Chapter Text
chapter one — the son of mactavish
the sun beams down on john's desk through the narrow arched window, the rays cutting a warm diagonal stripe across the worn wooden surface, illuminating the edges of books and scripts he has been assigned to study. dust motes drift lazily through the light.
outside he can hear the distant clang of steel from the training yard, the low rumble of horses being moved through the courtyard below, the muffled bark of one of the senior knights running drills. the castle breathes around him like a living thing, constant and indifferent to whether he participates in it or not.
john flicks his pencil up and down against the angled desk, the repetitive tap of it against the wood the only sound in the room besides his own murmuring as he stares at the notes his tutor left him that morning. the notes are thorough, as they always are.
his tutor is a meticulous man who believes that a prince without knowledge is simply a well-dressed fool, and he has never been shy about saying so. john does not disagree with him. what he disagrees with is the particular angle of sunlight coming through the window right now, the way it catches the tree line beyond the castle walls and turns the tops of the pines a deep burnished gold, suggesting a world out there that is warm and unhurried and completely inaccessible to him.
he looks back down at his notes.
his father is king of the highlands, and john is the youngest of his brothers. the most spoiled, maybe, though john has always thought that word was imprecise. spoiled implies excess without purpose.
john grew up with enormous purpose, every comfort and privilege calibrated to produce a particular kind of man. his servants serve him not for his own indulgence but for infrastructure, his lavish professionally cooked meals are not luxury but the standard that must be maintained. john thought every household in the world had servants and meals ready at supper time.
the top tier education, the finest tutors, the most skilled knights assigned to teach him self defense from the time he was old enough to hold a practice sword, all of it deliberate. all of it intentional. john has grown up understanding this, which is perhaps what separates him from the version of himself his brothers occasionally accuse him of being.
the mactavishes ruled a good portion of the highlands, their borders shared to the south with the lothians, the kingdom governing the lowlands of scotland. it was a delicate geography. to one side the highlands, wild and proud and fiercely independent.
to the other, the lowlands, more anglicised, more courtly in the norman fashion, with their own complicated allegiances and ambitions. and beyond that, the english border, which was never simply a border but always a question.
the mactavish kings had spent generations learning to hold all of it together through a combination of military strength, strategic marriage, and john's particular inheritance, careful and considered diplomacy.
he had grown up knowing this the way he knew the layout of the castle. it was simply the shape of the world.
what john had not grown up with, and what he was becoming increasingly aware of as he sat at his desk and watched the light move across the pine tops outside his window, was any direct experience of the world beyond the castle walls.
if he was training it was in the castle's courtyards, the stone worn smooth in particular patterns by generations of feet before his. if he was riding it was within the grounds, the same routes, the same gates, the same guards nodding him through with the same expressions.
if he was at leisure it was in the castle parks, manicured and contained and pleasant, and entirely unlike whatever was out there beyond the treeline catching the gold afternoon light.
the young scot liked to think that he knew the world. he was honest enough with himself, in quiet moments like this one, to suspect that what he actually knew was a very detailed and well-sourced description of the world. he thought every boy his age must be going through the same thing, staring down at his boring academic notes.
he excelled in politics. not in a polite fiction maintained by educators reluctant to criticise a prince, john was genuinely good at it, in the way that some people are good at reading weather or reading horses, a natural facility that education had sharpened into something formidable.
his tutors praised him openly for his grasp of diplomatic relations and political history, and his father had recognised it early enough to give it a name: prince of diplomacy. it was not the grandest title his father distributed among his sons but john had come to understand it was perhaps the most useful one.
it was john who drafted the letters his father sent to other kingdoms. he felt out the particular tone required for a particular recipient and adjusted accordingly. a letter to the lothian court required a different register than a letter to a highland chieftain. a letter requesting cooperation read differently from a letter implying consequence.
john understood this instinctively and had been trusted with it since he was fifteen years old, which was either a mark of great confidence from his father or a mark of his father's pragmatism. possibly both.
his brothers had their own domains in keeping the kingdom intact.
his oldest brother moved through the castle with the particular gravity of someone who had been told since birth that the weight of the kingdom would eventually be his. john respected him in the abstract way one respects something large and reliable like a castle wall. they were not close in the manner of confidants.
his second oldest brother was marquis of the highlands, and he was the one john had always felt the most complicated about. military minded, physically formidable, an excellent knight by every measure, the kind of man who walked into rooms and made other men stand slightly straighter without meaning to.
his knowledge of highland terrain, clan politics, and military strategy was genuinely impressive and john had spent enough time in his company to know it was earned rather than inherited. they debated often, they disagreed often. there was a sharpness to it that john found more honest than the careful courtly agreement he encountered everywhere else, which was perhaps the closest thing they had to affection. the marquis always questions john’s political takes which keeps the two sharp and in check.
dinner in the mactavish household was never quiet.
the table was long and the candles were always lit by the time they sat down regardless of the hour, because john's father believed that a poorly lit table produced poorly lit thinking. they would eat and debate with the particular energy of people who had spent the day in separate corners of a large complicated kingdom and had opinions to discharge.
his father presided over it with the patience of a man who had learned that controlled argument was preferable to suppressed argument. his mother had been dead for six years and her absence still sat at the table with them in the particular way that an absence shapes the space around it.
john's position at the table was the youngest, which meant he had to be sharper than the others simply to be heard. he had learned early that if his argument was not worth interrupting for, it would not be heard at all, and this had produced in him a quality his tutors called precision and his brothers occasionally called irritating. he thought both were pretty accurate.
outside his window the light was shifting. the gold on the pine tops was deepening toward amber, which meant the afternoon was further gone than he had realised, which meant he had spent the better part of an hour flicking his pencil and watching the treeline instead of completing the analysis of border taxation his tutor expected by morning.
he looked back down at his notes.
the scratching of his quill resumed in the quiet room, steady and deliberate, john mactavish setting down words about a world he had read about extensively and seen almost none of. it did not sit comfortably. it had never sat comfortably, but lately the discomfort had sharpened into something more pointed, less easy to set aside at the end of an evening.
he was twenty two years old. he had read more books about scotland than most men who had ridden its roads their entire lives. he could describe the particular political tensions of the border regions with a nuance that his tutors found remarkable. he had drafted letters to lords whose faces he had never seen, read their responses and understood the layers of meaning beneath the formal language, advised his father on how to respond.
he had done all of this without ever leaving.
the thought sat with him as the light through the window faded and the candle on his desk became the primary source of illumination in the room and somewhere below in the courtyard the evening watch changed over with the familiar sound of boots on stone.
three days later his father called him in.
the king's study was a large room that john still managed to feel claustrophobic in. the mountain of books, the hundred of scotland map iterations scattered throughout the room, the different weaponry in random corners reflecting the dim candle light. john has no idea how his father works in such a stress-inducing room.
his father sat behind a heavy oak desk, broader than any john had in his own chambers, papers and sealed letters spread before him. he looked up as john entered, his gaze sharp despite the late hour.
john crossed the room and took the chair opposite.
“i’ve word from the south,” his father began. “the lowlands are in unrest. there’s talk the english have crossed further north than before.”
john frowned slightly. “they’ve plagued the lowlands for as long as anyone can remember. what makes this any different?”
his father leaned back, steepling his fingers. “it’s no’ just the english this time. some of our own clans have been slipping south, raiding, trespassing on lowland lands. it’s stirred bad blood, especially among the lothians. they’ll not take kindly to it.”
john said nothing, but he already felt where this was going.
“i’m sending ye,” the king continued, “as duke of the highlands and my son, to treat with them. yer to mend what ye can, secure an alliance, or at the very least a truce. and you’ll do it without giving them cause to turn further against us.”
john exhaled slowly. he had known before the words were finished why the task had fallen to him.
“i’d send yer brother with ye,” his father went on, “but with the english pressing the lowlands, i’ll have him here. as marquis, he’s needed to see to our own defenses."
he paused, then added, “there’s a knight near the borderlands. a seasoned man. yer brother has fought beside him more than once, trusts him with his life. he’ll ride with you.”
“i don’t need an escort,” john said.
his father’s brow lifted, just slightly.
“son,” he said, almost amused, “you’ve never set foot beyond these walls without a retinue at yer back.” a quiet chuckle followed. “this is no courtly visit. the escort is not a matter for debate, you’ll have one.”
silence settled between them.
there was a weight to his father’s silences john had never learned to move against. he sat with it a moment, knowing well the difference between what he wanted and what would be allowed.
“very well,” he said at last. “will i meet him before we leave?”
his father gave a faint, dry smile. “do you make a habit of meeting every man before he serves you?”
john lowered his gaze. “no, sir.”
walking back to his study through the corridor, the castle around him the same as it had always been and somehow smaller than it had been an hour ago, john turned the shape of the thing over in his mind. a mission. a real one, not a letter composed at a desk but an actual negotiation conducted in person, in a room with a man whose face john would finally see. the south. roads he had not travelled. country he had only read about.
and a knight, assigned to manage him, because his father did not trust him to manage himself.
john sat back down at his desk. the candle had burned lower. outside the window the night was fully settled and the pines were dark shapes against a darker sky.
he picked up his quill.
he was going down south, a long journey through the highlands awaits him.
the escort was a problem he would deal with on the road.