Brinstan is not obliged

His father’s study was so dark and desolate that Brinstan believed he had imagined the reply to his knock.

Then he heard Osfrey’s unforgotten voice bark, “Are you coming in or not?”

He nearly slammed the door in disgust and went away again, but then he wondered what Osfrey was doing alone in his father’s study.

Osfrey was not alone, however.

“Brin!” his father cried. “We weren’t expecting you any longer today.”

Brinstan had been expecting such a greeting, and had already prepared a joking reply. It was lucky he had – it saw him through his first shock.

“I left after dinner – Grandfather was so sick of me by that time I couldn’t put him through another evening of me!”

“I shall never believe that!” his father laughed.

His old, booming laugh had withered down to a rattling echo in his lungs. His old, fond eyes were stained pink from a distance by a thicket of red veins creeping across the whites, and the skin below them hung in slack pouches. His brows and beard and hair were as bright as ever, but they seemed to have grown bushier – or perhaps his face had simply shrunken beneath them.

Brinstan hardly knew him. He had not seen his father in months – not since the spring – and now he believed he knew why.

He reminded himself that he had grown since he had last been home – enough to have required a new collection of pants and new straps for his stirrups to accommodate his legs – but when his father hugged him, he still felt like a little boy, and it seemed the old, tall father he remembered had shriveled away.

“God! You’re getting tall!” his father laughed. “Isn’t he?” he asked Osfrey.

“All your sons will be tall,” Osfrey said – almost to the word what Brinstan had expected him to say. Osfrey would not admit that his own grandsons could be lacking anything that Githa’s sons had.

“How are you?” his father asked softly. “You look well!”

“I am!” Brinstan said enthusiastically, hoping he could impart some of his own strength to his father just by making himself feel he had enough to spare.

“How’s Agatha?” his father asked tenderly.

“She is very well, and gave me a kiss for you.” He kissed his father’s cheek, as shyly as tiny Agatha had done, though Brinstan did not have to stand on his tip-​​toes to do it.

“You don’t begrudge me the kiss, I hope?” his father winked. “Or did you get one for yourself?”

Brinstan grinned and shook his head slyly, though the secret he refused to tell was only that Agatha’s kiss for him had been just as polite and just as shy, unless a kiss on one cheek meant more than a kiss on the other according to some code only girls knew.

“Osfrey?”

Brinstan’s father spun him around abruptly to face Osfrey in his chair. The Baron and the Baron’s son were standing, but Osfrey had not bothered to rise.

“Good day, Brin,” Osfrey said smoothly. “How nice to see you again.”

Osfrey was a lord now, through some gelatinous transformation that Brinstan and Lord Hamelan had never quite made sense of. It seemed that Lady Ana’s lands needed a guardian since Sir Eadwyn was beholden to Nothelm, and somehow Sir Eadwyn’s elder brother was the appropriate man, and somehow, since their father was still alive, neither could be a lord and landowner unless he was… and so…

Nevertheless, Brinstan would not admit that any title created by the Baron could outrank the Baron’s son and heir. Whether or not Osfrey believed himself free to address Brinstan as anything but “my lord”, Brinstan did not believe himself obliged to address Osfrey at all unless Osfrey stood up and showed him at least a sham respect.

Osfrey knew it, too. He waited long enough to indicate his disagreement with this protocol, but in the end he stood.

“My lord,” he murmured, with a slight bow that might only have been a shifting of his weight from one boot to the other. “I hope your journey has not left you too fatigued to dance. The Baroness’s young cousins are here, and young men are so scarce lately they will take anything they can get for a dancing partner.”

“You know I dance like a mule in pattens,” Brinstan replied coolly.

His father laughed, but Osfrey merely smiled his courtly smile.

“We had hoped Lady Hamelan might have taught you better since,” he said.

“It is no discredit to Lady Hamelan if she didn’t.”

“Of course. Shall we go up to surprise the ladies?”

“I should like to speak to my father first,” Brinstan said. He did not mind adding, “Alone.”