He had heard that after he’d left, his father had named Gwendolyn. It was actually probably the only wise choice of his father’s life—and probably the only thing Godfrey respected him for. Godfrey despised Gareth: he was an evil, plotting schemer. It was the wisest thing his father had ever done to cut him out of kingship. And yet now, look where they were. Gareth was crowned.
Something tugged away at Godfrey, something that would not disappear, that made him wonder more about him. There was some look of hate in Gareth’s eyes, something he had spotted since he was a child. He couldn’t help but wonder if Gareth had something to do with their father’s murder. In fact, a part of him felt sure that he did. He did not know why. And he knew that no one would take him seriously, he, Godfrey, the drunk.
Still, a part of him felt compelled to find the answer. Maybe if for no other reason than to make amends to his father, to make up for his wasted life. If he could not have his father’s approval in life, perhaps he could gain it in death.
Godfrey sat there, rubbing his head, trying to think, trying to get to the bottom of something. Something weighed on the dark corners of his consciousness, some message, persistently nagging at him. It was an image; maybe a memory. But he could not recall precisely of what. He knew, though, that it was important.
As he sat there, racking his brain, drying to drown out the laughter of the others, suddenly, it came to him. The other day. In the forest. He had spotted Gareth. With Firth. The two of them, walking. He remembered thinking at the time that it was strange. And he remembered that they had no answer for where they were going, or where they had been.
He suddenly sat upright, electrified. He turned to Akorth.
“Do you remember the other day, in the wood? My brother, Gareth?”
Akorth furrowed his brow, clearly trying to summon it through his drunken haze.
“I remember seeing him walking with that lover boy of his!” Akorth mocked.
“Hand-in-hand, I suspect!” Fulton chimed in, then burst into laughter.
Godfrey tried to concentrate, in no mood for their jokes.
“But do you recall where they were coming from?”
“Where?” Akorth asked, perplexed.
“You asked them, and they didn’t tell you,” Fulton said.
An idea was solidifying in Godfrey’s brain.
“Odd, isn’t it? The two of them walking there, in the middle of nowhere? Do you remember what he was wearing? A cloak and a hood on a hot summer day? Walking so fast, as if he was heading somewhere? Or coming from somewhere?”
Godfrey was convincing himself as he spoke.
Akorth looked at him, puzzled.
“What is it you’re trying to put together?” he asked. “Because if you’re asking me to figure it out, you’ve come to the wrong man, my friend. I would just tell you that if you want to get to the bottom of something, drink another ale!” he shouted, and roared with laughter.
But Godfrey was serious. He was focused. This time, he would not be distracted.
“I think he was going somewhere,” Godfrey added, thinking out loud. “I think they were both going somewhere. And I think it was with ill intent.”
He turned and stared at his two friends.
“And I think it has something to do with my father’s death.”