They entered the ancestral home of Goldenrod's father, and roost for her brothers. As they stood in an atrium carved from living rock, the stone door closing on hidden, silent hinges behind them, the stale and damp air assaulted Kelwas. The high and sweet smell of spoilage was everywhere. The atrium opened into the main feasting hall, faint light slanting across the empty place settings, the cracked and overturned flagons. The dusty tables were strewn with all manner of food, all in varying stages of decay: here, a rasher of bacon, maggoty and bejeweled with flies; there quinces, rinds mottled and collapsing into themselves with rot; crusts of dark bread, stale and with edges hard enough to cut skin.

Everywhere, the vinegar smell and chalky markings of raven droppings: dripped on chair backs, feasting tables, flagstones. Marring the hunting scenes on the threadbare and moth-eaten tapestries along the walls.

One raven - who had been on a nearby table, tearing into something bloody when they entered - startled and flew up into the rafters to scold them. Goldenrod called to it, attempting to calm its ruffled feathers.

"Krikhor, my love. Come!" She held out her arm as an invitation, but his suspicion was not so easily soothed. Goldenrod had to repeat the process several times before appeasing his indignance at her and at last he swooped in to perch on her outstretched arm. After some bickering, Krikhor bristled his feathers to accept her preening. He bowed his head and gurgled while Goldenrod turned to speak to Kelwas. "He was always the most vigilant, so my brothers left him to keep watch over Father." 

At the word, Krikhor plucked at her sleeve. "Fodder," he said, followed by two clicks. "Fodder!"

"Good," Goldenrod said.. "Yes, yes, show us. Where is Father?"

Krikhor took wing and flew ahead, leading the way.

Dust motes swirled and eddied in their wake. Kelwas and Wolf followed Goldenrod, who in her turn followed Krikhor from the feasting hall and past the accusing gazes of mounted trophies, antlers and tusks garlanded with cobwebs. The high ceilings disappeared into shadows, and silence - unchallenged by laughter or song - had grown to fill every corner. An expectant quiet like that which stretches between plea and reply trembled around Kelwas and he became loath to disturb it. It was what it must feel like to stand within one of the grand temples dedicated to Khayme All-Father. If he could ignore the sharp and yeast-haunted smell of ferment everywhere. 

Evidence of the ravens' housekeeping was strewn throughout, as well. Here, a wizened, brown apple dropped onto the tip of a rusted spear-head. There, Wolf sniffed at a much-pecked loaf moldering into dust.

They followed Krikhor - who flew ahead to perch atop an empty sconce, or sometimes a tapestry rod, and croaked Fodder! Fodder! as if scolding them for lagging behind - until at last the labyrinthine halls of the wing opened into a wide bedchamber. As if enveloped in a fog bank, they walked into the smell of a long and lingering illness hanging in the air. On the bed, under layer upon layer of thick blankets, Goldenrod's and Krikhor's father, sleeping. Perhaps dreaming what vivid, inchoate dreams sickness can bring. Emaciated, his hair and beard grown as long and unkempt as the nails on his be-ringed hands, you might forgive Kelwas if he thought the old lord was dead. Had died during the time Goldenrod had been away. A thrill of recognition shivered through him as he looked upon the old lord, so like the sainted dead he had seen the night before. Crusts of bread, curled rinds of cheese, and other food were scattered across the covers. Goldenrod made a small cry before approaching the bedside. She brushed the hair from her father's face and murmured his name over and over, adding I'm here, papa, I'm here.

Krikhor perched on the headboard, tilting his head this way and that. First, he peered at Goldenrod, then at his father's slack and open-mouthed face. He made small, contented sounds as he sidled closer to Goldenrod and tried to preen a hank of her hair. Wolf stood on the threshold. His amber eyes moved between Kelwas, the old and infirm lord, and Krikhor before he turned and padded back out of the room.

Once Goldenrod had finished tending to her father, she turned to Kelwas.

"Now, we wait for them to return."

"Who?"

"My brothers," Goldenrod said, her voice sharpening, as if it should be plain to Kelwas who she meant. "Maybe they will bring back useful things in their beaks, maybe they will have found the way to awaken our father from his slumber this time."

You may have already put this together, likely being more clever than Kelwas, but he was reminded of the dark-skinned caravan guard, the raided villages, and the black-cloaked rider who Goldenrod claimed as one of her brothers.

"The raiders," he said. "Your brothers?"

Goldenrod had the grace to bow her head, but not before a coldness crept into her expression.

"It's true," she said. "After Father came here and fell ill, it was what we needed to do to survive."

His expression must have betrayed his indignation because Goldenrod snapped at him.

"Should we have starved?"

Kelwas wondered how many villagers had gone hungry with their raids; how if Goldenrod and her brothers had asked, they would have been given enough. Perhaps not a feast that might fill them to bursting, but sufficient to blunt their want. Goldenrod's question hung in the air, and instead of trusting himself to speak, Kelwas shook his head no.

Her expression softened, and she stroked her father's bony hand. "Too late, I understood how my raven-addled brothers saw that thieving bread, cheese, salt, the odd trinket, was necessary for our and Father's survival." The old Lord stirred, eyelids fluttering, mumbling as if on the verge of waking. Goldenrod made soothing noises and after a moment, he settled back into a less fitful slumber.

"I demanded they take me with them in the hopes of--" Goldenrod's shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug but looked more of a defeated slump.

After a moment, thinking better of attempting to explain further, she began her story.

The King Who Would Conquer Death 

"Across seven rivers and past seven valleys," Goldenrod said, in the old way of beginning a story you likely know from sitting at your babka's or papeh's knee. "There was a kingdom where its king suffered the loss of his queen. Standing among his counselors - who had stopped their bickering and jostling amongst themselves for his favor long enough for their silence to seem respectful - and his sons - all of whom ached to return to their hunting and feasting as soon as the priest poured sacred water over their mother's grave - the king was stricken. In her cold and pale face, the king realized everything she had once been - his queen and wife, mother to his sons, companion and confidant in his schemes, and all the thousand things besides - had been washed away by the cold waters of death and he at last knew fear.

"When he had been a young man, carving his kingdom out of battle and blood, in the very midst of rains of arrows he crowed with triumph. When, as king, he weathered attempts against his life by rival lords and ladies, he smoldered with fury, and punished his enemies in ways direct and subtle. But now, he felt the fear someone who has spent all their lives building something feels when they can imagine their achievements crumbling into dust, statues carved in their likeness worn smooth and featureless by wind and by rain. Their face and name lost, forgotten in the tumult of life and its consequences.

"He was shaken, the king was, and he spent many a night burning the oil in his lamps down to nothing, afraid to even close his eyes lest he visit even that pale cousin to death. He vowed not to succumb, and wanted to make sure his name was still on the lips of his subjects near and far. He shrank into himself, growing gray and wizened where he had once been hale; the steel-gray fading into a snowy white. The land also withered as he did, and the fields did lay fallow, and his people suffered from want, though he knew it not. Until one night he wandered out into the land, disguised in the rags of a beggar. Some say he did this to confound his counselors, who advised him not to leave his home, but you might be correct in believing he did this to hide from death, as if those hollow and sunken eyes could be fooled so easily. Creeping out among the houses of the common folk, he could at last hear the cries of hunger, sharp enough to wake graybeard and child alike, and how each of them shed bitter tears that they should die unheard and unmourned. 

"Understanding that his shrinking away from death had caused others pain, he at last shrugged off his fear like a cloak. The very next day, he called his counselors together to bid them find a way to conquer death.

"At first, the king's inner circle made a great show of scratching their chins or furrowing their brows while stealing sly glances at each other. You might be inclined to forgive them for believing their old king's wits had wandered away, perhaps only occasionally to return. You can imagine how many of them were quietly taking measure of the throne, and how comfortably they might sit upon it. However, the old king recognized that gleam in their eyes, for it was the very same that spurred him to water the battlefields of his youth with so much blood. 

"Imagine, then, the surprise on the counselors' faces when the king ordered his guards to seize the offenders from their number to be executed the very next day. Understanding at last that their liege was serious, the remainder bowed and prostrated themselves before the throne. They promised they would do their king's bidding over and over again. Once given their leave, all of them fled to the four winds, and so passed beyond the borders of their realm and this story.

"When weeks passed and his court emptied of even its lowliest servants, instead its halls filling with silence and dust, the king realized he must resort to asking his sons to help him in his conquest of death. Each son had become a different kind of disappointment to the king as they grew older, all of them more interested in hunts or far-off tourneys or carousing than in learning how to hold the kingdom he killed and bled for after his passing. 

"So, before the turning of the year, and with winter snows growing thick on the ground, the king climbed the narrow stairs to the castle's Dove Tower. Surrounded on all sides by the low murmurs of his most loyal subjects, he chose four doves to wing their way to the wilder corners of the realm. Each bore a summons for his sons to appear before him in his court.

"When the first chill breezes of spring heralded the opening of the chamomile's blooms, the king waited atop the Dove Tower but while he saw the foxes emerge from their dens, and robins flit from one budding branch to another, his sons did not come. So, he scattered food for his feathered subjects and held court for them.

"When the green of spring blooms deepened with the warmth of summer and the air was full of the smells of growing and nectar sweetening on peaches and plums, the king watched how a lazy heat lay upon the fields like a fume, and most creatures hid themselves away until dusk chased the sun away. Sweating, his crown slipping this way and that on his brow, the king was surrounded by the low coos of his subjects, all dozing away the heat. He loosed a pigeon of the most ancient of his lineages, having heard they could still find its way to its first nesting grounds, where its mothers' mothers' mothers had been fledged, beyond the Gates of Paradise. To its leg, he attached a message to the Tziren of the Day, she who raises her crowned head and spreads her vast pinions upon her roost to sing the sun back into life every dawn, how to best conquer death. Still his sons did not come.

"By the time the fields had been shorn for harvest, and the world grew closer to the Night Lands, the king despaired of receiving any response from the Tziren of Day. When he saw a flock of ravens picking their way through empty fields, turning every leaf and giving mournful squawks when they found nothing underneath, the king offered them gifts.

"Gifts of apples, of red and gold and green. Gifts of honey, thick and sweet and still in their combs. Gifts of hazelnuts, brown and earthy. All of them for the ravens, if only they would help him. For everyone knows ravens are favored by the Tziren of the Night and can fly from the land of the living to the Night Lands and back again. And so, after listening to the king's plea (and with many a glance at the food offerings), they hunched together and conferred. After a time, the oldest of them came forward, cocked an eye towards the king, and in a croaking voice began to tell him an old story of his own."

Kelwas waited for Goldenrod to continue before blurting out, "That was it?"

"No," Goldenrod said. "But I'm tired, it's late, and the tapers have nearly burned down. I can continue tomorrow."

Kelwas almost groaned with impatience, but he was also tired and so agreed to stop for the night.