Chapter 4: Of Knuckles and Kingship
The palace gardens lay under a shroud of hoarfrost, each blade of grass and thorn of rose encased in a brittle, silver shell. The world was silent, the air so cold it hurt to breathe. Then, cutting through the stillness, came the rhythmic, heavy sounds of impact: a grunt of effort, the sharp exhale of breath, the deep thwump of something massive striking wood and stone.
Arl Eamon followed the sound, his boots crunching through the frozen dew. He found Kerr in the training circle near the frozen fountain, a spectral giant moving in the pearlescent dawn light.
Kerr’s hair was quite long with intricate braids holding the sides tight while the back hung low, a dark cascade against his sweat-sheened back. His beard, which grew up to his eyes and thick as a horse’s mane, now went down to his clavicle, oiled and straight. The hair on his chest, arms, and abdomen was also thick and uncut, a pelt over corded muscle. He was a monument of wild, focused power.
He was swinging his hammer, a gift from King Bhelen of Orzammar. It was a brutal, beautiful piece of dwarven craftsmanship, its head a single block of volcanic obsidian set in rune-etched steel. With his other hand, he wielded a shield gifted from the Legion of the Dead, its surface scarred and pitted from the Deep Roads, a history of despair turned into a tool of defense. On his brow, simple and severe, sat a crown of brushed silverite, forged by the Paragon Caradin of Orzammar. It looked less like jewelry and more like a geared component of his skull.
He was perfecting his heavier, momentum-based fighting approach. He wasn’t fencing; he was dismantling. He’d spin, using the sheer mass of his body to whip the hammer around in a devastating arc, letting its weight carry him, then anchoring himself behind the Legion shield to absorb the imaginary rebound. Every movement was economical, lethal. A training dummy made of thick posts and lashed straw was already splintered into kindling at his feet. His knuckles, Eamon noted, were split and purpled from yesterday’s work in the council chamber.
Eamon waited until the final swing, a downward crushing blow that atomized what was left of the dummy’s base. The shockwave echoed off the garden walls. Kerr planted the hammer head on the flagstones, resting his forearms on the haft, his breath pluming in great clouds. He turned his head, his eyes finding Eamon in the mist. They held no surprise.
“Arl,” Kerr said, his voice rough from exertion.
“Your Majesty,” Eamon replied, the title feeling strangely formal against the raw physicality of the scene. He stepped closer, the cold biting through his robes. “I see you’re… continuing yesterday’s deliberations.”
Kerr gave a short, sharp bark of laughter that held no humor. He straightened, wiping his brow with a thick forearm. The crown didn’t shift. “Something like that. Couldn’t sleep.” He nodded toward the palace. “She could. Slept like a stone. Peaceful.”
“And that troubles you?”
“It fascinates me,” Kerr said, picking up a waterskin and taking a long pull. He offered it to Eamon, who declined with a slight shake of his head. “After yesterday. After I turned that prick’s face into pulp right in front of her. She just… exhaled. Later, in our chambers…” He trailed off, a different, more private heat coming into his eyes. He looked at Eamon, assessing. “You’re a married man, Eamon. Was Isolde… forthright?”
Eamon’s eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”
“In bed,” Kerr said, as casually as if discussing the weather. “Anora is. A politician to her core, sure. Calculated. But there’s a… a directness there. No games. It’s like the council chamber cleared out and all that fire had nowhere else to go.” He grinned, a flash of his old mischievous self in the wild-maned king. “She damn near cracked my ribs. In a good way.”
Eamon looked away, his cheeks flushing faintly from the cold and the unexpected intimacy. “I did not come to discuss the Queen’s… passions.”
“I know why you came,” Kerr said, his voice dropping back into its grave tone. He leaned on the hammer again. “You think I was a brute. You think I undermined her authority, made us look like barbarians.”
“The thought occurred,” Eamon admitted, turning back to face him. “Bannswick is a fool, but he is a lord of the realm. There are channels. Fines. Confiscation of lands. Public censure. There is a… machinery for these things.”
“Machinery is slow,” Kerr said, his gaze fixed on the shattered dummy. “And Bannswick wasn’t just insulting his queen. He was testing a theory. That she’s just a Mac Tir clinging to power through a well-muscled consort. That I’m just a jumped-up bann’s son with a lucky sword arm and a famous name. He was probing a crack. So I welded the crack shut.”
“And created ten new fissures,” Eamon pressed, though his voice remained calm, professorial. “The story isn’t ‘the king defended the queen’s honor.’ It’s ‘the king beat a lord senseless for speaking out of turn.’ Fear is a tool, Kerr, but it’s a brittle one. It makes men obedient, not loyal.”
Kerr let the silence hang between them, broken only by the drip of melting frost from a nearby rose arbor.
He shrugged, a rolling motion of his massive shoulders, then bent to his weapons. He placed the hammer down on the stones with a deliberate, heavy thud that Eamon felt in his soles. The shield followed, leaning against the frozen fountain's basin with a tired metallic groan.
Their weight was obscene; no grown man Kerr's size could wield just one of them effectively. Yet he moved them with a single hand, then took a rough square of linen from a bench. He began methodically toweling the sweat from his shaggy torso, steam rising from his skin in thick curls against the knife's-edge dawn air. The vapor wreathed the ancient silverite on his brow.
“Obedient gets the job done today,” Kerr said, his voice low now, the earlier heat banked to embers. “You speak of channels, Eamon. The ‘machinery’.”
He paused, the linen clutched in his fist. His eyes, usually so bright, had gone flat and distant, seeing something else entirely. The manicured gardens seemed to fade, replaced in his vision by the blood-slicked stones of Highever’s great hall, the taste of smoke and iron, the heavy silence of a home turned tomb.
“I’ve lived a long life in the few years since the massacre,” he said, the words stripped bare. “Since Howe’s men butchered my family while the teyrnir slept. While the Fereldan nobility slept.” He looked directly at Eamon, the pain in his gaze so raw it was almost physical. “How long, I wonder, would that courtly machinery have taken to grind into action for them?A month? A year?Never? While they politicked, Fergus rotted in a prison and I bled in the wilds.”
Eamon’s face softened, but he did not look away. He’d seen Bryce Cousland’s second son grow from a charming lad into this weathered king, each transformation etched by loss.
“Fear is brittle, you say. I’m not interested in fear, Eamon,” Kerr continued, his tone acquiring a grim, weary maturity that belied his face. “I’m interested in truth. The truth is good men and women, people I bled alongside, died to put a crown on my head so we could fix things. Not play dress-up. The truth is Anora wants to rebuild Highever, secure the borders, give the Wardens a home so the next Blight doesn’t find us asleep. It’s right. It’s just. It’s fair.”
He balled the damp linen in his fist. “And the biggest problem some polished prick like Bannswick sees is his own fortune maybe getting a little lighter? His influence might dwindle? And he decides the best way to address that is to publicly challenge her right, her authority, to do her fucking duty?” Kerr shook his head slowly, a predator’s calm settling over him. “Well. Challenge accepted.”
He said it without rancor, without boast. It was a simple statement of irreversible fact. He tossed the towel aside.
“I’m not interested in a blind rush,” Kerr admitted, his voice dropping. “We need plans. We need your wisdom, the kind that sees three moves ahead. I’m not my father, or my brother. I know that.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “But tell me there’s any logical reason, any good and honest reason, for the wheels of this political machinery to turn as slowly as they do. One that doesn’t boil down to powerful men hoarding power, drawing out the process to squeeze concessions, to weaken their rivals, to hold onto every scrap of privilege they got while everyone else waits for scraps from their table?”
The silence this time was heavier. Eamon opened his mouth, the practiced diplomatic answer on his tongue, but found no purchase in the face of Kerr’s unflinching stare.
“My wife,” Kerr said, the word thick with a possessiveness that was more solemn than boastful, “intends to do what is right. She knows the game better than any of us. And I intend to ensure her work isn’t impeded by impudent whelps who think a name and a title shield them from the consequences of insulting a man’s wife to his face. In his own house.”
He stood up, his full, imposing height casting a long shadow over the seated Arl. The sun finally crested the garden wall, bathing his scarred, steam-veiled form in pale gold. He looked like something mythic, or something feral.
His eyes never left Eamon’s. “You’re a good man. A just man. I know you loved Isolde. Truly loved her.” He let that hang, the memory of Eamon’s own deep, tumultuous devotion a stark anchor in the conversation. “So tell me, with all the maturity you’ve earned and all the love you had for her… what would you have done? If a man in that room, full of your so-called peers, had called her a whore for making the only decisions that would keep this ship from sinking?”
Eamon’s face, usually a composed map of careful diplomacy, went utterly still. The morning cold seemed to seep into his bones, deeper now. He didn’t look at Kerr. His gaze drifted past the shattered dummy, past the frost-glazed roses, to some invisible point in the middle distance. Memories flickered there, sharp and private: Isolde’s laugh, bright and slightly reckless; the way her hand felt in his; the decades of quiet partnership against the noisy world.
He didn’t speak for a long time. The only sound was the drip of melting frost from a thorny branch.
Finally, he drew in a slow breath, the air sharp in his lungs.
“I would have killed him,” Eamon said, his voice quiet and stripped of all its customary polish. It was a flat, factual sound, like a stone dropping into a deep well. “Not with my fists. With a knife. In the dark, later. I would have arranged an accident. A robbery on the road. A fall from a horse.” He met Kerr’s gaze then, his own eyes clear and terribly honest. “It would have been clean. Deniable. Politically neat.” A faint, pained grimace touched his lips. “And it would have been an act of cowardice. A sin of passion disguised as statecraft.”
He stood, his old knees protesting the motion, and faced the king squarely. “What you did was not politically neat. It was brutally direct. It was, perhaps, necessary.” He let out a long, tired sigh, the ghost of his own confession hanging between them. “You showed the court your teeth. Anora will spend the next month showing them the meticulously drafted tax codes and land grants that prove she has the brains. It is… an effective, if unorthodox, division of labor.”
Eamon’s shoulders settled, the weight of his own admission somehow shifting the dynamic in the frozen garden. He looked at the split skin on Kerr’s knuckles, the still-steaming mass of him. “I came here to counsel restraint. To explain the long game.” He gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head. “I see now you understand the only game that matters. The one happening right now. Yesterday, you didn’t just hit a man. You drew a line in marble and stained it with his blood. Every lord in Ferelden now knows exactly where that line is, and more importantly, they know you are the one standing on it.” He paused. “They will call you a tyrant. A brute.”
A slow, hard smile spread across Kerr’s face. It held no joy, only a dark acknowledgment. “Good,” he said, the word a low rumble. “Let them. Tyrants and brutes get things built. They get walls raised and enemies broken. Better than a philosopher-king whose people starve while he debates the morality of the granary key.”
He bent and retrieved his hammer, hefting its impossible weight as if it were a walking stick. The silverite crown caught the rising sun, throwing a stark, metallic gleam. “You’ll smooth the edges, Eamon. That’s your job. Make the peace after I’ve made the point. Tell them I’m young. Tell them whatever story lets them sleep at night and gets those levies for Highever moving north by week’s end.”
Kerr turned to walk back toward the palace, his shadow a giant’s stride across the frosted lawn. He stopped after a few paces and looked back over his shoulder, his expression unreadable. “Just don’t tell them I’m sorry.”
Eamon watched the king go, the solid, unyielding shape of him disappearing into the mist that still clung to the stone archways. The garden felt emptier, quieter, the chill settling back in without the furnace of Kerr’s presence.
Eamon looked down at his own hands, the soft, veined hands of a man who built with words and ledgers and whispered counsel. He thought of Isolde, long gone. He thought of the single, bright thread of murderous fury her memory could still conjure in his heart, even now. A thread he had always carefully sheathed in procedure and patience.
He looked at the blood on the flagstones where the training dummy had stood, a few dark droplets melting small craters in the frost.
Eamon nods.Understanding.
It was not an endorsement. It was a reluctant, grim comprehension of the new math governing his kingdom. He pulled his robes tighter against the cold and began the slow walk back to the palace, his mind already drafting the careful, pacifying letters he would need to send.