A heavy mist had settled over the fields, hovering close to the ground. Swathes of mist wafted around his legs, playing around them as Payton dragged them limp across the ground. Dozens of horses had trotted through here before him, trampling down the grass, churning up the earth. The ground was still wet from the rain a few days ago, and at times Payton's foot sank into the mud up to his ankle, soaking his shoes and feet.
Walking for days in wet shoes had chafed his feet until the red skin had blistered red. Eventually, however, the blisters had also been worn down. Now the shoes made of light leather were brown with mud and blood oozed from the seams and dried there into a dark crust, all of which the boy wiped off with his other shoe, balancing on one leg.

"Move", the man riding beside him, barked harshly, poking the boy rough in the ribs with the wooden end of his spear.
That was as far as they dared go. But to lay hands on a Burdened? His arms might be bound, tied tightly behind his back, that he could barely feel his fingertips, and yet he would be able to draw his weapon, and it would snatch some to their deaths before they could overpower him.
In theory.
However, the truth was, he was debilitated, feverish and exhausted to such an extent that he fell asleep while walking not just once. Moreover, even in the best of health, he was no fighter, being small, slender, and clumsy with weapons.

Albeit he was obviously not a threat, he did his best to meet their fears and acted as fearless as he could, provided he was conscious.

There were moments when the fever seized him, where he found himself in the most tangled depths of his memory, and suddenly he was a child again, and a blizzard raged around the Tower.
He had hid under a holey blanket then, squinting his eyes tightly shut and telling himself there was no storm until the gusts of wind stopped whistling and the first rays of sun announced that the blizzard was over.
Oh, how he wished he could pull a blanket over his head right now and talk away the shackles around his sore wrists, the blisters on his feet, his impending demise.

He was too young to die.

Again and again this thought struck him, and he wanted to stamp his foot like a child in defiance at this injustice. Would it be so reprehensible?

Not so long ago, he had been a child, running through the empty, chilly corridors of the castle. And barely a handful of years had passed since he had sneaked out of his lessons to kiss a girl in a field.
Was he not burdened for a reason? Chosen to full fill a destiny other than dying after barely two decades of meaningless existence?
It was the arrogance of a young man who had always been taught that his life outweighed that of hundreds of ordinary mortals, that spoke out of him. Yet the last few days had taught him - no, downright beaten into him - humility.

The worst was not the disgust he was met with, nor the slurs they threw at him, well aware that he understood each one. Rather, it was the stench that emanated from him after days of walking without washing, it was the constant observation, the lack of any privacy when he needed to relieve himself.
It was the encrusted dirt on his arms, the foul water in the bucket to which he had to bend his head in order to drink.
It was his reflection looking at him from the greenish surface with blank eyes, a face he did not recognize under all the grime and dried blood.

At nightfall, they would tie him to a tree, and then he would be free to sleep among the roots, at least for a few hours. But even in his sleep, the war haunted him.
As soon as he closed his eyes, the battle in front of the tower played in an endless loop. When the images became too gruesome, when he felt the breath of his pursuers on the back of his neck again, he woke up, drenched in sweat, desperately gasping for air.

It was in the third night in a row of waking up wheezing for air that a burly figure loomed above him when he opened his eyes. It was pitch dark in the forest where they had set up camp, but the shadow stood out even from the blackness of its surroundings, darker, as if swallowing the faint light of the surrounding stars.

"Breath in through your mouth and out with your mouth. Slowly", the deep voice rumbled, a sound like debris rolling down a slope. He knew the voice, but at that moment his head was so deprived of oxygen that he could not possibly put a face to it. "Breath from your gut. In. And out. Slow down."

Out of desperation, Payton allowed the words to cloud his mind, to take over his being. In and out. As the voice said.

Slowly, the world began to take shape again.

A frigid wind blew, and he shivered from the feeling of gripping cold on the bare, sweaty skin of his neck. For the first time in days, he was able to think clearly.

"Your first time loosing a battle?", the general asked.

Weakly, the boy shook his head. "My first time taking a life", he confessed to the night sky, looking up at the faraway stars. They held all the answers yet choose to remain silent.
Wondering if they were watching, if they saw him, tied to that tree, wondering how small he might look from up there, he lost himself a little in the trillions of stars sprinkling the night's midnight-blue body like glittering freckles.

"You are an odd one."

Payton shrugged, a small, tired smile lifting the corners of his mouth. This was familiar ground. Being considered odd, even at the threshold of death.

"How much time do I have left?", he asked, struggling to keep his voice light and even. Fortitudinem etiam in faciem mortis. He had to be brave. Fortitudinem. But what if he wasn't brave to begin with? What if, in faciem mortis, he wanted to cry like a child?

"I never understood your kin's deal with dignity. But here you sit, hurt, ill, in anticipation of death or worse, and swallow down your tears instead of shedding them."

"If I have nothing left but dignity, I shall preserve at least that", the youth managed to say through the sob that got stuck in his throat.

"What dignity, boy? Once the king takes one look at you covered in dirt, smelling like death himself, he will order a pawn fallen out of grace to dispose of you. And then they will unceremoniously set your corpse aflame, with nothing left of you to cry over for whoever was unfortunate enough to take a liking to you. My advice is, shed your tears. No one else will do so when you die."

That wasn't true. Genevieve would cry for him. Lowell would drown his loss in beer. Reimund would scowl. His mother would turn in her grave knowing he had managed to get himself killed with barely reaching an age of twenty summers.
After all she had done to keep him alive until then, he would still die before his time.
Oh, how she would rage now if she saw him like this, chained, weak, captive to the enemy. All her efforts to raise him securely as possible, far away from the turmoil of the capital, far away from the front, far away from herself, were in vain. Ironically, they had been in vain even before he was captured.
As a child, she had given him to a nurse, Liane, who should have raised him as her own son. Where his mother's face was more of a blur, almost a dream, he remembered well the nurse's rough hands, her strong shoulders and the way she looked at him, scrutinizing, distant, the way she looked at her loom or the vegetables for the soup she had yet to cook. Following Payton's mother's orders, the nurse tried to steel the boy. Discipline. Should he disobey, there would be no supper, or he would be left to sleep in the stables with the horses in winter.
Insofar, the cold that now gripped him, bound to this tree at night, drenched in sweat, was old familiar, a memory from a distant past.

"Why are you here, telling me to cry?", Payton asked, giving the man a fleeting side glance before turning his full and undivided attention back to the stars.
Somewhere, high above him, a star fell from the sky and its light chased it like a tail before it faded away behind the horizon.

Silence stretched, spread and enveloped them, only a lark broke into song in the far distance.

It took the general a while to answer, and his words seemed to be chosen with the utmost care.

"Because it matters. You are young. Almost a child."

His voice was low, as if whispering a secret into the black night, and completely devoid of pity. No, there was something else behind these words. There was more to it, a suggestion, a chance.
It doesn't matter that Payton is no longer a child by any means as long as he looks like one - small, frail, big-eyed, tearful.

There were many scary stories told to little children to make them behave, stories of the dark king, the leader of the demons, who came to naughty children at night and devoured them in one bite. Payton himself had shivered under his blanket when the nurse told him those stories, and at night he had lain awake imagining with fascinated horror what the demon might look like.
Surely he had to be huge to be able to swallow children in one bite. He had imagined what it would be like to look right into the monster's maw, and that would be the last thing he would see – razor-sharp teeth as big as Payton's forearm.

Needless to say, such old wives' tales had little to do with reality, but the dark king had always remained a demon in the form of a man, even in the adult Payton's imagination.
Yet if Payton read the general's undertone correctly, it was precisely his childhood demon whom he could hope for mercy?

"Say, what do you gain from this?", the youth asked, carefully examining what little he could make out of the old man's face in the dark.

"Oh, nothing much. But, somehow, something invaluable at the same time. A purer conscience."

And in the distance, for a fraction of a second, a second shooting star cuts the dark body of the night.
The hint of a smile spreads across the boy's face.
There is still hope left.

As time passes, the days are getting shorter.
The army leaves less and less distance in the daylight before setting up camp at night. However, the scenery changes as well. The scorched highlands of the north became steppe, until the latter gave way to alluvial land covered by shrubs and bushes. Gradually, the trees became taller, denser, the forest darker. Sometimes, between the treetops, Payton could catch a glimpse of the gray rock of the mountain range they were heading toward.

Growing up, the boy had always imagined he would be able to feel it, the hostile land. That he would notice a change in the air when he set foot out of his kingdom. However, the grass was no less green here, the sky no less blue, and even the few people they encountered; farmers in the fields, bent over by the heavy load of golden wheat on their backs, were humans just like him. Now he was so deep in enemy territory that it would take him days of marching to even catch a glimpse of his own kingdom on the horizon.

The soldiers' spirits rose the closer they got to the mountains. In the evening they sang at the top of their lungs, in the morning they marched with elated steps. They were soon home. But to Payton, the men's joyous singing seemed like his requiem. Each step brought him closer to his end. Every day he walked was a day numbered.

At night the ground froze and Payton sought shelter from the icy wind among the roots of the trees to which he was tied. His limbs became numb, his lips blue, and he now shivered even during the day, for the fading sunlight could not warm his bones. The ankle he had fractured in the battle was red and had swollen so much that Payton had to rip the leather of his shoe to fit his ankle.
The fever set in after a particularly stormy, rainy night, the shivering barely a day later. A viscous mucus had settled on his airways until his breathing rattled like that of an old man, and the hoary taste of blood rose in his mouth every time he coughed.
In the delirium of a fever, he had heard distantly sounding, as through water, the voices of several soldiers surrounding him.

"Move along!", someone had shouted.

"Why did he stop?"

Sinking to his knees, the youth sensed his breeches and skin ripping at his knees.

"I think he is ill."
"They can't die from illness, can they?"
"Hey, move, boy!"

Someone shook him violently, but he could not make out their face. He was tired. So, so tired. Maybe he could just lie down and never wake up again?

"Just put it on your horse."
"Are you crazy? What if he wakes up and attacks me?"
"Doesn't look like that is going to happen soon. Looks pretty dead to me."

There was movement, shuffling, then Payton was manhandled like a ragdoll, he was lifted and thrown over the saddle of a horse like a sack of grain.

"I'm not gonna sit behind it."
"Then walk beside your horse like the donkey you are."

There came amused grunts from the men, which Payton no longer heard.

His eyelids sank shut and sleep overtook him like a rabid boar, taking him back to dreams of earlier, better times.
Dreams of the one good thing in his life, his long-lost childhood love.