He had a dream. He was with his father, and they were dancing around the fire. They sang a war prayer his father had written, because there hadn’t been war prayers before him, not for them. And they lifted their voices and called to the gods, if there were any gods, Jon had always doubted to the shame of his mother who’d otherwise raised three devout boys and two more girls. But it was his father’s fault, it was his father’s song, and they clasped hands and spun each other around the flames and sang to the gods that mightn’t have been there or mightn’t have listened,
Lead us in battle
shelter our kin
if there our souls are
forced from our skin
We do not fight for
your name or your grace
We fight for our mercy
to find us a place
He’d never sung his father’s war-song before this, alone, terrified of its magnitude, of the way the idea of it settled heavy and constricting in his chest. But now the fire flickered against his robes — he was wearing robes, card-readers’ robes he’d never touched in his waking life — and his father’s dark face, illuminating golden tones in his skin, the gold-laced stitches in his thick worn coat making cold blue flames of light dance with them across it, the boldest blue he’d never forget.
Their dancing was merry. It was merry but not in the celebration of victory or the optimism of coming freedom. It was merry in the way that men danced when they knew it might be the last dance they ever had, around the fire, singing together. And then his father took him closer in a warm embrace, a swinging trot, and he was dizzy, and he felt tears on his face but couldn’t feel if they were his own or his father’s thrown against him by the wind they made together, dipping and turning. And then something warm in a liquid way, and it blossomed against his chest, and his father’s coat was gone and instead there was blood, blood everywhere, and he realized that his father was shot and where he was shot Jon bled too.
It poured forth from their chests but he couldn’t stop spinning, and hand locked in his father’s he wouldn’t let go. One of them was on their back and he wasn’t sure who, but the heat became drier and he realized that both of them were burning, the fire consuming them, and their matching blood, and his father’s bare chest, and his card-readers’ robes, pale passion blue-turned-crimson.
He tossed through the rest of the dry summer night with a fever that smothered him late into the morning.
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