Padrick

The clatter of swords rang out. Steel hissed against steel; wood cracked against bone. Boys stumbled through forms while their partners, the risen dead, moved with a rigid steadiness that would not tire or flinch. Their eyes were milked over; their skin pulled drum-tight.

The captain barked sequences: high guard, turn the shoulder, sweep, step in. A boy’s blade knocked free, and the dead thing he faced did not chase the opening; only returned to ready stance. Mercy by command, not intention.

High above, the long gallery threw a hard shadow over the yard. Caltrion stood there, hands clasped behind him, expression unreadable. Sunlight caught in his eyes like coins.

“Where is Padrick?” he asked without turning.

“I’ve not seen him today, my lord,” said the captain. His voice was careful. Everyone’s was careful here.

The god’s gaze slid from the yard, to the low buildings where the living slept in shifts, and to the fields beyond.

“Call the boys to water,” he said. “I will find my son.”

The captain bowed, and his shout cracked the yard. The boys limped gratefully to pails. Caltrion pulled at the unseen threads of the dead as he went, and they stopped as one and turned, feet dragging in unison towards the pens.

Caltrion left the shade and crossed into the sun without a blink, his shadow long, his steps a weightless glide.

He already knew where Padrick would be.

In the southwest field, a square of messy green angled into an empire of wheat. The garden was fenced with rough slats Padrick had hammered himself, more gesture than barrier. Bees thrummed in the air; the earth smelled dark and warm.

Padrick crouched among tomato vines, fingertips dusty. “Look at you,” he murmured to the smallest plant, its fruit round and shy under leaves. He smiled proudly at it, tucking a stray stem back against its stake.

“Padrick,” Caltrion appeared as storms do over flat land—suddenly inevitable.

Padrick didn’t jump. He had sensed him coming—had already sent Gemma away. “Yes, Father,” he said, still facing the tomatoes. Then he rose, hands muddy to the wrist.

“Why are you not training?” The words were without softness.

“I was tending to my garden.” Padrick wiped his palms on his trousers and found the gesture pointless; the dirt only spread.

The air seemed to cool around them. Leaves recoiled, stems drew in as if wind had passed in the opposite direction. “You waste your time. You skip drills. You turn from what is yours. How do you hope to command an army if you will not even learn its steps?”

“I do not hope for it,” Padrick said, meeting his eyes. “I do not wish to command an army, or to lord over the dead.”

The god’s gaze did not waver. “One way or another you will.”

Padrick’s jaw tightened. “I only want to be human.”

Caltrion’s eyes, once bright as hammered gold, darkened as a cup fills with ink. He seemed taller by slow degrees, back easing toward the sky. “You are not,” he said, voice gone cold. “It is in your fate to be more. You are my son. And this is how you speak to me? I should have left you for teeth in the wolf-woods.”

“You do not frighten me,” Padrick said. He was not certain this was true. But the sentence felt like a stake set in the earth.

“Train,” Caltrion said. The word landed as command, and the garden held its breath. “I have been patient. This is the last I will remind you.”

He vanished so neatly the bees and air did not stir.

Padrick remained, chest tight, hands still dirty. He knelt and touched the smallest tomato lightly. The plant quivered back toward the light.

“I’m sorry,” he told the leaves, and returned to the yard.

The next day, he was late to training.

He had meant to be there. He had put on the padded jacket and strapped the dull practice blade to his side. He had even made it halfway down the track before the thought of the garden tugged his steps off the packed dirt. Just a look, he told himself. Check the stakes. Turn the soil around the basil. Ten minutes. Then drills.

At the fence line he stopped. Boards hung at odd angles. The gate was wrenched sideways, the rope latch snapped clean.

Inside, stems lay crushed to the ground as if a boulder had rolled through them. Tomato cages tilted in the dirt like bent crowns. Basil stalks were snapped; the sweet smell turned sharp and bruised.

Gemma came up beside him, breath warm from a half-run. She wore her hair knotted back and a sunburn across her nose. “Aren’t you meant to be at drills?” she asked breathlessly, then saw the ruin. “Oh.”

Padrick swallowed. The back of his throat tasted like iron. “A deer must have come through,” he said. The words were smooth, an old habit of easing her. “They’re clumsy when they panic.”

Gemma glanced at the fence. “Must’ve been one hell of a deer,” she said, but she let his story stand. That was how she loved him: honest, but not cruel.

He stepped into the bed and knelt. The smallest tomato had been flattened—the delicate stem folded where it met the soil, the fruit pressed into the dirt like a heel. He cupped the stem gently. The little life in it shivered under his touch.

“Not to worry,” he said, more to the plant than to Gemma. He closed his eyes. He did not reach far—only into the shallow place where his power lay like a hidden spring. He allowed a trickle to flow through his hands. The broken stem knit beneath his fingers. The fruit, dirt-smeared, lifted back toward the sun.

Gemma made a soft noise. “You’re amazing,” she said, leaning in to kiss him, a kiss that tasted like summer. Her hand touched his jaw with a steadiness that anchored him to the world.

At the field’s edge, under the ribboned shade of a poplar, a figure watched. Caltrion’s eyes were very dark.

It took one more missed drill to break what little patience Caltrion had claimed to possess.

Padrick had run to the river with Gemma that morning, sleeves rolled, the two of them trying to catch minnows in a woven basket. They came back wet and laughing, hair stringing water, the basket empty.

Caltrion stood in the doorway of Padrick’s quarters when he returned, a dark cut against the day.

“You were not at training,” the god said.

“I’ll make it up this afternoon,” Padrick answered. It was the wrong thing to say; he knew it and said it anyway.

Caltrion held his gaze for a full breath. “Your afternoon is already spent,” he said. Then he was gone.

The words clung to Padrick like a shadow. He stood unmoving, unsure how long had passed before his feet carried him toward the garden.

He found Gemma there.

Her body lay on the trampled edge of the plot, half in sunlight, hair spilled like cut grain. There was no wound; Caltrion did not need wounds.

He slid to his knees so fast the skin split. “Gemma,” he said, and her name broke in his mouth. “Gemma, wake up, please.” He gathered her, and the heat had only just begun to leave her.

The power in him woke like a struck hive. It thrummed under his ribs, eager, insistent. It knew her; it wanted her. It was the same trickle he had used to raise a plant, multiplied a thousandfold and sharpened like a blade. At once he knew it was his father’s intent. To waken his power in the way he’d always refused.

He could refuse still. He could put her down. He could weep and bury and let the world teach him any lesson but this.

“Please,” he said—not to Caltrion, not to any god, but to the shape of her. He pressed the pads of his fingers to the smooth skin between her eyes the way he had been shown to do on soldiers whose names he was never told. He spoke the words he swore he would never use. Power moved through him into her—too much—he let it, could not help letting it.

Gemma’s chest hitched. A sound clawed from her throat like wind in a stopped flute. Her eyelids fluttered open.

Where the green had been, only milky white.

“Gemma,” he said, and the name did not fit this face the same way. Her gaze did not hold him; it did not hold anything. Her mouth opened and closed once. Her hand rose and fell.

Padrick’s heart went hollow. He had brought her back. And he had not brought her back at all.

Caltrion stood at the fence, one hand on a broken slat, watching. There was disgust in his eyes, and something that might have been relief. “You see?” he said softly. “Love is a distraction. You are meant for more than garden tricks and silly girls. You are meant to stand where I stand. Do not waste yourself on small lives.”

Padrick did not look at him. He held Gemma’s body the way a man clings to a piece of driftwood in a flood.

“Do not speak of her,” he said.

“This has always been your fate.”

“There is no fate!” Padrick roared. He clutched the hollow girl tighter. “There is only what you have done to me,” his voice broke, and he buried his face into the hair of his lost love.

Caltrion’s mouth thinned. “Train,” he said again, and left his son with the wind and the bees and the not-Gemma.

Padrick carried her to his narrow bed and sat beside her until sunset. She made no sound. Her skin cooled. He wrapped her in a blanket—it felt like an insult—and unwrapped it again. He tried speaking to her in the low nonsense voice he used with seedlings on cold nights.

Nothing reached her.

He learned the tethers while they sat, the knowledge written in him like a book. He could feel the thread that connected his will to hers, to the dead in their pens, to the hundreds across the yard and the fields. He tugged thoughtfully. The connection tightened. With a thought he could make their fingers curl. With a word he could bring their feet together. If he wanted, he could stand and turn the whole field to his own heartbeat.

He did not want.

In the night he rose, cradled Gemma against his chest, and carried her out into the southwest field and their ruined garden. He dug with his hands. The soil was stubborn deep down; blisters opened and filled and opened again. He could will the dead to help him dig, but he would not.

When the pit was finally deep enough to be called a grave, he set her inside. He brushed hair from her brow and stared at the eyes that once held him but now stared through everything.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed.

He sat for a long time, clutching the thread that kept her near. He didn’t want to let go, but the weight of it broke him, and he would not hold her there besides. With a trembling thought, he severed their last connection. Her lips parted, and a soft breath escaped — the last of her. Then only stillness. He bowed over her, weeping.

Time worked differently around gods. Years could be a very long day or a very short century. Padrick learned what Caltrion had always wanted him to know. He drilled the boys with efficiency. He walked among the pens and felt the dead wait for him like horses waiting for a heel. He sat in council and said nothing until saying something would end the conversation. He didn’t smile.

The garden grew wild without him. Once he went to look and found tomatoes gone to seed, the fence devoured by honeysuckle. He stood with his hands on the ruined gate, letting the sweetness hurt.

Caltrion watched him with malignant regard as Padrick’s power grew from a spring to a river flooded. The god drank more at feasts. He clapped Padrick’s shoulder and toasted him and spoke with pride, of legacies.

“You are nearly ready,” he would say, wine deepening his voice to a counterfeit warmth. “The dead bend sweeter to you than they ever bent to me. You were made for this.”

“We were all made for something,” Padrick would answer.

Caltrion would laugh. Sometimes he put his arm around his son. Padrick endured that as he had endured the first winter of training: with quiet, with the knowledge there would be an end.

The hall swelled with men and conversation. Caltrion poured for everyone, mood bright as a knife. “To what is ours,” he proclaimed, raising his cup, “and to what will be.” Laughter came easy. The dead leaned in the corners like forgotten tools.

Padrick lifted his cup and wet his mouth because it was required.

“When will you end this useless crusade, Father?” he asked conversationally sometime into the night, watching the wine settle in the god’s glass.

Talk around them dimmed.

Caltrion did not set his cup down. “It is not useless to destroy those who threaten us,” he said. The mildness in his tone was carefully built.

“We are the ones doing the threatening,” Padrick said. He kept his voice simple. “We bring harm and call it safety.”

A muscle jumped in Caltrion’s jaw. “Safety is always paid in blood,” he said coolly, before addressing the room. “Tonight, let the soldiers rest. Tomorrow, we take what is ours, and those who stand in our way will swell our ranks.”

“The dead need no rest,” Padrick said. He looked into the corner where a fallen captain’s body stood gathering dust. “That is the point, isn’t it?”

Caltrion set his cup down. The sound was not loud. “Mind your tongue.”

Padrick smiled without humor. “I am done minding anything for you.”

A murmur ran through the hall like mice under floorboards.

Caltrion’s eyes went dark the way a storm does. “You insolent child.”

“Not a child,” Padrick said. “Not anymore.”

He reached—inward, outward, both—and found every tether at once. It was a harvest, a net, a web he had been caught in and now held in his hands. He tugged.

The dead turned toward Caltrion as one.

“Stop,” the god said, and two hundred years of command sat in that word. Padrick felt the pull of it scrape along the inside of his mind. But he had grown strong. He stood and pulled–and the first rank lurched forward.

Caltrion threw three of them back without touching them. He broke another with a word. He unmade a fifth with the kind of dismissal that turns a living thing to nothing.

But the dead did not tire. Nor did they fear. They came on in a rush, a spill, a sea, and soon the god of them drowned under bodies he had taught to stand back up.

He did not beg. He would not have bothered. He only looked at Padrick across the press of limbs and said, with vicious certainty, “You cannot be rid of me.”

Padrick pulled hard on a hundred threads at once, until one gave way beneath his grip. The snap rang out—a rupture in the power that had bound father to son and both to the army. An icy wind swept through the hall. The dead twitched at the severed thread and sagged into stillness as Padrick, with a final wrench, loosed his own tether. Beneath the collapsing mound of corpses lay Caltrion, stilled by Padrick’s hand.

Padrick’s breath heaved. “This is your fate,” he said quietly. "I've decided it so."

He left the hall by the back way. No one stopped him.

In the field, night had settled. The wildflowers went black around the edges. Crickets worked. Padrick’s steps led him to the garden by reflex.

He dug again. He had strong hands now; the blisters were long since scar. The earth came up in clean bites. When the hole was deep enough, he sat on the lip and listened to it breathe.

He lowered himself down, folding one arm under his head and the other flat against the soil where Gemma slept a foot beside him.

He spoke into the dark. “I killed him,” he said. The words surprised him. He had thought they would taste like victory or like ash. They tasted like nothing. “I did what he made me for. And I will not do it again.”

Above him the sky threw a net of stars. He did not look long. He closed his eyes. With a final tug on the tether, he summoned one of the dead to cast the soil over his body.

He could not die like this. But he could lay down where he had chosen, beside what he loved, and be a weight the world grew around.

By morning, the first blades of grass bent over the mound. In a week, the dirt smoothed its own edges and sprouted wildflowers. In a season, the place was a soft lift in the field, hung with tomatoes.

Years later, a shepherd girl cut through the field and paused at what remained of the garden. She did not know why she paused; the place felt like a held breath. She set her bundle down and stood, head cocked, listening. There was nothing but stillness. Still, she said, “Blessings,” because it seemed a good word to spend here.

She walked on. Sheep streamed after her in a woolly river.

Somewhere under the ground a man who could not die dreamed of gardens and a woman whose laugh had sounded like water in a wicker basket.

Wind came and went. Bees persisted. And the world, missing a god, kept on.

The dead did not rise.

The grass, as ever, grew.