Spoiler warning: concerns material for The Claw and The War both.

Overview

This is pretty much a chapter discussing Mordred's two surrogate fathers: i.e., the General of Orden and Jedediah Crayes. If you read the Claw one-shot posted in this book, or even just picked up on the vague hints thrown around the actual story, you know Mordred's parents were a pitiable excuse for parents and didn't really deserve that title. So happily for Mordred, right around the most traumatic time of his life he stumbled upon a couple new ones.

The General

In 2889, General Erhard Winston and King Derin II died within days of one another. The General's son, Derek Winston, was only seventeen, yet he proved himself fully ready for the office handed down to him. Not only that, he took on a kind of tutelage of young King Conrad, a bashful, backwards young man, whose own father had ill prepared him for his office. At the time of The War, he is thirty-six years of age and has held the office of General for nineteen years.

Throughout The War, the General takes prominence far beyond the king. He is everywhere, putting courage into the hearts of men, riding out to command the armies, inspecting the defences. The king is there, behind the scenes, an important figure who makes decisions and presides at the councils, but it is the General who is his executive.

This scenario is not an ordinary one. Historically, Orden's king has acted alongside the General, placing himself in the forefront of the people's minds. But Conrad is not an ordinary king. Timid by nature, and ignorant by neglection, when he arose to the throne he could not bear to speak in public, much less make a single law or executive act. And to understand him, we must go back to his grandfather, Derin I.

Derin I was hopelessly mad. The General and Captains of the time could have and should have declared him unfit to rule and demanded that the queen take his place as regent until her son was old enough. But a country begins to fall into disrepair slowly, microscopically, beneath what the eye can see. Orden had known peace and prosperity for decades, and the high officials and nobles were unused to having problems, real problems, to handle. They tied their own hands with the numbness of their complacency, and Derin reigned for forty-four increasingly ruinous years.

Derin II, his son, was a weak, scatterbrained, ineffectual man who tried in his distracted, ineffectual way to repair the damage his father had done over his own seventy-year reign. He had no time or concentration to spare for his own son, Conrad, whose mother died early in his childhood, and the boy was left to a lonely and completely instruction-less existence, except the vague maxims that he heard every once in awhile: A king is good and just, a king loves his people -- and so forth. He was a shy and retiring lad, not one to go out and make his own way, not one to search and discover for himself.

It was horrific, shameful neglect, and again, the General and Captains should have seen to it that the boy had a tutor and discipline in kingly things. But they did not think of him. He was not their problem, they thought. And he was very easy to forget.

As for the General Erhard Winston, he would not under most circumstances have been considered a poor General. He did what was asked of him -- never less. But with King Derin II, that was not enough. He needed to do more, for there were many things that Derin II, with his scattered ways and forgetfulness, did not ask. There were many things that could have been done, and were never done. For this reason Orden's recovery as a nation from the years of the Mad King were slow.

And at last, in 2891, King Conrad was crowned at the age of twenty-seven, a bashful, terrified boy who had become a bashful, terrified man, and the new General, ten years younger, looked at the bewilderment and fear on his face. And he looked at the void he had to fill of a father who had always done what was asked and never all he should have. And he looked at the Captains and lords who had grown lax and dull, taking no action as the country eroded under their feet and thinking, "The end will not come in my day."

And he said to himself, Enough.

From that moment there was not a day in the young General's life that he did not devote to training the young king, and shouldering all the duties that Conrad was not ready for, and tirelessly addressing the corruption that he had witnessed.

But that is why the General is always at the fore. Because, though he taught Conrad to be a king and not a puppet, he was forced to take so much upon himself at the beginning that he was never able to give it all back. King Conrad came astonishingly far, but he would always be a shy, unwilling monarch. He never offered to relieve the General of duties that he did not know he was supposed to take, and the time came when the General did not ask him to take any more.

So much for the General's history. Now for his character.

The General, at heart, is full of love. He is an incredibly single-minded man, whose one passion is to give his all for his people. He does not have some romanticized patriotism in his mind with this ideal, but by the people he means the people, the men and women and children of the earth. His compassion extends to whomever he meets; he has the gift of casting aside stereotypes, and appraising each individual person's need and worth.

When I say he gives his all, I mean it. Every day of his life, especially during the war, is spent in spending himself, giving his strength to and for others. And in that lies his greatest weakness, for he is in danger of draining himself completely. He will not, like most people, understand when he has pushed himself too far. He will go on, and on, and give himself until he collapses.

In Mordred's life, the General is a stability, a rock. In his boyhood, Mordred was the rock for his brother and sister, but he had none for himself, and as he struggles to right himself and find his way after the Claw, it is the General who provides a touchstone, a security that Mordred has never known. We see his instant deference to him; his willing, boyishly impulsive service; the striking way in which he looks up to him like he does no other. Mordred would leap into the Cleft of Lynnel if the General asked. So would many others, of course. But Mordred would probably be the first one to the rock.

Jedediah Crayes

Jedediah Crayes is an anachronism. A puzzle. An enigma. Nobody knows his parents, his nationality, or nothin'. If you want to try your hand at it, here are some fascinating and sometimes contradictory clues:

- His surname sounds possibly Rehirnish

- He disavows any nativity or citizenship of any particular country.

- He likes Orden for no discernible reason

- His way of speech is closest to a Rehirnish/Delgrassian mode.

- He has a peculiar affinity for the Thiredanian language (the Ordenians were Thiredanians and the language is still in use among the upper classes)

- You don't see this until we get into the final book, but he has prolonged natural vigour and lifespan beyond ordinary people.

- He has extraordinary instincts and reflexes

- He is staggeringly well-read and has appreciation for the fine arts and culture

- He can live for weeks on near-starvation rations and turn around and gorge himself on a feast with no ill effects

- He has a mental block about using the term "friend"

- His sense of morality and justice is absolute.

I know the answers to some of the questions these raise. Others are in grey areas. I don't want to ever delve too far into Jedediah Crayes' secrets, because the secret is part of who he is. I need to know that there's more beyond the pages with him, there's colour outside the lines. As the years go by, I've begun to trace a shadowy, formless conception of his background, but shadowy and formless it will remain. Some things stay maybes.

Jedediah Crayes' background may be vague, but his present and his personality are totally concrete. He came on the scene in his early twenties, joining the Legean Association and shooting up the ladder of fame in a matter of years. He is now the most well-known name in Legea, a terror to evildoers, a byword, and thoroughly enjoys his prestige like the vain creature he is.

Excessively irritable; unexpected mood swings; cocky, arrogant, self-important; sarcastic and uncivil: all these things are Jedediah Crayes. He has a very fine brand of witty and sly humour, which tends to manifest itself in not quite complimentary remarks. All in all, he rarely comes across as likeable.

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He speaks his mind without fail. He doesn't care two straws about diplomacy(unless has absolutely has to). He's outspoken to the point of rudeness, and tends to a certain level of sarcastic exaggeration in conversation. The flip side? He never varnishes the truth. White lies don't cut it for Jedediah Crayes. He'll tell you the truth even if it hurts you -- even if it hurts him. As bad as he is at handling interpersonal conflicts(he's horrible), you can always trust him to admit the worst in a situation, and promptly set about to find a way of fixing it.

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His irritability and temper are notorious, as is the way he can mysteriously cool, shut down, and become a pleasant, genial conversant after blowing his top moments before. Why? Because it's only half real. He'll never admit it, but that's not his real anger. It's superficial stuff, blowing over the surface of his character like a froth.

You do not, ever, want to see Jedediah Crayes truly angry.

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He has the biggest ego in Legea. Or does he? He's always inflating his image, puffing it up, and he does certainly have a swelled sense of his own importance. But his need for truth keeps him firmly grounded. He knows who he is, and he knows what he can do. He would be the last person in the world to say he's invincible, and if he heard anybody else say it he'd start sputtering with indignation.

He talks.
All. The. Time.
Flip side? You can have conversations of real worth with him, on deep concepts, history, and values.

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Jedediah Crayes' loyalty is the hardest trait to find. You can find the truth, the moral standard, the hardheaded sensibility, and the intelligent discourser, and many people have, and yet still are blind to his best side, because it's buried one step deeper. They would think of him as, roughly, "A good fellow, but is he really worth the trouble?"

Jedediah Crayes does not let loyalties bind him readily. He's spent his life disowning most loyalties, and insisting that he has no friends, and refusing to make them.

But when his loyalty is formed, it is unbreakable and unmatchable. It involves vehement protective feelings, hopeless denial of attachment, and a matter-of-fact, almost unconscious habit of putting the other's priorities above his own. For those who read Chapter 22 of The War, just posted, you saw a glimpse of what I'm talking about.

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Now, Mordred and Jedediah Crayes have a surprising degree of things in common. Far more than Mordred and the General do, in fact.

They both have a certain playfulness with words. It's in the way they speak, and the specific ones they choose. Words are toys, and words are weapons, and they both know it and use them thus.

They share a high regard for learning and books.

They both have a reckless nature and are attracted to danger(the difference is that Jedediah Crayes usually makes a plan, and therefore survives the adventure undamaged).

They both have certain vanity; with Jedediah Crayes it comes out more in verbal inflation of his personage, with Mordred the pride innate in his bearing.

They insult people in similar ways.

They are both superb actors.

But none of this drew them together at the first. It was that they each saw the other as an astonishing, new, stimulating puzzle. Mordred, breaking inside, struggling to live with his anger and bitterness, saw a man who was more stuck-up than he had ever expected anyone could be, and was so fascinated that he was drawn out of his pain to smile, and even to laugh. Jedediah Crayes, bobbing in a comfortable well of his own esteem, was jolted into the air by someone who had never heard of him before, and instantly his alert mind was hungry for more. And so Mordred gained a second father -- the kind who is less a rock of stability than the one who takes his son up to the high dive at the age of two, and drags him on long wilderness camping trips; and yet he is a rock, too, in his own way. He pulls Mordred out of every scrape. He asks questions where the General fears to tread. He provides a world where Mordred can be a boy. Because Mordred, so young, needs still to be a boy sometimes.

Mordred never will be a man to Jedediah Crayes. He'll always be "that boy".