Excerpt: Princes of Lothian

He could feel Lot waiting for him to say the wrong thing, waiting to let loose his formidable temper, and the awareness made it harder for Gawaine to keep his focus. “You’re the one who says that in order to beat them, we must learn what they’re like, what they know.”

“I never said you were supposed to ape them!” shouted Lot. “I never said you were to try to make yourself into an imitation of Arthur and his minions, at the expense of everything else! Where did you get that ridiculous idea, that I would be pleased that you try to make yourself more like them?” Lot loomed over Gawaine, and now he could smell the sourness of the alcohol on his father’s breath and the sharpness of the sweat, and he recognized that smell, remembered it from battle, and he could feel himself getting colder inside.

“There wasn’t any harm in it,” Gawaine began, but that was the wrong thing to say as well.

“No harm?” Lot thundered, tossing his glass to the side, the shattering sound as it hit the fireplace adding to the volume. He grabbed Gawaine’s upper arms and shook him back and forth. “No harm? While you were selling us out, trying to pretend that you were one of them, a mob of those English cowards attacked your brother and beat him! Because you weren’t there, they realized that they could split us up, find our weaknesses and break us! No harm? NO HARM?”

Gawaine tried to break Lot’s grip on his arms, but his father was stronger than he, and Lot’s fury, augmented by the whisky, gave him almost supernatural power. Gawaine’s teeth rattled in his head, and he knew better, at last, than to say anything that might set Lot off even more.

“Who do you think you are, you miserable excuse for a son of mine?” demanded Lot, yanking Gawaine off his feet and slamming him back into the wall. Gawaine could feel the whole wall shaking and for a second he wondered whether the entire building would fall down around them from the impact. His whole field of vision turned red for a few seconds, as if he were going to black out, but he kept himself awake, aware of Lot’s shouting.

“What kind of man would let his brothers be set upon by human waste such as that? What kind of man would turn his back on his family, his blood, in the midst of the enemy?” Lot accompanied each question with another slam into the wall. “Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re so special, so important that you can abandon us, abandon ME, abandon everything that’s important, to go and play with the sons of Pellinore, that worthless waste of human flesh, that coward? You want to be like them, cowards and traitors and lickspittles the lot of them? Is that what you want? No son of mine would ever want such a thing, no son of mine would ever behave this way, but you – you aren’t worthy to be called a son of mine!”

Through tears, Gawaine protested at that. “No, Father, no, you know I’m your son, you know I’m loyal, I fought with you, I fought at your side, we went into battle together – “

“And for what?” Lot shouted. Now he brought Gawaine closer to him, their faces inches apart, so that Gawaine could look into his father’s eyes and see the hate there, the fury like unquenchable fire. There was nothing more frightening in the world than the look on Lot’s face when he got in this state, and Gawaine was truly afraid of Lot as he hadn’t been in a long time. “What did we fight for, eh? So that you could make yourself into an inferior copy of the weak and treacherous English? So you could abandon everything that’s important to suck up to the people who are trying to destroy us? Is that what we went to war for? Is that why we’re here? To make you into another Arthur?” He spat the words into Gawaine’s face, and Gawaine winced away from his father’s fury, though he couldn’t go very far, with Lot’s grip so tight.

“I don’t want to be – “ Gawaine began. He could hardly form the words, could hardly figure out what to say to placate his father, especially since he knew that nothing he said was going to be right anyway.

Lot threw Gawaine back into the wall again, and let go, stalking off toward the fire. “You let your brother down,” said Lot, his voice quieter now, but bitter, filled with terrible contempt. Gawaine, staggering to regain his balance, almost wished that his father were still screaming at him; it would be better than this. “You let me down,” said Lot in that terrible voice, as he took another mug and filled it with whisky. “I thought you were worthy. I thought you had what it takes. I see I was wrong. I can see that I have been wasting my time fighting for you, trying to protect your heritage, your future.”