Your Fair Warning: This is a story I did not finish and do not intend to finish. It may be unedited, meaning there may be errors (spelling, grammatical, continuity, ect.). It also means it may cut off in the middle of a chapter, scene, even sentence. There is no conclusion here.
This fic was a rewrite/novelization of a potential bad ending of the first Suikoden game. (If I recall correctly, my plan was to have Tir die in Sasarazade, because I genuinely feel like Sonya deserved the win.) In 165K words, I got as far as Garan; then I did something else with my time.
It is also about growing up in a repressive and oppressive conservative environment but growing up to be a loving, empathetic adult that sides with your family's victims over your family. Tir McDohl's refusal to believe that anyone deserved to be mistreated leads to him choosing the common man over the ruling class, and then empathizing with them, and then coming to successive realizations about himself that lead him to the conclusion that he would have never really fit into the Scarlet Moon Empire's ruling elite, and that he didn't really want to.
If I had finished this this it would have eventually been about immortality and inhuamnity too, but I didn't get that far.
Mature. Much of it is teen but startlingly uncomfortable scenes come out of the blue on occasion (my specialty) and there are sexually explicit dream sequences.
This fic is largely centered on Tir and Gremio's relationship, which squirms around in a gray area between romantic and familial. There's some one-sided Tir/Vikor (Tir has a little crush) and double-sided Viktor/Flik that clashes with the Viktor/Valeria. Tir and Flik's rocky rivalry gets a lot of words. Some Kirkis/Sylvina. This was meant to be endgame Tir/Luc, but I didn't get that far. I got very absorbed in very many minor characters, which is one reason why this got too long to finish.
It's fair to warn any prospective reader that this fic is headcanon town. It was initially written for my husband, writing out our headcanons about the first game that we developed as I played. I no longer have an explanation for all my choices here, I was also going through it in my personal life, to a degree where I don't have strong memories of writing the thing. Long story. Also, lots of weird surreal sex dreams.
As I said I was going through it at the time, and it shows. This is the work of a younger writer and it's not a very cohesive work. I think it's lower quality than a lot of the stuff on this site. It is not however without its high points, especially my treatment of characters like Viktor or Valeria--there's a reason I came back to them later in life.
Because this fic is so long, Neocities struggled to keep it on one page. Start the story in Part 1.
They were still a week away from reaching their destination when Stallion, Lorelai, and Humphrey caught up with them. After this the march would be easy, since they were finally exiting the Great Forest, and once they were free of its grasp, they would be travelling through what was, essentially, their territory. Tir had learned that so many able-bodied fighters from the central-east region get caught in the rebellious fervor that the area had no choice but to line up under their banner—their husbands, wives, children, brothers, and sisters were practically all in the army now and not throwing in their lot with them would be pointless stubbornness. They hadn’t just gotten many troops from Kaku, Seika, Kouan, and the many villages—they had won them. As the army started funneling into that area, those who lived in those towns begged leave to see their families and tend their farms. After they received the news the scouts brought them, they were all granted permission.
What they learned from the scouts was that the castle was safe for now and the presence of Imperials was yet an uncomfortable rumor—but many of the crops had failed. They simply hadn’t had the manpower to harvest them all after unusual weather had led to an early crop. They had to get back fast—and yes, anyone who could was welcome to go home and feed their selves. So the numbers slowly lowered to about two-thirds of the people who had started the journey as many got back home under oath to heed the call when it came. Realistically, Viktor claimed, not all of them could be counted to come back again—especially not the young ones who had just seen battle for the first time. But the overwhelming fluke victory would probably bless them with a higher return of reserves than most armies could expect.
Viktor did indeed begin improving after his fever finally broke, though slowly, because he was being drug under by too many injuries and setbacks. He was lucid, at least, within a few days; by the time they reached Kouan, he was reliably on the mend. Lessons in politics began one he could sit up, and were at first more like rambles than lessons, since Viktor was still losing energy, and his train of thought, easily.
“The first thing we’ll need to worry about is Shasarazade and General Shulen,” he said once, interrupting himself as a thought occurred to him, “which is also why Matt started acting like a paranoid fool the second we had our first victory, by the way. A good ship will only take two days to travel from Toran to Shasarazade, maybe less. She would be Gregminster’s quickest and most effective way of striking back at us, and I’m not totally sure why they didn’t send her to raze Toran immediately. I’m fairly sure she’s there, since they’re keeping her in reserve right now, and they love making her do the grunt work.”
“Is that so?” asked Tir incredulously, remembering the devastatingly poised and willful General he had once hated to see standing broomstick-straight and flocked by attendants in the foyer. She would spot him through the banisters of the staircase and upper balcony; sometimes she would wrinkle her nose before she caught herself.
“Yeah. She hasn’t proven herself in the eyes of the old guard sitting on their thumbs in Gregminster. Yeah, her mother was something else, she was a highly respected General, but she died younger than she should have too and never got her full honors; Sonya is a child to them and she hasn’t had the chance to do much yet. A few easy victories would at least give her the chance to move forward, so it must be something serious holding her back. Or maybe she’s on the way and we just don’t know it yet.”
“She’s already a Great General; how much farther forward can she move?” Tir griped.
Viktor chuckled scratchily. He had to break off his rambling of a lot of coughing and throat-clearing at that point. “She inherited the position without much of the respect or trust her mother had. She has a very long way to go.”
Tir sighed, uncomfortably familiar with the feeling. “Do you think she’s a threat to us, then?”
“Oh. Yes. Hell yes. Sonya’s a five-foot tall death sentence at this point. The navy is huge and the Empire hasn’t been doing shit with it except border control and unfair taxation. They would love to sink their claws into something and they outnumber us probably two to one, at least. She’s exploiting a loophole perhaps without meaning to—they don’t respect her yet or want to give her a huge force, so they give her the navy, which they undervalue, and is a huge fucking force. That’s going to be fun to maneuver around.”
“Is she… the biggest danger we face, then?”
“Not remotely!” Viktor laughed. “Oh hell, not remotely. Yeah, for sure, most of the fighting force of the Empire in concentrated in the hands of the major generals and Barbarossa actually keeps a pitiful force for himself, one that won’t mobilize, but Gregminster itself is so fucking well-made that an actual invasion would leave us wandering, starving, and waiting to be pinned outside the walls. As for the generals themselves? Kwanda was the one I was least worried about and he still could have pulverized us if we hadn’t been lucky. Most people are most bed-wettingly terrified of Teo and his cavalry, and yeah, he would probably wash his walls with our blood as we stand now, but those are people who forget that Kasim Hazil had been a nearly unstoppable bulwark defense for the Empire for half a century now and I’m convinced that I would personally bounce off of him like an arrow shot at a mountain if I were to go head to head with him. No comparison, no one close, no contest, at all.”
“…Okay,” said Tir. “So, what about Milich?”
“Milich Oppenheimer is perhaps the single person in the entire empire I would like to see across the ring from me least. I’d have to think about it a little more to be sure, but I’ve thought about it a lot .”
“No shit?” Tir asked, surprised.
“Maybe some shit, but not a lot,” Viktor reflected. “I honestly think General Hazil is the person I would least like to fight army-to-army, since he’s been granted the most and best troops and is a fucking respectable fighting mind besides, but I would like to be person-to-person in a room with Milich Oppenheimer the least. Yeech.”
“Why?” Tir asked, baffled. He had been person-to-person in a room with Milich an uncountable number of times. He was reasonably sure he and his dad were friends—like, they liked each other as people and would voluntarily choose to spend time with each other, though they instead seemed to be swamped with work and politics all the time. A day with Milich, in his memory, was a day he spent with musicians, painters, and embroiderers, dazzled by jewelers and lace-makers at their clattering looms, while his father and Milich paced outside in a well-tended garden, waves of pink, flowering bushes and white crawling vines on statues of The Queen and her lord attendants, practically tossing papers at each other, ranting, arguing, making their points inaudibly through rose-pink stained glass windows. Tir would get short glances of his father rubbing tired eyes while Milich gestured maps in the air, or his father expanding on something in sharp, small, understated mannerisms while Milich glowered, lowering his eyes. Now he wondered if they were usually fighting, like he once thought, or if they were so frustrated at enemies that weren’t in the room that it just looked like a fight.
And as for being face-to-face with him, Milich was his favorite among his father’s co-workers, or friends, perhaps. Fuck flattery, fuck presents, fuck ‘seeing such potential in him;’ Milich never spoke to him like he was a child.
Viktor had his hands clasped and his eyes far away. “Well, I will mention that he’s a creepy son of a mother, but really… it’s that he’s a long-term planner. And an independent one. I don’t believe for a fucking second he’s loyal to the crown. He’s been building his own power base since he was allowed his first position. But he’s been playing like he is loyal for a long time, and convincingly, at great cost to himself. I don’t know what he wants. Of course I’m uncomfortable around someone I can’t read.”
Tir found himself getting more annoyed than he thought he would. “…Have you ever met him?”
“Ha?” asked Viktor.
“Have you ever met him? I have. He’s not unreadable. He’s pretty straightforward. He’s just a private person.” This was, almost word for word, the opinion of Teo, which Tir was reciting.
Viktor looked at him evenly, consideringly. He tilted his head, a minor acquiescence. “You’re right. I have not met him.” He waved his open palm at him, curling his fingers. “You remember any hints or clues about what his long-term goals or actual political loyalties are?”
“He’s as loyal to the Emperor as the rest of them,” Tir stated flatly. “They love him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you the fuck know them?”
Viktor tensed, expression growing dire. Tir, who was controlling his fucking temper, waited for him to speak. “No. I don’t. But…”
Tir really wanted him to finish that fucking sentence. He did not. Instead, he remembered the point he had been making—castle defense. He summarized that they would probably be facing a sudden, brutal attempt at extermination in the near future. He figured they would pick Sonya for it, since there was no way they would pull Teo or Hazil from their posts defending the borders from actual, experienced armies and Milich was involved with an actually quite dire situation in the south—if they didn’t send a minor general instead. And all of that was, of course, unless… “…they decide to take a more subtle route instead.”
“Like what?”
Viktor waved a finger at him. “Sending someone to talk to you and seeing what price you’ll accept. No one would be surprised if you threw this, Tir. They would never trust you again, but they’d be willing to push it under the rug. Everyone would think that you did your best but we were outmanned and overwhelmed. Or everyone would let each other say that.”
“…What?”
“You could accept a price, make a bad call, let the army lose, and go home,” he said, shrugging. “You’re young enough to be intimidated and pushed around or even grateful to go back to what you understand—at least, they think you are. And I know y’all were favorites, you and your father, before you pulled this stunt. He could still get you out and he might try. And again, no one would ever knew you threw the match.”
Tir shook his head in disbelief. “What the hell do you think of me?”
Viktor smiled a smile that came up from his heart and all the way across his face. “Why he hell do you think I like you so much, man? I don’t think that of you.”
“You’d better not,” Tir huffed. “I would never sell out the army. That would be letting them die for nothing. That’s the one thing I can’t allow.”
“Oh, geeze,” Viktor said, beginning to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re just like Odessa,” he giggled, “but fun. I could never make her this fucking pissy. If you could see your face, man.”
“You—that was a serious—where I come from we take people to court for insults like that.”
“Holy shit,” Viktor laughed. “Kid. I don’t think you’re going to sell us out. I was warning you they’ll probably send someone with a price. Chill out.”
“You’re a dick.”
“Guilty as charged, but you’re precious.”
Tir was so mad that Viktor made a big fucking thing about him not being able to control his temper, because he was about to lose it. “Call me precious again, asshole.”
“You’re precious, sweetheart. You care so much and you’re so easy to wind up.”
Tir lost his fucking temper, but you can only lose it so much on a man who starts wheezing pink mucus when you punch him because his insides have been tenderized.
—
Master Kai resumed his teaching the morning after Tir won his fight. Falling into the daily repetition of training again was a blessing. Kai began simply, making him pound the basics back into his head since he had gotten sidetracked and shoddy—Tir remembered once being annoyed at being forced to do the same boring moves over and over, but he understood the value now. Having something basic and rote expected of him was a relief after all of the chaos, and being able to see himself actually improve at something instead of his efforts being lost in a wash of thousands moreso.
There were still few people who felt it appropriate to challenge him or bring him to the ring. He and Kirkis had talked about planning something staged for fun, but that had devolved into doing practice runs with each other instead of bringing it to the ring. Kirkis could do hand-to-hand impressively well for someone whose main strength was as a long-range fighter. His quickness with a simple knife made Tir want to get nowhere near him sometimes.
Sylvina and Rubi would usually be there for the matches. Soon enough neither of them could resist getting up and trying their hand at it. Sylvina, he had been told (many times, by her incredibly doting lover), was a precise shot. With the knowledge that she was small and hesitant, she had been taught to target pressure points with quick, harsh blows. Because of this is was difficult to fight her; Tir would do nothing but deflect her because she didn’t really know how to scale down a blow, and when she hit, he folded over and had to recover. He was soon bidding to spar with her more in order to learn how to counter her style; it was the easiest way he was ever going to find to practice fighting someone who wanted to kill him and be done with it.
Rubi made it clear he didn’t prefer hand-to-hand, but there’s no way to spar someone shooting arrows at you. When he fought, he fought dirty. A quick boot to the stomach followed by an elbow on the back of your neck is a good shorthand for ‘yes, I really do work as a mercenary and illegal goods smuggler.’ Weirdly, that made him easier for Tir to fight than the others; he had been taught how to overcome a big, angry, aggressive man who wanted to hurt him, not a small, delicate woman in the same position as himself. Rubi would come at him like a boar, and Tir knew how to handle a boar. Handling a bird, however, gave him some trouble.
He gave them one fuck of a shock, however, on the day when he was sick of listening to Kirkis and Rubi give him shit about not being able to fight a girl—in their own tongue, but he knew what the hell they were saying. Hli meant girl, and Sylvina rolled her eyes when they said it. Giigiha rauhi was what they said when he slipped up or got hit by Sylvina, and it was clearly derisive; and then they would play on the words aiti , which was a pain response, loor , too bad, fitais ii anua , you’re useless. If they were really making fun of you, they drug out their words, usually the first syllable; it was really bad if they but it off after one and started laughing. Kirkis and Rubi were howling as they sat on the fences, Tir was frustrated, Sylvina was getting annoyed; none of them expected him to snap like he did.
“ RESHANUA KHAK REIIFI,” he barked at the men, still instinctively guarding his back with his staff as he whipped around to face them; ‘give me a fucking break.’ “Are you really that proud that the little hli gives me more trouble than the both of you combined?? Stop acting like a dick and help her out, Kirkis, you’re better than this when you don’t have this rauanta egging you on.”
They all stared wide-eyed at him, totally gobsmacked that Tir had been figuring out their words by listening to them, as if they hadn’t done the same thing for his. Sylvina had her hand over her mouth but a bright giggle in her eyes. Rubi started falling of the fence with his laughter at Kirkis turned red, oozed off of his seat, and sheepishly got ready to do his job and help his lover out when she was floundering.
“Hey, don’t repeat what Rubi says,” he eventually whispered to Tir, still a little pink. “It makes you sound… he speaks roughly, you know? When you say ‘ reshanua khak reiifi, that’s lazy speaking; it should be more like reshuanua kha ak reiifi … and that’s the sort of thing you don’t say at all to… well, anyone you don’t want to start a fight with.”
“Alright, teach me better,” Tir replied.
Kirkis really didn’t have a choice, unless he wanted to listen to more than one Rubi.
He approached Luc with the thought of trying to get more runes onto his army, especially his officers. Luc enthusiastically agreed. He cautioned Tir that no one else would get quite the same benefits the two of them received from their runes, since necessarily all other runes they could provide are weaker. He talked about types and predilections, ways to discern what kind of rune a person would most take to, what to worry about when it came to pitting rune against rune—then he took his hand and made the air whisk around their feet and the world pitch upside down around him. It swerved and came full circle and Tir took a dizzying step backwards, and his eyes swelled as they adjusted to dimmer light.
Luc was already kneeling to pull something out from under his bed, uninterrupted in his speech. He was in Luc’s bedroom in Toran castle without a second of time lost or a step taken.
Viktor and Mathiu and Lepant had decided they couldn’t trust Luc to teleport for them—there was no reason Tir couldn’t have Luc take him places anyway.
Huh.
Initial musings were cut off when Luc wrenched a full wooden chest out from under his bed, carved in a strange, blocky style he didn’t recognize and a wood he couldn’t immediately place. It occurred to him under conscious thought that he had a hard time placing or recognizing most everything Luc had that was his own possession. Luc popped open the lid through a mechanism Tir didn’t quite catch and revealed that the whole trunk was filled, at least three-quarters full, with glittering runestones.
Tir knelt down, eyes full of the sparkling and ears with the humming. Having so many stones together had an intoxicating effect, like they were emitting shimmering smoke. Luc grinned, picking up one and handing it to him.
Tir took it with his left hand instinctively, but didn’t feel anything odd. He passed it from finger to finger, curiously, and saw that it had no markings. “Is it being used?”
“No. Look more closely at it.”
When Tir pulled it close to his face, he could finally see it—tiny spiderweb cracks through the middle of the sphere, invisible from most angles but shimmering like the edge of a snowflake when he caught the light on it. “It’s broken.”
“Most of these are dead, or shattered, or vacant. Maybe some of them are in use but divorced from their magic, but most runes can’t survive like that. They’re just not strong enough. People give these up like they’re useless.”
“Are they useless?”
“Well, they can’t be used as the runes they once were, but…” Luc detailed various uses that honestly sounded a bit useless to Tir, or difficult, or esoteric, but he let him go on. The runes and rune pieces clattered together, and Tir noticed that they usually moved when they were a few centimeters away from Luc’s fingers, before he actually touched them. “…but you can feel the energy with having so many ‘dead’ ones, right? And besides, I have a few live ones here. Some weird ones I haven’t really got a use for myself, since mine’s better. Here, look at this.”
Tir let him hand him another rune, switching out for the dead one with a twirl of his fingers. Honestly, it was overdone, but still cool that he could move things without touching them. Tir was pretty sure he wasn’t even trying to show off—it was just a safety measure for not bothering his own rune.
This one had magic in it. Tir could see its runic symbol floating inside, shivering, caught in the lattice of the crystal. When he turned it around it floated in and out of view, ducking behind something he couldn’t see, pulsing. It was a pale grey. “Those are letters, aren’t they?” He asked suddenly.
“Ah? What’s now?” Luc asked, having been distracted.
“The… shapes of the runes. Are they letters?”
Luc gave him a suspicious glance. “Actually… yes. There are theories that they are. But we don’t know all of the shapes, so we don’t have the full alphabet, so we can’t prove they are. People have tried to use them to write, and have produced some interesting texts, but… it’s still a theory at this point.”
“What does this one mean?”
“Rabbit,” said Luc. “It’ a beast rune. On a human it makes the bearer more evasive and able to skip around, like a rabbit. I figure you could use that for someone. Whoever you know that keeps getting their ass kicked, I guess.”
Kirkis. Tir nodded and put it in his bag. “What else do you have?”
Luc handed him something dark, as though the rune had inclusions, like a smoky quartz, lined with flaws. The rune symbol smoldered orange. “Killer. Heightens your senses, sharpens your sight in battle, helps you drive in a blade. Its aim is to turn wounding blows into killing blows. Good for a sword user.”
Viktor. Maybe he didn’t need it, but he could think of times when it would have made a difference. “What else?”
“I have a lot of wind runes, and earth runes, but those are mine… oh, this one is interesting.” He pulled out another rune with a little cyclone, rotating it slowly out of the trunk. “I was surprised I ever found one, they’re considered... well, a little malevolent.”
“What is it?” Tir asked, interested. It glittered red, brilliantly sparking, but only when turned just right.
“Violence,” Luc said after thinking, waving his hand back and forth a little. “I feel like there’s a better translation but I can’t think of it. Fills you with battlelust if you’re in danger. What I read is that it triggers itself if its bearer has been hurt badly and makes them go berserk.”
“So… it would take away your fear and inhibitions if you were really threatened?”
“Hmmm. Essentially.”
“But not… outside of battle?”
“I don’t think so? I think it only triggers itself if you’ve already been hurt or threatened. I don’t know if you can make it wakeup yourself or not.”
…Sheena. Tir accepted it. “Anything else you’re willing to part with?”
“Hm. Again, most of these are dead, or mine… but I should have a few…” He started picking them up and placing them inside the curved lid to sort through them all. It was like a crystalline rain, pieces, chunks, and perfect spheres of hail clattering together. “Ah, this is an interesting one… here.”
He passed him a small rune, noticeably small, though a perfect sphere, which shimmered pale white. It didn’t feel like much, a little spark; the rune was even small but very bright.
“You have a sunbeam rune or two, correct? Those are pretty common.”
“Yeah. They keep you upright longer. Really useful.” Tir turned it around, feeling like he liked it, unsure why. “Is this like that?”
“Quite a bit. You just don’t seem to have them here.” Luc tapped the top of it with a nail and it shimmered inside, like he made snowfall. “This is called starlight. It encourages mental soundness, like sunbeam encourages physical soundness. They’re a godsend for people who use a lot of magic.”
“Like sunbeam, but for a magic user?... Why not keep it for yourself?”
Luc raised an eyebrow at him and waved his right hand. “Breath is a friendly true rune, yeah, but do you think he’d let me sit a lesser rune right next to him? Fuck no. That’s still going way too far. And if I have to switch him out for something else, it won’t be for a little rune like that.”
Tir shifted the starlight around in his left hand, pondering. Cleo used a lot of fire magic, but was still more dependent on her knives, Sylvina had some kind of ‘different relationship’ with magic, Viki and Eileen seemed to both have magic to spare… “You said that you can use it with a different rune?”
“If the rune you have isn’t too dominating.”
“How about a flowing rune?”
“A flowing rune? Pfft, obviously. A water rune always folds under for something else.”
Mathiu.
Tir tucked the starlight into his bag. “But you couldn’t use a different rune with Breath… but you can switch him out with other runes?”
“I can,” Luc said with a little smirk. “Breath and I have an understanding because of a… special situation.”
“Do you.”
“Yes. So if I need to, I can switch him out with a few others he knows. I almost always have him in me, though, since I don’t like being without him.”
“So you have his runestone?...”
“Yes. I do.” Luc gave Tir a more suspicious glance, and Tir knew what he thought he wanted. “I put on a lesser rune if I don’t want it to be obvious that I have him, of if he needs to be hidden somewhere. There are people who want these runes, you know. Well, not yours.”
“Windy wants it.”
“Yes… she does.” Luc shuddered. “Crazy witch. Wait,” he said, snapping his fingers and returning to the trunk. “I just thought of something else.”
“But without Soul Eater’s runestone… how would I ever take her off of me?”
“Well…” Luc looked back and forth to him as he searched, breezes pushing things far out of the way of his hands. “Well, you can’t. You could, if… I mean… she wouldn’t agree, so, there’s nowhere to put her, and to my knowledge she doesn’t switch hosts unless… so… you kind of… can’t. I think. Oh, ah, I found it!”
Tir felt a little outside of his own head when he accepted that last runestone from Luc. Dizzy. His blood was surging fast. What had he just said?... “What’s… this, then?”
“That’s Minotaur. They’re not really rare but rarely used. It heightens the power and precision of an axe-wielder in battle. To find someone who will actually take an axe into battle when it’s so unwieldy and such an anachronism is rare, but you…”
Gremio.
“Thanks…” he whispered. “I’ll be on my way, then…”
“I’ll take us back,” Luc said, hurriedly, getting onto his feet. That was right, they were in Toran. Wait, yes, Luc could teleport him anywhere.
“Wait,” Tir said, pushing out his right hand to halt him.
He hadn’t been thinking. Luc jumped and leveled himself a foot in the air, tensing. Tir pulled his hand back, curling his fingers in slowly. Luc floated, bobbing with his breaths, as his expression of shock slowly sharpened. “Sorry. Ah… never mind,” he muttered.
“No. What do you want to say to me?” Luc demanded darkly.
“I was going to ask a favor, but I see it isn’t the time anymore.”
Tir could feel the air snake and swerve underneath him as Luc hesitated. “Well, what did you want?”
“I was going to ask you if you could take me to a few places… not now, but when everyone’s rested… for some reason, the others don’t want to use your abilities much, but I think they’re being short-sighted. But now’s the wrong time, anyway.”
Luc slowly settled down to the ground, turning his sharp gaze away, to something that wasn’t there. He tapped his foot. “Don’t they, huh?... To where, though?”
“Mostly enemy strongholds or Gregminster, so I could try to figure out what the enemies are thinking.”
The air went dead as Luc hit his forehead with his (left) palm and slowly drug his hand down his face. “I can’t stand you. The fuck? I can’t go into Gregminster for one thing, the power of Windy prevents me from doing it safely. I doubt I’ve been to any of the others, ever, so I can’t go unless—”
“You get a good picture of it? I could get those. There are endless paintings of Scarleticia and Shasarazade. They’re considered architectural marvels and there are depictions of them in the homes of the generals… which are in Gregminster, but I’m sure they’re elsewhere too. There has to be a way… but don’t worry about it.”
“The magic power in Scarleticia I had heard about before even the war started, and they’re of a strange nature that I haven’t had any experience in, so I would be hesitant, but…”
They pondered aloud with equal intrigue, skirting around the ridiculous possibility with increasing interest, and then caught each other’s eyes. He’s dangerous, they thought, at the same time. But…
—
“This is for you.”
Gremio startled when Tir appeared behind him without warning. Honestly, Tir thought Gremio had noticed his approach, but his habit of sneaking up unnoticed on people had gotten worse recently. He didn’t intend to do it, he simply moved quickly and quietly. “Oh, Tir,” he said, turning around with a hand and a bit of a blush on his cheek.
They had been… avoiding each other, in a way. They still went to bed at night, woke up together, and ate together, and Gremio still escorted him just about everywhere until it came time for Tir to run his errands, arms crossed and halberd strapped to him tightly, and yet they had been avoiding each other.
Since the kiss.
It was a ghost in Tir’s mind despite him not thinking about it. He couldn’t. It floated in his vision, and he could feel it, possessing his hands, and his mouth, and the soft inside of his thighs and his guts, but he could not think about it. It brushed over him and left him stupidly silent. In the end he had to be more concerned with keeping his closeness to Gremio, something had become more intense and yet more fragile in the months since they started the war, just as constant as it had always been and yet volatile now. In a way it reminded him of early years, ones he could barely remember, when he had been a child frustrated at Gremio’s controlling behavior and demands on his behavior and Gremio was an unannounced, uninvited member of his family, shoved on him while Tir was still reeling from the terror and upset of the kidnapping… but somehow, without knowing, he found himself clinging to him. It felt like… now it seemed almost as though his body still remembered the feeling of the rescue, remembered the safety of Gremio holding him tightly from above, keeping him sheltered from the destruction that raged around him, restoring him to home and security. Remembered it and still wanted it.
He supposed that was a little crazy. Still, that was what it felt like now. His life was changing again and he and Gremio were chafing each other, Gremio’s strict and overbearing behavior, Tir’s instinct to be uncontrolled, untracked, and unstoppable—and despite his need to be free he longed to feel it again, to feel guarded by Gremio, controlled, safe underneath him.
And so they had been avoiding each other, wishing it would all stop.
Tir held out a sparkling runestone to Gremio, keeping his face calm. Minotaur was brazen amber inside, crystal shot with glittering metal, and it felt hot. The magic in it was restless.
“Oh, I… really don’t know how to use runes, Tir,” Gremio fretted.
“It’s not like a magic rune. Well, it’s magic, obviously, but it’s a weapon-rune. It’s for someone who uses an axe. So…”
Tir felt himself flushing. Goddammit, why? He pushed minotaur forward to make Gremio take it, though he was hesitant. Still he started tossing it from hand to hand when he accepted it, brows furrowing and eyes light. “It’s lovely…”
Lovely? Tir wouldn’t call that one lovely, but he had learned there was quite a bit of personal preference in this sort of thing. “Well, let’s get it put on you.”
“Put on me?” Gremio bit his lower lip and let it spring back away when released. He had grooves in his lips from his teeth from how often he did that. Wow. Uh. “I’ve never had a rune on me before. I was told I have no magical aptitude. It probably won’t work.”
“Everyone has magical aptitude,” Tir argued, because Leknaat had said so in her book. “Some people have a lot of it, but no one has none of it. It’s part of being alive.”
“Ah, is that so…” Gremio muttered, sounding unconvinced.
“Let’s just try to put it on,” Tir insisted, taking Gremio’s arm. Gremio, of course, let himself be pulled along. “Who told you you couldn’t do it?”
“Sergeant,” Gremio replied quickly. “When I was a new private in the army. They did a test and he told me he had never seen a result as bad as mine.”
“Wow,” Tir said, before he thought. “Uh, I mean… He was probably trying to break you down, right, if he was training you?”
“Sure…” Gremio sighed, “but I think he was right, too. If you had seen how badly that went…”
All the same, he pushed Gremio onto the runemaster’s open wagon. Well, he was less of a runemaster and more of a runetinkerer; he had been in Humphrey’s army and had been depended on to switch around runestones and rune shards for a long time, though he was the first to admit he wasn’t the best. Generally he could make a lesser rune do what he wanted but fell short with really powerful ones. And he whistled in a way that didn’t make Tir feel uncomfortable when he handed him the minotaur, twirling it around in the light.
“Can you do it?...” Tir asked nervously.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said, squinting into the flickering bronze glow, “yeah, it’s just an attack rune, I just haven’t seen one of these before. Read about them. Monsters.”
“What do you mean?” Gremio asked.
“Well, it’s an axe rune, and axes really aren’t the weapon of choice right now, so they don’t make them anymore. This must be old. And since they’re old they’re clunky little beasts, give you immense power but leave you unbalanced and a bit shaky, if you don’t know what you’re doing. I suspect that’s why we don’t have many axe masters any more in the first place, so it’ll probably work great for you.”
“Oh,” Gremio said.
“So, let’s try it out,” the runemaster said, grinning. “Do you have a hand you prefer?”
“Eh?”
“Which hand do you attack with?”
“Um…” Gremio muttered, glancing back at his some-hundreds-pound, six-foot-tall, double-handed halberd.
“You’re right, dumb question. Usually I put attack runes on the right or left shoulder, depending, since it’s best to put it where the most of your attack force is coming from; magic runes can just be on the hand because magic doesn’t really have a center. Other than the mind, and no one lets me put runes on their foreheads.”
“Fancy that,” Tir smiled.
“For yours, though… You do attack from your shoulders, but both of them… how do you feel about it being on your back?”
“I don’t really care where it is?”
“Great, take your shirt off.”
Gremio reluctantly pulled his shirt off over head, reluctantly again pulled off his undershirt. Tir was already prepared to be politely turned away, but the runemaster asked him to steady Gremio from the front in case the procedure hurt.
“It will hurt?” he asked, alarmed.
“Most don’t but this one might.”
“Mine did,” Tir whispered.
Gremio’s eyes snapped to his. Tir had moved in front of him; now he was slowly, hesitatingly, lifting his hands to Gremio’s shoulders. He wrapped his fingers around him and Gremio impulsively rolled his shoulders back, trying to relax. He shifted to pull his ponytail over his right shoulder, and when his hair tried to fall back again, Tir pulled it forward himself. It was so soft—
They caught each other’s eyes instantly. While Tir’s breath stalled he saw Gremio’s pupils widen, flicker, look down and up again.
Shit.
Gremio tensed like he was about to undergo the rack when he felt the first tap of cool stone on his spine. “Are you—are you sure that’s the best place?” he squeaked. His biceps had bulged out in Tir’s hands when he went tense. Tir lost a couple of seconds to the sheer surreality of being able to feel how someone’s muscles are moving under their skin. Oh, damn, these were huge. How far down did they?...
Gremio had a hard time dividing his attention between the runemaster prepping him for a mostly unfamiliar operation and the boy suddenly rubbing his hands down his arms. “Uh—”
“I’m looking for the fattiest part you’ve got here,” the runemaster muttered. “So that there’s minimal chance of anything going wrong. Are you okay with it potentially being seen above your shirt?”
“Sure,” Gremio whined. He snapped his eyes dead forward at the wall when one of Tir’s fingers brushed down his collarbone.
You can feel people’s bones from their fucking skin, Tir was thinking. That’s freaky. Like, sure, you feel your own elbow all the time and you don’t think anything about it, but it’s your bone. Or your heel, or your shoulder. And you could just grab them and snap them at any time. That’s so fucked up.
“Alright, get yourselves ready,” the runemaster said. The cold stone was just below Gremio’s back, between his shoulderblades, pulsing. Tir’s hands wrapped around his sides, fingers between his ribs, to brace him in case something went really wrong. Gremio’s breath hitched in his throat horribly and Tir thought he was about to pass out when the runemaster made the first slow, cautious stroke of the brightly activated rune on his back—
Bright golden light. His eardrums popped. Then Gremio was wheezing and shuddering, head slumped against his shoulder, and the runemaster was standing behind him, staring, gobsmacked, at the blank rune that he was rolling around in his hands. Tir slowly curled his arms around Gremio’s back, feeling sweaty, distressed skin. His heartbeat pounded underneath it, sickly-quick. He felt for the rune—hot. Hot, like a live burn on his back, a brand just taken away.
“Shit,” Tir hissed, and pulled back. But in the next seconds the air cooled, all falling into place.
Gremio panted, shakily pulling back from Tir, struggling to pull his hair back into place.
“What, uh… what happened?” Tir asked.
“Well,” said the runemaster, continuing to search the empty rune for clues, “I think it likes you.”
“Unngh?” Gremio asked, bracing one forearm on Tir’s shoulder to turn around. Now he could see it—Gremio’s back, scrunched over, slick with sweat, and a still-glowing bronze rune in the dead center of his shoulders—the glowering head and horns of a bull, lowered to charge.
Damn. That looked good.
“What happened was… this does happen, just not often, alright? Usually you trace a rune onto someone carefully, line by line, so that it gets its full power, but that one just jumped on. Again, that happens. Usually only with runes that are really eager to get out. So, you should probably get out there and try to use it, man. Because I want to see it. And it wants to be used.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Here’s your shirt,” Tir said.
“Thank you, Sir. I’m not sure I should—”
“Come on, we’re near the end of the train, so it’ll be easy to find open space,” the runemaster continued, hopping off of the wagon.
“Alright,” said Gremio, pulling his shirt on over his head. ”I’m not sure that—"
“Hey,” said Lorelai, appearing out of literally nowhere, “what was that light?”
“Was that the minotaur?” asked Luc from Tir’s other shoulder.
“Lady of light,” Tir swore.
“Do I really—wait—”
“I have to see what that does,” Lorelai insisted.
“I—what?” Gremio whined.
Tir encouragingly pushed Gremio off of the wagon. He solemnly stepped down.
—
“Alright, you ready?” The runemaster asked.
“No!” Gremio screeched.
Somehow, in the time it took to explain to Gremio how to activate a rune, they had pulled in a crowd. Not a huge one, mostly people who knew Gremio and wanted a look at the new rune. That meant there were a lot of people in imperial piecemaile with colorful bandanas tied over pauldrons and coats of arms scratched out through the heart, but Tir had kind of grown fond of the spiteful ex-imperial look. Some people that he was finally recognizing as Gremio’s ‘guys’ had taken their places leaning on trees, laughing at Gremio’s shaky hesitance. “Come on, ‘Mio, give it a good shot,” one called.
‘'Mio’? Who the fuck—Tir took a deep breath. Whatever. Just the guys. Sheena had started calling him Tia, for some the fuck reason, and they had barely become friends.
…He really needed to figure out where Sheena had disappeared to for the past few days after their fight.
Gremio’s eyebrows knit together in annoyance. He finally waved his hand to tell everyone to shut the fuck up. The giggles turned into chuckles, stifled by hands.
Gremio took a deep, steadying breath. Then another. His lips moved inaudibly.
There was a very faint, dull glow under the loose knit of his shirt.
When he chose to attack, it was fast. His great halberd, heavier than most human, swerved over his shoulder as fast as if he were tossing on a coat. He pulled it back, took a fraction of a second to relax, spun his hands and swung it forward, with bronze light dancing down his arms—
He had chosen a thin birch tree to practice the minotaur on for the first time. He figured he would hit it with a good strike, and told everyone to keep a good distance away just in case he struck some loose branches down.
With a splitting crack, the axe cut through the tree like air. It whirled, screaming, a half-second and cracked again—an adolescent silver maple. Crack. Like it was nothing. In another half-second the axe was stuck deep in an older maple and Gremio was facing them, bent slightly forward, eyes vacant.
There was silence in the forest.
“Oh, shit,” Luc said in his left ear.
“Ah. Shit,” Tir repeated.
The young maple slowly sagged to its death, tapping Gremio’s ankle with a branch as it went down and up. He absentmindedly kicked it aside.
Because the good lady was watching over them that day, the birch fell backwards. She hit another tree with a shriek and made it bend and groan, and after the birds had flown away, the treeline was quiet again.
Gremio slowly struggled up to his full height. He weakly tried to pull his halberd out of the tree and fell onto his knees.
“I don’t like it,” he told the ground.
“Oh hell YEAH,” screamed the runemaster.
He was quickly swamped by friends and comrades congratulating him on the killer strike, as he stared blankly ahead of him, looking distressed.
Tir smiled broadly at him. Then he walked up to take him away; the crowd parted for him, and Gremio’s back was under his hand, warm, familiar, and so help him, no matter what he had to do to make it okay, it was going to be okay. They were going to stay like this, because they both wanted to, and it was going to be okay.
—
ORIGINAL NOTE
Goss/Minotaur is a rune that does not show up in the first Suikoden game, but in a few later games in the series. Killer rune is in every game obviously and it does heighten your Viktor experience. Violence shows up in every game after the first. Starlight and Rabbit I made up.
I remember having a long conversation with my spouse about what kind of runes someone who already has a true rune should be able to equip and how, I remember that we reasoned out a good answer, and I remember that I ditched that in favor of having fun.
Sometimes, when it comes to functionality, runestones accidentally become materia or dragoon stones or some other shiny magical item from some OTHER jrpg I played to death and life is just too short to nitpick it, ha ha!
Gremio was bent forward in front of him, head and strands of hair bunched into one hand so that his bare back was exposed. He insisted there was something wrong.
Tir let his (left) hand hover just over the dull rune. When not activated it was a color like old copper, a bit dull, a patch of discolored skin in the shape of a bull. One might almost think it was a stain except for the precision of design in its tapered horns. “There’s nothing unusual about it,” Tir insisted. “You’re just not used to having one.”
Gremio reluctantly let his hair fall back across his shoulders in disordered clumps. He anxiously rubbed the back of his neck; Tir knew he couldn’t feel anything. “It’s… it’s like knowing you have a tick on you and you can’t get it off.”
Tir giggled. “And we put it in the one place you can never scratch. I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
“How do you stand it?” he whined.
“Did it feel weird to use?”
“Yes. I can’t do that.” Gremio grumpily shuffled to his feet and reached for his shirt. It was easier to stand up in the wagon than it had been in the tent, since the vaulted wooden beams gave him more space. He did have to watch out for the swinging lanterns, however. “I’ve been practicing with this weapon all my life and I can’t do that. No one can. It takes more force than a human being has.”
“Well, a rune isn’t a human. It’s a different kind of creature.”
Gremio gave him an odd look after pulling his shirt down over his face. “It… it’s weird. Some of the things I do, I practiced for years to do them. It doesn’t feel right to just… suddenly be able to do something I never tried.”
“But weapon runes only accept bearers with high enough skill and familiarity… you’re only able to use it because you’ve practiced hard.”
“Hmm.”
“And it really liked you.”
“Hmmph.”
Gremio’s cheeks had dusted pink. It was really adorable. The warmth he felt in his heart was immediately followed by the pins of anxiousness and shame it had become associated with. Just don’t—just don’t worry about it , he told himself, breathing deeply. You got yourself confused and backwards on a stressful day and made up a spirit to haunt you, but you made it up, and it can just fade away.
“Oh, I wanted to ask you about something,” Tir remembered.
“Mmmhm?” Gremio nodded his head, his hands busy with dimming the lanterns for the evening.
“It was about something Matt said... a little while ago.”
Gremio seemed to immediately know it was something that had bothered him. “What was it all about?”
“He was… he said that he found it too difficult to contact me. Well, people in general find it too difficult to contact me. People don’t know where I am or how to get a message to me or get me to show up somewhere. I don’t really know what to do about that, though. I can’t just stay in one place so I can be tugged around; that defeats the point of leading the army.”
“Of course. The leader mingles.”
“But after thinking about it, I realized he was right… at least a little right. If people don’t know how to find me and don’t feel free to talk to me, that’s not really leading either.”
“That’s… important too.”
“So… I’m not totally sure what to do. I can’t just stay in the war tent all the time, right?”
“Well… no. But spending more of your time there wouldn’t be an awful idea. Most people of import generally run some version of court; not like the Emperor does, only for a few hours in your own home. I’m sure you remember your father doing it.”
“Yes… when he was at home. Though not every day.”
“He didn’t have as many demands on his time as some did. People… well, people knew he was much more likely to turn down a request than to help them. He’s a practical man and doesn’t like wasting his time.” Gremio got an amusingly uppity look when talking about how his father managed his affairs; Tir could see him explaining the same thing to an unruly lieutenant demanding to have their way. “But he did hold regular hours, he just usually spent them replying to correspondences, not entertaining in-person requests.”
Tir nodded along as he memories came back to him. As a child, he had just been told it was father’s work time, and he hadn’t thought about it… beyond sulking about being told that he still couldn’t spend time with his father even though he was finally home. “I guess I’ll have to do that.”
“It would be a good idea. Then people know when to bring up grievances with you without having to interrupt private time or worry about not being able to find you. And I can be your secretary, to make sure everything goes more smoothly.”
“My… what?”
“Your secretary,” Gremio said, finally settling down across from him. “I would go through requests on your time, decide which were legitimate, and respond—”
“I know what it is,” Tir said, grinning. “But you? A secretary?”
Gremio rolled his eyes at him, haughtily embarrassed. “I did it for your father. I can do it for you.”
Tir started giggling.
“What??” Gremio asked, voice pitching up. “It’s not like I can’t do it.”
“Gremio, no. I don’t want you to be a secretary. I don’t want to keep you at home at a desk like dad did. Or over a stove. Or cleaning the whole house. You’re supposed to be with me.”
“Tir…” Gremio whined. He was really turning red, and it was really very cute.
“Why would I get you some fancy battle rune if I wanted you to be a secretary?... and didn’t we talk about this already? I’m not going to keep you behind me…”
“I guess we did…” he mumbled, ducking his head. “You should probably designate someone to do it then… someone who isn’t Mr. Silverberg, since he seems to resent the idea.”
Tir shook his head. “I’ll think about it. I’m not totally sure it’s necessary… but you know what, it probably is. I’m constantly disappointed by how many letters, ledgers, and lists violent revolution involves. It sucks? I thought I was going to be… cutting off heads and eating children, I guess.”
Gremio sighed in exasperation, rubbing one of his eyes. “Tir…”
“I’m joking.”
“I know you’re joking…”
Tir giggled, and eventually, Gremio was forced to crack a smile, even if he looked like he really wished it wasn’t happening. He shook his head fondly, peeking at Tir from between his fingers. “Young master, what are we going to do with you?”
Something about the old appellation (and equally old admonishment) made his heart beat. Or maybe it was the love in Gremio’s soft eyes. “Hey,” he said, not totally sure what he was going to say next, “Dad made you do everything, huh?”
…that probably hadn’t been the smartest thing to say.
Still, Gremio didn’t look as distressed by the sudden question as he thought he might. His face did fall a little, and he did sigh. His fingers curled together and apart as he looked into another place. “No… I did handle all of his home affairs. He had others who took care of things for him on the ground. Grenseal’s been there for a long time, he’s essentially you father’s secretary while he’s away on campaign, which is most of the time. And an actual lieutenant too. He certainly isn’t at a desk. Alan, too. I couldn’t go a day without a letter to and from one of them when things were rough. If things were really bad, it would be constant correspondence with them from whatever edge of the world your father was antagonizing to Gregminster and back, and forth, and back… what are they saying in the capitol, Gremio, what’s the feeling in the palace, what do they say in the houses of the other Generals; ” He used an up-scale Gregminster accent to mimic the officers; “I don’t know, I’ve been boiling soup stock for three hours! Oh, and fending off some fool who won’t get it into his head that General McDohl cannot speak with him because he is not in the country , and getting constant updates from our contact with General Hazil about a dire situation that changes every five minutes, and trying to keep a child from killing himself by jumping out of a tree, and why he’s gotten it into his head that he can do that, I don’t even know!”
“I thought I could fly.”
“He thinks he can fly! Yes, between the flying child, the demands on my attention, the expectation to give orders as if I am the General just because you don’t have the patience to wait two days for a letter, and the soup, how am I supposed to… well, what was this about again?”
“I… I don’t know. I just thought I’d let you talk.” Tir shook his head as Gremio huffed. “You had that much responsibility?”
“Well… people as important as your father are expected to have a presence in the Imperial court and the society in the Capitol, but your father in particular was hardly ever there. You have to keep up appearances, there was no lady wife to do it for him, no firstborn son old enough… the head of household was considered good enough, though they mostly wanted me to bow my head and say yes to whatever they wanted while your father wasn’t there to butt heads with them. As if I would. I wasn’t a courtier pulled in from a house of country nobles to spend my master’s money and act big while his back was turned. I was there to get his business done right and if some hotblooded dime-a-dozen from-General-whomever lieutenant thought I was just a butler he had to go through to get his way, or some lazy noble cousin who just wanted a cushy job and no accountability—well!”
Tir was smiling from ear to ear. Hell, Gremio was fantastic when he got fired up. The single-minded stubbornness and fierce-eyed willpower reminded him of nothing more than a young mother who knew there was no opposition strong enough to keep her from getting her way for her children. That was—loyalty. This was what they called loyalty. Going so far out of his way to make sure Teo’s affairs were managed just as he wanted, no matter how long he was gone… Gremio truly adored his father.
Tir didn’t think he had ever loved his father that much.
He began to wonder if he had ever loved his father at all, and that question hit him hard and fast, scrambling in the aftershocks to search for the memory of a feeling which sensation he could not define or recall.
It was a pretty heavy shock for the middle of a causal conversation. It didn’t have time to sink in all the way. “Well. You were pretty seriously underestimated, huh?”
“Not being able to walk made a pretty poor first impression on a lot of people.”
“Well… you remembered how to do that eventually.”
“Which made it that much easier to throw people out.”
“You did not throw people out.”
“Once.”
“Who?”
An impish grin cracked its way onto Gremio’s face, a plate slowly breaking despite his effort to hold it together. “General Oppenheimer. Piss drunk and deliberately ignoring the Master’s order to calm himself. It took both Pahn and I and he had a scratch on his face from His Grace smacking him for a week.”
“No way.”
“Ask him about it. He’ll go white as a sheet, I promise.”
“Well, shit,” Tir laughed. “I hope Milich doesn’t remember it.”
“As I said, he was stinking drunk. I doubt he does. Heavens if I know what even caused it, I didn’t dare ask. I even remember your father wobbling in the snow on the porch, trying to look as soberly disapproving as he could. Goodness, I shouldn’t say something like that…”
“Where was I??”
“Oh, we had shuffled you off for the night, I can’t remember…”
More time passed than they should have allowed for remembering, swelling passing the time in the past. It was later than he was usually sleeping now by the time they found down to a bittersweet silence; it was a hard time to remember now. It was hard to skirt around the pain of losing it all so harshly. Even remembering the Gregminster house as it was in midwinter, lanterns a sweet soft yellow inside of the frosted white window panes, white snow adorning the fence and the pitches of the roof…
The answer of where they both slept was answered as awkwardly as it had been answered for the past week. Gremio no longer dared try to sleep outside, but Tir no longer dared to try to sleep right beside him; they made beds on either side of the wagon and said good-night.
—
(Tir had a dream that night; a strange dream, certainly not worth recounting. The reader will understand the necessity of documenting some unsavory details to further the cause of properly recounting a war story, which by nature must be unsavory.)
Teo’s mansion in Gregminster was beautiful in midwinter; the hanging lanterns glowed soft yellow inside of the frosted window panes, white snow adorned the fence and the pitches of the roof, and Tir was allowed to have a fire in his own room now, fierce and hot, vibrant in his eyes as he lay in bed. Father could trust him with becoming a soldier, father could entrust him with a goddamn fire. What was he going to do, jump in?
But he was not old enough to be a soldier yet. He was a child. The quilt with the scent he could remember was snug around him, but he couldn’t get it around his feet, and then his shoulders, and then it was half off; he was restless. Footsteps paced outside in the halls. Laughter and the sound of glass; what were the grown-ups doing? They would glower and turn up their noses if they ran into their party; Gremio had to come put him away somewhere so he wouldn’t bother the important men in their doublets and hats with their wives in red dresses on their arms. His fire was hot and vivid; the red coal heat was in his eyes and searing on his temples as he sat and stared into it. The snow gathered outside…
He heard a strange sound, a sound that made the hairs on his arms prickle. It was something he didn’t hear here. The crackles of the fire, the whispers, logs breaking like bones, sparks flying away. For a second he could see puddles of red blood on the hard dirt and trodden grass. His father’s guests—
He heard the sound again. Human, it was a human sound, but it—didn’t belong. It shouldn’t be here. Like the sound of the human body when broken, you always could hear it, but you should never have to—but no, it was… it was only a sigh.
He was standing at his door, listening. The coolness of the hallway outside—the stones were under his feet, the floorboards, cold with winter air. The glass windows kept most of it out, but not all of it. The hallway was quiet, the lanterns were snuffed out for the night, the guests were all gone; the patient moonlight peered through the glass, white on black, a hand of five fingers petting through the five windows lining the hall. One by one he passed them by; the moon smiled every time. It was a sigh—a woman’s sigh. Was it…?
Oh, gross. Was it his father and Sonya? But in his own house, he had never—and no one had ever confirmed their relationship to him, they only whispered, with their glasses clattering and their wives on their arms—he heard the moan again and he knew it was—the last door at the end of the hallway, his father’s room, a door always shut and cold behind, never used. Only Gremio went in, to clean—
He didn’t want to open the door, but his hands were opening it. He seemed small, he looked up from the floor. The room was cold inside, nothing but white moonlight spread on the bed, her pale arms wide open. No, it was his father—and he didn’t want to see—with a body just like his own, but a man’s body, full shoulders and a tired, stooped back, his hair grown in on his arms and legs and his—why hadn’t Tir--?
No, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to see. His father had Sonya laid down on his bed, her pale arms slowly slipping up his back to caress his shoulders, long fingers tickling the nape of his neck, the very edge of his hairline. Her leg hitched suddenly up his father’s thigh, slipping to the side for him to—no—her blonde hair was disorganized on the pillow, tangled, she was half-buried in the soft, dusty blankets, but she had so many scars—
Gremio
Gremio’s hand crawled shuddering up his father’s back—his thighs—
No, no, he didn’t want to see . The moonlight wavered. Teo rubbed his hands up Gremio’s ribcage, finding a weak place under his arms to hold his down—disabling—Gremio revealed his pale throat, bejeweled with bruises, as he rolled his head back. Submitting. NO. One hand trailed a greedy path, fingernails enticing, up the tight muscles of Gremio’s chest to touch that pale throat, and Gremio arched his head further back to give him whatever he wanted. Tir felt his heart jump and squeeze when Teo’s thumb rubbed over Gremio’s throat, the place where he breathed, the soft skin just under his chin, the curve of his cheek, fingers dancing over his lips, Gremio kept his own hands pinned down, curling into the bedsheets. He wouldn’t—
Tir was forced to watch and fear as Gremio’s eyes shuttered tight in pain and his teeth seized his lower lip, because Teo forced their hips together—shit—no—his lips rolled away from his teeth as he started panting, his shoulders and sides tensed up, red muscles flinching visibly under his white skin. Teo pumped himself at him, no, into him, oh fuck,
It was Gremio moaning, low, soft, undefinable as a woman or a man, his heavy painful breaths exhaled when Teo pushed himself into him and out of him, fingernails screwing up the bedsheet like claws, his thighs straining to open in a way a man’s won’t allow. It was Gremio’s blonde hair strewn over the pillow, smelling so vividly like him, tangled up from being grabbed and pulled through greedy fingers that wanted so much more. Gremio—it was Gremio with his beautiful body being caressed by Teo’s fingers, his nerves too overblown by the pain to mind them taking this, taking that, pinching and grabbing and claiming, exploring his ribs, his thin collarbone, his tense neck, his muscled sides, curving over his waist and his back, the beautiful bare expanses of pale, sweaty skin. Teo grabbed his hips to steady him so that he could fuck—no—his mind swam away from it—his eyes snapped—
Gremio was looking right at him. His head was laid sideways on the pillow like his neck had been snapped. But his lips were fluttering with the panting, the breath that made the blonde hairs draped across his face flutter. His brilliant eyes were in him, beautiful green, shimmering. He shook with the force of Teo—his eyes, oh, fuck. They were wide and bright and such a beautiful color. He was looking right at him.
He slowly wrenched a sheet up to his face as the pounding grew fiercer. His hips slid up the bed. A twisted expression, one of sick, long-awaited satisfaction, screwed his eyelids close and the corners of his lips up, his beautiful eyes in hooded gaze slowly turned up to his oppressor. “Ah, ahh—” he panted, “oh, Tir—”
—
Fuck, NO—
—
Gremio was right on top of—
Shit, he smacked Gremio. Shit—
Gremio’s hands were clenching his shoulders. He was saying something. Tir couldn’t hear him over—the sound?—he looked scared. It was dark in—
The wagon. Their wagon. The lanterns were swaying softly from their hooks. Soul Eater was glowing red. Gremio’s fingers smoothed slow circles in his shoulders; it felt nice, he could hear him now, he was saying “breathe, just breathe.”
He was the one crying. Himself. Tir.
He was crying. Oh, fuck, pull it together. He rubbed his shaking hands over his eyes. No, Soul Eater wasn’t glowing, of course she wasn’t, he never woke her up. Gremio was wearing his dirty bedclothes, they needed to do laundry but they were so busy, right. Right. The soft quilt on his lap. Lady Leknaat’s book at the bedside. His staff, Gremio’s halberd, stacked up by the door, their boots and bags and a pile of dirty clothes…
He rubbed impatiently at his eyes as the hitched breaths slowly evened out. Relaxed. You were startled. You were just startled. You had a bad dream about—
“You had a bad dream,” Gremio was telling him. “It’s alright.” He looked more scared than Tir did.
“Oh, Gremio—” Was that him? He moved to hold Gremio, and he shouldn’t have. Then Gremio was holding him tightly, wrapping his warm arms around his waist. And the voice that told him to stop indulging in a vice he couldn’t afford was barely a strangled whisper. He couldn’t help it. Tir felt so afraid and Gremio felt so comforting. He clung onto Gremio and they rocked each other silently, fast against the night.
“What was it?” Gremio asked.
Fear filled his eyes, he could feel it welling up. “I—I—” he looked down, overwhelmed with what to say. “My father…”
Pain filled Gremio’s eyes. “Oh…”
Tir miserably shook his head. He couldn’t…
“A bad dream is nothing to be ashamed of,” Gremio whispered to him, gently touching his cheek, then pulling his hand away. “Especially when you’ve suffered so much in such a short time… no one would have the right to judge you. Please, don’t worry about it.”
But Tir thought some bad dreams were something to be ashamed of. They came from you, didn’t they? He was the one who made it.
“Do you want to try to sleep again?”
“No…” Tir shook his head. “No, I… I don’t know. I just want to… I don’t know.”
“Then…” Gremio’s eyes scanned the room, pinched and anxious. “Then let’s get some tea… let’s sit by a fire… there won’t be many people out. You can relax… just relax for a minute.”
The fire sounded nice.
Tir nodded in agreement, and Gremio got his coat and his shoes for him. They went out together, with Gremio’s arms guiding him on his shoulders, and Tir knew how it made him look, but he just couldn’t resist.
He felt weak, but he felt more grateful than weak. The fear of the moonlight, of the dreams, of his mind—it could be inside him, and Gremio could be outside, safe.
He had to keep him safe.
Tir was more or less handed a hoe and a wicker basket when he set foot in his castle again after months of trial almost beyond endurance and told to get reaping. There was a ridiculous amount of land to weed out, till, replant, resoil, even burn up and restart.
Honestly, it was such a fucking relief. No, he had never really done gardening or farming. Yes, it felt like heaven after what he had been doing.
“Fucking Lady,” Mathiu swore when they first took a look over the fields as they were, “burn it all.”
“Was that a request to the Lady or a suggestion for further action?” Viktor asked. “Because we can burn it all.”
Mathiu put his forehead in his hands and sighed.
“By any chance,” Tir asked, poking at a dry vine that looked like it was meant to grow grapes, “where were the specialty crops we planted to try to pay back Antei?”
“You’re poking them,” Mathiu continued miserably from behind his hands.
“After the flooding there was only so much we could do,” explained an exhausted-looking but upright Tai Ho. “Yeah, everyone worked hard, but we would have needed a whole platoon to overhaul the fields and rescue the more particular crops. We cut our losses and focused on growing what we needed to feed y’all.”
Mathiu was nodding. He wasn’t mad, he was just disappointed. “And we have enough harvested for the months of deep winter, and I genuinely thank you for that. But we are now deeply in debt. Again, no fault of you or your men. But we are deeply in debt.”
“With who?” Tir asked, standing up. “Who actually organized the trade? I know we’re popular with common men in the Antei area, but who can actually set up the trade agreement and decide how much it’s worth?”
Mathiu pulled his hand down his face and kept the grimace. “The one I signed a paper with is one Dame Esmeralda de Boule. She’s another whose family were nobility before the area was domesticated by the empire, part of a small circle of old-money ex-aristocrats who sit around and act like they haven’t lost everything but their jewels, to my knowledge. They in particular never made any secret of disliking the new order, which is why I thought to contact them. And it did work, but…”
“Since she has a lot of money anyway, maybe she’ll pardon us?”
“The more money a man has, the less he’s willing to forgive a debt,” Mathiu denied, “and a woman moreso. We’ll be paying her and her faction somehow. Worst case scenario is she’ll take the floor out from under us and tell us to take it up with the boss.”
“Who is?...” asked Viktor, already wincing.
“Who do you think it is?” Mathiu sighed.
Viktor tossed his head back and groaned miserably.
“Milich Oppenheimer,” Valeria reasoned. She had started ripping dead plants out of the ground.
Tir shook his head. “How can he be leading the faction that opposes the empire and also be… well, Milich Oppenheimer?”
Viktor pointed a finger at him, slowly rolling his head back down. “That’s what I was telling you. He’s someone who’s playing the field. He wants to be ready to receive a reward for loyal service if Sonya sinks the island and be ready to get the run of Antei handed back to him if we burn down Gregminster. If everyone remembers favors, no one feels right calling him out.”
“Alight, we don’t know that,” Mathiu sighed, waving an open palm at Viktor. “It seems to fit the facts we have on hand, but we don’t know that.”
“Look, the facts are these,” Viktor argued. “He runs everything in Antei. We know this because no one from the Antei area will make a choice without regards to him or his faction. And his factions runs around loose form the most pro-Empire Scarlet Guard to literally here, making deals to feed us and arm us. They all swear allegiance to him and the Empire, not just the Empire, and they’re playing the field. He’s using hands. He obviously is.”
“And I’ve already agreed with you that this is the most likely explanation for the chaotic action we have seen in the Antei area, but it remains—”
“So do we take up reparations on the level of Dame Esmeralda,” interrupted Tir, unwilling to let the conversation veer into a private scene between Viktor and Mathiu, who sometimes knew best opposite each other, “or on the level of Milich?”
Viktor made a bitterly amused noise in his throat. Mathiu winced. “Ah, whether what we just described is the case or not, it would certainly not be a good idea to try to make a deal with the General. Either he truly is loyal to the Emperor and he would react to us with violence, or he would be forced to appear as though he were and the result would be the same. Even if Dame Esmeralda is secretly entrusted with plans to undermine the Empire from Oppenheimer himself, that is, even if the most extreme possibility is true, well, we’ve been told to make deals with him through her. And in that case, and it would be rude to sidestep his request for anonymity in order to try to wheedle a better deal out of him. One I can’t imagine he’d be willing to provide, with even my limited memory of the man…”
“He’s not that bad,” Tir protested.
“Well, I wouldn’t know, I suppose,” Mathiu admitted. “He does cut a blood-curdling figure from afar. And if the opposite is true and we’re dealing with a true rebel in the form of Dame Esmeralda, it would be a high dishonor to betray her confidence.”
“Alright, I understand,” Tir acquiesced. “We’re cutting a deal with Dame Esmeralda. We can’t return food for food like we said we would; we’ll give her something more valuable to apologize for the inconvenience. The question is what.”
“If we had the direct funds, I would distribute them immediately,” Mathiu considered. “But we don’t. It would be the correct way to apologize to the people who really sacrificed in order to feed us; that is, the people of the Antei area.”
“War plunder would also be an acceptable apology, but most of it had to be distributed among our own troops;” Viktor continued. “It was the only way to pay them, especially the settled locals who essentially agreed to not do any wage work for a while.”
“Alright… so… we have to find something of equal value to a few months of food for thousands of people, with interest, by… when?”
“Spring,” Mathiu said moodily. “Spring harvest. Holding until Beltane would be pushing our luck.”
“And we’re not doing slaves. I’m pretty sure they still take them in Antei, but we’re not doing it,” Viktor grumbled with a firm handslash.
“Slaves?” Tir gaped.
“We can’t?” Valeria asked, deadpan.
“No, silly girl, all the slaves ran away, remember?” Viktor grinned.
Valeria snorted and went back to digging up dead plant matter. Mathiu shook his head in tired, unsurprised disappointment.
“Well,” Tir said, “how about tons of crazy dwarven weapons?”
Viktor barked with laughter. “Please. Let’s arm Antei with ridiculous firepower. Everyone will hate it.”
“Including me,” Mathiu shuddered. “Let’s please consider our long-term outlook. A powerful Antei is something no one wants.”
“For fuck’s sake, why?” Tir asked, genuinely confused. “Why do you all hate it so much?”
He received a medium-length lecture on the history of the Kunan state, whose capital was once Antei, and its historical role as a thorn in everyone else’s side, known for not picking a side and yet always picking a fight. At the end he still felt they were being unfair and untrusting, but he was willing to admit one thing. Milich Oppenheimer had one hell of an effect on people, and yes, whatever he did, it must be terrifying, to effect so many battle-hardened people. He just had no idea what it was.
—
Tir slept alone then. They had made a new room for him. It was down a long hallway, hidden in the back of the building up many flights of stairs, protected, secure, hard to intrude upon. It was private and dark.
Gremio slept outside of it in his own alcove, so that Tir was being guarded, but they did not have to sleep together.
It was for the best and he knew it. Sure, Tir would be protected; more importantly, Gremio would be protected as well. There was a locked door in-between the two of them. It was for the best.
—
There was no way around it—everyone had a lot of hard work to do to get the fields ready to be farmable for the next few years down the line. For mercy’s sake, the Liberation was not going to die because of starvation. Captured livestock soon proved to be a blessing both for improving the island’s somewhat skinny ecosystem and for long-term plans of security and wealth. It was not impossible that Antei might accept livestock and dairy in return for grain, after all.
More interestingly for Tir, he fully realized there was an entire fucking island around him where almost no one lived. Toran had once been inhabited, they said, by the Sindar; the Sindar are gone now. Humans were repelled by both the eerie feeling of the island, said to be the work of restless Sindar spirits, and the poor climate of the island for farming. It was possible, but a challenge pointless to undertake if you had the option of just settling on the opposite shore instead. And the island, though largely uninhabited, was huge; their army of several thousand essentially camped in a little corner of it; the rest were wilds.
And the wilds were wild. Creatures Tir had been taught were extinct or exotic were shot down by even mediocre hunting parties and brought back for dinner, their unique pelts marveled upon and treasured as part of the ever-expanding line of unique rebel fashion. Fanged deer with spots on their hides, ridiculously large badgers and white squirrels, water-lizards and water-snakes of a size he had never known with striped in blue and purple and silver, wild cats with great long claws and black tongues, a small, furry, striped thief that no one knew what to make of, storms of white butterflies like snow, predatory horse-like creatures that loped slow, giant humanoids with great horns that appeared only at night, small red birds and great golden hunting birds whose shrieks pierced the night; they even said the island had one great dragon, never seen except for its prints in the rocks, which split when it landed from flight. The predators were many; the hunters branched out into the wilds of the islands slowly.
The areas by the shore tended to be rocky. Inland they morphed into rocky grasslands, which turned slowly into sloping, golden hills, speckled by strange ruins and whisked with great storms; deep in the heart of the island one could find deep, shadowy caves overshadowed by strange, low-branching trees that hosted large blue lizards, many buzzing bugs, bright-eyed monkeys, and, many times, human or humanoid remains. They rarely traveled into these caves, they were simply too far away and had never proved to contain anything of use.
Luc, however, just loved them. Tir supposed part of it was the unusually high wind the center of the island suffered; strange for a rock whose shoes were so misty. He supposed part of it was his morbid streak enjoying the ancient ruins and their ancient dead. But it was also clear that he liked the solitude out there; it was pointlessly dangerous for people who had to walk to come out to those caves, but Luc didn’t have to. And if some of the strange, predatory horses, or the large badgers, or the great-clawed cat, or anything stranger approached him, he could simply leave again. They would, as people, probably never use the inside of Toran Island for anything, Tir reflected—as soon as the war was won, or lost, the victors would consolidate back into the civilized cities to run things. The ancient caves were experiencing another small span of time, like one they had before, of being seen by human eyes.
It made it a good area, in Luc’s eyes, to practice usages of ancient runes whose works should not be seen by human eyes.
It made it a good place, in Tir’s mind, to ask questions about things like that.
“What do you mean, I can’t take her off?”
Luc’s brow furrowed. He carefully didn’t remove his eyes from the book he was paging through. “Soul Eater?”
“Of course Soul Eater.”
Luc’s finger tapped nervously on the cover of the book. Hard-bound with thin wood. It was carved in a language Tir didn’t know, not even the letters. He had to accept Luc’s translations. “You can’t take a rune off of you unless you have a runestone to put it in… or another body to put it on. Or some other vessel it’ll accept. A basic rune can be tricked by a blank runestone and convinced to go inside, sometimes. Some will go into a weapon or another tool. Some can be transferred directly from person to person. All of this is usually impossible without an experienced runemaster, obviously. Someone who has even a little private magic in them. Ours… they’re not like that. You don’t trick them. They’re smarter than us. They want a human vessel. They will accept being passed on to a new host, but one they want, when they want them. They won’t be chained to a body that doesn’t match their spirit. They don’t even want to be in their runestones. They want… us.”
Tir contemplated what Luc said quietly. He did it because he really didn’t want to snap at Luc.
Luc gazed up at him with sharp eyes. “Well?” he demanded.
“So I have no way of taking Soul Eater off.”
“Unless you find somewhere else she wants to go. I’ve heard stories about her before. I’m probably the only person you’ll ever meet who has some idea of how she works already. But True Runes are the same in one way. They will only accept what they want themselves. We can’t make them do anything. What you should do is get to know her and see what you can entice her with.”
Tir’s stomach was hurting. He turned it around on Luc to keep it out of himself. “And that’s what you’ve done with Breath, then? Found something to ‘entice’ him with?”
“Breath is Wind. He likes to move. I found a way to get him to stay with me despite his desire to drift.”
“How?” Tir demanded.
Luc avoided his eyes. “I told you. I switch him out with other runes.”
“And put him back in his stone?”
“Yes.”
“You just said that they don’t like that.”
“He wants to keep me, alright? He knows it’s in his best interest to be undercover sometimes.”
“And how does that accomplish him drifting around?”
Tir could see the lie in his eyes before he made it. Suddenly, surprising even himself, he caught Luc’s wrist and pinned it to the floor. The feeling that had once scared them both out of their skin was not duller now, but more familiar, a jolt in his spine that could be depended on—already it was getting cheap for him to use it against Luc. “Tell me the—”
Luc had his hand snapped up before he knew what was happening. His right palm was clutched around his face like pale spider’s legs and his head was filled with a shriek.
“I could tear you into shreds by twitching,” Luc snarled.
Tir kneed Luc in the gut; an elementary blow he didn’t have a way to compensate for because the little shit was a magician of insane caliber with almost no physical fighting skills. Luc flinched and his hand clenched, but, wouldn’t you know it, Tir’s head was still intact. He flipped his hand away with his own right hand, bent it, and pinned it to the ground, letting the pain pulse in both of them. Luc screeched; Tir’s blood pounded quickly. “Tell me the truth , or—”
And then he let Luc go.
What—what—he had been filled with bloodlust, and then suddenly—suddenly, he saw the fear on Luc’s face, and it was gone. He didn’t want to be doing this—why had he done it?
It was a little too late to regret an outburst. The next thing he felt was his back hitting the stone floor and two hands clutching at his shoulders. Luc pinned him down alarmingly quickly and held up a hand to swipe—but he didn’t. Instinctively, they both wavered.
“Listen,” Luc whispered once, before his face twisted. Then it did. “Listen,” he snarled. “You want to know the truth? Fine. If you don’t like it, you’ll know what to do about it. You’re stuck with her. You’re stuck with her forever. You can’t take her off because she’s a cursed rune and she’s going to be stuck on your body, eating you up, until she kills you. You have the blessing of immortality because she’s a true rune. Like Leknaat has. Like I have. Like Windy has. You’ll never age, never die of disease, never feel your body go out from under you. You can only be killed or kill yourself. Your rune is the rune of death. That’s what the mark on your hand means. You are granted the power of death in return for death. You belong to her now and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it. She’ll try to kill you and everyone around you while you don’t age, don’t die, and it will never stop. Until you kill yourself, so go ahead if you don’t like it.”
Luc breathed raggedly while Tir stared at him.
In his head, he vividly saw how it would look and feel if he bucked him and clutched at his throat to choke him to death.
He didn’t do it.
Something slid into place in Tir. Staring at what you’re terrified of becoming does that for you.
He made himself lift up his chin and wait.
Within a minute Luc was sitting back on his knees, panting and gasping. Fascinated, Tir thought he looked like he was trying not to cry.
“How do you know all this?” He asked.
“What?...” Luc spoke in a small voice. “Leknaat taught me…”
“She knows more about this…” Tir pondered. “If there’s a way to circumvent it…”
“There isn’t a way to circumvent it, dumbass. They’re so much more powerful than us.”
“If anyone does know, it’ll be her. She talks about coming to mastery over the rune. It can be done.”
“That’s not what she… it can’t be done. You can’t control her. You can’t take it off. You’re stuck with her.”
“It can be done,” Tir insisted. “I know. Ted gave her to me. I can give her away. I just need to learn how.”
—
ORIGINAL NOTE
This was probably written around the time I had gotten far enough in playing Suikoden III to start getting extra attached to Luc but not quite far enough to understand his character in that game. I stand by the moodswingy bastard I wrote him as; the stress he is under is mind-crushingly phenomenal especially at his age (which is a number I have gone to the salt mines for and emerged more confused than when I started out but I decided he would be Tir's age for the purposes of this fanfiction and so Tir's age he is) and I'm writing him as if he possesses the knowledge of most of his own backstory.
I made up the description of Toran island on the spot to answer one question that had been in the back of my head: why doesn't anyone else live on that relatively large island in the middle of a well-populated area? I decided the answer was 'it was never really settled properly and has a bunch of scary endemic creatures. One of those scary endemic creatures is now ornery sorcerers.'
Tir would not have handled it so well, of course, if Luc hadn’t handled it so badly. Great powers of self-control and dignity are discovered in the presence of someone who has neither. The twisted face of a child already so many years haunted by a presence in his bones was a sufficiently correcting cautionary tale, for now. For as long as the optimism of the beginning of the story could bear him upward and on.
The easiest thing, naturally, would be to try to puzzle out the location of her runestone. Ted would not be able to help him. He quickly reasoned that the person who would be able to tell him the most about the rune was the person who had been hunting for it for a long time—and he was already on a crash course to meet her.
He would only have to be ready to face her when the time came.
—
As finances and future plans swirled around in the drinking-cup, more and more grew discontented with the Empire’s lack of action against them. Knowing that there were so many swords hanging over their heads and that none of them chose to fall was nerve-wracking.
Unfortunately, Tir knew what their plan was. A man disguised as an assassin gave it to him—his attack was powerful but missed egregiously, striking the wall. He was quickly chased off, leaving Tir rattled and with a note slipped into his shirt where the assassin’s hand had grabbed him.
The note was penned by his father.
It addressed him by his title as Commander. It reminded him that his rash and unconsidered actions had caused egregious pain and suffering to the people of the Empire, not only the many who had been killed, and the many mourning and destitute left behind, but the many more who now lived with the terror of being struck by him next. It pleaded with him for common sense—to consider that there was no way for him to win his war, and all he was doing before the hand of the Imperial Army crushed him and his men was causing more suffering for his own people. Let them go home to their wives before they all died, it said. It ensured him that his rage against the corruption in the Imperial Army and the usurpation of rightful power in the Imperial court were understood, even shared, by the sympathetic author. It was true that many of his concerns were legitimate, and he was mistaken in thinking the very people he fought were not also concerned about the sickness in their beloved homeland. Instead of fighting them, Tir should let himself be convinced to help them heal the sickness in the Empire together, instead of adding to their troubles by ailing them from another side. It implored Tir to think—think about what the right thing to do was, if he was really concerned about justice, equity, his own honor, and peace in the Empire.
It assured him that he would be treated with that same justice, equity, honor, and fairness were he to give himself up and come back to his father, who waited for him in the North. Make your way to me, it said—you are surrounded by real danger. It promised him that it would not have him fall into the hands of one who would let their anger overcome their sense of humanity.
“Instead,” it said, “let me handle your case—though you are a man of good sense and rail, I know, against the thought of being defended by one who loves you and will overreach his position to defend you—still I beg you to let me handle things. I have already found a way to smooth things over and ensure that few lives are lost—you need only agree to take the route of peace instead of violence.”
I will await you in Dunan, it said. It was signed with his father’s pen.
He kept the letter to himself for two days. Then he gave it to Mathiu.
What stung, of course, was that Viktor had predicted almost every word on the page. What stung was that he was not sure, he still as not sure, which one of them to trust, and that he was making this decision of dire consequences still not sure, not really sure, that it was the right choice. He remembers he had been convinced of his path to such a degree that he knew nothing would ever change his mind.
He couldn’t remember how or why when he read his father’s letter.
—
“This is disgusting,” Viktor complained when he read it.
“How so?” Tir asked, eyebrow raised.
“Disgusting?” Gremio squawked.
Gremio sat by his side in the conference room, like he always had. Viktor sat on his other side. Not really being at ease around either of them was disappointingly familiar, and just when he had thought he finally had all of this sorted out.
“The first thing he does is tear you to shreds for causing suffering and loss of life against a person who was hell-bent on ethnic genocide,” Viktor began, fingers tapping the table and breath not even a little finished. “He calls all of your military decisions stupid and shortsighted and rash even though our victory was staggering and we are still unopposed. I haven’t even gotten into the fact that he’s acting like he’s just rolling on his fainting couch about you having the INHUMANITY and GALL to make tough calls he himself has been making for decades in his capacity as a Great General. Thousands dead in Dunan, Teo. Thousands of civilians . That was you, stupid. That’s nowhere near comparable to approaching an enemy fortress, declaring a challenge, and then fucking winning. Motherfucker acting so appalled about someone making the tough choice to help innocent people in need from his lofty position as the fucking butcher of the lowlands. Damn.
“And if that isn’t fucking enough, after this bastard spends a page calling you a monster and an idiot, you know, once he’s got you torn down good and proper, he reminds you that he loves you and he’s the only one who will take care of you and that you can’t count on anyone else. Wow, I wonder what response he’s trying to evoke? Help me out with this one, Matt.”
“Panic and a need for safety.”
“Thank you, Matt! That’s a good boy.”
“Choke on it.”
“Later, you animal. We’re in the war room. Yeah, he’s trying to play on your good and rational terror of his own damn army so that you’ll be forced to take the solution he makes up for a problem he made up.
“And enemies everywhere? Where? Those mysterious enemies he talks about literally don’t give a shit about us. They’ve been letting us farm for a month! Look, the guys up top took a sigh of relief and leaned back when we cleared out Pannu Yakuta for them instead of making them get their hands dirty.
“What else? ‘I understand you, of course you’re upset, dear, but let the grownups do the thinking for you; oh, we’re mad, too, but you have to let us do nothing about it for you; you’re succeeding too hard, you’re making us look bad.’ Hugs and Kisses, signed, an obvious fucking trap. Yeah, go to his camp, be surrounded by his loyal men, take any terms he offers because you’re too scared to argue in a room full of his goons and watch your life as anything but Daddy’s puppet hitch a ride to Camarro forever. Aaand it ends with another pleasant reminder that he thinks you’re a bad person, just in case you got lulled into not feeling miserable by his assurances of tender love and care. Tir, if your dad was here right now, I’d slap his jaw off of his face.”
“Lady of Light,” whispered Gremio, obviously appalled.
“What, am I wrong?” Viktor challenged.
“No…” Gremio sighed, shocking Tir, “no, that would almost certainly be the result of accepting the offer, though…” He shook his head to summarize his dissenting arguments, whatever they might have been. Tir figured he harbored an argument about Viktor’s assessment of his father’s character, which, of course, he did too.
Or, he figured he did.
“The only important thing is we all agree that General Teo set a trap, specifically for the Commander, most likely at the behest of superiors instead of against their wishes, and that, most importantly , they probably thought this maneuver could win the war for them,” Mathiu rattled off, wrenching the conversation away from Viktor. “This is fantastic news. Do you realize that they think we’ll fall apart if they cut off our upper command ? They’re thinking like authoritarians and still don’t realize we work in autonomous factions—even now, they are still underestimating us, treating us like blind mice who will scatter after they cut off the head, and as a consequence have revealed they won’t take us seriously enough to crush us yet. They think this is a rebellious son’s attempt to climb up the hierarchy, not a true revolution of the dispossessed. They don’t expect anything, even after we led a fucking massacre against one of their top men. We have all the freedom to move we could possibly want. This is amazing!”
“Did you tell Viktor to choke on it?” wheezed Tir, because he had been holding his laughter back since.
“What—” for the love of the Lady, Mathiu blushed. He seriously blushed. “I…”
“He can be rough,” Viktor sighed, putting his chin in his hands.
“Stop,” groaned Mathiu.
Viktor winked. Tir snickered explosively.
“ Stop,” Mathiu insisted, doing nothing but causing more people to laugh. Valeria was snorting on Viktor’s other side, eagerly enjoying Mathiu’s embarrassment; the LePants were chuckling with identical scandalized but amused demeanors. Humphrey, as always, looked like he was in some other fucking room, and Sanchez looked like he wished he was. “I can’t abide you children. I was just talking about how we’re not being taken seriously as a real army and we can use that to our advantage, so can you all act like a real army?”
“If we were in a real army,” Gremio countered, as cool and collected as though he were writing up a grocery list, “and you were someone of standing, you would actually be doing it instead of joking about it and then getting embarrassed when called out on it, so put up.”
“Gremio,” Tir shrieked, choking on his laughter. For his big talk, Gremio was a little pink, but he was doing better than Matt was.
“I’m… sorry, what?” Matt asked, in utter disbelief that he had just been roasted like that by Gremio.
“Holy shit, Gremio, give me some of that,” Viktor cackled, trying to push Tir forward so he could get at Gremio over his back. It wasn’t hard for him to shove him down, because Tir’s stomach was spasming with laughter. “Come on, babe.”
“Hell no.”
“You never get like this. I can’t let this chance slip away. Talk dirty to me.”
“Hell n—that was not talking dirty ,” Gremio flushed, glaring over Tir. “That was clearly talking shit .”
He said it like he had learned the phrase yesterday. Tir wheezed on the table. His only goal was to not drool on it.
“And get off of Tir,” Gremio continued, shoving at Viktor’s arm with the heel of his palm.
“You can go get a room if you need to, Vik,” said Valeria calmly, with a little quirk in her lip. “And stop harassing little boys, you’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I’m pretty sure Gremio is a grown man, actually,” Viktor replied, leaning over his shoulder to talk to Val without getting off of Tir’s back, “it’s just that his put-on innocent demeanor makes him act like a fucking child.”
“Are we talking about the same guy?...” Valeria asked incredulously. “Gremio ‘axe psycho’ McDohl?”
Tir heard and felt the scuffling happening over his shoulderblades as Gremio scrabbled to get at the impossible couple before Mathiu made his final attempt to salvage the meeting. “All of you, cut it out. This is ridiculous and bordering on harassment. And are you fools actually upset about being in a military hierarchy which doesn’t expect sexual favors from junior officers? Seriously?”
“I was only saying that it’s different ,” Gremio protested. “Hard to adjust to.”
“Yeah, a little,” Viktor complained, wounded. “Since you won’t do everyone it just feels like you’re picking on me.”
“ I never fucking ,” Matt snarled, before he realized he had gotten roped into playing along. He sighed, slumped his shoulders, rubbed his temple with two fingers, and gave up. “Oh, whatever. Anarchy reigns, you fucking perverts.”
“Anarchy is only reigning because you won’t respect the old ways and molest your subordinates,” Viktor reprimanded him.
“You’re making the rest of us feel like we’re doing something wrong. It’s uppity,” Valeria continued.
“What will you do about everyone’s expectations?” Gremio criticized gently.
“Good heavens,” muttered LePant, shaking his head and trying not to smile. Eileen was clutched onto his arm, face hidden in his shoulder, obviously laughing. “I know you don’t need to spare Mr. Silverberg, but will you lot let the Commander breathe?”
“You too, Charles?” Mathiu sighed. “What did I do to you?”
“ Probably nothing, you bastard ,” Viktor snapped back.
LePant, throwing back his head to howl with laughter, admitted that that’s what he got for getting involved. Eileen giggled so hard that she had to wipe tears out of her eyes. Viktor and Valeria continued their onslaught undaunted as Gremio slowly pushed Viktor off of Tir, who was genuinely unable to breathe.
“…Are you alright down there?” Gremio eventually asked, concerned.
“ ’probably nothing, you bastard ,’” Tir repeated, wheezing. Gremio patted his back as he poor boy, who had practically not even heard someone say the word ‘sex’ before he began this whole nation-scale revenge thing, recovered from his shock.
—
Luc did not show up to the next lesson like he was supposed to. Tir wondered why he was shocked. He seemed like the type to dwell on things.
When Tir found him, he said, more or less, “hey, it’s time for the fucking lesson.” Luc was startled initially, and was not exactly at ease after. Tir simply let him lecture him that night, shutting the hell up in a way he wouldn’t usually do for Luc, who provided his best information, and his funniest faces, when prodded. Last week had finally taught him that a person, even a person you theoretically could control, could be prodded too far, and that violent retribution wasn’t the only thing to worry about. Sometimes, you didn’t like how you made people look.
Luc talked for an hour about the differences between runic magic and personal magic, which comes from your own body. From the bones, he theorized, because they were nearest part of the human body to crystals and could be used in spellcraft after a magician’s death. Then he showed him—he took off his rune, put it, violently pulsing, into an air-clear stone, and he showed him. He took a deep breath in and breathed out heat, coursing around the room in wavering gusts, making the air scorch for a sharp second that left Tir’s skin tingling for an hour.
“It’s easier to generate heat or light or movement than to generate darkness, cold, or stillness,” Luc whispered, hand on his chest to recover from the effort, “because those things are actually absences, taking away. In all other human activities, taking away is easier than creating. The nature of magic is such that it’s an exception. In magic alone is it easier to create than it is to destroy. Which is why… I personally, I guess, always though it was a shame that almost all magic now is battle magic.”
Tir felt a real longing for something he never knew, and knew he had never had, and a history he thought he could be part of but couldn’t quite claim.
What was it like once, he asked.
The answer had to be read, not spoken; who was alive to remember it?
—
It was so reminiscent of the beginning of the war, before they had marched on Pannu Yakuta. There was work to do—not the work of war, the work of building. Tir trained, he helped in the fields, he listened to complaints and concerns, he made people pull their weight. He at down at the end of the day with Gremio, Cleo, and Pahn. After so many years, Pahn had finally worked up the nerve to hold his arm around Cleo’s waist in public. It was a little cute, he guessed, when it wasn’t gross that someone he always thought of like an obnoxious older brother was fucking someone he always thought of as an older sister. They weren’t his siblings, but… still.
Tai Ho had taken over a lot of basic housekeeping responsibilities while they were gone. Tir hadn’t expected it from him, but apparently, he was the sort to get annoyed when men were sitting around not helping out while others worked. Those who had worked on the construction of the castle immediately settled into working the fields and hunting, with a hundred times more help than they had once had. The divisions they made for battle worked excellently for the work of survival, and any rough edges were quickly smoothed out once they had the time and freedom to mingle. After an explosive surge of new blood to the challenges that led to some very late nights after their initial arrival—new people to fight, new ladies who wanted a chance to watch (Mostly Marie and Onil, who were sisters by now), new arenas to try out—they slowly settled into short shows that got fiery when some drama had unfolded during the day. They were practically getting to the point that the challenges were nothing but meetings with fighting out your arguments until…
Well, before we go there, let’s also mention that Tir did, after some thought, promote a new secretary. Her name was Apple. She was as sharp as a dagger, quick with her tongue, painfully literal-minded and impossible to please, cajole, or bribe, and head over heels in love with Mathiu Silverberg, the poor bird. They had picked her up from Mathiu’s schoolhouse where she had, completely uninvited, ‘taken up after him—’ really, she had been stealing his notes, an obsessive fan of his work and writings from before his injury, and was discovered by an official who thought she was the substitute teacher. Knowing absolutely everything Mathiu would have taught himself, she pretended she really was the substitute and had been working that way for months before Mathiu himself showed up, chewed her out, and then employed her.
But her, ah, affections quickly grew intolerable to Mathiu, who did, after all, seem to have some kind of pathological repulsion to affections. The poor man basically squirmed in his seat when he begged Tir to please find something for her to do, because she was trying to become his personal assistant, which might have been good, but he already had one, who was annoyed, she couldn’t heal, and he needed a PA who could serve as a nurse, and she was basically trying to get on his lap while he was at his desk, which he really, really didn’t want. Tir had the pleasure of personally informing her that she had done so well in proving her worth as an assistant that she had now become Tir’s, and he nearly laughed out loud when he saw her face.
Being mean about it didn’t change the fact that she was good at it. Yeah, she basically threw them at him, but her summaries of everyone who had asked after him during the day and what they wanted were concise, precise, and informative. People were clearly willing to talk down to her in a way they weren’t willing to do to Tir’s face, which told Tir who he could really depend on and who was only kissing up to him. Letting her rag on about who had gotten smarmy or vicious or uppity with her was more informative than a hundred meetings with each would have been. And more entertaining. Besides which she organized his office—she MADE his office, because he hadn’t had one before—responded to letters that he honestly didn’t give a shit about, barked at people for him when there were too many people to be barked at, and was willing, at any point, to be derisive and presumptive to someone whenever Tir was required to hold himself back. Almost everyone just hated Tir’s icy, pretentious new secretary—Tir goddamn loved her. Aside from not really liking her as a person. Her… harassment, honestly, of Matt had been really uncomfortable to watch.
Gremio hated her too. Tir could see him thinking, behind a carefully composed expression, that this was not what he thought of as a fitting replacement for himself. But he found a way to tolerate her, and to compensate for any anxiety Gremio might feel abut being replaced, Tir began to stress his role as a guard more fiercely so that he could focus on helping in another way.
Until the day he accidentally said ‘lieutenant’ instead of ‘guard.’
Sure, he had been thinking it, but the expression on Gremio’s face was both a blessing and a mistake. He saw Gremio beautifully shocked, then shrinking away from the honor, and trying to debase himself, and he just… wanted more for Gremio, and he wanted him, and it felt horrible.
Admitting that he wanted Gremio happened from time to time now, always under his head, in his chest and his lungs, a physical spike in a deep, vulnerable place, followed by dull echoes of pain in the wound. He still tried not to think about it so much, but he felt it truer and harsher now. The sensation and its accompanying cause crept around him, not there when he turned his eyes to see it—haunting, rising and falling, circling and waiting. He had a lot of things to occupy his mind, after all…
…Unless he was looking at Gremio, full in the face, at his soft frown, his brilliant eyes, his nervous fingers fiddling with his golden hair. Then, Goddess. He wanted him. And he wanted better for him.
And it waited, circled around, fell and rose, and haunted.
—
In that time they also set up Viki with a map and some lists, provided by Luc, containing esoteric information about where things were and how to get to them that Tir didn’t recognize as any kind of directions he knew how to read. It was nice to see her brighten when she was given them; she said ‘I remember this’ and ‘Oh, I know how to do that’ and ‘I had forgotten all about that!’ It was also nice to see Luc, who usually didn’t give anyone but Tir the time to day, being patient with her. Tir knew that he gained some kind of satisfaction from teaching, which was adorable.
Though they didn’t trust Luc to do it himself, with Luc’s help Viki became a goddamn useful teleporter. Almost all of the restrictions that applied to Luc applied to her: she couldn’t send you somewhere she had never seen, she could only teleport a few people at a time before getting exhausted, she had the limits of her energy and the power of her rune when it came to when, how often, and to where she could take people. On the positive side, her rune was specifically for teleportation and excelled at doing it; on the negative side, it didn’t have the sheer firepower that Luc’s did and could not be used for more than its intended purpose: travel. It did not really bring travel insurance with it like Breath did. Luc was also less prone to accidents or misdirection, though she could send more people at once than Luc could.
Now, Viki could not keep a secret for her life. Luckily, Tir had a private use teleporter, if a persnickety one. They hadn’t really gotten any espionage plans into action yet—Tir had asked around and Luc had hunted, but they hadn’t yet found any good depictions of anywhere they wanted to slip themselves inside. And it didn’t matter if they had a hundred people who had worked at Moravia for twenty years; Luc needed a reliable mental portrait of it and career soldiers cannot fucking draw.
The two magicians, though seeming to like each other well enough, deeply and visibly distrusted each other’s chosen rune. Tir had learned by now that that was a big deal with magicians. Which rune you chose as your base element opened you to more harsh judgement than judgement by your hometown, father’s profession, or taste in music. A long-time magician would roll their eyes at practically anyone’s base rune but their own and be able to tell you, for each and every kind, what they found so wrong about it. Even Viki, in her air-filled, sugary voice, told Luc that ‘ that thing really isn’t meant for travel though, isn’t it?’ while wiggling her fingers at his hand.
She had patted Tir on the head and told him in a placating tone that it was alright, really when she saw his rune, as if she had just made a five-year-old child make a stupid mistake and she didn’t want them to feel bad.
Speaking of runes, Tir had had all of his presents deposited, except for one. Gremio was practicing with his minotaur rune despite misgivings. In his own words, he wanted to be able to stay standing on his own damn feet through that fucking recoil if he ever had to use it.
Kirkis had accepted the rabbit rune without any complaint. Tir had managed to avoid saying that he got him an evasion-enhancing rune because he wanted to stop seeing him with fresh black eyes.
Viktor had shown a little more hesitance about the killer rune; like Gremio, he was reluctant to increase his abilities in a way he hadn’t worked for and wasn’t certain he’d be able to control. But Tir insisted and he saw it attached to him later. He hadn’t seen him use it yet, though he frequented the challenges again. Tir figured he was aware that using a Killer rune in casual combat might be a poor choice.
Mathiu was, of course, turned down using a second rune out-of-hand because of his perceived difficulties in casting magic until Tir explained what it did. Then he said he would try it, and Tir never saw him without his starlight again, always glowing gentle white.
The only one who remained was to track down Sheena.
He had stopped coming to meetings with his parents. Fair enough; he had no real position. He hadn’t accepted any more challenges. The only times Tir heard about him was when another young woman, and there had been about three now, complained about his unwanted advances.
Now, Tir had known from the way he had talked that Sheena was a little bit of a pervert, but three separate women felt the need to complain to his personal secretary about his behavior and to ask the commander of the entire army to do something about it? That’s fucked up. Yet there was next to nothing he could do about it—it was somewhat misplaced affection that made him not want to rat out Sheena to his dad, but seriously, he was not going to rat out his subordinates to their fucking parents. That wasn’t very Commander of the Liberation Army of him, was it?
But it was too far, and just far enough, when he bothered the secretary herself.
Tir walked into the office for Apple’s daily report to find Sheena, who he hadn’t even seen in a month, literally leaned over her desk in her face. And when he turned around with a look of horrified shock to see who had caught him in the act, her fist took the advantage and collided with it, snapping a sloppy but lucky shot on the corner of his eye socket. As the boy yelped and went reeling and Apple slowly settled back in her chair, grinning vindictively, Tir cleared his throat.
“Mr. LePant,” he said, drumming his fingers on the doorframe, “How fortunate it is that I’ve run across you like this. We need to talk.”
He wasn’t going to sit Sheena on the other side of his desk in the office and reprimand him. He thought, or had once thought, that they were becoming friends. He took him outside, to a windy bluff outside the castle. Less dramatic when he couldn’t have Luc take him there instantly, but he did kind of enjoy making him stew in silence.
This was the quiet field where he and Master Kai practiced. They didn’t have a ring laid out; they used the uneven terrain, ranging here and there. Settled against a strange rock with many holes that was stuck deep into the ground were the practicing staffs; Tir threw one at Sheena and picked one up for himself.
Sheena looked down at the staff in his hands with a look of resignment that said ‘shit, I’m about to get my ass beat.’
“What are you afraid of?” Tir asked quietly.
“Ah… what?” Sheena asked, snapping to attention.
“You told me that you were too afraid to fight at Pannu Yakuta. I didn’t forget that. I’m asking you now what you were afraid of.”
“I…” Sheena’s eyes flooded with panic. They were so bright that Tir could see the fear rush in. He had lovely eyes—pale yellow, very wide with a pretty taper on the edges; full of quick emotions. He probably telegraphed his moves fraudulently once you were used to fighting him.
“The first thing you want to be able to do with it is grip it right,” Tir said. “Right hand over, left hand under. Good. You know how to stand, right? Okay, good. It’s not so different, you just have to think a little differently.”
“Because it’s a weapon with a different range…”
“Exactly. And because it’s a blunt edge. You can’t kill someone with a simple stab and rarely ever do you kill by accident. You have to go in for a killing blow for it to happen and will it with all your body. So, don’t be afraid about hurting me.”
“But—”
“Hold it like that and push up to block,” Tir said. Then he was rushing at him.
Sheena’s block was, honestly, very good. He was a well-trained fighter trained by a truly incredible fighter—two, in fact—and his basic impulses had been honed so well that using an unfamiliar weapon still produced a good result. Even so, he did not so much repel Tir as push him back.
“ Evening Star ,” Sheena swore, “you’re really strong for your size, you know?”
“Next you need to be able to block an attack to your side,” said Tir.
“Shit,” said Sheena.
It wasn’t a hard move to teach him either—sideswipe, redirect your opponent’s weapon. But he didn’t yet understand the need to never stop moving. Tir kept striking him on the backswing, or the second circle, while Sheena was trying to draw back and recalculate. “You already know how to defend yourself,” Tir growled, “you don’t have to be afraid of being hit if you just keep moving.”
“I’m not ,” Sheena insisted, brows knitting together.
“Next, attack me.”
“How—”
“Attack me,” Tir barked, pulling back his shoulders to obviously jab his staff into Sheena’s stomach.
Sheena guessed the next step as easily as a dance—he would knock Tir’s blow aside with one end of the staff, keep moving in that direction, and the other end would almost inevitably hit Tir’s head. He tried, but he had followed the steps Tir set up for him, and when Sheena’s staff came for his head, Tir wasn’t there anymore. He had stepped forward to his side and was swinging his staff around his back to strike Sheena from behind. “Defend yourself!”
Sheena copied him. He danced away, knocked at Tir’s staff with his own, and came at him with the backswing. Tir knocked it aside just as easily, slapping blows away until Sheena had to step back, disoriented, wrists shaking. “You can’t even hit me, alright? So don’t be scared that you’ll kill someone.”
“I’m—I’m not!” Sheena shouted. He gripped his staff steadily, but his eyes flickered all around Tir’s body.
“Turn it in front of you. Use your wrist, not your shoulder. It’ll move on its own, don’t overdo it,” Tir commanded, beginning to turn in a circle around Sheena. Sheena, too nervous to guess what Tir was going to do next, watched him carefully. “Do you see the range you have? You barely turn, or don’t even turn at all, and there’s nothing to worry about. Attackers can be all around you can you still have range of motion. You don’t have to—”
“I’m not afraid of that,” Sheena whispered.
“What?” Tir asked, whipping his staff from a front grip to a back grip instantly, kicking up a stream of dust as it whirred over the ground.
“I’m not afraid of that shit,” Sheena growled, getting into a better stance—maybe even subconsciously, Tir thought, as he watched Sheena’s warrior instincts come forth with guarded delight. “Do you think I wasn’t trained like you were? Do you think I don’t know how to fight?”
“Well, do you?” Tir asked haughtily.
A tiny click in Sheena’s throat was louder and more definite than the bellow of the announcer. Tir was already braced for him surging forward, and he came forward with a dizzying attack. It was like the first time they had fought, but with greater violence and sudden, mind-melting closeness, the kind of fight that you could feel the heat from your enemy’s skin in. It was not fun to fight the maniac who had dove headlong at his feet when he had a disadvantage now that they were on even footing.
Sheena kept his staff a little too close to his body, making short, handicapped strikes that Tir flicked aside with his longer, smoother strokes, but he gave no trace of being bothered by it. His focus was perfect; Tir granted him the courtesy of diving underneath with him.
When Sheena shoved his weight at Tir’s midsection, he kicked him back and followed with a blow aimed at his neck. Sheena struck it away; the other end of his staff came up to crack Tir’s chin. Tir dove to the side, letting the blow bend over his shoulder, and came at Sheena’s ribs with a sideswipe. That one hit; Sheena winced as his lowest ribs buckled for an instant and sprang back. Still, he was already pushing from his poor position with a hook meant to pull Tir’s leg out from under him—no such thing happened, and Sheena missed a single step.
When Tir tried to press his advantage and move Sheena backwards with strikes thundered at his side, Sheena instinctually turned around instead, looping them into circles around each other, backwards steps danced to the beat of the blows. Tir raised his forearm to bare-handed block a strike from Sheena’s staff; it was more painful than he hoped it would be and he knew he just bruised himself badly, but Sheena’s momentum was stopped dead for a second. In that second, Tir had his legs swept out from beneath him and was upon him.
Sheena fell brilliantly and surged up quickly to meet the attack, but he only drove his exposed neck into a staff that was held in a white grip on either side of his throat. Tir shoved him back by force, knowing almost no one could override the desperation to breathe freely, and fell upon him, thighs straddling his hips to lock him down. Sheena struggled, but disoriented, far away from his weapon, and facing an attacker who was not going to let up, he couldn’t find anything to do before his chest started heaving.
“Familiar?” Tir asked, blood surging in his own ears. His fingers tingled with draining adrenaline and victory was filling him. “So, are you afraid of dying?”
Sheena didn’t balk or look like he was about to cry like Luc had. He didn’t flinch away like Gremio would. Even so, Tir’s stomach twisted at his look of rage and loss. If he wasn’t doing this for a reason—
“Of course I’m afraid to die,” Sheena snapped, voice harsh through the vice on his throat. Tir could feel his staff jolting when he tried to speak through it. It felt—weird. “Everyone is fucking afraid to die.”
“So, did you run away because you were afraid to die?” asked Tir, sounding harsher than he really meant to.
“No,” Sheena snapped, hands scrabbling in the grass. “I didn’t even think about it. You think I haven’t had to meditate on dying? Stop underestimating me!”
“Then what are you afraid of?” Tir growled. “Me?”
Sheena nailed him with his knee in the crotch. He didn’t think he had ever actually had someone do that to him. They were either too chivalrous or had been taught by a real instructor that that move didn’t keep anyone down for long. It did, however, loosen his grip on his staff, which had him cursing his lack of vigilance when Sheena was suddenly at his face. The struggle was brief, claw-filled, and honestly frightening, and in the three seconds it took Sheena to reverse their positions and have Tir pounded on his back in the dirt, Tir learned that his opponent had been initially trained in hand-to-hand. Fucking of course. He had been trained by his father. Did Charles LePant have the build of a typical sword-fighter? Fuck no. He was built like someone skilled in breaking your face with his fist.
Sheena shoved him into the ground with his bare hands, immediately reversing their positions with a kick that flattened him. Tir knew he had to recover from the knock fucking fast when he felt thin hands clutch at his throat. “EAT IT, ASSHOLE,” Sheena bellowed, the rush of victory unstopping a few of his reservations, “I’M NOT SCARED OF ANY MAN WHO AIN’T MY DAD.”
“…Is that it?” Tir whispered, lips quirking up in a smirk.
Sheena’s face slipped. Then he hung his head, groaned, and slowly slid backwards to rest on his haunches. “Dammit, you little weasel,” he sighed.
Tir rubbed his throat, which had gotten a few seconds of good wringing before Sheena had calmed his bloodlust a little. “I would say the same for you, but you’re a little more of a viper. What the hell was that?...”
“What was that?”
“That reversal.”
Sheena smiled from behind his hands. “Seriously? Maybe the most basic fucking attack to shake off a male assailant possible, and it overwhelmed you pitifully. That was awful , dude. Please, don’t go around trying to rape anyone, because I promise every single girl you try that one on will have you on the floor in seconds, just like I did.”
Tir blanched. “Wh—what?? That was for—” his thoughts packed up and left, taking any trace of smugness with them and leaving behind only a dawning horror at his own actions. “I wasn’t trying to—I wasn’t—”
“Yeah, I know you weren’t,” Sheena snorted, working on easing a crick in his neck. “I would have definitely felt your hard-on by then if you had one. Or would be feeling it now, for sure,” he considered, taking a good look at their position, thighs locked tightly around each other over Tir, who was thrown violently backwards.
Tir squeaked and flailed hopelessly, trying to shove Sheena away. Less than a minute ago Tir would have thrown him like a ragdoll, but suddenly, there was no strength in his arms. Sheena went dead weight, the bastard, and just laughed at him as he vainly tried to uncompromise their position.
“May She strike you down, you fucking jerk,” Tir fumed, face as hot as a brand.
Sheena eventually rolled off of him onto the soft yellow grass, giggling and pitching. “Holy shit, you’re bright red,” he gasped, tracing Tir out with his eyes. “I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t realize you were so innocent.”
“I’m not—stop it,” Tir whined, curling his legs underneath him to get away from the fucking viper. “I’m not innocent! I’m tired of people saying that. I bested an enemy commander in single combat, pulled a confession of his crimes out of him, and then carried out his death sentence myself. After this guy KO’d Valeria AND Gremio. I’ve personally killed, like, probably twenty people. At least. I fought a dragon! I lead an army!! I’m not innocent just because I haven’t had sex, okay??”
“You’re a virgin?” Sheena asked, tongue cruelly inquisitive and eyes tracing Tir with a gaze he could feel. “Are you really? But you’re…”
“Shut up , man,” Tir whined, moving to shove at his shoulder, but then deciding he didn’t want to touch him. He nervously shoved his hair back behind his ears instead. “I don’t… I don’t have time for that, okay? And it would be weird… I’m the Commander… who would I ask to… for that kind of thing… where it wouldn’t be a command, you know? I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to do something like that…”
Sheena managed to sober up just slightly, though he was still snickering a little. “Okay, okay… that is a real problem. I hadn’t thought about it.” He glanced consideringly at the world around him from his place on the ground, as though the waving blades of grass had the answers. “It’s good that you’re worried about not forcing yourself on anyone, for sure.”
“Well, thanks,” Tir sighed, rolling his eyes. “I like to think I know what not to do. I just wish I knew what to do.”
“You mean, how to know someone is really interested, and doesn’t just feel like they have to?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well… are you interested in anyone in particular?” Sheena asked, folding his arms under his head so that he could stare up at Tir with his head thrown back.
Tir’s cheeks brightened, and he knew they did, so he ducked his head, which was just as obvious a sign. “I… I guess I am…”
The admission felt bad. It felt like a snake lost in his stomach, writing around, docile now but ready to lash out if he provoked it further. It also felt just a little good.
“Awww,” Sheena smiled, crossing a leg to get well and settled into this uncomfortable conversation, “who?”
Tir shook his head violently. No way in hell.
Sheena accepted he wasn’t getting an answer pretty quickly. Tir had expected him to badger him a little longer. “Well… even if I don’t know who in particular you’re interested in…” Sheena said, drawling out his words, cheeky grin stamped on his face, “there are some things that work on just about anyone, you know?”
“I’m not sure I should be taking your word on that,” Tir muttered, “considering your track record.”
“Ouch,” said Sheena, looking unhurt. “Hey, then you just know I have the experience.”
Tir glowered at him and tried to convince himself he didn’t want to know, not even a little. “So, what things work on just about anyone, then?” he asked, trying to sound cynical.
“Ahh…” Sheena sighed, cupping a hand on his jaw and studying the sky above him, as if deeply pondering the question for Tir, “since you’re worried about being too pushy, or someone going along with it when they’re not really interested in you… you need to know how to look for obvious signs that someone is interested.”
“Like what?”
“Well, there’s body language,” Sheena began, uncrossing his arms and rolling his head back into the grass to gaze up at Tir from the ground. “Someone who doesn’t want you around will keep their guard up, keep their arms crossed or their legs pressed together… sit stiffly, you know? Someone who’s comfortable around you will keep their body relaxed… sit with their legs apart or loosely crossed, their arms open, their head back, or be willing to longue around a little… Someone who’s really into you will touch their own skin a little, subconsciously.”
…He was hardly ever comfortable like that around anyone. But, when they were alone together… “But that just tells you if someone’s comfortable around you. Not if they’re interested in you. Even Cleo is that relaxed around me, and she’s my sister, kind of.”
“And she’s one hell of a stunner, but that’s beside the point,” said Sheena, gazing dreamily away. “Ok, you’re right. That’s just one sign. What I’m saying is that a relaxed pose is one of the first things you would look for if you were wondering if someone is into you or not.”
“Well, what else?” Tir asked.
Sheena snapped his eyes back to Tir, forced to look up at him, low-lidded. “Eye contact. Keeping their eyes on you, instead of always looking away. Be watching where their eyes are going, in general. If someone’s thinking about kissing you, their eyes will usually flicker to your lips, briefly. They’ll stare at your chest, or your arms, or something they can linger on without getting your attention immediately. Most men will pretty obviously run their eyes down your body, if they think you’re looking away. Sometimes women do it too, but faster. Less conspicuously. Basically… if they want you, they’ll be looking at you a lot, right?”
“That… makes sense,” Tir admitted. It seemed obvious, yet it occurred to him that he had never looked for it. And… it occurred to him that he had done all of that, too, when interested in someone, without thinking about it. Looking at his lips, and then having to look away, fast, because his stomach had turned over. And catching himself staring when he shouldn’t be… “But a person can also stare at you because they’re nervous or afraid.”
“True,” said Sheena, smiling slyly at him. “None of these are certain by themselves.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, here’s another one. Often someone who wants you will just talk about it with you, too. Not bluntly. No one walks up like, ‘hey, you’re hot, wanna bang?’ Except maybe Viktor.”
“Oh, ew,” Tir groaned.
“Like I said, no one does it like that. But they’ll bring it up with you, you know? Ask if you have a partner now. Or if you had one previously, and what they were like. Ask if you’re available. Point out people who look good to get your judgement on them. Try to get you to talk about what you like, because they’re trying to see if they fit the bill. And they really want to hear you talk about sex, because it’ll sound hot, so you both win out there. Someone who doesn’t want to hear about it won’t bring it up, you know? But someone who seems to want to talk about sex a lot or brings up people they think are attractive, or try to get you to talk about what you find attractive… that’s a pretty obvious sign.”
Tir flushed. Did he actually have to say ‘sex’ so many times?? Sure, Tir had just gone on about how he’s not innocent, but he wasn’t used to it. “I guess I can’t think of any other reason someone would bring it up all the time… unless they’re just gross,” he said, glowering at Sheena.
Sheena put his hands up on either side of his head, saying, you got me . He giggled and blinked slow, staring sharply at Tir when he opened his eyes again. “They’ll find a way to broach the conversation if they want to, in summary.”
That was true, he figured, but with him… “…Some people are pretty reticent though, you know? There are… I know people who pretty much never bring this sort of thing up. With anyone.”
Sheena shrugged, smoothing his hair back over his head, then dropping on hand to fiddle with the tie on his shirt. “True. There are people who are just… more delicate. Not everyone wants to talk about it out loud, I get it. For that type, the body language really is more telling. Or they’ll talk about it obliquely. They’ll not talk about sex, but how nice it would be to have someone at home to help out… or how cute it would be to go on a date like the one you’re looking at… and walk around it. Proximity. They’ll choose to be physically close to you.” Sheena uncrossed his leg to nudge his foot at Tir’s knee, and Tir whacked him away, rolling his eyes. “Ha ha. But seriously. Someone who’s shy often shows it by choosing to sit or stand very close to you, so that you’re close enough for something to happen… without saying anything. Someone who’s always trying to get your drunk or high is obviously suspect too, since those things break down defenses.”
“Are you just describing your own pattern?” Tir asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Uh…”
“Because I don’t want to do what you do, jackass. It doesn’t seem to work for you.”
Sheena sat up abruptly, crossing his legs and leaning forward so that the two of them were almost eye-to-eye. He had a challenging look in his bright eyes now that he was being questioned, one not too different from the one that had sparked right before he fought him. “Hey, you asked me what sort of things you look out for if you want to be sure someone is interested. These are things people can’t help but do when they’re into someone, unless they’re perfectly self-controlled. Your body shows that you’re interested for you. You won’t even notice you’re doing it.”
Tir met him glare for glare. “Well, I haven’t noticed any of that.”
“You know, maybe you haven’t been looking.”
“ And you’re just describing things that could happen by accident, or for no reason. Sometimes a person is just relaxed, or sex-focused, or high all the damn time. Like Rubi. None of it’s really an obvious sign.”
“Well, some people do choose to be really obvious, if that’s what you want,” Sheena whispered, drawing his eyes up Tir’s face, “especially if subtle signs aren’t working. There’s the kind of person who lets you know they’re interested by pulling you up and kissing you senseless, no questions asked.”
“What,” Tir murmured in monotone, quirking an eyebrow, “like you?”
Sheena’s eyes widened. His lips parted, followed by his tongue, anxiously wetting his lower lip. “I—”
“I asked you how to know if someone’s into me without looking like a creep, you creep,” Tir grinned as he shoved Sheena’s shoulder back. “I kind of don’t need to know that you can just kiss people. I’m looking for something a little more subtle , you know? Ring any bells?”
Sheena leaned back, looking incredibly annoyed. “…Yeah, you should really work on subtle signs first. That’s for sure fucking true.”
“Anyway, since you’ve not told me anything that I couldn’t figure out on my own, how about you talk to me about something that’s actually confusing me and tell me why you’re scared of your dad.”
Sheena groaned and laid back down with a thump, staying where he laid. “I’m not scared of my dad, jerk.”
“Really? Because a minute ago, when I asked you, your words were ‘I’m not scared of any man who ain’t my dad,’ so…”
“First of all,” Sheena huffed, “you didn’t so much ask me as shove me into the ground and demand an answer. Second off, I’m not afraid of my dad. My dad is… great. I’m afraid of disappointing him. Which I already have, so I’m not sure what I’m afraid of. That’s… already shot.”
He closed in on himself quickly when he thought about it. Tir frowned. “That was the reason why you ran off?...”
“I…” Sheena uncomfortably ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, it’s… complicated. I know… that by now he doesn’t expect much of me, and before the day came, I thought it would be a chance to redeem myself in his eyes, but then it did come, and I thought about everything that could go wrong, and how I could come back from making a mistake like, I don’t know, dying, or letting someone die right in front of me, or losing… or losing dad or mom…” he glowered, frustrated. “I don’t know. I had it together, and then, when we got closer, and closer, and I saw… I just… I couldn’t. I ran and I hid in a wagon. And the longer I stayed hidden, the more ashamed of myself I was for running, so I… I just… couldn’t do anything. The one chance I had to stop being such a failure in my father’s eyes, to start looking like the son he wanted, and I just… somehow, the one chance I had, I just couldn’t do anything.”
“Here,” said Tir.
Sheena glared up at Tir’s let hand, which cupped a sparkling red rune.
“You know what this is?”
“A… rune.”
“I got it for you,” Tir said. “Well, I got it and I thought of you. It’s kind of… crazy?”
“Wow, thanks.”
“No, listen. What it does, is… if you’ve been hurt and you’re suffering, it sends you into battle frenzy. Like, it makes you find your focus and your rage. I don’t know if you can make it work without being hurt first, but… I don’t see why you couldn’t be able to. Runes want to work with you, you know. You just need to get to know them.”
Sheena stared incredulously at the rune. “Well, that’s fucked up. Thanks.” All the same, he took it, turning it in his hands for a minute. “…I like it, I think. I don’t know why.”
“If you want…” Tir said, staring anxiously away. “You can fight with me instead. Since I lead a completely different contingent from your father. I know you want him to see it, but… it might be easier to start, I guess. And don’t… don’t worry about what he thinks, alright? It doesn’t matter. You can’t always act the way your father wants you to.”
He didn’t mean for his tone to skew so bitterly, but he couldn’t avoid it. After a minute, he felt Sheena’s arm around his shoulder. “Thanks,” he said, “for the beatdown, weird talk, and freaky battlerune, you psychopath.”
“Thanks for making me incredibly uncomfortable by trying to give me a sex talk, freak,” Tir replied.
Sheena snorted, and slowly stretched his way to get up. “Alright, that’s that. Let’s go back to the castle and never talk about this again.”
“…One more thing, actually,” said Tir.
“…What is it?” asked Sheena, extending his hand down to help Tir onto his feet.
Tir turned his head to smile at him. “If one more fucking girl comes to my office to complain about you making her uncomfortable, I’m hanging you out of a third story window by your ankles and leaving you there for three days.”
Sheena blinked through the seconds, waiting for Tir to put away his creepy smile.
He didn’t.
“…A’ight,” said Sheena, and helped him to his feet.
There is no way to exaggerate how much of a disaster the next significant occurrence in the timeline of the Gate Rune War was for the Liberation Army in general and Tir in particular. Between you and me, he has already planted many of the seeds that would eventually lead to his demise—or perhaps they had been planted in him. How could any of this have happened without the misfortune that brought him Soul Eater and ejected him from his home, after all? And one cannot ignore either his poor fate in being the son of Teo McDohl, whose influence and character have not even begun to start taking their tolls on his son.
Paranoia, self-hatred, lust, emotional dependence, indecisiveness, and the need for control would all find a way to eat away at the unfortunate man, or have the way found for them; in the meanwhile, one’s friends are their worst enemies. Who would be stupid enough to not see that he had surrounded himself with problems? A megalomaniacal father beginning to show desperation, a mysterious magician with an eager striking hand, a libertine swordsman who could not control himself, a ruined, bitter strategist whose revenge plot was being given the run of an army, a cynical mercenary with the power of a general, a hundred unleashed beaten hounds starving to bite the hand that fed; worst of all, one kind-hearted, life-long beloved; one kind-hearted beloved acting as his only protection and only refuge.
His strength of resolve was such that he might have made it work if there wasn’t anyone fiendishly devoted to tearing it up. But in politics of power, the arrival of the scorned and jealous co-regent is as inevitable as it is regrettable.
—
“What,” Flik growled, with his hand curled in a fist on the table, which struck once and was clenched tight to strike again, “the hell did you just say?”
Mathiu had just said that he couldn’t speak to Odessa.
For context, Flik looked like he had spent the past year having as much fun as Tir had had struggling to survive in the mountains. He wore leathers slashed by god knows what tied paranoia-tight around thick under armor and it was clear he had refused to take a scrap of it off when entering the castle. His sword was still buckled to his side, he had a knife attached to his thigh, and there was an unbound facial wound on his cheek. There was an air of pus, beer, iron, and horse’s sweat about him; if life hadn’t been rough as hell for the past few months then he hadjust had a disaster of a week.
Tir had only unpleasant memories of the young man and it was easy to recall them as he stood there then. There had been no time to fetch him; he and Gremio had run down the hall at the sound of explosive shouting to find this. Oddly, the shouting they had heard had sounded happy; this scene did not look so.
Viktor was disengaging himself from Flik’s grip on his shoulder. Tir assumed that they had been greeting each other before Mathiu had made a questionably wise statement. “Flik,” he muttered, trying to turn him away slightly from Mathiu. “I need to… talk to you.”
Flik gave Viktor the most minute of glances, a second of acknowledgement given to an ally before he focused on the enemy again. “Viktor. Who is this?”
Humphrey, Valeria, Eileen, and Sanchez were in various stages of standing up from where they had been seated at the table, each one poised to intervene in a scene of violence that hadn’t unfolded yet. Eileen’s husband was handling other business, and others had not chosen to attend a meeting about next to nothing on yet another winter day. None had been prepared for this; Tir would learn later that Flik had left his lieutenants behind him and rushed up the stairs alone in his eagerness to return to his lover and companions-in-arms. Mathiu alone remained seated fully, though not comfortably; a barbarian he had heard much of but never laid eyes on stood hunched across the table from him, fist threateningly pounded into the wood.
Flik’s eyes darted up once more, to the just-opened doorway. “And who the hell is that?”
‘Who the hell’ was Tir.
Tir saw Viktor’s eyes, shimmering with fear, take stock of the room a though it was packed with monsters. He sent Tir a look of panicked calculation; Tir didn’t know what he was hoping to help him achieve it. Mathiu had his hands folded on the table ahead of him, was sitting ramrod-straight, every ounce the polished officer; put another way, he was out of his mind with anger right now, though the newcomer probably didn’t know it.
Gremio pushed into the room behind him, hovering at his shoulder.
Flik tilted his head when Gremio came in behind Tir. “Oh,” he said. “The McDohl guard.”
Gremio nodded his head.
Flik lowered his glare precisely to scrutinize Tir. “So, you’re Tir. I didn’t recognize you.”
Really?... because he literally hadn’t changed. “Tir McDohl. I remember you as Flik.”
Flik nodded once. “I heard it was you who took the position of commander for the battle against General Rosman. When I heard about the victory I knew it was time to take the forces I had gathered and come back here, even if I hadn’t gone as far into the outskirts of Arcadian as I had hoped to. I heard it was a strong victory.”
“…I killed him,” Tir summarized. His skin was prickling. “Since I had so little experience, Mathiu did a lot of the commanding.”
“…Right,” said Flik, returning to how he had been when Tir found him: bearing down on Matt. His fist slowly uncurled into a clutching grasp on the table. He was holding a conversation with the focus and the hawk’s eye for detail of a duel; missing and admitting nothing. “And this is Mathiu?...”
“Silverberg,” Matt continued, layering disdain into his own name. “Mathiu Silverberg.”
“Oh,” said Flik, eyebrows raised. He grimaced. “Like fuck YOU ARE !”
Every syllable of the sentence was squeezed out with more hatred than the last. By the final one, Viktor already had his arms locked against Flik’s shoulders; it was just in time to restrain him from lunging. Mathiu tried not to flinch, Tir thought, but he did.
“BROTHER!!” Viktor was shouting. “Her BROTHER! Get a hold of yourself, moron!!”
“I’M GOING TO FLAY YOU DISGUSTING SON OF—”
“ BROTHER , YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” Viktor repeated, knocking him once on the forehead for good measure. “I DON’T KNOW WHETHER YOU THINK YOU’RE ABOUT TO PUMMEL HER FATHER OR HER HUSBAND BUT YOU’RE WRONG TWICE. FUCKING—"
Flik elbowed Viktor, who took it like a flea-bite; huffing, he then shoved flippantly at his captor and Viktor let him go. Apparently… Viktor knew that he was done, somehow. He still looked pretty acrimonious to Tir.
“You think I’d let him be sitting there if he was who you thought he was? Screw your head on,” Viktor snapped, letting his speech slip a little…or perhaps losing his grip on his grammar in his emotion. “I’da fixed him already.”
“Heavens,” said Matt, weakly. He was still sitting up straight, but with a little less conviction. “For what it’s worth, I was never fond of either of the gentlemen you referenced. Silverberg men tend to be of… poor moral character, as a trend.”
“I heard,” Flik spat. Viktor still had a cautious hand on his opposite shoulder, though Flik didn’t seem to mind that. “Sorry,” he muttered, glancing Viktor’s way. Viktor shrugged.
“Yes…” Mathiu continued, “I, ah… well, my only defense is I don’t contact any of them either. It is because of my sister’s grace that I serve now as the Liberation Army’s top strategist.”
“She’s very kind,” Flik growled. “And that established I’m going to ask again why I can’t see her.”
Tir couldn’t believe what he just heard. They hadn’t told him?? Yes, of course they hadn’t told many of her officers to keep morale from slipping and chain of command from disintegrating. Yes, most people had kept their mouths shut when they figured out the truth because they didn’t want the truth spread to their enemies. Yes, most people had resigned themselves now to calling Tir The Commander instead of Seneschal Commander, or Acting Commander, or whatever names they had used originally, with silent loyalty and acquiescence that humbled him miserably. But they hadn’t told… him??
Lady, even he had enough common sense to balk at how terrible a way that was to respect someone’s love.
Mathiu’s eyes slid over to Tir. “Commander…”
The fucking prick. As if this was his job? “Go on, then,” he bit, as though Mathiu had just been asking for permission.
Mathiu had to close his eyes. The second in which it wasn’t too late yet came and went. “She’s dead.”
Leave it to fucking Mathiu, who would be unable to phrase a lullaby gently. He saw Humphrey squeeze his eyes shut and lean forward as if he had been dealt a blow; Valeria nodded in grim understanding while Eileen clutched the hilt of her sword. Sanchez, who had been tensely watching the altercation, finally slumped back into his seat, tired and old. No one had ever made an announcement to any of them, they had all simply figured it out. But Flik… they had never told Flik? He couldn’t believe it.
Guess this was his job, then.
“Odessa was killed when the hideout a Lenenkamp was attacked,” Tir continued for Mathiu, arms crossed. “She was protecting innocent people who ended up in the way of the conflict. She got away from… everyone else. I don’t think anyone saw that happened for sure. But there was no one left alive.”
Tir, with bitter empathy, knew he couldn’t imagine what was happening inside of Flik. He stood in bleary shock. Time passed in silence that weighed.
“Flik…” sighed Viktor, the beginning of a sentence that was never spoken. He rubbed a comforting hand up Flik’s arm.
Flik grabbed it and pushed his wrist back, eyes never breaking their dead gaze ahead. “You,” he whispered.
Tir pulled his head back, looked back and forth from Viktor to Flik. Me? Him?
“ You ,” snarled Flik, slowly bending Viktor’s hand backwards, “ were supposed to be watching her .”
Viktor wasn’t fighting it. He shuddered when Flik tightened his grasp.
“ What the hell were you doing ?” Flik asked, yanking Viktor’s arm so that he was pulled an uncomfortable half-step into Flik’s space. His pain-filled eyes were lowered to Flik’s teeth. “ How the hell did you let your Lady get killed right the fuck in front of you?”
“Flik, I’m so sorry.” Viktor’s knees buckled as he was forced down. “Please forgive me—”
Watching Viktor being forced without putting up a fight more than ruffled Tir wrong. It scared him. “Hey.” Tir approached Flik, heard Gremio jolt after him. “It wasn’t his fault. Everyone—”
“And THIS,” Flik continued. “What the hell is this? Your leader is killed, and you hand over the army to General McDohl?? How stupid can you be ? Were you too scared to think straight or did you just give up?”
“Hold on,” Tir bit, walking brazenly into Flik’s space. “I am NOT—”
“ Shut up.”
“ No!” Tir shrugged Gremio’s hand off of his shoulder. “You insulted me to the face and expect me not to say anything? More importantly, you insulted men who—who I know and trust and have come to depend on—men who have been running our army with—”
“MY ARMY!” Flik roared suddenly, throwing Viktor to the side. Viktor was not thrown; nor did he really step back, though Tir could not pay attention to him now. “They have been running MY ARMY, which they gave to YOU while my back was turned after KILLING OUR LEADER!”
“No one here killed Odessa!” Tir spat. “And we’ve been doing everything in our power to—to uphold her mission—”
“She was thinking of the army until the last,” Gremio continued from behind him. His voice was pinched and hollow. Tir could feel his heat, suddenly, his solidness—“I was there. Her choice was hard to accept, but…”
Flik stepped backwards, wavering, his face a twisted grimace that fought seizing emotions with its puckered skin. “Humphrey,” he barked, turning to the side. “You accepted this? This—takeover??”
Humphrey bowed his head painfully. “We need a leader. Odessa—is gone—Viktor accepted him. He’s been doing well. Viktor can’t do it himself. I can’t do it, I can’t; we don’t know where Ronnie has gone… and we couldn’t find you either. We didn’t have anyone...”
“Well,” said Flik, backing up another step. “I’m here now. Sanchez, get everything sensitive packed up.”
“I… Flik?” asked Sanchez tensely.
“These… what are these?” he asked, waving his hands at the others in the room.
“Well…” Sanchez muttered.
“General Eileen LePant,” said Eileen primly. “charmed.”
“Move along; I don’t play like this,” Valeria spat.
Flik did seem to give her an appraising look. She didn’t even look up at him. “Right,” he began, dangerously collected. “Sanchez, Humphrey, get everything together. Tell everyone to move out. We’re setting up outside of Kaku for now; I’m organizing my affairs from the Inn. We’ll find Ronnie, lock down Kage, and get marching toward the West. Bring anyone who remembers whose army we are.”
“Flik—” Viktor gasped.
“You can stay here.”
Humphrey startled and gave Flik an alarmed look. “Flik, we can’t just—”
“We have some sensitive business to handle, Humphrey. I want it done out of the way of prying ears.”
Tir could see Humphrey weighing options. Though a quiet man, he was always calculating. He didn’t disclose yet his reason for standing up and beckoning to Sanchez, who also stood.
“I beg his honor’s pardon,” said Eileen, rising to her feet, “would he be offended if I followed as well?”
“…Not at all,” Flik decided, “although I’m not his honor. My title is Commander.”
Eileen delicately bowed her head.
Flik was forced to shove his way through Tir and Gremio to get to the door. Gremio was moving to bow out until Tir did not.
“You’re going to split the army in half?” Tir hissed.
Flik deliberately, slowly, with a snake’s fierce glower, lowered himself to Tir’s level. “I’m weeding out your army from mine,” he corrected. “So that I can be sure I’m leading something other than a nest of Imperial vipers.”
Disgusted, Tir let him shove himself by.
He was more concerned with something else. Turning his back to Flik as Flik turned his, he walked up to Viktor, and spoke without waiting for him to leave the room. “Vik, are you alright?”
“I…” Viktor was clutching his arms across his chest, looking stupefied in front of him. At some point, a tear had slipped out of his eye. He didn’t seem aware of it. He couldn’t speak until Flik had left. “He… he’s not usually…”
“He’s mourning his lover,” Valeria sighed, finally getting out of her seat. She walked to Viktor’s other side. “I’ve done the same before. He won’t be reasoned with today.”
“He’s doing a good job of taking everyone down with him,” Mathiu whispered, in quiet panic. “How many do you think?... And where are they setting up? We’ll have to—”
“No—no.” Viktor shook his head. “No, no one’s separating anything. That’s NOT happening. I’ll talk to him. We’ll figure out what to do to make this work. Tir—he was Vice-Commander of the army. He’s not… he’s not doing this for no reason.”
“I understand he’s not doing this for no reason,” Tir conceded, “I just don’t think it’s a good enough reason. We’ve been waiting for an attack for months now. Almost long enough for my father to travel down here from where he was, by the way. What if?—”
“Not going to happen. He can’t sneak up on us in a day’s time. And even if so, Flik wouldn’t… he doesn’t have such a big head he would let people die because he’s mad. He’s not… he’s not a bad person.”
“Sure,” said Valeria.
“Val—” Viktor barked. Then he immediately bowed his head. “I’m sorry,” he sighed. “It’s just… this one… Flik was always…”
“Alright, I know, and I’ll keep my mouth shut about it,” Valeria acquiesced, “but I hate him immediately and I’m never changing my mind about it.”
“Please,” Viktor said, with the softest of smiles.
“Commander,” said Valeria.
“…What, do you mean me?” asked Tir, perhaps a bit too soon.
“Doubt me again and you’ll be going out the window. Commander, what do you think we should do?”
“Well—” interrupted Mathiu.
“I said ‘Commander,’ you piece of shit. Commander, what do you think we should do?”
Tir sighed out his exhaustion. Gremio put a hand on his shoulder. Viktor slowly raised his dark eyes to him. “We’re definitely giving him the night. It’s stupid to try to change someone’s mind before the anger had drained out. Early in the morning, Viktor, myself; let’s see. Sorry, Val, not you.”
“Hell no, not me.”
“Mr. LePant, since it’ll be pointless to try to stop him. Not Luc, as much as I would like… Viki instead. Kirkis, he’s my best diplomat. Not you either, Mathiu, no offense.”
“None taken.”
“Myself, Viktor, Mr. LePant, Viki, Kirkis, Gremio… any more and it’s bringing a force, not a diplomatic party. We’ll send a request instead of barging in, be as nonaggressive as possible… then we give him numbers. Fighting forces. Convince him that we need to outnumber the enemy. And then we tell him… well, we tell him the contingents recruited in the area will likely continue to follow me, so… I’ll have to retain a position as a general.”
“Tir,” Gremio gasped.
“What,” Viktor snapped, gaping. “No, Tir, you can’t—”
“Some SHIT,” bellowed the voice of someone who was not in the room a few seconds earlier, “is HAPPENING.”
“Afternoon, Stallion,” said five tired people at once.
“There is a man??? With boats. He loads the army onto the boats and is taking away?? What??”
“What??” Viktor repeated, with, finally, just a bit of fire.
They rushed to the windows. They watched in helpless horror as Flik ripped hundreds of people away from the Island and sailed them out.
—
That was a night that passed too quickly and too slowly. The first thing that happened was having to settle down a distressed mob. Easily enough handled, but the second thing was settling down a distressed Charles Lepant. There was nothing that could be said to him to ease his mind about his wife’s choice, except that he was welcome to come along with them when they went to negotiate the next day.
The third thing to happen was dinner. Everyone was too frazzled and tired to act tough and skip it. Unfortunately, dinner transitioned seamlessly and smoothly into scheming and arguing, which took up the most of the night. A revolving cast of characters circled in and out of what turned out to be a Socratic discussion room with a few core players; an unbending Mathiu who wanted Flik put into a generalship over his own forces and no more, an uncompromising Viktor who had a perfect plan for a compromise he couldn’t budge on, an irate Lepant who wanted a duel for leadership, an indignant Valeria who said the upstart should be tried for insubordination, and a typically fire-filled Kirkis who insisted that they needed to be focusing on upcoming battle instead. Tir, unconvinced, underwhelmed, knew that nothing would be settled unless and until they talked to him first; no enemy, he had finally learned, would follow the script you wrote for them.
Out of all the people in that room, he was the one most wont to say that perhaps, by all rights, the army should be Flik’s. He started it, he built it, and the command of it had been taken from him unawares while he was purposefully left out of contact. Tir found himself wondering, casting his eyes around a sea of stress and panic, if they had already been trying to lock him out, and why.
He started to wish he had left with Flik too. He already knew what everyone was going to say in this room. He didn’t know what was going on in that little inn room in Kaku.
And then, goddammit, he had an idea.
It was easy to excuse himself by saying that he needed to get a few hour’s rest before they headed out in the morning. They wanted him to make a call on whose plan they would follow; he said that he wouldn’t make a call until he heard what Flik himself actually wanted instead of a thousand suppositions about it and tapped out Gremio. Gremio followed him closely down the hall; Tir led them to the stairs and down.
“Should I ask where we’re going?” Gremio asked.
They rounded a dark corner—no one thought to lit the torches tonight, and moonlight alone showed the way. “To see Luc.”
Gremio sighed. “Tir… do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I’ve never had to wake him up before, but I figure not. I can only imagine he’s not a morning person.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean what you’re planning to do.”
“And what am I planning to do, Gremio?”
“Settle things with Flik yourself.” The noise of the crowd had slowly faded to faint echoes behind as they walked into the silent third floor. “Which is exactly what you would do. I know that you respect getting people’s perspectives from them directly, and weighing everyone’s opinion, but…”
“You think he might still be too upset?”
“And dangerous,” Gremio concluded. “You saw him today.”
“He just found out that…”
“I know,” Gremio pleaded. “I know, and I’ve seen it a dozen times before. Yes, it’s understandable to react with anger when you receive such horrible news, but you know what? Most people don’t. Most people don’t start screaming and beating others when they’re upset. It’s too extreme a reaction. Most people can handle grief without violence and abuse. It’s still a bad sign if someone can’t. And you recall, he was going to start violence BEFORE he was told she was dead.”
Tir considered his words, nodding. “I don’t like it, but if he tries to take it to blows… well, I can speak to him on that level.”
“…I know you can, and you’ll likely win, but we really couldn’t recover from him being subdued by violence… or killed.”
“If that’s what someone understands, that’s what they understand.”
“Why not at least bring Viktor? His plan was the most sensible.”
Tir smiled at Gremio as they passed the silent shelves of the library, the only place yet lit up by their usual lights—Luc’s fairy lights. “What, you liked Viktor’s plan best?”
“Oh, come on…” Gremio sighed, crossing his arms. “Can’t you recognize that it was the most realistic option?...”
“…I do…” Tir admitted. “I just don’t know if anyone will accept it. Matt was right there and he hated it. And Flik…”
“It was a plan that requires everyone to bend a little and no one to break. In the end, that’s the sort of plan that wins. That or open conflict.”
“Then how are you okay with it?... Shouldn’t you be a little upset that we’re being asked to bend?”
Gremio sighed and looked away as Tir knocked on Luc’s door. “…No,” he finally said. “Not if it’s fair. And not if you can accept it, which… you seemed to like his ideas better, too.”
“I did, but… you saw him today, Gremio. I think he’s… a little too emotionally involved. I’m not going to pretend I have the steadiest head either, but… I think as much as he talks big, Viktor tends to be a little soft. He’s won over by emotional arguments pretty easily. And from what we saw, I think it’s going to be worse with Flik.”
Gremio sighed in frustrated acknowledgement. “I suppose.”
Luc had been given a nice room on the top floor of the castle like everyone else that Tir needed to deal with on a regular basis. He had completely rejected that room in favor of a tiny storage room that was supposed to fit the library and the stone tablet chamber outside. Having been inside it a few times, Tir knew it was a small bed with ridiculous magical power shoved underneath it, a set of dressers with ridiculous magic power shoved inside, and a shelf that contained weird little knickknacks and hoarded food slowly going bad. Where he cleaned or dressed himself he didn’t know—he could be keeping a bathroom in another country that he teleported to every morning for all he fucking knew. The door was darkwood he had harvested from heavens know where with little gold-leaf designs on it—odd animal designs, blocky, with red eyes. He didn’t respond immediately to the first knock, but after the second, he responded with a gentle sigh and opened the door.
“What.”
Luc was still dressed in his dayclothes, though barefoot. There were books, papers, and crumbs scattered on the mislaid sheets of his bed. He levelled them both with a look of pure disdain and Tir felt a little better about his awful night.
“Hey man! I know you long for my death and all, but how do you feel about barging into my new rival co-commander’s room so we can pressure him into a deal before someone else gets to him first?”
“Have you not slept yet?” fretted Gremio.
Luc glowered at them both in turn, but responded to Gremio first. “No. I have not slept. You people are too fucking loud. And… kind of, yeah. I’m bored and that sounds messed up.”
“It will be,” Tir promised. “Alright! All we need is a little jump to the inn at Kaku and…”
“That’s all? You can practically walk there.”
“We’re trying to get there first, Luc, pay attention.”
“Why not get Viki to take you on such a short jump?...”
“Because Viki is a square and will tell someone if she thinks we’re breaking the rules. You, however, won’t do something unless you think we’re breaking the rules.”
“Essentially,” Luc agreed. “How did you convince King Square to come with you then?”
“What?” asked Gremio.
“Uh, maybe he knows I had a good idea and wants to help me implement it?”
“I wouldn’t go that far…” Gremio muttered.
“Good talk, guys. Time to go make trouble.”
“Without me? I’m hurt,” said Viktor.
Tir jumped nearly to the ceiling. Gremio shuddered all over. Luc, who, in retrospect, had definitely been watching Viktor approach behind them, snickered.
“Viktor!” Tir grinned, turning around. “We were just about to go talk to Flik about your idea!”
“That, or fight him, whichever came first,” Gremio shrugged.
“Yeah, or fight him, if he wants to go,” Tir agreed.
“At three o’clock?... He might fight you,” Viktor sighed.
“Would that be bad, necessarily?”
“Not… necessarily… He does like fighting…”
“Everyone likes fighting.”
“Not everyone,” said Luc from the back. “I’d like to remind you all that you’re meatheads and you’re crazy.”
“Thanks, Luc.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Anyway,” Viktor sighed. He dropped his hands from his hips to cross them over his chest. His expression slipped from teasing cheer to a soft, fractured smile, a little bit beaten down. “…Anyway, as charmed as I am that you think my idea will work out—because it will, by the way—yes, I would like to be there to hash it out myself. Honestly, I think it would be better to bring along fewer people who met Flik today and hate him already and get it done with an air of openness… unless you think I’m far too ‘emotionally involved’ and I’m just going to bend over for him when he’s acting like a prick.”
“Oh, no, you were following us, like, the whole time.” Tir tried to shrink into his own shoulders.
“Sure was,” Viktor smiled. “I was taken aback by how vicious he chose to be about the news… I won’t deny that I got upset too. But… I know him. Very well. He’s done now. He’s not going to be angry any more. He’ll be receptive to hashing things out, but… I know what will or won’t set him off. You don’t. You really want me to talk to him.”
“This isn’t saying ‘not emotionally involved’ to me,” Luc whispered at Tir.
“Hey, the rest of us are a little emotionally involved in a war raging around us that is either changing or destroying our lives, kid,” Viktor told Luc, “it’s not a bad thing. It’s good sense to care.”
Tir, knowing that Luc was about to slowly begin boiling, grabbed him around the neck and Gremio on the waist and said “all right, we’re all on board! Let’s go before someone with more sword and less sense catches up with us and tries to shove in too.”
“Do you mean Charles, or?” Viktor asked with amusement.
“Fine,” Luc snarled, at the same moment, disengaging himself from Tir. He tossed back his hair and then held up his hands in front of his face. “Keep yourselves still.”
—
Tir could tell that the others were used to Viki’s gentler, less snapping teleports when they both stumbled onto the streets of Kaku turning and losing their footing. Luc settled into a gentle bob over the ground as a breeze skittered away under his feet. Tir needed only a second to steady himself; then he was looking up and down the way.
Though the streets should have been still with he quiet of dead night, there were people wandering about, sounds echoing the alleyways hie and yonder. The dark waters of Lake Toran bobbed and sparkled with starlight, reflecting a clear winter sky. It was so much warner here than winter had ever been in Gregminster, warmed and kinder. The lights were on everywhere and the smell of salt and cinnamon whisked over the rooftops with the wind. Looking into the wilds outside of town he saw many fires outside of town and could hearing crying and calling; they were having a party, he assumed, to celebrate the march being over. He wondered if they were tense; if they knew how uncertain their situation was or if they were just glad to put their feet down. He wondered how many forces Flik really had, and whether his own had integrated or were keeping a steely, standoffish silence. He wondered whether the people of Kaku had celebrated with them or had hut their windows and grumbled about more light and noise.
In the quiet moment, isolated from the noise with enough air to breathe, he felt like he wanted to give them a reason to celebrate, and be happy. The people of this poor town… they wouldn’t make them regret giving them help and a home.
“Alright,” he said, “let’s sort this out.”
Tir walked into the little inn, bowing slightly to the innkeeper, who he knew by now. The innkeeper bowed in return, surprised out of a bit of a daze but glad to see his guests. Luc floated in after him, but Gremio and Viktor both had to adjust their weaponry to fit through the small door.
The inn on the shore had always been a pleasant place; a little old, a little salt-scoured outside, where blue and gold paint chipped and split for lichen and streamlets, but it was well-warmed and clean inside. Usually they had their rooms about half-full with sailors and men with their mistresses, tonight, the girls were still cleaning up discarded cups and plates and puddles on the floor when their heads all turned to see Tir. They bowed, too, clutching their buckets and brooms.
Tir awkwardly waved them off. He didn’t really know what to do with the loyalty of the average person of the Kaku area, except appreciate it, he supposed.
“Which guests are you visiting tonight, sir? Unless you’re looking for a room of your own, and I’m afraid…”
“I figured you’re full up,” Tir assured him. “I only wished we could have warned you about the influx, but no one knew… when he’d be arriving, exactly.”
“Oh, Miss Aubrey, Miss Cornelia, good evening,” Viktor said, swerving to take a detour.
“Viktor,” Tir groaned, pointing at the ground beside him. Viktor stayed. The girls giggled, both grabbing some dishes and darting into the kitchen. For fuck’s sake, Tir didn’t understand… anyway. “Yes, we’re hoping to visit Flik, if he’s still awake.”
“He’s awake,” Viktor promised him. “He sleeps for about twenty minutes from daybreak to breakfast.”
“That’s fucked up,” Tir interjected.
“It’s not that weird,” Luc argued.
“No, no, it’s fucked up,” said Gremio.
“We can send up someone to ask if he’s seeing visitors,” the innkeeper offered.
Viktor frowned as they considered the option. “No, I think we should really…”
“No, that sounds good,” Tir overruled. “Please do, and let him know who it is by name. We’re not trying to alarm him.”
When they were offered to have their weapons and coats taken off of them, Viktor and Gremio protested again, but Tir told them to do it. He let them take his own staff as well. They waited a surprisingly short amount of time before the girl came back down the stairs and said that they were welcome to come up.
They walked up the stairs in silence. They were taken to a door; Viktor put a hand on Tir’s shoulder and motioned him gently to the side. Tir weighed the options and nodded.
Viktor knocked on the door. “Flik,” he called, voice low.
“Come in,” said a quiet, guarded voice. Tir saw Viktor’s eyes light up nervously; his brow was still tense but his body relaxed, instinctively quickly. He twisted the handle on the door, unlocked, and slowly pushed it open.
“Brother,” Flik addressed Viktor. He was seated in a hard-backed bamboo chair at a round table, with two other young people sitting with him. One was still in armor, all were armed. Eileen was not there. Flik himself hadn’t changed except to take off his waycoat. There were drinks in front of them from the inn, thick glasses almost empty; the girl that led them up also politely cleaned the table and was turned away gently when she asked if they needed more.
“Brother,” replied Viktor, with relief almost child-like on his scarred face, “I—”
“You brought some more with you, again,” Flik continued, somewhat sarcastically. “You can’t come by to say hello?”
“…Unfortunately, no.” Viktor cast his eyes down. “The situation is too serious.”
“It is.” Flik gestured at the party with a curled hand, beckoning them forward. “All of you, come inside.”
He watched then from his position on the table, with his chin rested on his locked hands, eyes steely blue. “One more time,” he said, quietly. “Tir McDohl, acting commander of the Liberation Army, yes?”
“That’s so,” Tir agreed, cautiously.
“And Gremio McDohl, personal assistant of the commander, yes?”
“That’s…”
“Lieutenant Gremio McDohl,” Tir corrected.
Gremio didn’t dare argue with him in a situation as tense as this one. Ha. “Lieutenant McDohl,” Flik corrected himself. “Thank you. And this one?...”
“I’m Luc,” said Luc, uncomfortably. “I represent Lady Himawari Leknaat.”
“Do you? That’s good news. We didn’t know her position.”
“She prefers her interests be kept quiet. Thank you in advance.”
“I understand,” he said, with the slightest skein of annoyance in his tone. Tir was reminded why he usually told Luc to play outside while the grown-ups were talking. “And Viktor. What are you these days?”
“Oh, you know. Getting by.”
“Of course,” Flik sighed. “You of all people wouldn’t have changed much.”
Viktor looked at Flik with emotion that Tir hadn’t seen on him before. Flik had his head bent over the table. An anxiety began to grow in his stomach, not a new one, but a new context; the workings of the weird machine he lived inside were changing again, and it was a dependable function that was breaking now. Gears reset, ground the other way; Tir clenched his jaw. “Flik, I—”
Flik held up his hand. “No. I don’t want to.”
“I—”
“I don’t want to . I don’t want to drag it out. I don’t want to have an argument. I don’t want to be around a table for another two hours holding out on what little I have left to come to an agreement no one wants. I don’t want to march against the empire dispirited and hateful and having forgotten why we started this war in the first place. I don’t want Odessa’s Liberation to turn into another emperor’s court where everyone is at everyone else’s throats and we’re willing to sacrifice lives and our own good sense to get ahead of each other. No. We’re supposed to be more than that. We’re supposed to be Odessa’s army, the ones who carry on her dream of equality and compassion for everyone, and I’m going to do what it takes to live up to that, no matter how much I suck at it. No matter what I gotta do.”
He blearily shoved his hair out of his face, tangled and dirty. Tir could see his red-rimmed eyes and pale cheeks now. He had the look of someone who had been drinking a lot, and no surprise. It was good luck if he was emotionally drunk; bad luck if he was too drunk to remember he had said this tomorrow morning. But he was speaking rather coherently…
“Flik… that’s what I thought as well,” Viktor encouraged him. “May I sit down?”
“No. No. We’re not dragging out a hair-splitting round table discussion on… no. Stay right there and we’ll finish this in five minutes.” He swooped back into his chair. “Tir.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the acting commander of your army.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m the acting commander of my army.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
There was a beat of silence before Tir understood. “So you’re saying we just… take our halves.”
“Yeah.”
He was sorely tempted to say ‘sounds great’ and walk out of the room there. But even he could see the issues already—refusing to let the armies blend, and then eventual trouble when they blended anyway and they weren’t sure whose was whose, or whose orders to follow when, and what happened when they eventually had completely different ideas about what to do. “Great concept. Listen to this.”
“Sure.”
“The whole thing’s yours. Whole army, command of each faction… when we’re in battle or when we’re making battle choices. I’m admin. I run things that don’t have to do with military functions. Diplomacy, housekeeping, grounds, travel, logistics, the talking. We’re both commander.”
Flik leaned back. “War-leader and peace-leader. That was Viktor’s idea.”
“Ouch, that was instant ,” Tir complained, glaring at Viktor.
“He just knows who comes up with the good ideas.”
“Alright, I’ll hear it from Viktor, but make it fast,” he said, pointing at the man accusingly. “Who’s who, and why.”
“You sure?”
“Hit me with it.”
“You’re commander in battle, because you’re goddamn stirring and I’ve never seen you lose face, ever, in front of an enemy. Tir’s good at battle and decent at commanding in battle, but he’s spectacular in a drawing-room or around table. You’re not so great at that and hate doing it. So. If we’re on the field, he stands down. If we’re about to meet a new potential ally, you shut the fuck up.
“You’re stuck with Mathiu Silverberg. He’s our lead strategist and your check. He’s brilliant and you’re dealing with it. He used to be head of medical too, but I’m making him step down so he can focus on assisting you. Tir’s stuck with whomever you deem him stuck with in return. We have a system where various generals have semi-autonomous command of their factions of the army; that doesn’t change. Humphrey, Valeria, Varkas, Lepant and Lepant, Kirkis, Lorelai. We’ll introduce you. You’ll integrate whoever you trust into that system.”
“…And you?”
“Oh, you know,” Viktor shrugged, grinning.
“…Right,” said Flik, in resigned disappointment, “he’s stuck with you, then, until I get a better idea. Though that should be rough enough.”
“…So you find it a good enough system?” Tir asked.
Flik shook his head sadly. “It’s… I’m going to have to do whatever works. If everyone really accepts you as a leader… then I’ll have to see why. It doesn’t matter right now. I came here for a reason, and I should have been thinking about that first before petty politics. Goddess, she would be ashamed of me…”
“Alright?” Tir prompted him reluctantly.
“After the hideout at Lenankamp was attacked, I escaped toward Milich's domain in the west,” he began. “I was out there rounding up the former soldiers of the Liberation Army who were scattered all over the place. Suddenly there was a crackdown on the rebel factions, and many of our comrades were captured. That was when I heard about a revived Liberation Army and came here. We must unite our forces to liberate Milich's domain. We left any in dire straits there—they’ve felt the terror of the uprising and have turned to cruelty and murder to keep our allies suppressed. I left hem struggling for their lives with the promise I would come back with a greater force to save them; we must leave at once to fulfill that promise.”
“Alright,” Tir agreed. In his stomach anxiety was brewing into dread, a dread that was a ghost, the visceral memory of making a promise to a nearly-drowned elf shivering in a tiny medical room and the thousands of deaths that cascaded out of that one promise. The blood-tide was rising again; he already knew it and he had already said yes. “But we can’t leave immediately. We need at least a few days.”
“What?” asked Flik, incensed.
“I’m in charge of logistics, and logistically, I can tell you that’s an awful idea. Our supply train is pitiful, we need at least a few days to pack up what food, water, medical supplies, and livestock we can so we can reach Scarleticia without starving. You intend to go all the way to Scarleticia?”
“Yes.”
“Through the Fortress of Garan, I assume?”
“…Yes. We had to go around it coming here, which is how I know it’s a ridiculously long march, and a painful one.”
“Two major battles without returning to base with a dangerously low supply train. We need three days to prepare, and then we’ll march out… as per your orders, Commander.”
Tir was watching Flik, but he could feel everyone else bristle around him. Truth be told, he didn’t like it either. No, he didn’t like it at all. But he would worry it with blunt back teeth for now. He would wait and see. He agreed with Flik, after all. He didn’t want to let internal squabbling ruin their chances for victory or rot away at their dream of making life better for everyone. They had things to do. They had deaths to avenge. They had people to send home safely and people to keep alive, and that wouldn’t happen if they tore each other apart.
“Alright, then. Three days.”
“If you don’t mind, we’ll take our leave.” Tir turned his shoulder away. “I’d like to get some sleep before we begin preparations in the morning.”
“Where shall we meet?” Flik asked.
“Come to the castle and I’ll meet you at the harbor.”
“Alright,” Flik agreed. “Safe travel. And…” he hesitated, glancing at them, then back. “Viktor, would you…”
Viktor raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Would you stay a minute?”
Viktor’s face softened horribly. He stepped forward to pull out a chair, will he or nil he, and lounged next to Flik, smiling. “Need to unwind for a minute?”
“Come off it, you freak.”
“We’ll be going, then,” Tir continued, minorly distressed.
“Yeah, bye,” said Luc, who had been basically falling asleep behind Tir the whole time, and they were gone.
“THREE. DAYS.”
“I knew you would love it,” Tir said, smiling, entire body curled around a large cup of hot black tea.
“Three days!!” Mathiu repeated, slamming his chair into the wall as he got up to pace. “You—you went to make a deal with him alone—”
“With Gremio, and Viktor, which is not even close to alone.”
“Rearranged the structure of upper command by vocal agreement in the middle of the night without confirmation from any of the Generals who previously served under you—”
“It was his army before I got it, Matt. It kind of never stopped being his.”
“It’s your army! You literally made—thousands! Thousands of these people are here because of you! Not him, you! They follow you! You don’t know if they’ll accept this change! And they shouldn’t!”
“His troops won’t like me telling them about the bathing schedule either.”
“We never came to a consensus—you just—just decided to adopt VIKTOR’S suggestion without any additions or substitutions—MILICH OPPENHEIMER as your next target—abandoning the castle again in winter—INVADING ANTEI BEFORE WE’VE EVEN PAID THEM BACK—THREE DAYS??”
“Alright, listen. But Flik is bound by oath to listen to you. It’s gonna be fun, right?”
“And—and I have to step down as head surgeon! I never agreed to that!”
“Matt, you’ve been training… uh… Trevor?”
“Trenthian!”
“Wow. Yeah, Trenthian for as long as we’ve been doing this. He was already, what, a trained healer with his own practice from a family of healer-hermits in the mountains?”
“Not exactly—”
“I’ve seen him reset a spine while he was looking away. And I felt fear that day I hadn’t felt since I was fist-to-man-sized-claw with a dragon. Or since the last time I saw you. He can do it, and you have to focus on strategy. It’s going to be harder than it was with Kwanda now.”
“A LOT harder. SCARLETICIA? Do you want to march on Gregminster after we’re done with Scarleticia? Do you want me to sail us out to the Queendoms so we can raze them for fun? This is all ignoring the fact that you shuffled me over so that I can be this—this caveman’s handler.”
“I think that was racist?” asked Tir. “Because I can tell he’s not from here, but I don’t know where. Don’t be racist. Anyway, you’re not Flik’s handler. You’re his manager. He literally has to listen to you. Those were the rules we laid down.”
“I don’t—” Mathiu huffed himself down into a chair. “I don’t want to, damn it.”
“Seriously, dude?”
“I don’t—I don’t follow him. I don’t accept him. You’re the commander of this army and he’s a usurper. This is outright mutiny and I don’t care if you’re condoning it.”
“If… I’m condoning it… it’s not…” Tir shook his head. “TRUST me, Matt. Besides, this is a longer-term plan than it looks like, alright? It’s going to work this way for now. It’s a compromise no one really likes. I understand that. But you’re smart enough to have thought through the other options, right? What happens if we refuse to make peace with Flik? Even in the best-case scenario, where we shove him under our heel and manage to convince most of his forces to do what we say, what happens?”
“I don’t have a completely new upper command that wants me to start heckling border control in three day’s time is what happens.”
“A sickness of resentment and revenge that starts eating away at the heart of the system. Goddammit, Matt, we both grew up in the periphery of Gregminster power politics. How long is even the best-case scenario sustainable if we could have even managed it?
“…and if you’re right and Teo is already on his way… we need to move.”
Mathiu clutched his coat.
“We… you were the one who told me we wouldn’t be able to stand up to him right now.”
“…General Oppenheimer won’t be easier, exactly. Intel is… variable. Hard to verify. There are a lot of things we hear from Antei and Rikon that sound… implausible, at best. Somehow despite Scarleticia being a major base of operations, we have no idea what’s going on there… or no idea which stories are true. I get the impression they’re getting more and more worried about it in the Capital too.”
“Great. Then it’ll be just like Pannu Yakuta, and we won’t be torn to shreds for this one either.”
“I don’t think it’ll be like Pannu Yakuta…”
“Good. I hope not. That was horrifying. So, who do we start talking to to get the real story? Who will have the best information?”
Mathiu rubbed his temples and subsequently gave in. “We need to have a serious discussion with Esmeralda anyway. And… I have a contact in Antei. Former merchant, bit of a rogue now. I’ve been meaning to have a bit of a talk with him about where he’s getting his own information.”
“Set it up. Weasel-wrangling is my primary occupation now and they’ll never know which bottled-up frustrations hit them.”
“Do you need a break to go fight someone, sir?”
“No. But have you seen Sheena?”
“…Not since he and his father came in and out like a typhoon wreaking random discussion because of their displeasure with the good work of General Eileen, why?”
“I need to compel him to incredible violence is all. Gremio too. Maybe Viktor. I suppose that has to wait until after the day’s wrangling, doesn’t it?”
“Please go at least punch a wall before you try to talk to anyone, sir. Or… don’t you have a young lady? Can’t you just go… I don’t know? Be hormonal with your girlfriend? Indulge in vices? Calm down?”
Tir shuddered mightily and stood up from his chair. “Wow. Time to go punch a wall or something. And I do not have a girlfriend. Wait, who do you think is my girlfriend? I don’t have—who do you think is my girlfriend??”
“The… ah… flying girl? The magician?”
“Oh,” said Tir, in awful realization. “Oh. Oh. No. I have to go.”
Matt waved him off. He braced himself on the wall of the hallway and asked himself whether the pressure trying to escape his chest was laughter or vomit. Oh, hell, Gross. Luc was like. A child. Even if he was seventeen. He had, like… a high voice. And… like… no chest.
Besides, he… he was a boy.
He felt a sharp stab in his chest when he thought that wavering thought.
He… no. Now wasn’t the time. Flik could show up at the docks at any minute, and it made the better impression if he was down there, waiting for him. Good impressions were what he did now. He may as well go down there and show off how frustratingly, painfully, soul-crushingly GREAT he was at them.
—
He gathered up Apple, Gremio, Valeria, Sheena, and Charles Lepant. Luc was probably sleeping now that it was finally light out; no way was he waking him up again. Mathiu would be busy for every second of the next three days, and he wasn’t going to saddle him with Flik even a minute before he had to. Apple was sulkily arranging and rearranging lists of persons, livestock, provisions, and weapons with hierarchical charts and maps of the island while Gremio, Valeria, and Charles paced and tapped and muttered. Sheena and Tir bitched and whined in low voices.
Out of all the problems Tir anticipated when it came to merging his army with Flik’s, the fact that so many people would be so pissed off about Tir graciously accepting a fair compromise was not among them.
Flik and his crew showed up in scores of bad boats, made to ford the thin waters of the inner Empire, and probably remade every time they had to do so. Flik was at least riding at the head. Tir had always been told that the commander goes out with the head of his army, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve his position. He was just as quickly able to spy Viktor alongside him, lounging against a trunk and talking with his arms.
Tir found himself wondering what he had been up to. Laying the seeds for some five-year-length plot no one would ever found out he planted? Subtly convincing the new commander of this thing or that thing to get his way? Clearing the air with an old friend? Trying to rekindle an old flame?
…That last one was probably uncharitable, but so had been most of the rest of them. Lessons with Viktor hadn’t lowered his opinion of the man, exactly, but they had heightened his anxiety around him. He was beginning to see what the mercenary was capable of, and why a mercenary had been hired to manage a rose-tinted revolution in the first place.
Flik stepped off the boat before it was moored, bowing sharply, without feeling, to the people gathered. Tir was looking specifically for a hangover and didn’t really see it. Even though he had been trashed the night before, he only looked a little red-rimmed and furrow-browed now. Even though it was spring, he was still wrapped up in his leathers like he had been every time Tir had seen him yet; despite that he had a fantastic tan. Mysterious. “Hail,” he said, in general, and then to Tir. “I recognize some of these, but not others.”
“Apple Pumila, my secretary. She’ll have some documents for you to look over. And General Charles and Sheena Lepant; they’ll be the—”
“EILEEN!”
“Husband and… son of… there he goes.”
“How’s it going, Charles?” Viktor asked, laid-back, as Charles Lepant attempted to sprint down a line of boats to get to his wife. In the distance, Eileen was yelling at him to compose himself and get off the damn boats, no doubt. Flik watched him go with disaffected annoyance.
“…Right,” he said. “Charles and Sheena Lepant, fighters. Apple Pumila, secretary. Lieutenant McDohl, good to see you. And…” a suppressed look, invisible and indistinguishable except for the tightness of suppressing it, narrowed his eyes. “General Meullefleur.”
“General y Meullefleur, please. It’s part of the family name.”
“Apologies. And where is Meullefleur?...”
“Across from the Summerlands, right under Heaven,” Viktor pronounced, finally jumping off the boat. In three strides he crossed the deck and was reaching out to embrace the unamused lady General. “Or wherever they make angels like you.”
Valeria’s head tilted barely as a small smile softened her marble-hard expression. Unbelievably, she let Viktor kiss her. Everyone gathered either found themselves expelling a sigh of annoyance or pretending they weren’t there; Tir chose to watch Flik’s reaction. He didn’t like it; Tir had to poke into whatever was happening here.
“So, these are the lists of just about everything,” said Apple, who, like usual, was above it. “We’re still pulling together more complete records of reserve troops and the stock of weaponry, because no one knows how to report fucking correctly. This is what we have for now.”
Flik accepted the papers with obvious distaste. He rifled through a few of them; a minute of silence followed. Valeria had managed to regain use of her face, but she was still held around the waist by a pleased, clingy bear.
“…Right,” Flik said. “That’s… a lot. I’ll have to look through these later. More importantly, I’m going to figure out how this place actually runs. Vik.”
“Yyyes?” asked Viktor.
“Get me into the camp, man. I’m going to go ground-up.”
“You’re gonna start out like that? But a’ight,” Viktor sighed, detaching himself from Valeria with a pat to her thigh. Again, unbelievably, she did not protest. “Tir, Flik wants to get a feel for the actual army, so we’re going to start mingling, will we or nil we. If you could… well, I’m sure you have a shit ton of work to do for sure. I don’t have to tell you what to do.”
“I do. We’re going to start out by getting your army docked in, obviously.”
“Great. Let’s get people mingling; I hear y’all fight. I’ll need to see that to know who’s who. That’s what, sunset?”
“…After dinner.”
“Great. I’ll meet up with you then. Oh, these. Vik, could you?”
Viktor took the papers from Flik. ‘For sure, but I am gonna make you read them. Hey, Val,”
“Alright, see you then,” Val cut him off.
“…Alright.” Flik was already on his way across the docks. Viktor half-stepped backwards, face tight. “Val, I’ll—catch up with you tonight. See you in the ring maybe?”
“You won’t be busy with anything else?...”
“You’re killing me, Val. Look, we can go hand-to-hand if you like.”
“Knives.”
“You’re pushing it, but for you, babe,” he sighed, spinning away. “Catch up with y’all soon.”
“…Absolutely,” Tir said.
The boats pulled up to the docks; Flik and Viktor vanished behind the castle.
“Wow,” said Sheena.
Valeria made a deep, throaty noise and turned to walk away.
“He’s… uh…” Sheena put one hand on his face, drumming his fingers.
“…A prick,” Gremio muttered.
“I think he’s just laconic,” Apple argued.
“YOU think he’s just tall and ripped,” Sheena counterargued. “Don’t lie.”
Apple told Sheena what he thought of him and stormed away. A smile blossomed on his face as he fondly watched her retreat, eyes swinging back and forth with her steps. “Ah… what a bitch. Dude, he is fucking ripped, though.”
“Seriously?” Tir groaned.
“You have looked at this guy, right? He’s stacked. Got legs like a horse. Face like a girl.”
“What… Sheena, the fuck? How am I supposed to see his… horse-legs under his armor?”
“Do you have eyes, man?”
“Yeah, and a working brain on my shoulders.”
“Brains have nothing to do with this, Tir. Turn that shit off and just tell me you really think, all the way down, that that prick isn’t a big hunk of hot.”
“Wow!!” Tir tried to shove Sheena away from him. “No! We’re never talking again. We’ve got to go. I forgot how I was going to lead into this because you’re such an asshole. Just… you…”
“Just me what?”
Tir started shoving Sheena down the dock and away from the castle, toward the sloping hills. “I mean, not that I feel like protesting too strongly, but where are we going.”
“Just… march. No talk. March.”
“Again, yes, sir, but why.”
“You too, Gremio.”
“You are mistaken if I thought I was going to let you go anywhere alone with young master Lepant,” Gremio whispered at Tir.
“Oh, Tir, you haven’t told him?” Sheena gasped.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“This is an actual order for you to shut up.”
“…” Sheena glanced over his shoulder at Tir, wounded, and struggled with his silence for a minute. Too well-trained, he held his tongue. Gremio followed suit.
When they reached the hills where Master Kai trained Tir, and where Tir had taken Sheena to speak to him privately, Tir knelt down to pick up a practice-staff from where it had been laid. For some reason, Master Kai had the odd habit of leaving his belongings where he had stopped using them. He wouldn’t show an ounce of care if they disappeared. When once a valuable bowl was stolen, he only said he assumed the thief needed it more. This staff was deep in the dirt now, having parted the spring-yellow blades of grass, just rebounding from the harsh winter. Tir curled his fingers around it. A good heft. This felt familiar in his hand—the constancy of it comforted him.
For some reason, he found himself just… staring at it. The well-known weight in his palms, rolling over the bumps and grooves of his skin, shedding little potentials, attacks and parries and counters. The ruffles of wind on his bare cheek, cold and sharp, steadying. The sight of the grass flowing, the far-off swell of the rising hills; he felt strange, and fragile, and full of sickness, surging at his worn-down edges.
“Hey,” Sheena said softly, after some time, “you alright?”
“I saw that you put on the rune,” Tir said.
“Oh, uh… I did. Though I don’t believe I’ve used it yet.”
“That’s why we should practice with it.”
“Oh, actually,” Sheena acted as though he was backing up a step, sliding a single foot out to brace a ready position. “I know this tone of voice, and I don’t fuck with it anymore. Been a pleasure— Aw, you’re joking,” he whined, as Gremio stopped him with a single hand on his back.
Gremio raised an eyebrow.
“Look. You can get caught by surprise by a rune like that, right? It gets in your head. If you’re taken by surprise, the rune controls you, not the other way around, and you’re well-trained enough to know that you can’t have that. You’ll need to have felt it and learned how to handle it before it activates in battle.”
“I know that. I’ve worked with them before. You know my mother is a first-rate magician. This isn’t even the only rune I have on me right now!”
“But this one is different.”
“It… is.” Sheena huffed. “Fine, but we’re not using your staffs again.”
“Nope. I am, and you’re going bare-handed.”
“Aw, what??”
Tir distantly felt a smile hitch up his cheek. “The Violence rune, according to what I’ve researched, can put the user into a rage if it’s strong enough. I don’t know how well it will work on you—for all I know, I’m about to get my ass handed to me. I’m armed, you’re not. Just in case.”
“That’s… flattering.” Sheena’s voice was still pinched. Tir hadn’t even stood up yet. He felt like he didn’t want to, or like something would happen if he actually did this. Dread. “Even so, you’re implying that we’re gonna trigger the rune so that I can practice using it, which means you have to hurt me, a lot, and what if I just don’t want to get hurt?”
“Actually, I was thinking that Gremio needs some practice too, but it could be me if you want.”
“…Master,” Gremio said, tone low. “I would say… that I don’t know if I should.”
“You have to get better at using yours too.” Feeling nervous and defensive, Tir made himself get up, tossing the staff in his hands. He thought he didn’t want to do this now, so… “I know you’ve been practicing, but not with other people. And that’s not the same.”
“No…”
“Tir, dude. Gremio will kill me.”
“He won’t. He’s going to give you a stinging welt to make you pissed as hell. Then you’ll be willing to fight me, I assume.”
“Okay, what did I do to make you this mad? Just tell me what I did.”
“I don’t believe you did anything…” Gremio said.
“Hey. Focus,” Tir snapped. “We’re beginning our march to Scarleticia in three days. And we’re not ready. We’re not going to siege Scarleticia not fucking ready.”
They looked at him in a way he didn’t like. But they listened to him.
“Alright,” he said. “Listen. Minotaur is very powerful, but slow and overwhelming for the user. Because it prefers a wide, multi-target blow, it doesn’t produce a deadly attack without a deadly weapon. Gremio’s going to try to hit Sheena with it once. Sheena’s going to dodge until it hits him.
“That’s when things should get weird. Sheena, he hits hard, but you’re good at absorbing a blow. I’ve seen you shrug off the exact equivalent of what I’m asking you to handle now. Gremio, he’s fast as hell and really, really good at dodging. You’re going to have to aim well to hit him even once before your rune is expended. Once you do hit, I’ll take over. Then the Violence rune will be activated, and I’m going to personally experience it while Gremio stands to intervene if necessary.
“Got it?”
They both looked like they were thinking something they didn’t dare say when they responded in affirmative. They looked like soldiers. Tir wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t stop what he was doing when he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to do it. The thought of not doing it was intolerable.
(Gremio was thinking that Tir was much, much more bothered by the events of the day than he was letting on. He was thinking that he did resemble his father sometimes.)
(Sheena was wondering if this was his fucked-up fetish, because that would explain a lot about Tir. He was thinking that this was going to hurt really fucking bad and he was scared.)
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Tir was observing from the outside when they bowed to each other; first Gremio, in full, then Sheena, in a quarter, his eyes not wavering from his opponent. He was miserably slight, unarmed, and Tir couldn’t even tell where he had put Violence. Sheena chose, after a second of wavering, to stand in first position.
Gremio had more trouble, seeing as he had the crueler task and one unfit for him. He scanned the ground for a weapon; Minotaur demanded an axe, but he could not use one. He had to pick up a staff, not tossed lightly in his hands, but gripped precisely, once. He braced himself and stared at the boy. He wasn’t prepared.
Tir wasn’t going to step in. The seconds passed. Gremio closed his eyes and forced himself in. He was tense and the strike would surely be strictly linear; even Sheena, a ring’s length across him, looked doubtful.
But when Minotaur’s copper glimmer burst from his back his feet slid into a better position and his hand squeezed on the staff. With explosive energy he wrenched back the staff. The moment of spellcasting is distracting, it covers your conscious mind for a moment—“ Minotaur ”—the magic is compelling and pulls you along with it, setting you up, letting you go a little changed. Gremio wasn’t ready, but the Minotaur was, and their opponent was only a step away.
Sheena had no idea that Gremio was already in range. With a step and a torque of his shoulders Gremio was in position; with a second step he was ready. His arm jolted down the bouncing staff, not constructed to hold a current, as he hurled it and his body weight forward. Sheena jumped back with less agility than he usually showed with Tir. The strike was audible, a crack against nothing; Gremio missed, but not by much.
Two steps. Twenty feet. Unbelievable, but then he had to stop. Sheena’s best move would have been to run, and had he, he would have absolutely escaped. By the time Gremio had prepared himself for a second attempt, Sheena had hopped several steps away and had a hand on his chin, poised in consideration. A complete mismatch—the little twerp could run circles around him.
Sheena’s hands tried to grip a weapon that he wasn’t holding as Gremio came at him—“ Minotaur! —”a second time. He came in lower, opposite, a blow to snap a knee; Sheena simply went over it, which wasn’t his smartest move. Gremio was far too close to him and could have taken his head off normally, but he hadn’t managed to cut down the recovery time after using his rune quite enough. Before he came back up, Sheena had smacked the hand holding the staff, intending to disarm him, raising his opposite leg for a hammer kick. Gremio instinctively spun the other side of the staff around to attack with a jab. With his halberd, such a move would have cracked the femur. As it was, Sheena took it and jumped back.
Tir couldn’t believe how uneven the match he was watching was—Gremio really wasn’t going to be able to hit him, not once. No, he wasn’t going to try. That had to be it, because he was unstoppable on the battlefield. Tir had never seen him be seriously wounded. He was amazing, Tir knew he was. He wasn’t even in the focus of battle right now.
Tir didn’t know why all this was making him so mad. Gremio was one of the most unshakable warriors he had ever known, and Sheena—Sheena had run and hid from battle! And yet, all it took was a slight change in the psychology of the situation for Gremio to just buckle under. This happened all the time! Someone put on the waterworks and he turned into a mother hen. Why did he have to be so soft? Why couldn’t he be the strong arm Tir could depend on? He was going to need Gremio to—to support him.
He watched the blows rain on nothing. He wondered if he should say something. Gremio had to be almost expended; the exertion that Minotaur demanded was insane. It could only be used a half-dozen times before the wielder needed a break.
But while his higher mind debated going easy on them and whether or not anyone’s pride would be wounded, his battle-mind, run by instinct, working under the surface, and fueled by frustration, divined something. The combatants, both distracted by their feelings, were defaulting. All of their steps were paced in a simple circle pattern, turning slowly counter-clockwise, practically scripted. They were heading to an easily predictable point parallel to Tir’s position. All Tir had to do to meet them was walk to it, half-steps that appeared meandering, as he put pressure on the combatants with his eyes.
Predictably they circled. Predictably Sheena jumped backwards from what may have been Gremio’s last strike, and predictably he jumped right into the blunt of a staff that Tir had swung up to stop him. It pressed into his spine, horribly painfully; Tir didn’t have to see him jolt to know the pressure point he had agitated would be throbbing in him for several heartbeats. Too bad for him, he was easily shocked. Too bad for Gremio, he was too slow to pull back a strike. There was nothing either of them could do about it; Tir stunned Sheena, Sheena couldn’t get away, Gremio couldn’t stop the swinging staff aimed at his neck. The taut muscles that strung collarbone to skull spasmed and sprang back; the head snapped aside and returned to its place. In a second the boy was on the ground.
When Tir and Gremio met each other’s eyes in the absence of a person between them, something that usually happened failed to happen. Tir was stuck in the hunter’s mind. He was waiting to see how Gremio reacted; he didn’t think pay attention to the fallen warrior himself. But Gremio was interested in Tir too, and so, they stared at each other, silently, as Sheena collapsed.
It was like trying to look at just anyone for a second. Gremio’s thin hair shivering in the breeze, the roll of his well-trained body as he pulled his strike back, his bright green eyes; none of them felt like Gremio, they just felt like someone. Just a body. He was a soldier staring at a soldier, a mirror trained at a mirror, calculating. Inside they both braced for the attack, ready to press their advantage, and at the same moment they sucked in breath, loosened their grips, and knew where they were again.
For a second, he didn’t care about this man at all—this man who couldn’t take a shot at one unarmed little boy, this governess to hold him back from doing this or finishing that, tried to tell him he was overstepping or going too far, so cautious, so passionless, so permissive, so submissive, so kind , so undependable—one who hedged his loyalties between him and his father, and wouldn’t even support Tir when someone came after his command—who didn’t speak up when Tir said he would step down!
There was a hand on his ankle.
He was going down.
Sheena was at his best on the ground.
The next few seconds were indistinct, disorienting—damn it, Gremio was slow, Sheena was not, and Sheena would remember that Tir said that Gremio’s job was done after one strike—he intuitively rolled but was instantly crested, his chin was pushed up by a perfectly curled claw-hand, and he had only just fought it off with his forearm when a blow he didn’t even see coming knocked the wind out of him—shit—instinct helped him, he curled his legs up, he was about to kick him off, he hoped—a strong arm wrenched the boy into the air, bending him backwards, and that’s when Tir saw it—a red glow in the center of Sheena’s chest, sparkling through the weft of his shirt.
By his heart? That’s fucked up.
Gremio didn’t even manage to pull him onto his feet. He swung a foot under Gremio’s ankle, tripped him, and brought them both back down. He slammed Gremio into the ground with the same leg, pounding on his chest to pin him, and when Tir jumped onto the balls of his feet to get up again he found Sheena turned around to face him, fist raised. He took a hammer-fist to the face and it hurt . Sheena had hit him before and brilliant stars , that one stung.
Tir took it and rolled. His staff; he wrenched it up, bouncing it up with his elbow so that it soared in front of him before he caught it. Sheena’s hands caught it at the same time Tir’s did; he found himself immediately shoved back, locked into a tete-a-tete, sweaty grip slipping as knees locked into the dirt. “Fuck,” he breathed, because Sheena was about to press him down again.
The boy growled like an animal when Gremio, pale-faced and straining, appeared behind him to pull him out of the way. It wasn’t hard for him to weasel out of Gremio’s grapple; it was hard for him to resist the grip the older man found on his wrist when he wrenched his arm away. Gremio bent him to the ground; Sheena bucked at him but couldn’t do anything. Tir, wavering, pushed himself up to his feet. Tir could see the rune shining under his shirt; it was compelling, like a light in the night.
“Let him go,” Tir encouraged Gremio. “I want to—”
“No,” Gremio huffed, slowly pressing Sheena down with both arms as he shook and whined. “Young master, you are completely out of line.”
“What?—”
“He’s having an attack, and he’s going to need medical attention. We’re only making it—just—please wait .”
The hot blood slowly trickled out of Tir’s head as, with growing numbness, he watched Gremio secure Sheena on the ground, press his head down with his forearm, and hold him. He stopped struggling after a few futile jerks. They he sunk into the mud, trembling, utterly silent.
Gremio did not flinch as he waited, his eyes trained on the boy. At a cue Tir did not see, he cautiously lifted his arm from Sheena’s neck, causing absolutely nothing to happen. He took the time to pop his neck, walk to Sheena’s side, and then sat back down beside him. Tir sat down too, at his distance. Sheena’s hands, shaking badly, slowly lifted themselves to touch his own face.
“How do you feel?” Gremio asked quietly.
“ Tired.” Sheena’s voice was light and fake. “Like I just got pulverized. Fuck.”
“You fought very well. You’re hard to repel and harder to hit. You should be proud.”
“Well, thanks.”
Gremio calmly tilted Sheena’s head up to look at him. Sheena was nervous and rabbit-eyed, but Gremio was unconcerned, taking stock. “No internal bleeding. You also took your hits well. My compliments to the Lepants; you had a more thorough training than I realized.”
“Charmed.”
Gremio let Sheena’s head go and watched at it slid down. Frowning, he braced the boy from the back, and Tir saw that even Sheena had a hard time not leaning on his kindness when it was offered. “Yet I know that not everything could be shrugged off today… would you take off your shirt? I need to see the rest of your wounds.”
Sheena flinched. “No…”
“I don’t mean to insult you. You fought well, but the best warrior can have bad luck in battle. Or too many opponents. I need to make sure that we didn’t snap any ribs.”
“I can’t take it off…”
“I’m okay with touch-testing you, but if something is broken, we’ll have to attend to it properly.”
Sheena refused that too. He refused the demand that they take him to a medic instead. Sheena was shaking his head, joints snapped tense, eyes red. At a loss, Gremio returned to his starting point. “Alright… I think the hardest hits were to your neck, to your back, to your face, and I could have strained your wrist. Do any of those hurt you?…”
Sheena’s hand nervously clutched at his back, where Tir had struck him.
“…Then I need to examine that,” Gremio quietly insisted, “if it bothers you that badly.”
Sheena refused. He insisted it didn’t hurt. Gremio took his hand, pulled it away from his back, and told him that he couldn’t forgive himself if Sheena walked away from this with a wound that only got worse. He didn’t bring up the fact that he didn’t cause that one. Gremio said he was sorry; said that he would only make sure everything was alright and then they would go clean up.
Sheena was shaking when he took his shirt off. When it was gone, he was sitting rigidly, eyes on the ground. He had a musculature similar to Tir’s, with good upper body strength, thick biceps and trained pectorals, and a thinner waist underneath. His hips, Tir noticed, were unusually large. He had a few small bruises, a few small cuts—from his position he could see the colors of two runes, red on his chest, pale blue that shone low on his waist, barely above the waistband of his trousers.
Okay. What rune possibly wanted attached there ? And why was it activated? Even more alarmingly, he still wore the bandages that Tir remembered him having tied across from—from before Pannu Yakuta. Months ago. They were clean white bandages, not blood-stained, not wrapped tightly around some craterous injury—what wound did he have that still needed covered up? Had he shook so badly because Tir struck something already badly in disrepair?
Gremio recoiled as Sheena softly set his shirt on the ground. He had come to a swift conclusion, though Tir did not know to what. Gremio averted his eyes. “Oh. Oh no. I don’t—I wouldn’t presume—I make the assumption—I’m not trying to sound—with the goal of confirming what I think is—the situation—I can’t look under these bandages, can I?
“Not that I mean that I want to! I mean—good heavens—”
Gremio’s panic caused a little sick smile to twist onto Sheena’s face. “I would prefer you didn’t, yeah.”
“I—I wouldn’t—” Gremio was red. “I only intend… Oh, goddess. Please, I insist on letting a medic see to you. Does anyone know?...”
Sheena sighed, wrapping his arms around his torso. “Not really… Mom always took care of me. She doesn’t specialize in healing, but being a talented enough magician…”
“I see… I see.” Gremio physically turned away from him. “I’m not looking forward to this conversation.”
Tir had no idea what was going on.
Sheena asked that they please not tell his mom about this, she didn’t even know about the new rune. Gremio hemmed and hawed and asked the Lady of the Heavens what to do.
“If you really want to, you can check me out,” Sheena said, grin twitching back into his face. “I wouldn’t call you my first option, exactly, but…”
“I’ll… goodness.” Defeated, Gremio rose to his feet. “Stand up. I’ll make sure you’re not… can you stand?”
Sheena looked apprehensive, but Gremio lowered his arm. His legs were weak, it seemed, but he still got up alright—Gremio balked when he pulled Sheena up and they were standing so close to each other, but he could only gently shove him so far away, because he was weak on his feet. Sheena laughed at him.
…Seriously, what the hell was going on? Tir could feel his cheeks growing hot and he didn’t even fully understand why. He hated— ugh, something.
Gremio did for Sheena the same thing he would do for Tir. He turned his head this way and that with his hands gently held under his ears, muttering over the spreading bruised on his neck from where Gremio hit him. “Right in the middle… strained at best… that’s going to get worse…” With quick fingers he found and confirmed every wound he thought he was going to find after the fight they had, one fast circle around the young boy, while he fell silent, turned, lifted his arms.
“You do have to get some attention paid to your back and your neck,” Gremio admitted, “but anyone with a decent water rune can help you since nothing is broken. Except, perhaps, your nose. I’m not certain about that.”
“It’s not broken,” Sheena insisted. “Tir just gave me a nosebleed.”
“Regardless, if it is broken, it’s still a minor injury. So… whomever you can trust, I suppose. I know he’s intimidating, but Mr. Silverberg...”
“I’m sure he can keep a secret, but I wouldn’t want to bother him,” Sheena sighed.
“But you have to get it looked at by someone. At least the neck. Just have someone look over the strike on your neck; that can be a killing blow if it’s directed right. Luckily, this forsaken rune makes it so that I can’t deliver anything right. But you have to…”
“I understand.” Sheena knocked Gremio away casually as he bent down to reach for his shirt. Gremio had put it down folded on the grass even through his alarm and confusion; that kind of thing about him was so lovely. “I’ll figure it out… I’ll tell mom it was a training accident. Or that I clotheslined myself. She’ll believe that. If she can’t do it we’ll find someone… if it’s just my neck it’s not big deal.” He dressed himself and reached for his sword instinctively; it wasn’t there. Shrugging it off, he turned to Tir for a second, who was still seated on his haunches on the ground. “Hey… take it easy.”
Tir had no adequate response to Sheena’s well-wishes.
“You’ll be alright?” asked Gremio one more time.
“Yes, sir,” said Sheena, somewhat sarcastically. “You take it easy too, okay? You’re kind of high-strung.”
“Thanks… Sorry…”
Silence fell.
A minute later, Gremio kneeled down in front of Tir.
“You’re not going to go with him?”
“…Sheena can take care of… himself, I’m sure.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Tir…”
Gremio sighed, rubbing an eye with the heel of his hand. Tir felt his palms itching to touch him, but… what did he even want to do? Did he want to help and comfort him, or did he just want comfort and reassurance himself, or did he want something less kind that he was covering with an acceptable veneer? Was he being selfish? Did he feel for Gremio? How would he ever know the difference? He felt so cold in the absence of the hot anger he had felt only minutes ago. All he knew was that he wanted to touch him, the rest was a roiling stomach, opaque as silty sea.
“There’s no reason to take things out on him…”
Tir’s stomach clenched. “I wasn’t… I mean, I know. I didn’t mean to, I think… I wasn’t trying to take out my frustration on him.
“I’m just frightened.”
That hurt to admit. He had been putting on such a mature image; reality and ideals ran countercurrent to each other. He had been keeping anger, fear, and frustration out of his life in public and now alone, with Gremio, and the sighing wind, he felt all of them, cluttered, a mess in his stomach, numb in his head.
Gremio nodded. “I understand…”
“I don’t think… I don’t think we’re going to make it,” he said suddenly. “I don’t think we’re going to win. We can’t siege Scarleticia. We don’t have enough people. We don’t have firepower, weapons, we’re not organized enough. But… if we can’t do that we don’t stand a chance anywhere else either. This is a suicide mission. We never had a chance and… I don’t know what to do, if everyone doesn’t get tougher soon, I’ll be—just letting them die.”
“Oh, Tir.”
Gremio rubbed his palms down the curves of his own arms. He caught Tir’s eyes, but didn’t say anything.
“Gremio, is this—is this going to work? You know… you’ve been doing this longer, and… are we going to make it? Could we even possibly pull this off?”
“I told you not to ask me questions like that… I don’t know.”
“I’m about to lead thousands of people into battle… and I need to be sure whether or not I’m leading them all to their deaths before I go. And I’m not. No one is. I’m about to charge thousands of people into battle and I just don’t know if they will live. I can’t do that! And yet—yet, what can I do?”
Gremio was quietly still, eyes on the grass lightly shifting in the breeze. (These open plains were starting to make Tir think of Luc, their restless wind, an odd intrusion here, under the surface of the mind.) Gremio’s hands found his face, and beginning tears, and he shook his head.
“Gremio…” his own voice was tight, soft, and begging. The shame of it forced him to fight tears harder. He sounded like a child.
“When your father asked me…” began Gremio, petal-light, “Asked me whether or not he had any business invading and occupying Arcadian, or the territories which once were Arcadian, I said nothing because it wasn’t my place. He knew he was being asked to invade civilian lands and cause hundreds of civilian deaths, and he knew why, and he knew he was going to do it whether or not it was his business.
“I knew he would as well. We both knew that the invasion was happening, and it was well enough that he was being asked to direct it, because he could press his influence on the course of events. If he wanted the course of events to be kinder, or harsher, he could will it so.
“But will he or nil he it had already been determined that it would happen; so too this, I see. Thousands have already formed an army determined to crush themselves against the walls of the Empire and had long before you were involved. Enemies and promises have already been made. A course has already been set. I have no doubt that your new enemy already knows about our intention to cross him; now I begin to have few doubts that we were already being pushed in his direction by disengagement on other fronts and prodding from his territory. Everyone wants this war to happen, our side and theirs. I would be surprised if we were doing anything, now, that wasn’t someone else’s plan.
“I, at least, have always had the comfort of being a servant. I know I cannot change what will happen, and all I can affect is what is right in front of me. But you have always been told that you are free, that you have choices, that what you do matters, and that if you make a mistake, then the consequences are entirely and all your fault. That must weight on you. It certainly weighed on your father. I believe… after being asked so many times to do things against his conscience… that he has begun to grow numb to it. I saw this even when I was last with him in his house. And now that I haven’t seen him in a year’s time, I am afraid for him.
“I am afraid for you as well. You shouldn’t have to do this. This shouldn’t be your responsibility. You didn’t even want it; someone who knew nothing about you latched onto your father’s name and claimed you as an asset. And now you’re being told, by people who have spent many years constructing a war, that it’s your fault if it ends badly.
“Well, I knew it then and I know it now that this is none of our business. It never was. It’s no one’s business. We didn’t ask for it, we don’t have any right to do it and they didn’t have any right to ask us, the Empire didn’t have the right to terrorize us and the Rebels didn’t have any right to cannibalize us when we were down, it’s no one’s business at all to wage war and it’s just—happening.”
Gremio’s shoulders slumped. “It’s just happening to us. All I can tell you is… that you won’t die. I won’t let that happen. As for the rest, I don’t know.”
The impulse that he could not resist compelled him to take Gremio’s hands. They were cold; they were covered in blisters. Tir ran his thumbs over the ridges of Gremio’s knuckles and felt sadly in love and strangely comforted. His stomach was sunk deep into him with smoldering fear, but above that black undertow was a shimmering surface, delighted by being told the truth, hating it, grateful to have heard it. They were both watching each other’s hands.
“Gremio, I… I don’t know what to say. You… I’m frightened to believe you. If I say it’s out of my hands, and it’s not up to me what happens, how do I account for all the work I did to recruit people to fight? All the time I spent making ready soldiers? All the deaths I’ve already dealt? And if it will happen anyway, what can I do but do the best I can to keep everyone alive?”
Gremio… Gremio ducked his head, and worked to hide laughter.
“…Well, what?”
“I… was going to say,” he tittered, covering his mouth, “that that was just what your father said after puzzling it out himself, except he didn’t say ‘I’ll try to keep everyone alive,’ he said that he would ‘do his best to take as many dirty bastards down with him so that this sort of thing never happens again.’”
“…What?”
“You must have a lot of your mother in you.”
“What?”
“Well, That certainly doesn’t come from your father.”
“What doesn’t?”
Are you trying to be obtuse, or is it natural? said Gremio’s raised eyebrow. “That kindness.”
“…My mother didn’t raise me.”
“I meant… it must be a holdover from her. Your—your father said she was very kind. And your father, though he is… considerate… though he cares about social standing and moral exactitude… I wouldn’t call him kind.”
Tir couldn’t help but flush. After all, he had just been called feminine—men and warriors didn’t care for kindness, he had always thought. But in a moment of enlightenment, brought by a cold wind, in a bitter moment ripe for introducing new ideas to a recently scoured mind, Tir saw that kindness had gone well for those warriors he did know who did take the time to be kind. Mr. Lepant, Eileen, Viktor, Sylvina, Gremio—anyone he could think of was respected for it, woman or man.
“Your mother must have been a saint, then,” Tir muttered.
Gremio flushed. “She—she was.” Quickly, he lifted himself to his feet, straining his weak knees to stand. “Let’s go inside, young master—it’s growing cold. We’ll get something to drink and calm down… I’ll make sure young master Lepant is alright. I don’t want… anyway, I’m sure there are a lot of questions to be answered, now that people have gotten a daylight look at the young ‘Commander.’” Gremio said it with unbelievable derision. “Or if we’re lucky, we’ll run across wherever Valeria has sat herself down and she can vent for us.”
“Do you think he can do it?” Tir asked while he gripped Gremio’s outstretched hand.
“Pardon?” Gremio lifted him to his feet. He couldn’t do it effortlessly anymore; besides the struggle of overtaxing himself made him unbalanced, and he swayed as he pulled Tir up.
“Flik.” Tir shifted his left foot back so he was standing evenly. He kept Gremio’s hands in his. Mindlessly, he rubbed his thumb on Gremio’s wrist. “Do you think he’s that good? Do you think he’s good enough?”
Gremio tilted his head away, looking sour. “I surely wouldn’t know.”
Tir grinned. “Well, surely we’ll see him fighting soon… fighting Val, if no one else. Oh, shit, do you think they’re holding the challenges tonight? Do you think they’re fighting tonight??”
The challenges were being held off until the army was on the march again. This was both the only smart decision and INSANELY disappointing to Tir. He had gotten himself disproportionally excited to see several probable matches between various disgruntled parties, but he was brought to understand that precisely because of all of that bad blood, it was too risky to let people start hacking at each other the night after first contact.
“But soon,” Khuluta said casually, pouring more mead into her drinking-horn. She had, Tir thought, even more strings of glass beads than she had the day previously. “People are excited; better, tense. The reason for the fighting, other than fun, is to relieve tension. Now is stupid, but waiting too long is stupider. So, once we begin the march.”
“You already have challenges in for the new Commander?” Gremio asked, passing Tir a mug of his own. Small, glass, cold. Gremio had gotten himself a bigger one, the jerk. A small company sat around the long tables in a ring, starting their drinking early. True to form, Valeria was there, grumbling with a couple other lady knights and ladies. Tir recognized a few ‘prisoners’ from Pannu Yakuta, who didn't seem like prisoners any longer. Old friends to her—or lovers of old friends. The fishermen relaxed in lazy camaraderie with infantrymen and cooks—most were outside getting in on the mingling of the armies. These were the unaffected, incurious, or entirely too discontent. Khuluta herself must have been trying to not get her lists fill up too early by being scarce.
“Little blue-eyes? Absolutely. He and I will have a very serious talk.” Her eyes brightened with a curious glare. “Do you want to fight him too? Everyone would love to see you back in the ring. You ended your streak with such a victory.”
Gremio blushed to his neck when he remembered his overkill of Viktor. “No thank you. I don’t desire to stand across from him.”
“Then you?...” she asked Tir with hesitant hope.
“I can’t,” he said sourly. “You know I can’t.”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. “I know. Yes, I know it too. I only hoped. I dream of that kind of drama.”
“I’m sure there would be plenty happy to take my place,” Tir said, shouting directly at Valeria.
“Why do you think I’m not already signed up?” she shouted back.
“You’re fantastically dependable, Val.”
“Wish I could way the same for you, shorty.”
—
Tir was holding Gremio’s hands again as they stood outside the door to his bedroom. He kept taking them unthinkingly—and it was him that was doing it, not Gremio. When Gremio moved to touch him, he would put a hand on his shoulder or his back, or the crown on his head if they were alone and Gremio was treating him like he used to again. It was Tir who wanted to have his hands.
…Hold.
Tir ducked his head instinctively in response to a thought he didn’t like. Gremio noticed. His thumbs put a little pressure on his palms and his shoulders tensed. “…Do you need anything?”
What a question. What could he say? For all this to have never happened? A better personality? Five thousand more able-bodied troops? A good way to ask Apple if she was down for slitting someone’s throat in the night? But that’s not what he meant. “No. I’m not going to stay up, I don’t think, with the long days I’ve been having.”
“Well, don’t stay up writing all night. Or worrying.”
“I won’t.” He promised this despite knowing he was going to spend at least a little time writing and worrying in lamp-light. Some told him that his habit of mulling over the day with ink was bad for him, that it was languishing and introspective, and un-manly, but he had more than once found answers he needed when memory failed him in his pages, so he kept it up now.
“And… I’ll be right outside. So… let me…” Gremio sighed. “I mean, if you do need anything… things have been hard enough as it is. Don’t suffer alone.”
Tir hurt. He breathed it out with a steadying breath. An answer crawled slowly up his throat: stay with me. Every time he had to repress it, it seemed, that confession climbed another step up closer to his tongue: stay with me. Don’t go. Come here. Sleep with me. But he couldn’t know what would happen if he said so. He didn’t know what he wanted to happen. And if what he said was a command, despite Gremio agreeing to treat him personally now, if there was even a chance that Gremio would follow his urges on command… There wasn’t a chance that Tir could make another step. No, the one who had to do it…
“Tir?”
Where could he hide this cancer in his heart? It grew bigger every day. Someday he wouldn’t be able to. He kept saying he would have to wait for some day to face it inside himself, some quiet day, but would that day come before he was dead?
“There’s nothing I need. I just want some time to rest.”
It couldn’t have been a more obvious lie. The words fit over the feelings as well as a child’s clothing on a man. Tir could feel Gremio study his face. Only months ago, on the road, they would have laid down together and figured it out, but—
He looked upset.
Head in a dozen places, it occurred to Tir that he couldn’t feel anything when Gremio’s fingers brushed over Soul Eater. No painful shocks, no confusing tingles, nothing. Only warm skin.
“I—” Gremio was staring at him.
Tir looked up at caught his eyes, after a circling glace. He was still staring. His face was set like stone. Tir felt his sick heart quickening. “What?—”
Gremio put his hands on his shoulders. There was a spark in his eyes. It caught in the pile of shit he had been packing down inside of him and made a smoldering, disgusting fire. His head leapt blind to thoughts of Gremio’s body, his lips pressing on him, his soft tongue, hard teeth, his tight thighs touching his own.
Gremio crushed Tir in an embrace. A horrible disappointment was put out by first shame and then the outpouring of comfort that always followed Gremio’s affection. Things were such a wound-up, confused knot in his mind, how Gremio could possibly untangle it all by just being there, he didn’t know. He felt so light when Gremio held him—he felt almost like his child again, but in a different way, a shift that was impossible for him to discern or describe, since this was the first time he had ever felt it. He felt better, safe, loved and valued, and he felt like warm arms were holding him tightly, soft, sweet-smelling hair tickling his face, and he could wind his fingers into it, and it was fine. He felt like he wouldn’t ruin everything.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” Gremio whispered.
He must have jolted. “It’s fine.”
“I only…” he did not say more. He held him for a long time, as breaths rose sharply in Tir and settled again. His blood was quick and his mind bright when Gremio finally pulled back, and Tir felt as though he could feel him go, something stretching and snapping between them, a third, shared skin, with a scant, a feeling, a—a—he couldn’t place what it was.
“I love you,” said Gremio, “Very much. You were a son to me, and a brother now. But you are still young, and… no…” Gremio shook something off of his mind. A bit more of that air-something drifted away. “What I mean is… I’m still here to protect you. However I must. Not just on the battlefield. If you need me, I’ll be there. But you do have to tell me what to do.”
Oh, fuck. He had to be blazing red. He felt weak. His mind was full of kissing and holding and maybe crying while Gremio told him that everything was okay and no one would die and he was the best leader and he wasn’t going to be fifteen forever either, and he was adamant on not letting go even as the demand to let go and compose himself started blaring in him. Was he—was he really seeing things that weren’t there? He didn’t—he thought he knew what Gremio meant when he asked for commands, but—goddess above, he didn’t know what to do. And he couldn’t stop thinking about what he didn’t want to do long enough to say anything—he shook his head.
“Just… keep me in mind.”
“I will,” Tir promised weakly. “I will.”
Tir knew Gremio was doing something out-of-character, he felt the prickle of something being off, but he was too overwhelmed to process it. They pulled back from each other, and stood, at a loss.
“You don’t want a bath before bed, or?”
Oh, fuck. “For pity’s sake, Gremio, we’ve already talked about me not being a child anymore.”
“You’re right,” he chuckled. “Okay, I’m sorry. Old habits.”
“When was the last time I asked you to… seriously. You get some sleep too, Gremio. Don’t… don’t stay up all night worrying either.”
“I won’t…”
“I mean it.”
“I won’t.”
“Alright. We’re both going to get some sleep, then?”
Gremio smiled a tired, sweet smile. “If you say so.”
Tir forced himself to turn away. “Good night, Gremio.”
“Good night,” he said, good-natured amusement in his voice.
Tir opened the door awkwardly, walked through it awkwardly, and shut it awkwardly. He walked a couple of steps in the room, stopped, heard silence buzzing everywhere, felt the warmth slowly seeping away. And then he. Uh.
Slowly sank to the ground, landing on his ass, planting both of his palms firmly on the floor.
How long. Had he. Been hard.
Oh. Holy light. How long had he?? It was just a little. Had it been visible?? It hadn’t been, right?? He was still basically in training clothes, which were really loose!! But how had he not noticed? Maybe it had just happened, just now!
Wait, he could retrace this. When did he start feeling warm and fuzzy? When Gremio hugged him? No, before that. Before the hug. Sweet Tara, it happened before they even hugged. Before he started thinking about kissing him?? Surely not when he had just started holding Gremio’s hands?? There was no way, he wasn’t feeling—anything—then. Maybe when he… but how had he not noticed?? He usually the fuck noticed when this started happening because he was fucking mortified of it. Is this what he got for feeling good for once? Is that all it took? Did he have to stop feeling good at all now to keep things under control??? When the fuck would it all end!?
Tir hit his forehead to his knees. Well, it was certainly gone now. Hoooollly shit. At least it hadn’t been… uh… really hard. Probably Gremio hadn’t seen anything. Probably. Gremio would definitely have said something or… seemed awkward… but he certainly had been acting strangely. Still, if he had noticed!
What if he had noticed??
Deep in it, Tir knew he was miserably embarrassed, recoiling as hard as he could from a moment who was too sharp, too sudden, too soon, except…
Except it wasn’t too soon. It wasn’t a shock. The ground work had already been laid. He had already started noticing his feelings. He had already guessed what they were. They only waited for him to turn around and acknowledge them, stifled and furious in a back corner of his mind.
Later, he would know that this was the night he saw things for how they were. This is how it happened: he was slumped on the ground, emotionally desiccated. The night was very dark, so much so that he could hardly see himself. With the awestruck horror of an unsuspecting passer-by discovering a corpse in the woods, he lifted a hand to his face. Not knowing why, only feeling compelled, he kissed his own palm. He imagined Gremio, not posed suggestively, not blushing like a girl, he just—saw him. Imagined not his face but his warmth, the scent of his hair and his shirt and his skin, still fresh in his mind, the feeling of the nebulous substance that passed between them when they got too close, held each other for too long. He only imagined it and felt it feel right.
And then not it, but he, felt wrong, terribly wrong, sick like a throat coated in shit, worthless like a child put into a corner to be punished. The moment came with a breath, ripped at his mind, went out with another, tripping down his spine, tweaking him painfully as it went, and then he felt hollow.
He was exactly that way. It was as he feared. That’s why he was so fascinated with and bothered by the subject. That’s why he couldn’t stop focusing on how Viktor was a queer and how Sheena was too flirtatious and how awful his dreams were and how Gremio touching him made him feel hot. He was obsessed with these things because they fueled an awful fire in him that was him, and he already knew it, and now he wouldn’t ever not know it again. The fire had already been burning and the coals had already eaten away at his foundation. He was already ruined.
He got up to change into his sleepclothes. He didn’t feel like writing. He’d just go to bed.
—
Going to bed did not help him find sleep. When worrying and self-sickness wasn’t keeping him clawing at himself, soreness from fighting so much and uncomfortable heat dueled for needling him more than the other needlers. It was like now that he had faced this thing inside him full-on, it… wouldn’t go away. It rose into his vision, sunk away again on the edges. Images of lust were completely unstoppable though undesired. He saw corners and edges of what had happened to him, snippets of memories, fractions of himself and his feelings, but in the late dark he grew confused to what it even was. What was once known as a whole beast because a thousand independent teeth.
Was he so horrified because of his attraction to men? Or to Gremio? Or was it someone else? Was he afraid it was not really him, but something else influencing him, and if so, was that worse or better? Was it worse or better to know that surely he would never consummate his attraction? How would everyone feel about this? Would he be left with his position if people knew? Could he even do this? How the hell were they going to siege Scarleticia? Did they even have a plan? What was Flik thinking?
Flik… was he being honest about his motivation? Was he truly motivated by rescuing Toran from its tyrants, and even if so, what else was a factor? He couldn’t be as malicious as he seemed, and what would Tir do if he was? Viktor… he was so mad at Viktor… he was mad at everyone, honestly… he could hear Flik dismissing Apple like she was no one, he saw Valeria’s hate-filled face, he saw Flik’s hand bending back Viktor’s wrist…
He could see a hushed conversation in the candlelight… in a basement, he thought, or an underhouse tavern. Flik had Viktor’s hand held on the table, and what they were saying was nonsense… “how could you let this happen,” “where have you been,” “what do you want,” “where are we going from here.” Tir felt like he couldn’t tell what was going on. He circled the table; a cold, silent stream coursed down the floor of the tavern. It made him shudder with chill but didn’t get him wet. Viktor had his head bowed. He was shuddering. Something about his twitches didn’t seem right. Someone was behind him.
He turned to see. The river flowed. It coursed black down the hillside, not disturbing a single blade of waving grass but seeping slowly through them like molten metal. Still it was cold. The stars didn’t reflect in it; up above they shone disturbingly close, circles of candlelight, flickering and waving, hurting his eyes. Luc was—he couldn’t see him clearly, but Luc was standing on a distant hill, observing the stars. He glowed pale yellow-gold, Breath’s champagne glow, intoxicating, as though he were one of the stars. He seemed older. He was taller than Tir. He was—seventeen, obviously. Tir knew that. His hair had been cropped short. He looked good. Tir tried to approach him, but it was so hard to walk through the black water.
“You can tell there’s something really, really wrong with me,” Luc whispered. So close and so far.
“What?”
“That must be why you like me so much.”
“I don’t…”
Even his words were slow. He felt like there was a darkness in his forehead.
“What is it? What’s so wrong about me? You can feel it. What is it?”
Luc was looking at him in profile. There was something dreadfully uncomfortable about his eye, but he couldn’t tell what it looked like. His face was as white as a skull. Tir was suddenly much closer to him. He was having a hard time breathing in the thick air.
“Come and find me underneath.”
“What?”
Sheena turned around. He had his hands on his own neck. Tir couldn’t see his chest. The black water went right through it. “Can’t you tell?”
“You’re not making any sense!”
Tir backed up a sluggish step, tangled in filmy seaweed. The tavern—he had just been in Lenenkamp. How did he end up in Toran? For there were the caves full of bones and strange creatures, ruins and darkness, creeping close.
When he wheeled around, he saw the port lights of Kaku distorted through the waters of the lake. Foot traffic drifted in the currents, dead and bloated.
“You don’t like me unless you can get me fucked up. That’s pretty sick.”
There was a skeletal grip on his arm. He tried to fight it, but there was nowhere he could go. In his panic, he called to Soul Eater. Piercing the darkness, she glowed. Her light drifted on the rolling waves like fresh-kill in the lake, red lines of blood that shifted, flowed, and circled around him. He wrenched backward, and saw another person, standing on the shore.
“Gremio!” Tir rushed to him. The sand crushed under his feet. Many red hands reached out to touch him, soft hair, pale skin, strong shoulders. Tir collapsed onto him. He could feel his warmth. “Something’s really wrong.”
“I know,” Gremio reassured him. His voice was very soft. He was fully armed, as he was before they approached Pannu Yakuta, in the quiet of the Commander’s tent. “Don’t be afraid.”
The air was red. His eyes were red. Tir knew that without looking at them. Gremio held him fast, turning him, like dancers turning in an embrace, before settling him down onto his bedroll on the ground. The air of the tent was red as if full with blood, as if it was hard to keep all of the blood in here. Gremio sat down with him, on top of him. He looked beautiful, poised and pale, strong and delicate, fetchingly paradoxical. Tir could feel himself growing excited, though his stomach was rolling with blood.
“Here—just try.”
Gremio threaded his fingers slowly between Tir’s, one at a time, gently rubbing the soft skin of his palm. Tir stared in rapture. Gremio used nothing but the gentle grip on his hand to pull him forward. Tir struggled up and Gremio calmly put Tir’s hand on his cheek, fine and smooth; Gremio shaved every day, he knew, and was mortified if he ever had to go without. Gremio slowly pushed Tir’s hand over the curve of his chin, leaning back with total submission and skilled foresight, so that he moved in allowance to the path Tir’s hand would have to make. He pulled Tir’s hand down his neck, not the rough back with the glittering rune, but the soft underside, where his Adam’s apple bobbed between two of Tir’s fingers. He could feel the muscles tense and soften as he traced his fingertips on more vulnerable areas, sensitive to touch or violence; he could feel the breath coming in and out of his throat. His head rolled side to side to allow Tir to explore him however he liked, enjoying the soft skin over his collarbone, the sharp sinews, the hot muscle. He ran the tips of his fingers down Gremio’s sternum and watched him breathe.
Tir was growing too excited. He knew he would probably start showing soon. He didn’t know why he liked this so much. Gremio sensed that Tir was confused and pulling back, so he slipped his hand off of his neck and held Tir’s hands in his. They did this, all the time—“It’s alright, see?” Gremio reassured him. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I don’t know…”
The air tasted like metal when he spoke. His lips were prickling.
“But you want to… right?” Gremio was tracing the tips of his fingers up Tir’s underarms. Little shocks on sensitive skin turned into a full-body shudder. He could feel the tiny tips of his nails, barely painful, creeping up to his shoulders.
“Yes.”
“Let me…” he whispered, fanning his fingers up Tir’s side, putting gentle pressure on his shoulderblades. He was getting very, very close. His legs were curled but tensed, ready as if sparring to spring. “It’s alright. This is just what humans do.”
Tir was breathing blood. His pulse was pounding, he could hear it. He unwound his legs and shyly parted them. Gremio’s hands hitched themselves between his upper ribs, under his arms—he was going to lay him down, and the second he knew that, Tir felt the cold ground settle under his back. He couldn’t see the ceiling. He felt dizzy in the swimming room and he wanted a touch to anchor him. He put one of Gremio’s hands on his chest, over his heart—she pumped blood in crashing waves, waves he felt all along the shoreline of his body, his fingertips, his thighs, his stomach, his cheeks. With Tir’s guidance, smoothing his fingers over soft sinews, Gremio’s hand gripped her tightly; Tir tensed under him and bit his lip, feeling overwhelmed and hot. He was sweating. Gremio’s fingers pulsed. He stroked the slimy walls of the beating muscle, soothing the tension, convincing her to pulse with him, finding her rhythm with his thumb.
Tir’s free hand wound into the rug, viciously tense. The other slid up Gremio’s back to encourage him down, deeper into him. Gremio’s hand went into his body, bulky, intrusive, too big, and so fucking satisfying, as if the lonely contents of a cold ribcage had been waiting for him for a long time. Tir was making these noises he had never heard himself make before. He could feel his own hips rocking. His face was splattered with blood. Gremio gripped him harder, his heart seized and his legs spasmed, and he just felt crazy. Fuck, that hurt , his fingers fucking him inside, and it just didn’t matter, because he was being filled up, and he wasn’t empty any more, and it didn’t matter . He felt good. He should be allowed to feel good.
Gremio leaned down to kiss him where it hurt. He came back with his lips red
—
He heard a noise
—
Tir shoved himself up on his elbow, on full alert, in enough time to see someone poking their head in the door. He already had an arm up in defense by the time Sheena was half-way inside.
“Ksshhfff?” He asked, having a fucking heart attack, unaware of where he was, and feeling like Sheena wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Oh, hi,” Sheena whispered, awkwardly shuffling into his bedroom. “In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought I could sneak up on you.”
“nnn… what?”
“It’s just me, man. Put the… put the woman’s guard down.”
“Woman… what? Why are you here?”
“Swordfighting. You look like you’re in woman’s guard.” Sheena mimed holding a heavy sword over his shoulder, poised to be swung, with one arm across his face. “I think we use different terms.”
“It’s just, like… a regular defense stance,” Tir squeaked. “Why are you in my room. What time is it?”
“Just about dawn. I thought you would be awake. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Did Gremio let you in??”
“Yeah.”
That didn’t seem right. Did Gremio think it was fine for someone to walk into his bedroom like this? Did he have a really important question? Shit, Gremio probably thought he was awake, if it was almost dawn. Gremio probably thought he was already out of the room at this point.
… Please, kind goddess , he thought, have mercy and let me not be hard again.
…Judging by the feel of things, the goddess had no mercy or just wasn’t there.
I’m going to abandon you for the forest gods.
“Can we do it again?”
“I’m… sorry?”
Sheena was looking at him with a bit of frustration. Or maybe embarrassment. “I don’t have a handle on this rune. At all. It bothered me all night. I need to be able to control it in battle. It’ll be a great boon once I just get it under control! And you’re the best guy for that other than Luc, who makes me uncomfortable. So can we fight again?”
“…You want to repeat last night? Like, you want that to happen again?”
“Ideally, with me not getting my ass kicked as much, yeah.”
“You really like? Ok, you don’t totally hate me, for one thing?”
“Man, I hate you as much as I would hate a rabid dog for trying to bite. You’re a crazy ass son of a bitch… sorry, I know you didn’t know your mom. Crazy ass son of a loyalist motherfucker, but I figure you can’t help it.”
“Thanks.”
“I honestly feel a lot of pity for you, come to think of it. Man, you’ve got issues .”
“Forget I asked. Get out of my room, I need to get ready.”
“Yeah, good idea. I’m going to be right outside though, okay?”
“Fine…”
The door clicked behind Sheena and Tir slowly slumped back into bed, head slapping on the pillow. He felt… a lot of things. He felt more relieved and happy than he thought he would that Sheena didn’t hate him now, and didn’t look very beat up either. He was pretty sure they were friends now. He didn’t want Sheena to hate him, even if he was a… crazy ass son of a loyalist motherfucker. He felt nervous, too. And now that he was alone again, and silence was settled back down, he felt wrong inside. Like there was a little something missing from inside him, or like he was a little bit rotten, with a growing cavity.
And he felt a little bit hard. Seriously. Damn it , go away .
He took enough time pacing, hitting his head on the wall, and dousing himself in cold water so that it would go the hell away and leave him alone, got dressed, and got moving. Fuck breakfast. He didn’t need breakfast. Gremio happened to be busy with getting ready himself when he passed by so he had the opportunity to not look at him and feel shame for now. Instead, he just endured Sheena slinging an arm around his shoulders with a reflexive and not at all grateful smile.
“Hey, ah…” Sheena began awkwardly, as they made their way down the spiral stairs. “I’m also got something to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“Well… I know who you like.”
The words took a minute to sink in. “How do you know?”
“Eh… once I realized that it might be a man, the pieces fell into place, so to speak. It’s how you act around him. Goes completely unnoticed when you assume that the two of you have a familial relationship, but when you look at it with different eyes…”
“You—how did—why did you think it was a man?”
“I just realized that it might be. It was when we were having our conversation about him. You were very careful to never say it was a woman or talk about women in general. And if a guy goes out of his way to not talk exclusively about women when he’s talking about romance… then he’s probably talking about guys. There’s no other reason to avoid saying ‘she’ and ‘her’ every single time. Any other man would.”
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Never talk about this kind of thing again. “Oh…”
“Hey, I’m only bringing it up, because… because I mean, I know this is a big secret. Like, it could be a really big deal. So, like, first off, that’s how I figured it out… the careful gender neutrality, you know, and you never acting like you like girls, and how you act around him… really sweet, and close, and stuff. But more importantly, the reason I brought it up at all is to let you know the secret’s safe with me. You know? I’m not going to tell anyone. You’re safe with me.”
“Oh… thanks.”
“I am going to make fun of you though.”
“Oh. No thank you.” Tir ducked under Sheena’s arm to extract himself. “Never mind. Go away.”
“I don’t even know where to start. You’re a little freak, aren’t you? First off, a lieutenant? That’s fucked up.”
“That’s not uncommon. Stop talking to me, I’m walking away from you.”
“Your legs are too short to get away from me. Second off, Axe Crazy? Really? All the cute girls in the world, hell, all the cute boys in the world and you want old Axe Crazy. Speaking of, isn’t he a little old for you?”
“I didn’t do this to you when you wouldn’t shut up about Jeanne.”
“Yeah, but you looked at me judgmentally.”
“Because you’re REALLY GROSS when you talk about girls. I don’t need to know that kind of stuff.”
“Well, I don’t need to see you making fawn-eyes at Gremio every time he smiles or rubs your back or calls you ‘master,’ which, speaking of him calling you ‘master’ all the time, get on guard, because I’m about to talk about that so fucking much. Tir, how do I even begin.”
Sheena haunted him like a friendly, hypocritical poltergeist all the way to the training fields as Tir hissed at him to shut up and leave him alone, face almost hot enough to properly poach an egg. Master Kai was already waiting when they arrived; Tir was late and Kai didn’t stand for youthful shenanigans. Sheena stopped talking shit and started cursing soon enough, but Tir already could tell it was good for him; if Sheena wanted to be able to use his rune appropriately, he needed to get used to taking pain more gracefully first, and tempering his fear of combat. And if Master Kai, he of the thousand disciplinary strikes, wasn’t good for that, he was good for nothing.
Looking at Sheena suplexed on the ground, Tir knew he was fucked if he wasn’t going to see him there every morning from then on. And he was right.
—
ORIGINAL NOTE
—
F R I E N D S H I P
A ha ha, yes, so much age gap drama. With, as I have said my before, what is now my normal amount of pointless incestual undertones.
That dream scene was a doozy! I had a hell of a time writing it and it's still one of my favorite scenes. It contained a slight reference to a Blackmore's Night song (Where are we Going from Here, which, in retrospect, would have been a better title source for this mess than an Inkubus Sukkubus song.) Luc's older appearance obviously is faceclaimed right from his appearance in SIII and it was meant to be a lead-up to some late-fic stuff I will surely never write now ;u;
After that day, which in retrospect had been a slow-boiled and carefully simmered jealous meltdown, Tir had a lot of catch up to do. Two days until they were on the march—and they had to rearrange construction and responsibilities of their armies entirely to try to blend the forces as well as they possibly could. Flik had fewer troops by over half, and luckily, he had the sense to realize they had to bend more than Tir’s did when it came to their eventual arrangement.
Still, the battle-table looked complicated when everyone sat down on the day before departure for a final meeting. For the most part they were to hash out their plan for getting to and attacking Garan; the siege at Scarleticia was discussed only insomuch as they had to plan for the conservation of supplies to get there. It was too much of an Ordeal to strategize for Garan to even get there.
The usual suspects were headed, of course, with Mathiu at the pinnacle of the table, the stubborn deciding vote. He was looking as harried but even more pissed off than usual, flipping through a pile of notes in front of him and tapping on a glass of something very heavy at his side. His side, particularly, that was right next to Flik, who was in the exact same tightly-tied armor Tir had never seen him out of, wearing the same musk of sleeplessness, sweat, and bitter alcohol, a fuller glass of which he held in leather grip to his chest. Viktor sat on Matt’s other side; Tir wondered immediately if Matt put himself purposefully in between them.
Descending down the counter-clockwise side of the table, with Mathiu at noon, was Viktor, beside him Valeria, cheeks scrubbed and scars glimmering, beside her Eileen and Charles LePant, both poised and armored; beside Charles was Varkas, with whom he had become fast friends because of their equally intense dedication to the warrior’s way; beside him, an extra seat down the way, was Lorelai, lounging back in her chair, as casual as one could appear when they were always battle-ready. With more and more training and more experience with combat, Tir could see with resignation and admiration how relaxed his fellow co-commanders never were.
Again beginning with Mathiu, but this time traveling clockwise, was Flik (again, in disconcerting disarray), beside him Humphrey, quiet, almost calm; in the next three seats after him the three soldiers whom Flik had appointed unit commanders. They were first the young men Tir had seen in the hotel room with him, Dague and Seax respectively, and a woman, Navaja. Dague was lean and a bit short, dark, and quiet. Seax, with bright eyes and the look of a heavy fighter, had more of a presence. This was the first time Tir got a good look at Navaja; she had ridiculously long, braided hair, many glittering knives, an air of quiet confidence, and wings. No one was talking about the fact that she had big, black wings on her back, but she did. Next to her, completely unfazed by Navaja’s wings or anything else happening at this fucked-up meeting, was Kirkis, for once without a swollen eye or an infected slash on his forearm, and Rubi, for some reason, was seated backwards in a pulled-out chair behind him, snickering and chattering in Elvish. A seat away from him was Sanchez’s belongings, though the man himself was hopping from chair to chair, boozing, feeding, and spreading information.
At the foot of the table, at six o’clock, opposite Mattiu, was Tir himself. On his right, seated closest to Navaja, was Apple, unbelievably prim, laying out pages of parchment with dates and minutes already noted. On his left, closest to Lorelai, was Gremio, arms crossed, eyes pinched. Somewhere not far behind Tir, with a cushioned chair he pulled from another room and reading a book, was Luc. Luc was here because he was required to sit in on serious strategy meetings so he was prepared for battles. Tir had developed the habit of flicking balls of paper at him when he had to pay attention.
Such would the meetings be for a while. The tension between those who railed for or against Mathiu’s ideas in the past, in the days before Pannu Yakuta, was vanished like water in drought. All those who remembered those days found a way to be banded uncomfortably together against Flik.
Tir didn’t want that, because their schism was going to tear this army apart, but all the well-bred decorum her had in him couldn’t stop him from liking it.
In the center was a map of the Antei area, carefully engraved on a wooden panel that fit into the center of the table. It could be changed out with other maps, still being worked on, that more closely detailed their target fortresses. Upon it were many of the same carved chips of wood they had used in their previous meetings, with Odessa’s and Ronnie’s, and a few others Tir still wasn’t sure about, placed respectfully on the northern border of the map. A blue bolt of lightning apparently represented Flik. His lieutenants all chose to be represented by roughly carven knife-strokes, one rich burgundy, one emerald green, one silver. As if that wasn’t fucking confusing. Rubi and Apple were not granted player’s chips, one because he didn’t deserve it and the other because she wasn’t going to set foot on the battlefield. Tir hadn’t approached Gremio about having one made for him, since that would imply Tir intended for Gremio to leave his side, which suggestion he would not take gracefully.
Tir would not say that he was exactly distracted by having Gremio pinned to his side at the war table. This was how it had always been, and as the tension rose like a thundercloud rolling in from the hills, it was easy to slip into the feeling of things as they once were. Tir with a thousand troubles at his throat and his fiery willpower alone keeping them at bay, and Gremio dependable, undaunted, unstoppable, not quite invisible at his side, silent until the second Tir needed him.
But looking at him too long made the so-familiar feeling, once immovable in his gut, waver like it was the heat-mist of a summer day, transparent, shifting, ungraspable. When at his side, taken for granted, nearly invisible, the man at his left hand was Gremio as he always had been; when looked at in full, regarded, taken into account, he became a new man, the one who fought like a monster, joked and punched and drank with the soldiers, compassionately handled the worst of the worst when it came to split skin and bared souls, and kissed Tir softly and permissively and with the tip of his tongue, which he just couldn’t forget. And though this person was Gremio, and had always been inside him, and blended perfectly into and out of the Gremio he had already known, yet he was a new person, and yet Tir did not have a new name for him. He still had to be Gremio, cooking, humming, fussing Gremio, he just drank and fought and argued and kissed him with his tongue now.
...Once. And it had definitely been an accident.
So went the moments in which Tir accidentally looked at Gremio when they were debating how to conquer Garan. They were long moments, longer than other moments, stretched out by tides and turns in his body, stretched out like skin, washed slowly down with wine.
The meeting was easy for Mathiu to control. Yes, there were more and more acrimonious people than he was used to managing, but they all hated each other so much that he was able to pass the sides back and forth as if he was tossing it from hand to hand, and so many of the major players were, considering recent events, mentally preoccupied. The agreement they all begin with was this: it shouldn’t be too difficult to take Garan.
“Not too difficult,” Valeria surmised, “but if we’re not careful, it could prove costly.”
“It’s still an armed fortress,” Eileen agreed. “It’s our approach we have to be careful of, even if the attack strategy is less fraught with danger.”
“The trouble with that is that there’s only one way through it,” Flik groused. “You can ford the river below but it’s not easy, and we’re not looking to take the sort of time it would take to travel far enough south of the fortress unobserved this time. You have to attack front and center, no matter what.”
“I recall Garan,” Mathiu admitted, “you may be right. I would say this would be the time to send an official declaration of intent to combat so that they feel the pressure to let us walk up at the appointed place and time, but…”
“Considering how we’ve conducted ourselves so far? Yeah, right.”
“What do you mean?” Kirkis asked. “Why would we declare our intent to fight them?”
“It used to be common practice,” Valeria explained, “among factions in the Empire, or other respected governments, like Tinto, the Highlands, or Harmonia. If it was decided that war was the only way, we would decide on a time and a place, bring the best of our troops, and settle things quickly. Sometimes, you could know who was about to win by looking. Surprise attacks were reserved for barbarians, traitors, or anyone we intended to really ruin… you showed respect by declaring your intention to fight instead.”
“There were fewer deaths that way,” murmured Humphrey, as Valeria nodded.
“Considering all of our attacks so far have been unannounced and ended up bloody, pretending we’re a civilized army now would just make them feel insulted. We’d probably get the Empire on the offensive that way. They consider us enemies to slaughter and not their equals anyway, they’re probably planning to go in swinging anyway, we’d just be showing our hand.”
“Pretending to ignore the fact that that’s a cruel and backwards system anyway,” Flik began, “seeing as if you have the clear head and ‘civility’ to decide on a time and place to start the slaughter, then—”
“So we have to find some other way to ensure we can approach Garan without being picked apart by archers on the walls, since just asking for open field battle won’t work.” Mathiu was quick to rap his glass on the table to shut Flik up. Sanchez, perhaps unfortunately, took it as a demand for more to drink. Tir decided to down some of his own. This petty back-biting, already? “They’re a border control fortress, there’s no way they don’t have hell to rain down on us.”
“Archers on the walls, catapults, probably slickfire…” Kirkis quirked his head over his shoulder and explained what he said to Rubi. Rubi, snorting, took a drag from a smoke he dangled loosely from two fingers. He growled something, which Kirkis translated: “Probably not fantastic archers, but since we’re getting into Antei, lots of technology. Definitely slickfire, since it’s good to attack ships with. They’re prepared for naval attacks.”
“But we’re coming from land.” That was Seax, the largest of Flik’s officers. “And they’re likely to be unprepared for us—”
“They’ll be prepared,” Valeria interrupted. “There’s no way to cover up an army of this size marching, even if we didn’t have Imperial spies in here.”
Mathiu wasn’t as quick to relieve that uncomfortable silence. Valeria said it like a fact, as simple as the history she had recounted. And Tir had heard others, especially Viktor, say as much before. If Viktor, Valeria, and Mathiu all thought so…
Gremio shuffled his legs underneath him in his seat. Tir glanced at him, hyper-aware. His eyes were pinched forward, then downcast; he tensely folded his hands on the table. His tongue slipped out of his mouth to draw back his lower lip into his mouth. It slid back out of his mouth slowly, drug under his teeth. His skin went white, then red, as the blood flowed back in…
Tir’s head was emptied and his stomach dropped to the floor as a visceral, disorienting, misplaced memory hit him of Gremio’s soft throat underneath his fingertips, of Gremio’s warm lips on his heart. A dream. Just the dream. But he felt like he knew the feeling of Gremio’s body on top of his, fireplace-hot, his weight pressing him into the harshness of the wide-woven rug, his hands running down his body, every individual fucking rib feeling loved as he felt him down… but he did know how it felt to be crushed underneath Gremio, he had known it in his first battle in the Great Forest, when he almost died, he had known it a hundred times in childhood, pushed gently down by a man who just wanted him to tie his damn shoes, he had known it once before, his body totally covered by a man who was a shield against death, the comfort of a human to hold…
He had been buried under Gremio before, close to his death, and the dream used a precious memory like that to fuel such a terrible fantasy… the feeling of Gremio’s soft hands inside his body, caressing his heart.
The memory took a long time to sink down from his mind and slowly through his body, sticking like oil or honey, causing a shiver as it went. It felt like it had happened. He remembered it, and yet he knew he had dreamed it last night. How could it feel real to have had his... his heart touched inside of his chest? How could he even imagine what that even felt like? He knew a gentle caress, even from those hands, and he knew pain, but not pain as he should have felt it in that situation, just… raw, throbbing, invasive, good pain. Pain like satisfaction, and getting what you deserve.
Tir felt disgusting.
“But that’s the strength of the formation,” Lorelai said with sudden harshness. “You haven’t experienced it yet, but you’ll understand.”
“I just can’t understand how such massive forces could be kept concealed.” Seax was leaning back in his seat, aggressively controlled, face pinched.
“They’re not massive. We run small sections of the army. Like we have explained.”
“It’s a new concept,” Mattiu sighed. “It’s difficult to start thinking in small groups when it comes to battle plans, but that’s why the method has worked so well so far. Our enemies don’t think the way we do. They don’t understand that we trust our officers to move autonomously. And they don’t realize that we can contact them instantaneously to spread information.”
Tir heard Luc shuffle behind him. Surely, he was smirking. Tir didn’t look at him, however, not wanting to act twitchy or too easily suggested in front of the new lieutenants. That dream was on his mind… something had so distressed him about Luc in his dream, but he couldn’t remember what it had been. It was something he couldn’t pin down, a sixth sense that told him, like it would tell a mouse in a hole, that a cat or a hawk was lurking by nothing but shadow and scent. An overwhelming surety of danger, but why? Perhaps he could admit he had always been taken aback by Luc, but when everyone else treated him like a little psychopath, he didn’t want to be. He wanted to be above it all, and he didn’t want to be scared. Luc had great magical power, absolutely. But Tir had power that had bested it reliably.
Where had he pulled the vision of Luc as a young man from, though in his dream, he thought he appeared no different? What had he said—'that’s why you like me so much?' Tir wanted to say ‘bullshit, I don’t like him at all.’ But would a dream, made inside your mind, be wrong about how you felt?
Tir heard Luc turning a page. Was he really able to read in a tense situation like this?
“Would you all be so kind as to lay down the actual planned positions on the table,” Apple sighed, flipping to a new page in her notebook, “so that I can have the plan written down in case of disagreements later?”
A few arms moved to put pieces on the table; Mathiu held up his hands. “Allow me,” he said. “When I’ve put everything down, we can have any arguments about placements.”
Tir thought that, naturally, Mathiu’s placements were well thought-out. A sizable amount of the force would approach them head-on, including Tir, Valeria, Kirkis, and Flik; the faces of the revolution, which the Empire were already on the look-out for after the reports from Pannu Yakuta. It was a shame they couldn’t put Kirkis’s archers to the side; Lorelai would have to head more of them to make up for the deficit. Tir saw Kirkis thinking hard about the appointment, but like asked, he refrained from saying anything immediately. Though Flik was front and center in the attack, seeing as he was the military commander, his officers were all supposed to be hidden; Navaja, who specialized in long-range weapons like Lorelai, would be tasked with taking her troops on a much longer, harsher route so that they could approach unnoticed from the south while the bulk of the forces arrived brazenly from the east. Varkas, whose troops were specialized in stealth missions, would accompany her. Charles and Eileen’s, dependable and small in number, were to hang back and specifically not attack until instruction, since they could charge into any gap or take any advantage. Humphrey, as always, was tasked with the impossible; catching the forces of Garan from behind.
“To all appearances, it’s impossible,” Mathiu began, “but the power of our army is in its mobility. If people move as expected, and in the Imperial Army, they almost always do, we should be able to choke them and cut them down, much like we did at Pannu Yakuta. It will only be harder in that we’ll have to compel them to leave the fortress. The bait to draw them out is first and foremost a force that they expect appearing at their gate; they know about us, they know Flik’s forces have joined us, so they’ll expect a force much like what was reported at Pannu Yakuta, but a little larger. We’ll show them about 6,000, a believable number; the rest will be hidden out of sight. Small forces, scattered, waiting for an opportunity or a command. You have the right to recognize a good opportunity to attack; you are also bound to take commands from the tactician, or his messenger.”
…That was another worry that had gotten thorny.
Luc hadn’t made it clear if he was going to work for Flik, or take orders from him, or carry messages to him. He hadn’t totally made it clear that he was going to work for Mathiu, either. He hadn’t said he wouldn’t. But he hadn’t said he would. And if he was going to keep looking to Tir for command, even in battle… what would Tir do?
It was up to Flik to try to get an agreement out of Luc, though. Not Tir. Maybe it was Tir’s job to make the connections now. But maybe Luc was a private matter, not his job.
…Sheesh, he needed to relax.
“Command still does take precedence over personal judgement?” asked Dague, the first he had spoken up.
“Yes,” said Viktor, who had also been unusually quiet. Tir thought he was enjoying observation. He had been subdued in general since Flik’s entrance. “We still have to be a cohesive force. If you’re given a direct order from a reliable source, obey it. You’ve already been introduced to all of the reliable sources; if someone on your level has an idea, you can override it. If it’s stupid. Lorelai.”
“I don’t know why you would mention me there.”
“’Let’s just shoot short people over the walls to invade,’” recited Vik in his best falsetto.
“It’s theoretically possible.”
“Yeah, but by ‘short people’ you for sure meant ‘elves.’”
“I respect their abilities as infiltrators.”
Kirkis, for the record, was laughing. Rubi was nudging him to translate, because he heard ‘elves’ but didn’t know most of the rest of what Lorelai was saying.
Navaja, unexpectedly, chimed in. “Obviously, just flying in was once the preferred tactic of the Horde. But there are only a few of us here. I would still be willing to fly in if it were useful, but not in high visibility or if arrows are flying; that will absolutely lead to our deaths.”
“I would have to see if there was an opportunity…” Mathiu hemmed. “For the same reasons you stated I wouldn’t expect it. Perhaps if we are already forcing our way inside. As it stands, we are instead pushing for the more realistic goal of luring the army out and then surrounding them with unexpected troops. Varkas’s liberators are as much made for it as the Horde are, but we still have the difficulty of making sure they do not just retreat back into the fortress, which would be impossible for us to just surge into to attack their full force, once we draw them out.”
“And that is my task,” said Humphrey with the same reluctant gravitas he always demonstrated.
“Yours and Charles’, if he’s still available. I know it won’t be easy. But I don’t think it’s impossible. You’ll have some of the best troops, and they already knows the army’s typical movements and methods of operations. It’ll have to be done very quickly, the timing will have to be precise, but when the time comes that their attention is entirely on their wall of defense, all you’ll have to do is open the back door.”
A typical Mathiu Silverberg plan—elegant, simple, insane. Garan was situated on the narrowest and most sedate section of the great River that separated Eastern and Western Toran, with the delta that led into Toran Lake to the north of it and a confusing array of rapids and tributaries to the south as the river flowed faster and wilder. Still, Garan was surrounded by its water, since the river remained wide and deep enough to situate it on an artificial island in the center, with a living, freezing moat separating it from both sides of the land. An attack from the east was obvious, from the south reasonable, from the north, which was the lake, impossible. But Mathiu, with a mind like a bird’s, saw every angle; why not attack from west, which was at their backs and unguarded? Damn the fact that it was their own territory, it was their blind spot as well, and he was going to exploit it. They were to sail the other way around Toran island, which feat they had proven possible but difficult, and come to Garan from the north, boarding along the shore in secret and marching to the battle. How to keep Humphrey’s troops undetected for long enough that the enemy could not simply pick them off was the difficult part, but with precise timing and deadly accuracy, Mathiu found a method he thought he could bring them to Garan’s back door when the army was so preoccupied defending the front that nothing could be done in time.
“It will be very dangerous. If any part of the plan does not work as expected you will be exposed. If everything works as we hope, then you will be immediately in the thickest, most difficult area of the battle… but if we push hard, we’ll tie a noose around their necks they cannot possibly escape . No one can escape from being fully surrounded. The troops left inside, if not already fleeing, will be easy to subdue with enemies swarming them from each exit.”
“Of course, all of this depends on the assumption that we can draw them out of the castle, which is not assured,” Flik interrupted. “Why would they not stay inside, where they are safe, especially if they don’t respect us as opponents?”
“Because we have almost no chance of storming inside, remember,” sighed Viktor.
“Uh, yeah! And they know that. How the hell do you think that we’ll be able to lure them out of their fortress when they’re totally safe inside, they don’t have to face us if they don’t want to, and just waiting will leave us helpless, pinned against their wall, and waiting for reinforcements to march in from Scarleticia or Shasarazade?”
Fighting again. Tir took a more serious drought of the wine. He had learned, now that enough alcohol was shoved in front of him on frequent occasion, that it started tasting and feeling much nicer after you had been drinking for a while. The second glass was much more pleasant than the first, and by the time the second glass was finished, the drink looked, smelled, and tasted like spring water, the water of life.
This didn’t mean he necessarily liked the feeling that came with it. The lightening of his thoughts that came with it was nice, too nice, too gentle. It made him feel like he was being sweet-talked by a con-man inside his own mind. It said things he liked too much.
“They almost certainly will come out to engage us whether or not they feel secure,” Gremio insisted. “Glory in battle is the only thing the infantry values. It’s how they’re recruited. They don’t have anything, but they will if they can get acclaim, war spoils, and a name for themselves. It’s hard to keep people inside the fortresses when they have a chance to fight.”
Tir gazed at him side-eyed. He didn’t want to lose his peripheral examination of Viktor, Matt, and Flik, since knowing which of them did or didn’t like an idea was frustratingly important (but laughably simple), but he was interested in what Gremio was saying. He wasn’t remotely the only person who had fought on the other side of this conflict, but knowing now that he had such a familiarity with the operation of it…
“There’s no reason not to try to plan a few ways options for flushing out the fortress if they don’t take the bait,” Mathiu sighed.
Gremio was settled with his chin on his palm, brow tense, watching the head of the table with intense dissatisfaction. His hair was braided back today—Tir knew that that meant he hadn’t had time to wash it in a while. He had surely been doing nothing but work for the past two days, just as Tir had. Now, he could see all the signs he had once missed—oily hair, unpleasant expression, quicker breaths, even occasional muttering. He was exhausted, or annoyed, or both. Probably both.
Tir wondered who, exactly, he was glaring at. Mathiu, or Flik? He knew it wasn’t Viktor. He wasn’t quite looking in Viktor’s direction, and Tir was assuming that his distaste for Flik had officially surpassed the loathing he had initially felt for Viktor. For not the first time, he wondered if something had happened between the two of them, somewhere along the road. He hadn’t noticed their opinions of each other shifting, but they tended to back each other up now in meetings or discussions in the field, hushed and secret, hidden in the grain. It sounded… well, after spending enough time with Viktor himself, he thought it sounded political. They had common goals. They knew how to work for them instead of in spite of them.
Viktor didn’t look happy either.
Tir had thought he hadn’t been speaking much, but he was surprised when he actually looked at him. Tired, of course. Everyone was tired. His forefinger was tapping restlessly, just above the table, so that it didn’t make any noise. Purposefully. Tir knew now that he made his actions purposefully. His mouth was being hidden by one curved hand. It looked like he was leaning on it. He was hiding his expression. His eyes were tight, and they glared at Flik. Was he cross with him? They had just been so happy to see each other—but two days ago. Tir had barely seen either in two day’s time. Tir had barely seen anyone in two day’s time despite being everywhere and seeing everyone.
This was why Viktor taught him to learn people’s physical patterns, wasn’t it? So he could spot anomalies. He had said, once, that you ALWAYS knew when a man had made up his mind to attack you, and where, when, and how. You could read it on his face the second he thought it, you only had to know how to read his face.
Viktor obviously knew Tir had shifted his attention to him. His eyes flickered up from Flik to Tir, no detours, no doubt. He had Tir’s eyes caught instantly, black glare turning into an amused glitter as fast as a hawk drops, and he lowered his hand to reveal half of a smile.
He had been smiling.
He winked at Tir.
A part of his mind hidden away, one conveniently in the back of his skull where it could bother his spine and his shoulders with shivers, reminded him with a nostalgic sensation of weight and joints aching and a smell like musk and blood that he had once, in a night buried by a few months, had a punishingly vivid sex dream about Viktor. He put him on the ground and fucked him until he screamed. After a dizzying stench of death. After laying into Gremio, back arched backwards, on the wall. After a strange remembrance of—
He had almost entirely buried that. He hadn’t even understood the events of the dream at the time, but that was what happened, hadn’t it? He understood more now. He had seen enough things by accident, and been involved in a few men’s conversations—he could understand what his mind had been trying to construct, with missing pieces, knowledge he hadn’t had yet. He had known then only what a body is born with, lust for what it finds attractive and the desire to be held tight by it, pushed underneath it, and touched. He hadn’t really known how it would work them. He wasn’t sure, in retrospect, he even knew he was dreaming about being fucked when he was dreaming about being fucked. He hadn’t fantasized about him coming inside him, but he could still feel, with a demanding and unpleasant pulse, what it was like to be underneath him, to have his blunt teeth biting on his neck, and his hands rubbing his hips, a mental impression like the memory of a wound… as though it had really happened.
Shit.
Tir had to avert his gaze. He had to avert his gaze to a believable target. Was he hot about fucking everyone?? How long had he been hot about fucking everyone?? Flik, the punchable bastard. Quick, glare at Flik.
Damn it fucking all, Flik was pretty hot, wasn’t he. Tir told himself to remember to give Sheena another broken nose for suggesting that possibility of Flik being hot to him in the first place. It wasn’t like he was, like, attractive to Tir, because the volume and strength of his shitty attitude overshadowed any good looks he might have had, he was just objectively… pretty, with pretty long eyelashes and pretty blue eyes, but in a manly way. That was usually called handsome, but Tir decided that Flik didn’t get to be called that. The bastard.
Flik pushed his hair away from his face, frustrated by a needling comment from Val, and tossed his head to flip the disheveled bangs back into place. His bangs had grown a little too long, he had to do this fucking head toss thing to get it out of his face. Was he showing off?? Was he trying to be pretty?? He was looking at Tir. Shit, he was looking at Tir.
The fight or flight response took the form of a bird of prey inside of Tir, so his natural impulse to look away was almost instantly overridden by a contrary impulse to aggressively double down, lest he unman and endanger himself in the eyes of another hawk.
Flick stared back.
Tir wondered how Flik fought again. His heart was beating fast. Flik’s concentration, though wavering behind the misty glass of alcohol-tinted eyes, was intense, low and simmering, like seething clouds, clearly far less than his true focus and power, and still… still… intimidating. Even so diminished by his intoxication and his misery, which Tir could see like writing on his face, he would not break his gaze.
Tir could not believe he was forced to fold under Flik’s glare. He never folded under. He wasn’t scared of Flik, or of being in some sort of struggle for dominance with him. He was afraid of his own intentions, his, Tir’s; his own intensity, his own temper, of being noticed, or judged, or of his feelings reflecting poorly on his image. He had to look strong. He had to remain collected. If he didn’t look like he had things under control…
With all the deliberation he could muster, he slid his eyes down the table, glancing at people one by one, as if he were taking stock of the crowd. Really, his mind was shaking with the effort of its impressions, hardly condensed into thoughts. The eyes, eyes of people, people he loved, hated, and feared, blue, black, green, and yellow, always watching, never letting him be; the hands and the tongues and the swords. Bitter stomach-memories of growing up with the army, memories of punishment and isolation and ‘no, not you, we’ll never do this to you, ’ a flare of remembering his father, his general, trampled down by a present he was trying to keep straight. Bright heart-memories of protectors and loved ones he could never depend on again, traitors and loyalists, exhaustingly dull mind-memories of calculating, calculating, calculating, calculating, and never understanding why, questions that ended in silence. Parts of the body flung across the room like a shredded corpse, disharmonized.
Lust and anger wavered and bled into red frustration, thick and sticking, fatigue stretched thin like oil on the water, flotsam and jetsam of dreams he was mixing with memories, memories with desires, desires with fears, half-remembered things and things not even known, the past all becoming one indiscriminate path to a place he knew not. His emotions, indiscernible, swimming the deep waters, great monsters of emotion; the possibility of being in love, the pain and embarrassment that that passion had caused him, the overwhelming shock and anxiety of being responsible for so many lives, the terrified knowledge that he wasn’t up to the task, the vast underbelly of murder, of the broken skull, the slithering scales of wishing this had never happened, wishing he could run away, the twin-headed monster, creature of the deep, that was the unshakable, bitter conviction that nothing could ever, ever make him stop the violence, madness, and killing, not any argument or any feeling, because he was beholden to do so, and he was not going to break a promise to the dead. In a black room with the white face of the moonlight he had promised that the deaths of those murdered by the empire would mean something, even the death of one bandit girl. He would make it so that they did.
But what?
Swift to shift and too liquid to hold, his thoughts pushed on him.
He heard Luc turn a page.
That’s right, Luc.
There were things he could do.
The rest of the meeting was the minute shifting of pieces on a board, a game of chess too complicated for most to play with a dozen players at odds. The possibility of a hundred deaths was weighed against two hundred as the game of war carried on.
It was harder to shake Gremio than it was to get Luc to agree to a private meeting, but he managed.
“Who drew it?” asked Luc, turning around the ink painting in his hands with obvious respect.
“One of Flik’s officers. Dague. The little squirrely one. The one he shouldn’t be trusting so much.”
“And why did he have such an intimate knowledge of the façade of Scarleticia to draw on in painting it?”
“Because he’s Flik’s sneak. When they marched this way, he was the one who took a pass through Milich’s territory to get a read on it. He did the map on the war table too; this is just better detail. Detail that the war table didn’t need.”
Luc frowned as he ran his fingers over color-coded columns and friezes; he flipped back and forth between three pages, various levels of close-up of one monumental, distinctive, ridiculous building, in jewel inks. A bright winter sky shone pale behind the castle, cliffs and wavering hills laid manicured with lavender and rosemary fields.
“So, can you do it?”
Luc was uncomfortably quiet. “Probably… probably. The way this works… it’s hard to take shortcuts around actually having been there. I’ve never been to that area, I’ll have to visualize the entire route… and if we’re not taking anyone at all who has been that way and has seen it…”
“Well, what would make it easier?”
“Having been there.” Luc shot him a dark look, nearly indistinguishable from the dark look he wore all the time. “I haven’t, so I need imagination and really accurate visuals. It’s still not necessarily easy.”
“What’s the worst that can happen if it doesn't work?”
“Nothing. The rune just won’t take me anywhere if I give him a poor direction. Worst, worst case scenario is he decides to go somewhere he wants to go instead. I mean, if I’m not being decisive enough. He doesn’t usually take you to very dangerous locations though… unless you happen to be in any kind of danger from arctic blizzards,” Luc snapped at his own hand.
“...Okay,” hedged Tir. “So you need to be certain of the appearance of the location, you need an idea of what to get there… what else?”
“Essentially, I’m trying to fake an entire journey there… or the memory of the journey. Anything I can use to construct a believable false memory of having actually been to Scarlecticia.”
“All the facts you would need to pretend you had been there. Like telling a tall tale."
“…Sure,” said Luc as if he was humoring him. “What does it smell like? Sound like? What would someone who has been there remember clearly? How this tree swayed? The sound of violins in the courtyard beyond that wall? The scent of?...”
“…Roses,” Tir interrupted. He could smell them still. “Blossoming roses. Milich’s house… was supposed to be like an enclave of Antei in Gregminster.”
“…So what do you remember about it?”
“…Roses… a heavy smell, from so many of them opening on the vine, the musky mulch they used to force the blooms… it was always cold, but the sunlight always seemed warm. I wasn’t usually allowed in the garden, but I remember the air being cold and the cobblestones in the garden being warm… the sound of minstrels to block out anyone from hearing what Father and General Oppenheimer were actually discussing… it was like you were just outside of the party, just a few steps away from where something was happening, but never allowed in. He was careful about his space. Where there weren’t walls, there were artificial walls, like rosebushes, statues, benches that were carefully placed… winding pathways to send you in circles, so you could be so close to what was happening and not make it there, like… I suppose I’m trying to say he was a master at keeping people at arm’s length. It seems he still is. No one knows what to make of him, no one knows what’s inside the castle, even though it’s a fully-staffed castle with people coming out and in… I suppose Scarleticia must feel like his house felt, except for… something’s missing.”
Father. I’m not welcome. The belief I once had that they wouldn’t hurt me. The belief I once had that these were the good guys.
“…it isn’t Gregminster, I guess. It’s his fortress, as much as the outside is beautiful. Inside, it must be… beautiful and war-like. It must be missing the… the…”
Tir put his hand on his forehead and tapped his skull. “…Society… the pretense. It’s missing the pretense. It’s his fortress, not his house. There’s no gay party. There’s a war-room you can’t get into. There’s a secret you’re not in on.”
“…Okay,” said Luc. “That’s… we can work with that. Hang on to your sense of… of the master of that castle. That will take us to the castle itself. Was the picture drawn from a safe position?”
“If a spy could draw it from there, it’s probably safe to jump into,” Tir confirmed uneasily. “You want to do this now? You usually practice at night…”
“I prefer to, but this picture was drawn in the day,” Luc grumbled. “Late afternoon, when you look at the place of the sun, which is now. If I’m depending on the image of a place to fake knowing that it really looks like, it had better be as close to the image as possible. And your memory takes place in the day too. If you want to do this before we’re on the road, it’s now.”
“Goddess. Okay, take us to the cave.”
With a breeze they were there. Luc dropped him down, swore, and vanished again.
Tir stood and felt the gentle wind from the open sky. It was a bright day, pale yellow and smelling like golden pollen. He turned in a short circle to look around the darkness of the cave, cluttered with Luc’s books and stones and brass instruments, and the lightness outside, nothing but birds and flowers and trees. It hurt his eyes to go between.
Luc reappeared holding more papers, a sack, and his mace. He hardly ever used his weapon, seeing as his magical powers were a mile more devastating than a swing of his noodle arms with an iron-capped stick would ever be, but he still had the sense to have it when going into enemy territory. It was forearm-length, his forearm, set with heavy panels of iron instead of spikes, balanced to be, essentially, dropped on someone’s head as quickly as the untrained hand could drop it. It was a novice’s weapon, and Tir disliked it.
He had to press Luc into actually training his body somehow… but he himself was at a loss for how to train a body that was pre-adolescence, but just barely, and wouldn’t fully retain any training done before maturation.
Luc had the look of a boy that was going to spring up six inches tomorrow night, but tomorrow night wasn’t going to come. He claimed he could age if he wanted to, but Tir wasn’t sure he believed that. Considering how closely he had to guard his fear of his own condition… Being stuck inside a young man’s body, never fully grown, was terrible enough for Tir. Imagining being trapped inside a body just a year, or less, away from being a young man… that is, never developing…
It’s not like it was fucking good for anything anyway. All growing up does is teach you new terrible things to feel.
This is gross, he thought. Tir swung his own pack off of his shoulders with frustration and began to stretch out, preparing for the worst. “How are we going to do this?”
“We’re going to pretend you have been to Scarleticia. You’re going to sear these pictures into your mind,” Luc began, handing him a sheaf of drawings and maps, “and pretend as hard as you can that you’ve walked this road to this fortress, and that you have a vivid, unshakable, absolutely real knowledge of what this view looks like when put in your own eyes. Smell the roses or whatever. Do whatever it takes to imagine you know exactly what it’s like. Then you’re going to shove that all into one second and I’m going to fly us."
“Okay…” said Tir, not willing to say ‘I don’t know how to do what you just described, so much so that I’m not entirely sure what it is you mean.’ “Do just start?...”
“No, jackass, let me set down a fucking circle.”
Luc pulled a brush and a small vial of vibrant green ink out of his bag and began to draw on the floor. Tir watched with interest; Luc had taught him the basics of magic done the hard way, but hadn’t shown him a lot of it. This was what he described as doing the work of a rune by yourself… or partly by himself, Tir assumed, considering they were still using his rune. Why Luc felt it necessary, he wasn’t totally sure.
The designs were simple, circles and spirals, and through the center he painted a simplification of the road they intended to ‘travel’ on. On the corner that faced the setting sun, he wrote some signs. Then he dug through his bag, procured a vial of red ink, and handed it to Tir. “Write your own name on the other side. Here, opposite of mine.”
“That’s your name?”
“Kind of. Yes. It’s in another script.”
“’Kind of, yes?’”
“It doesn’t have to be your literal birth name if there’s something you respond to better!”
“Like? What?”
“Saints and angels. You’re useless. Just put down your name.”
“What did you use?”
“Just, like… a better name… for this!”
“You have a better name for this?”
“It works better for magic!”
“Why?”
“Oh my god. Write down your name in the circle, asshole. Just—”
“How do you get a better name for magic?”
“Just! Put down!”
“But I wanna know!”
Luc growled and ran his hands down his face. “Imagine a name a demon would respect. Something powerful. I don’t know how to explain this to you. It’s you, but good at what you’re doing. What would you call you, but good at what you’re doing, Tir?”
Tir stared uneasily at the stone, glittering unnaturally with Luc’s weird, bright ink. There was, he could see now, a space left for his name, between two broken points on a circle inside a circle.
He knelt down, dipped the pen into the little vial of ink, and cleaned off the excess on the rim of the bottle. The red ink oozed back down the sheer glass in droplets. When he nervously lowered the brush to the ground, the first stroke shown an eerie red, with so much more clarity and a deeper gut punch than he expected. He made himself write as if he had confidence, pulling the brush across and around in wet calligraphic strokes, much larger than Luc’s, awkward, trailing, with the red strokes of the brush fading in and out… C… O… M…
He stood up when he was done, uncomfortably tapping the wet brush on his right palm. In strokes that looked so much like blood he could not disguise it: The Commander .
“That’s… to the point,” said Luc, in a tone of voice Tir had begun to understand, though still sure he must be misunderstanding it, as positive. “I’m sure the particular spirit we are invoking, which is Breath, will love that.”
“He already knows who I am anyway right?”
“That’s not… whatever. Okay.” Luc held out his hands for the supplies and Tir handed them over. Luc spent a minute walking in circles, picking up what he needed, noticing he forgot something, shoving it in the bag, dropping a paper… so on until Tir, stifling a little laughter, was standing across from him, feet planted right in front of his name. Luc, on the opposite side, was standing right in front of his.
“Now, normally, I would…. Okay….” Luc worried his lip, turning around to look at the cave. “Typically, when it comes to spell-casting… or, it’s what I was taught…” he looked at Tir, caught his eyes, and dropped them.
“Yes?...”
“I was… Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” he continued, turning a sharp corner. “I’ll have to modify typical practice to accommodate for the fact that we have unique runes.”
“Okay.”
“Lift up your right hand.”
“My right?”
“It’s your dominant hand, right?”
“Yes…”
“Alright, then.”
Tir did so. His fingers floated awkwardly in front of him, wanting to curl. Luc lifted his mirroring hand, his left, and floated it close to Tir’s perhaps three inches away. He tested the air for a minute, as if feeling the strings of a delicate instrument. Then he made it settle, floating in the air around Tir. He could feel it, even though it was Luc’s left hand—and uncomfortable shifting, as though something was brushing the hairs on his skin, a great spirit the whole cave was steeped with.
“There’s not going to be a lot of ceremony or preamble,” Luc warned him in a low voice.
“Will you let me know when I have to start?”
“Start now. Imagine what I told you to imagine. Slowly at first. I’ll build you up.”
He really didn’t know what Luc was talking about. Nervously, he closed his eyes. He tried to remember what it was that he felt so strongly a minute ago… roses, the hedgemaze, the feeling of being kept away from the center, the intimacy… but Luc told him to focus on his feeling of the master of the castle to take him to the castle. It made sense. If he focused too hard on Gregminster, they would go to Gregminster.
The air began to tingle and crackle, like burning incense, but a sense inside Tir told him to keep his eyes shut and focus. The scent of the roses… that feeling he used to feel when he was allowed to wander to Milich’s house as a boy, attended by Gremio, to be fawned on by the funny general and his maids… they gave him clothes to wear, and candy, and Milich let him play with his dogs… he had always liked Milich, more than any of his father’s friends. That’s what he had told Viktor. Milich was honest. He was kind but assertive when Tir, an inquisitive child, got his hands into something he shouldn’t be messing with. No, that’s expensive. You’d burden you father. No, that’s dangerous. It’ll hurt. Do you want to be hurt or do you want to put it down?
Is this really Teo’s child? He remembered him asking Gremio, in exasperation. This little?...
He would run up to him if all the generals were at a meeting or a dance. To a child’s mind, he was so bright, so colorful, so friendly. More real than the other silent grey adults.
Luc muttered something. Not a chant, a curse. Something didn’t seem to be going well. He had to focus. Not the past, the present. Milich Oppenheimer. The Great General. Overseer of Antei. Beloved in his city, in his court, hated, it seemed, everywhere else. Tir knew him: tall, straight-backed, two-faced; he would whisper his judgements of others to Tir behind their backs, and when Tir repeated them, giggling, Tir was the one who was reprimanded for being a naughty child. Always a bit of a bastard, wasn’t he? Like a viper. Like a back-handed strike. Sudden. Unexpected. Not someone who challenged you to your face like his father or Kwanda; someone who moved silently. But what a sense of humor, what a wit, what a cynical, smiling view of the world—what a love of beauty inside of a such a hatred for the decrepitude around him. Tir could see it now. The hatred. The sneering, haughty, bitter hatred. The hatred of someone who expected so much better out of you. The hatred of a man who climbed his way to the very top, to the most elevated of inner circles, and still didn’t like what he saw. Impeccable taste and unreachable standards. That was a sense—of justice.
There was a light climbing outside of his lidded eyes.
And the roses.
He could smell the roses.
He opened his eyes.
He could smell the roses, but he could see the fire.
A man was whacking a red-hot sword against an iron-black anvil. The sparks flew; the fire was roaring in the bellows.
The open-air forge sent billowing smoke into the sky, lifted by the wind, spun like sheets of silk around the gilded, curving parapets of the castle.
The winter sun was bright.
The ground beneath his feet was frosted cold, except for a circle around the forge. The frost was melting off of the cobblestones; some were plain, some were marble decorated with pictures of vines and roses.
He could smell the roses through the iron and the smoke, but it was winter, and the roses were not blooming.
He and Luc were standing at a blacksmith’s forge, beyond the golden gates of the castle.
Scarleticia castle.
It was beautiful.
The blacksmith held his hammer aloft in the air and did not bring it down. His sword clattered to the stones, hissing.
Two men stood at the other side of the blacksmith’s anvil, watching him forge his weapons. One Tir did not know. The other was tall, straight-backed, wearing a suit shirt cleanly pressed and spotted with soot, sleeves rolled up so he could have a hand in the work, hair pulled back into a tail.
He looked older. He had more wrinkles. And he looked as sharp as iron.
His eyes widened as he turned, gently, on one foot only.
“Tir.”
Not General, not Commander, not Teo’s kid, not the McDohl spawn, nothing but—
Luc made a noise like a bird very nearly shot by a hunter’s arrow and seized Tir’s forearm with a grip. His heart immediately thudded, and Milich took a quick step toward them, a step that was about to be a run, raising a hand. And Tir knew he had fucked up very badly.
“No! Wait—”
Luc thundered them across ice and grass and Tir could see it happening. A hundred miles in an instant and his eyes were stinging. The clouds roared like an explosion.
“Shit!”
That could have been either of them.
Tir wasn’t sure where they were. It seemed that Luc had Left, without much attention to where they had gone. There were rolling, rolling grasses; a wide sea of grasses, and cold air.
“Dude, what the fuck,” asked Tir.
“You—you took us straight to the General? Why!” asked Luc.
“You—ugh!” Tir allowed himself to sit down. The ground was cold, but his head was spinning horribly. It was like being drunk as a fish, but he hadn't done anything to deserve it. The wide blue sky was soaring in and away. “You told me to try to envision him!”
“Fuck! I did!” He heard, rather than saw, Luc lie down. “Well, we both fucked up today!”
“Guess we did!”
For a while, they both lay in the grasses. Tir could hear Luc heaving almost as heavily as Tir could feel himself heaving. “What did you do—there? Why do I feel like shit?”
“I took us too far away… it was a big jump. And I did it without any preparation or… warning or without asking Her… did you have to be so good at visualizing the General or whatever?”
“I apologize for exceeding expectations. Dick."
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
They laid in the cool grass, watching the clouds shift slowly.
“We fucked up, didn’t we?” Tir asked quietly.
“…Not if no one ever hears about it and it didn’t give our enemies any information they don’t already have?”
“So, if we don’t get in trouble?”
“Yes.”
Tar finally felt his breaths even out as the wind cooled his temples.
“They didn’t get any information they don’t already have, right?”
“I mean… they… already know about you.”
—
The night before they marched was spent alone in the moonlight again.
He wanted to rest, but rest was slow to come.
He burned down a candle and watched the flame, willing himself to move from his chair and do something.
The island outside was bejeweled with fires, campfires, pitfires, and torches.
He had a vision, in his mind’s eye, of all of the fires spilling together and turning Toran into a blackened grave.
He remembered the village of the elves.
He focused on it.
He would keep it in his mind.
He remembered the basement in Lenankamp, the blood in the water. He remembered the bandits of Seika, the gasp of muffled breath. He remembered his father’s house and a boy dying in his bed, skin like charcoal.
The flame lasted in his eyes when the candle was burnt out.
He realized he smelled like smoke when he stepped out into the air of morning and could smell the air without it.
Five days to Garan. Longer if things did not go in their favor. The first day was welcomingly grueling. They hitched wagons to horses, they loaded boxes and bags onto wagons, they strapped on their shoes, they got in line, and they marched. It was hard, it drug on horribly, it was mind-numbing, and all along, just about everyone was thinking about nothing but the night ahead.
The fights would recommence that night.
Even those who never fought were cheered considerably by being able to watch their favorite show again. Occasional competitors were praying to get a slot and defend their title, newcomers were hoping they pissed off or intrigued someone enough to be called out, and title defenders, the fit but few, were nervously, excitedly pacing, imagining potential matchups, potential rematches, potential accidents, potential glories. Viktor wasn’t left alone for a minute all day; Tir, who rode not far from him, could see contenders constantly flocking to him. He was keeping his cool with glittering eyes. Gremio, counterpoint, was dodging anyone who tried to approach him. When Tir teased him about it, he insisted that all he wanted was to be a guard and supervise the fights, not participate in them.
“I’m not falling for any provocations this time,” he insisted, cheeks pink, eyes trained on the ground. “The last thing I need is to make a fool of myself. Or injure myself.”
Rubi, Kirkis, and Sylvina walked with Tir for a while, just as caught up in the excitement of the fighting as everyone else was. Rubi, with his improving vocabulary, insisted upon his ability to destroy anyone who called him out; Kirkis tried to tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about with this crowd. Cleo stopped by to gab about gossip and throw downs she had heard would surely go down, from girlfriends who were bragged to or kitchen girls who snooped; Cleo seemed to know every single woman who populated Toran now. Her knowledge of their romantic lives was as vast as it was sickening. He caught a glance of Lorelai on her horse, scouting to the side, almost going in circles in her excitement; Sheena showed up to not-so-subtly say they should have a rematch some day too. Apple stopped by, disappointingly, with more fucking papers.
The first time he saw Luc that day, fully 24 hours after the Milich Fiasco, was across the ring, set up out of thin posts with bright red paint on them, two of which sported slowly waving flags. The fires were being lit; Tir saw him milling a little bit above the crowd when one went up in a blaze beside him, illuminating him briefly with white light before its flare was spent. When Tir tried to get a better look at him, he vanished.
Tir looked around him at the crowd, but Luc hadn’t reappeared close to him. He seemed to have left. Tir doubted that, somehow.
A roar of joy rose in the crowd when the announcer, dressed in nothing but a short-sleeved shirt and pants, stepped in to the ring. Now more than ever he was primed to get out of the way fucking quickly if he had to. As he addressed the crowd, voice amplified as far as it could carry, Tir reflected on the wisdom of holding the challenges; they had literally set a day and a time to work out the frustrations and grudges that had been simmering inside of the two clashing armies, new and uncomfortable bedfellows. Besides that, the most volatile members of both armies would be accounted for at exactly the time they might otherwise get antsy, since the volatile ones were dead certain to be seen in or at the ring, exhausting themselves for a peaceful night’s sleep. Everyone liked each other better, it seemed, late into the night, after a good pint and a black eye, everything out in the open; and Tir also knew, now, that while the majority of the forces were crowded around a small ring, delighted, the periphery of the crowd, where the dissatisfied and disloyal were skulking about, was being constantly watched by those inside it. The whole thing, designed to be visible to an audience, was a perfect vantage point. Gremio, the clever bastard, had always been inside of it, watching the people around him.
That night, Tir decided to start the night inside the ring too.
He stood on the edge, leaned, and smiled, simply being a presence. Simply being a presence was important work for him. He hopped back over the rails when a fight started, like everyone else; he tensed his grip on the wood and got ready to jump in if something seemed wrong, like the guards did. Mostly, he watched, and was watched, and watched back.
So many things happened in these circles within circles. He could see where everyone stood, and with who. Some crowded the front, begging for action and attention, some tried to look aloof but their eyes were bright; some were dull and unconcerned, some did not put in their appearance anywhere. No one bothered to hide their expression when someone they didn’t like got punched. No wonder people like Mathiu, Apple, Gremio, and Varkas, people who didn’t really care for a smackdown, could always be seen watching the fights—they weren’t watching the fights.
They started like they always did, indulgently familiar; Viktor launched over the fence, sword already out, with a shout, and people screamed and pelted him with whatever they were carrying. He shattered a flying beer-glass with a gigantic grin; Gremio, looking sour, trudged in to clean up the broken glass as the voice of the announcer rang above him. Tir squeezed in to help him.
“Who’s he fighting? Do you know?”
“I don’t, not until Valeria. I heard him planning a show-battle with Valeria.”
“Do they always plan theirs?”
“I think,” Gremio considered, “they usually make a plan, but I don’t think they typically stick to the plan.”
Tir was about to ask him how he figured that, but then they were scuttling out of the ring with their broken glass. It was disposed of; Tir looked up to observe the shouting.
Something fast, energetic; practically a fencing match with one of the finer swordsmen. The first battle was to warm up the crowd; Viktor won. Then, Camille, who was always a popular contender; she was fast, unapologetic, and beautiful, and she often won, but she fought fair; Viktor won. Then a fighter Tir didn’t know, a skilled fist-fighter from Flik’s side of the army. He was talented, clever, and hard to hit; Viktor won.
Viktor was sweating and glowing like firelight after three short, expressive fights. Tir found himself tempted—more than tempted, slipping into admiring him from where he stood. It was foolish—he could see them seeing him seeing Viktor, eyes were watching, watching him watching them, but even so he found excuses.
The show was about Viktor right now. He always fought first and kept fighting until someone beat him, he fell over exhausted, or something funny happened and he slouched away in hysterics. You were supposed to watch Viktor. He was as loud as the crack of a whip, bellowing, cursing, cackling; he charged like a bull, took up the whole space of the ring with a fast snap to the right, a turn and a slash to the left; his good-natured desire to see the best of his challenger ramped up into a battlelust not greedy but giving, not willing to stop until he was stopped, unable to bend until he was broken, drenched with sweat and shaking, and full of beautiful joy .
Tir had never fought Viktor. He wanted to, badly. He wanted to feel a stroke bleed into Viktor’s muscle and hear him yelp his delighted, surprised shout—he wanted to get thrown ten feet back like a doll, like he had seen Viktor do a dozen times, and feel what it’s like to get the wind knocked out of you like that. He was—painfully—jealous of how much Viktor looked like he loved it. The attention. The fighting. The pain and the shaking. The lightness of Viktor’s personality, how much he could let his mind go and let his body work for him, how well it fit him, how no one laughed at him or judged him or said he needed to be more respectable or more commanding or more impressive—he was so jealous he could be sick.
He thought he needed to cast his eyes away, but the first thing he saw when he did was Flik, leaning three-quarters across the ring from him. Staring up at Viktor with wide, stricken eyes. He was as focused on, as dazzled by, Viktor as Tir was. Tir knew, because Flik didn’t notice Tir staring at him.
He was watching Viktor.
Tir turned his eyes to Viktor.
He wanted—he just wanted what he had.
And those, those shimmering black eyes, bright as feverlight with the battlelove inside them. The hands that pushed his heavy hair from his forehead and ran back down his skull, slick and wet with sweat.
He was going to become exhausted if he had to keep fighting forever, which meant it was time to pull in Val.
Tir grew excited despite his twisting malaise when Viktor and Valeria caught each other’s eyes across the ring and grinned to each other their conspiratorial grin. They were a sedate and sometimes even cynical couple in the daylight, quick to bicker, united in their mature disdain for the world around them together. But Tir could tell they were so excited now. They had been planning this, after all; a flashy, show-piece battle meant to show off their skill, look good, please the crowd, and gain them acclaim. How could they become so beloved being so reckless and uncollected in the public eye? He was so jealous.
Curiously, he turned his eyes to Flik. Flik’s look of wonder had shattered like a mirror. He looked, bitterly discontented, at the couple who faced each other across the ring. No mistaking it, then; everything that happened, even if it had driven a wedge between Viktor and Flik, had not ruined their relationship as shield-brothers. But Flik and Valeria…
He couldn’t WAIT to see that. They would probably fight after this one. Yes, that had to be the script; a difficult, splashy, close battle that ended with the tired Viktor being finished off by Valeria, who was popular enough herself that no one would find it a slight; after that, she was already in there to call out Flik. There was no way that wasn’t their plan.
Shit, he needed to get a drink now before the good part started.
The crowd was easy to get lost in; even pushing through, he wasn’t able to really see what was going on again, or rather hear, until Valeria had already brandished a glittering knife. It’ blade was white-bright; Tir was distracted by it until he figured out, by her turning it in her hand, that it was made of polished obsidian. A weird choice, and perhaps unwise; obsidian shattered under relatively slight pressure. But then again, its edges were unusually sharp, quick to make slip-cuts, rarely digging in deep or making the serious, dragging wounds a regular battleblade would. As he turned it over in his head, the reason occurred to him; lots of blood, smaller chance of mistakes.
Viktor pulled a matching knife out of the front of his fucking shirt, baffling Tir. How did he do this shit without cutting himself? Maybe he did and he just shrugged it off. And Tir could swear he saw Val jus resist rolling her eyes about it too.
In either case, they were squared away against each other when Tir finally braced his elbows on the fence again, one of only a few people to still dare to do so. Valeria was in a simple pose, one leg tucked behind like a fencer, while Viktor, already warmed up, took an easy, low pose. Tir expected them to bandy words, perhaps flirt a little to incite the crowd—they didn’t taking the advantage of the held breath, the half-second of electric anticipation all around them, Valeria dove, knife held high above her head, like a dancer. Viktor swerved away dramatically, looked like he was dodging too far, until everyone saw the true target of the feint; her arm swung in a dramatic arc and she stabbed low at his side, which ended up not an inch away from the point of Valeria’s knife.
The held breath erupted with a crackle of shouts across the audience while Viktor was already continuing his turn behind Valeria, his wildly swung arm, throw behind him in his overdone dodge, came swinging back with so much power—less than a second into the battle Tir could feel his stomach lurch with the certainty that Valeria was about to be stuck like a bird on an arrow. But she had already shifted her back leg to give herself enough power to throw her knife arm into Viktor’s, slapping it away, and keep coming around with her opposite fist, which slugged into his gut with a sound that he could actually fucking hear.
The crowd was more disoriented than Viktor could have possibly been. Their lightning-crackle of shouts hadn’t even ended before Viktor was staggering from what could have been a snapped rib. Valeria spun her knife, open-handed, to switch into a backhand grip, and shifted her turn to come at Viktor’s throat, not with a slash, but a magnificently controlled push of the flat of the knife at his throat, backing him up a half-step. And only a half-step; with a look of concentration on his face, pure concentration, undiluted by either the nerves from fighting or affection for Valeria, he tossed the knife from one limp, shaking arm to another from where they dangled behind Valeria’s legs, and then swung it up at the junction of her hip, a single flicker of light from beneath that rose like the head of a serpent.
Tir had no idea how she dodged, even knowing she likely expected the move. The thigh that was about to be stuck shot up to strike Viktor in the chest and he grabbed it, the bloody bastard, wrapping his forearm under her leg, knife held tightly to her inner thigh. He didn’t have time to break into a grin, yet in the glitter of his black eyes, Tir saw it.
Anyone else in the planet would have gone down; Valeria, leg literally held up by a man with a knife, had nothing in her head but the fact that she had a man by the throat. She had been switching her grip again; of course she didn’t intend to slash Viktor’s throat, but she felt there was nothing wrong with banging his windpipe with he pommel.
Viktor’s grip shuddered. The pain was certainly real. Valeria yanked her leg up with the momentum she hadn’t even lost in the half-second Viktor had her trapped and struck the same spot her knife had just struck, not a moment earlier, with her heel, as dead-on as a sharp shooter.
Those in the crowd who had had time to breath in once expelled their breath in a shout.
Valeria had thrown her balance far, far off-center. She had no choice but to jump back and recollect herself. She ended up far to Viktor’s side, perhaps farther than where she intended to be, because Viktor, who had to be momentarily winded and blinded, swung out his knife to his side with a slash that aimed in Valeria’s direction but came nowhere near her. He ended the swing in a block, knife held in front of his face, other hand clenched in front of his body. It was the smartest move he could make when he was feeling as disoriented as he had to be after the double-strike at his neck. He betrayed the swimming in his head, too, by how specifically he defended it.
Valeria tossed her knife in her hand once. Then she threw it.
It was over before Tir had a chance to even not believe what he saw. Viktor popped the obsidian knife like a champagne glass and its shards went scattering like shooting stars. Some of the shrapnel bit his face, because he had deflected the knife two fucking inches away from his nose.
Val fucking threw her knife at Viktor’s face, Tir marveled, thought just finished right after Viktor had closed the distance between himself and Valeria, clenched hand held up to grasp at her shoulder and knife swinging at her thigh. She had absolutely given away her position no matter how destabilized Viktor was. Valera dropped her weight, changing Viktor’s target from her thighs to her waist—which would take slightly longer to reach—and let Viktor’s hand slip through her tossed hair while she hunched her head down over her chest and rammed him.
If she were pushing on someone her own size, she would have surely caused them to collapse. As it was, she broke Viktor’s stride, causing him to fall back on one foot, again, as she drew up a fist that looked like it was meant to punch his face. When Viktor yanked his fist into the path of Valeria’s strike to block her, her true objective became known—instead of redirecting or absorbing the parry, she grabbed his fist, encasing the hand that held his knife in her own.
On her feet now, she tried to push him backward. It was a tall order, even when Viktor was unbalanced. He dodged to the side and around, trying to keep his steps light. Valeria dug her nails into his fingers but he held fast. They danced in almost a full circle, tugging each on the last available weapon, letting the crowd, for the first time since they started sparring, take a whole breath. Viktor had regained, if not his breath, then at least his footing—which meant he managed to feel his fatal mistake, and even wince, before he went down. Valeria had led him in a little circle, but she had not gone in a circle herself—one leg stayed planted in his way to trip him. She had to take a wide, risky stance to manage it, but it was worth it.
Viktor, wheeling around his lover too fast, tripped right over her legs and landed face-first on the ground. Valeria standing over him, with his knife firmly in her grip, watched him tumble. Then, she leaned down and, with an open palm, patted him first on the back of the neck, firmly, and then gently on the head.
Viktor was laughing when he was finally hauled up by Valeria and Gremio’s dual efforts, over two hundred pounds of hysterical dead weight. In fact, his helpers were starting to crack up too, infected with his joy. Tir, from where he leaned on the railing, feeling his heartbeat slowly decrease, couldn’t help but smile.
The announcer tripped up to Valeria as Gremio helped a still cackling Viktor out of the ring, shaking his head and patting him reassuringly on the back. Not that Viktor needed reassured; Tir had never seen someone so delighted to have their ass handed to them. It took some doing to get the crowd to quiet down enough so that at least the first few rows could hear what the announcer, at least, had to say; Valeria was low-voiced and soft-spoken when she wasn’t shouting. He complimented her on her amazing work, but implied that Viktor had already been softened up pretty well for her. She took it with chuckling and shaking her head, graciously enough; Tir couldn’t help but feel, perhaps wrongly, that he saw some tension in her.
“But I’ve got a tip that you’ve got a more serious challenge to declare next,” the announcer teased.
Valeria straightening her shoulders happened simultaneously with the crowd hushing itself to hear. The rumor had gone around, or at least, the supposition; everyone knew how much tension Flik and Tir’s conflict had caused, and everyone knew which of Tir’s old guard had clashed with him the most. Someone was certain to call Flik out to the ring; man someones had, but everyone also knew that Khuluta wasn’t dumb enough to let a dozen people air their grievances at once, not when she staged these fights to improve morale. But one high-profile, representative fight to air out the dirty laundry, proclaim a winner, and set things to rest—that would do well.
He wondered about allowing Valeria to do it, though. Wouldn’t it be smarter to let Flik win his first fight so that everyone would see him as legitimate and come to respect him more? Perhaps Valeria had simply been too pushy to deny. Or maybe they even had something else staged. Interesting.
“It’s a matter that’s close to my heart,” she had, carefully, “if that’s what you mean.”
People started shushing each other. Tir was close enough to hear, no matter what; Gremio had finally brought the big old bear back to him, who had finally managed to quiet himself. “Ah, now we’ll see,” Viktor smiled.
“See what?”
“Normally, I’d do the shouting and the accusations for you,” the announcer continued, “but I think the General, of all people, can speak for herself!”
There was a roar of agreement. Valeria raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. Tir figured she wasn’t planning on actually calling Flik out, but was certainly fucking fine to do it. He wondered about the wisdom of letting her, however.
Valeria took a deep breath.
“I threw my life in with this motley crew of defectors many months ago now,” she bellowed, pitch of her voice rising to allow her to shout louder. “I trusted my companions in arms and my new-found comrades to see me through a place that was once my home and raze it with me. I trusted those I had just met through long marches, absurd plans, and uncertain stakes, and I was seen through! I was right to put faith in the rebellion.” The crowd cheered. “In my comrades!” Louder they cheered. Valeria raised her obsidian knife to glimmer at the sky. “And in one man in particular.”
She lowered her knife, slowly, with her arm straight, to point at Tir. “One man who trusted me and let me use my knowledge to betray my own commander. One man who gave me my position and entrusted me to use it to serve him. One man who fought with me to the bitter end and even finished what I could not in Pannu Yakuta Castle. One man who I thought would understand me well, who I thought would lead the rebellion to victory.”
Her knife was still pointing at Tir.
No one spoke.
“Get up here.”
Still, there was silence.
Tir wanted to let his eyes flicker, to see the reactions of the people he had gathered around him, to see Mathiu, Gremio, Viktor, Flik, or even the announcer. He wanted to know if anyone had expected this, and who, if people were shocked, surprised, or concerned, if there were looks of agreement, he had to know, but—he wouldn’t look away from Valeria.
“Pardon me?” he heard himself ask. He sounded like his fucking father, and he knew he did.
“I said get up here.”
Tir didn’t move yet.
“Commander Tir McDohl,” asked the announcer, his vocal tone carefully emotionless, “Do you accept General Meullefleur’s challenge?”
It became real. Tir thought very, very fast.
No, he couldn’t accept. If he accepted and he won, it set a completely different, authoritarian tone for his rule he didn’t want and had been specifically trying to avoid. If he accepted and lost, he showed a kind of martial weakness he couldn’t afford when his position was already so tenuous post-leadership crisis. Furthermore, if he lost to Valeria, wouldn’t that snap her apparently strained trust in him? And if he defeated her, he wasn’t sure how she would feel. Viktor? How would he feel? Which outcome would be prefer? Mathiu? Would beating down his general make him look too harsh? Would letting her unpunished after this speech—but how could he punish Valeria? He couldn’t even imagine it. That would be like punishing Eileen or Cleo. Not because she was a woman, but because—she was important to him. She had been by his side at a war table, more importantly, always on his side for months, which he had hardly even noticed. Valeria—
And how would Valeria feel if he refused to fight her?
“I accept.”
What the hell am I doing, he asked his hands numbly as they gripped the rough wood of the fence and tensed. What the hell am I doing, he asked his shoulders and his back as they lifted him off of the ground and over—what the hell am I doing, he asked the ankles that felt the pressure of the hard ground as they landed on the other side. He could see the announcer calculating, could guess by his pinched face that that’s not what he thought would happen—really, it was likely that Valeria hadn’t told anyone, had even lied about her course of action. But Tir made the effort to focus on her as he approached her.
He had forgotten to wonder if he COULD win.
Valeria would never throw a match for anyone. Not even her lover, clearly. She intended to kill Kwanda Rosman, once her commander, perhaps, though he didn’t want to think about it, another lover. She had honor as a warrior, he knew, and great skill. It was incomprehensible that she would throw a match; it would be dishonorable. If she let him win, that would mean she truly disrespected him. And if what she said was true, and she was no liar, she wanted him to prove that he was worthy of respect now.
But Valeria was a seasoned fighter, more used to trials and duels than most of even the other Generals. She was a product of fighting for her life and fighting as a profession both. And Tir knew that he was not unskilled, but he knew, from months of firsthand observation, that he would be absolutely a fucking idiot if he pretended he was on her level. He was absolutely not as good at her. He wasn’t. It wasn’t like she was strong but not smart, either. She was smart. He wouldn’t want to trick his way into victory, either. It would be disrespecting someone he knew, now facing her, now seeing her fiery eyes, that he respected so much.
These thoughts raced like thunderclouds.
He couldn’t lose. He didn’t know how he could win. And any tactic to ensure victory other than true skill—he wouldn’t consider such a thing.
The shock wouldn’t abade.
“I will need the two of you to pick seconds,” the announcer decided, wisely. They didn’t pick seconds often. But the second could pick up a fight if a combatant lost early. Tir wondered—was he depending on one of them losing quickly? Val bowing out and making him fight someone else? Tir picking a better fighter to put Valeria in her place? Who—he had to think fast—not Gremio this time, no, it couldn’t be, someone unaffected by the emotionality of the situation, not Viktor, not Gremio, who—
“General Charles LePant,” Tir heard himself say.
“General Charles LePant,” The announcer called into the crowd, “Do you agree to this?”
“He isn’t here,” called a younger, higher voice. “He doesn’t observe the challenges any longer.” That was news to Tir. He didn’t know why. “But I can take my father’s place.”
Goddess’s sweet tits. No.
But he literally couldn’t refuse a show of faith. Not after Valeria, of all people he’d never suspect—
“Fine,” said Tir.
“Then approach the ring, LePant, but stay outside,” The announcer declared.
The crowd parted as well as it could to let Sheena approach the side of the ring. He leaned, casually as ever, against its side, not sparing Tir a look as he walked up. When he did—it was a grin.
What the hell did the gangly bastard have to be cheerful about?? How did he not know Valeria would whip his ass until next fucking week??
“And you, General y Meullefleur?”
She wouldn’t pick Viktor. She couldn’t. If she did—
“General Eileen LePant.”
Had Valeria always been this much of a bitch?
Tir knew why she had made her choice while the crowd was still gasping. She didn’t want seconds. The announcer was trying to install a safety measure and she had refused it. She wouldn’t let there be a substitute for this fight; Sheena wouldn’t fight her, and if he did, he wouldn’t win. Besides that, Eileen would wipe the floor with Tir too. No contest.
“My mother isn’t available either,” Tir heard Sheena’s strained voice saying. He rarely sounded like this. “She—”
“I am available,” came a high, cool voice.
Sheena himself turned around, surprised. Tir was also surprised—the couple was hardly ever seen apart. But then again, he didn’t know himself why Charles wasn’t here.
Eileen weaved her way in through a thick crowd, turning skillfully so she was across the ring from her son. “And I accept. Thank you for the honor, General.”
“All mine, General,” said Valeria cooly.
Tir would just give up and go home to his father if he couldn’t keep Valeria on his side. What a show woman—no wonder Viktor was head over heels about her. God, what now?—it had to be an obvious defeat, of one or the other, or they could go to seconds, and Valeria clearly intended to not let that happen, but if she truly was on Tir’s side and wanted to restore everyone’s faith in him by giving him a hard victory, she would never—
Tara, was she intending to die?
“This is about you, and me, Commander,” Valeria said quietly.
Tir said nothing yet.
“I will need the weapon decided for the combat as well,” said the announcer. “I will ask the commander to decide, since he was challenged.”
Shit.
He couldn’t pick the staff. That obviously would set Valeria at a disadvantage. Hand-to-hand? No. No, a hand-to-hand battle was decided too quickly. He needed time to think or he’d lose. Knives, since they were already on the field? Someone would die, they were both too impulsive. He was so tempted to set up something that he knew he could had an advantage at, think through, something he could take his time with—
No.
“Swords.”
Valeria’s best weapon.
If he won. If he won. He would have won her respect.
And if he lost… maybe he was at enough of a disadvantage for everyone to understand why.
He thought that Valeria respected that choice. He hoped so.
“First blood,” asked the announcer, “three rounds, or until?”
First blood meant until someone had had blood drawn. Three rounds meant three rounds of significant hits. Until was what they usually did—until someone was thrown out of the ring or obviously had lost.
Tir wanted to know what she said, for that one. She seemed to be thinking.
“Well?” she asked.
First blood he would have no chance. If he picked three—
No. No, no, no.
“First blood,” he said.
If he won this thing. If.
She even seemed a little surprised. The announcer was certainly flummoxed. Tir was hating himself. He barely even used swords—
Sheena was passing his sword over the railing.
Christ, what a…
Tir took it. He looked into Sheena’s eyes as he did so, and saw that Sheena had faith in him.
Why?
Valeria did not have her own sword. Without a beat, she asked, “General?”
Eileen passed her her sword.
Approximately equivalent lengths; Sheena’s was shorter, but Tir was smaller than Valeria. Light blades, easier for him to muddle through that a heavy sword. Well-made, very sharp; the slightest slip could be the first blood.
“Have you anything further to say before combat begins?” he was being asked.
“No,” said Valeria.
Tir felt as though he were not here.
As if the world was spinning away from him, a light in the darkness, far below.
As if his head was full of water and he could not see, could not hear.
What to say? Mustn’t he reprimand her? Mustn’t he tell her to mind her place? With well-chosen words, like Viktor’s, or his father’s, or Flik’s, he could end this before it began, beat her down, tell her to leave this ring now and simply acknowledge his authority, couldn’t he? Shouldn’t he—
“What,” he heard himself saying. No, no, don’t. “What did I do, that you lost faith in me?” Everyone could hear him. No, no, no! “What do I need to do?”
You’re whining. You’re begging, for heaven’s sake! You don’t sound calm, you don’t sound like an authority, you don’t sound strong!
What do I need to do. That’s what Gremio would say, he thought.
Valeria looked like she didn’t know what to say, even.
“I…” Oh, no, don’t. “I trusted you too. And do, now.” What are you saying? He screamed inside. He didn’t even know what his next sentence would be. It was like someone else was talking!! No, no. It was like he was talking. The voice inside, that worried, fussed, feared, cared, wanted the respect and affection of the people he trusted. Who wanted—wanted to be kind. Who was afraid. It was like he was speaking, and the part of him that was strong, that was the Commander, he was silent. When Tir needed him most. “And I—I want you to trust me again.”
Valeria shook her head, flummoxed. “What—wow. I.”
She gathered herself. She took a breath, and filled her chest. “After you finish thrashing me,” she declared. “Thrash that asshole Flik.”
Well, that wasn’t what he was going for, but he did ask Valeria what to do.
It was a shame that that wasn’t going to happen.
Words were echoing in his head, a conversation he had had with Gremio just a few days ago, as Valeria tested her sword, as the announcer backed out of the ring—words about how they hadn’t intended this to happen, how they weren’t even making their own choices—how all he could do was keep a few people alive. He could hear, like a lower, further-away echo, the words of Luc; you’re stuck with her now and there’s nothing you can do about it. She’s yours until she kills you. A lower still, still farther echo, this time from Viktor— "People want different amounts of personality. You can bend things a little. But you can’t show your teeth because you feel threatened or scared. That proves to everyone that you can’t take it.”
He began to wonder something. When we’re faced with only having a few choices left, or being uncertain whether we do or we don’t, how do we make those choices? Is that the time to let yourself go, stop holding back what you truly desire, or is it time for something else? For example, wouldn’t it be the time for the ‘things that mattered,’ like his father would say—the things that made you honorable?
That was all the time he had to think.
He held Sheena’s sword like Sheena would. It seemed natural, in the moment, even if it was a more daring stance than he would typically take, with his right arm high above his head. Valeria, for her part, nodded, and took a puzzle piece opposite stance, holding her sword low, like she intended to fit into him when she dove for him. But she did not yet dive. She stood her own ground, defending.
Tir took the plunge, as though the fight were a cold lake.
Their swords struck each other perfectly, in the midpoint between them. Tir swung his body far to the side, mindlessly fighting as if he were still holding a staff. He swung up the hilt of the sword to strike Valeria in the back. Shocked, she circled opposite his circle, swinging around to face him again, her sword brought low once more. He could see it raising, he could see the edge glittering nearer—
He could hear the sounds of human voices, human cries. The same crowd it had been a year ago, the same army. His. Odessa’s. He could hear the same lives, some drifted away, some still here with him, and the sword’s edge was drawing nearer.
It wasn’t nearly as long as the full staffs he and Master Kai used. It was so easy to trip out of its way that he couldn’t believe it. It occurred to him as Valeria’s brown eyes glimmered into life under her raising arm, like stars appearing on the horizon in dusk, that he had already struck her once. His hand was still vibrating with the shock of it. He just hadn’t drawn blood.
He didn’t know what swing she was coming to him with, so he set his sword as a straight line, a simple defense. Her sword swung and wavered, coming unexpectedly at his other side. It did nothing but bounce off of the pommel of Sheena’s blade while Tir, still acting, stupidly, like he was holding a staff, swung up his sword as if to strike on her thigh and break her femur.
No such thing happened. Instead, the blade cut her clothes and bit half an inch into her skin.
Just like that.
It wasn’t a small cut either. Tir saw her eyes widen with immediate surprise and pain. He slid the sword back away, trying to pull it out the way it came in so it would cause as little damage as possible. The first second after that there was nothing. The second, there was a well of blood, like a burst sac of spider’s eggs, or like a ripe fruit bit. The third, a medic in blue was already kneeling at her side, already wrapping her wound in bandages, with Gremio right behind her. Valeria winced when her leg was hooked up over a medic’s shoulder, exposing the shaking in her legs, her strain—then those eyes, almost gold with emotion now, snapped open onto Tir again.
“Well,” she said, voice strained.
“Well?” he asked, realizing he hadn’t properly lowered the sword. He lowered his arm slowly.
“Well,” she wheezed, “you’ve got a twink ass to whip.”
“What? What’s a twink ass?”
Gremio, since he was the nearest, strongest person, then took a grip on Valeria to haul her off of the ground. She remained tense, even prim, in her grip, visibly presented disaffection from the pain. At that moment, the roar came back to him, the sound—the sound of the army, ringed a hundred times around him.
He had done it.
A woman twice his age, ten times his senior in martial arts, and he had done is as easy as that, in three—two?? Strikes. All because—why? She hadn’t held back. No, he had just… stupidly treated the sword like a staff—
No, he had done it differently . That was what he had done, and that was all it had took.
Gremio’s eyes bounced off of him as he left the ring with Valeria. He had to go now.
But Tir had something to do.
Ah, shit.
As much to delay the inevitability as for the propriety of it, he approached Sheena first. Once he was just on the other side of the fence from him, he turned his sword around, so that he was holding the lower half of the hilt and its blunt tip faced Sheena. Sheena was grinning ear to ear with excitement as he seized the hilt of his sword and he barely waited long enough for Tir to let go of it before he reclaimed it.
“Dude!! That was—”
Tir cut him off by putting a hand on his shoulder. His eyes slipped a couple people down the ring, and Sheena’s followed.
Flik was leaning casually as you please on the wooden fence, chin held up by a curled hand, expression cool. His left hand tapped idly on his right forearm, though his back was straight, his posture perfect.
He didn’t say anything, exactly.
His eyes dipped low on Tir, then back up. He didn’t crack a smile, he didn’t grimace, he didn’t sneer.
When those blue eyes, battle-sharp, locked with his again…
Yeah, he had been so thrown off by Valeria demanding that he fight Flik that he forgot about how he totally fucking wanted to.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling that compelled him to lift up his hands from the railing and turn slowly on his heels. The puppeteer was an anxious mass in his stomach, a foreign creature, one that walked his feet for him, said to him that he wanted something, something he wanted to think he didn’t. But once his feet were walked in front of Flik, he wasn’t sure what that thing was. What his nerves wanted, or his quickly pulsing blood, or the sparks of first under his skin, in his wrists, his shoulders, his chest, his thighs, the itch to—no, he didn’t know. Challenge, competition, domination—ancient impulses, new to him. Tir instead, Tir as he had always been, held out a hand to his opponent.
Flik didn’t take his hand, surprisingly. He was waiting for something, though fuck Tir if he knew what.
“I’m challenging you,” said Tir, with maybe a little more annoyance than necessary.
“To what?” he asked, voice plains-level.
Tara, this prick. “I’m challenging you. You get to decide what we’re doing.”
“Hah,” said Flik. Then, he was slapping his palm into Tir’s, a smile suddenly striking on his features, and as suddenly gone. Ignoring the offer, he dropped Tir’s hand and vaulted himself across the fence, clearing it easily. Tir wasn’t sure how tall he was; fairly damn, and broad, too. But, in retrospect, he didn’t think he was actually that much older than him. Probably not a full decade; maybe even five years.
You’ll be facing enemies bigger and stronger than you all of the time, his head echoed, again. What do you do?
Flik did the same thing to the announcer, smacked his hand and stalked off, taking up his side of the ring. Tir realized after the fact that he was signaling his acceptance of the challenge. Then, turning to face Tir, he shouted: “No seconds! We fight until! And—” he stopped, glancing askance. “And what weapon do you use, again?”
“A full staff.”
“A—seriously? Alright! And we use staffs!”
Tir wasn’t sure based on his voice whether he was surprised that Tir used a staff for some reason, or whether he was concerned about using one. Hopefully, both. He could tell that he wasn’t as drunk as… most any other time that he had seen him, though he wasn’t sure he’d call him sober, either. His feet were planted firmly. His movements were quick, precise, and lithe when a soldier from his side offered him a staff and he snatched it up, a snap of his wrist. He was still wearing tough leather armor; at this point, Tir had never seen him outside of it. He looked, however, as if someone had finally bathed him and got to him with a healing rune; Tir saw now he had pale skin, a bright complexion, but a mottled one. He had two skin tones, though they were both pretty light. It became more clear when one saw that some of his hair, on his head and on his face, where it stuck out now in barely visible bristles, was lighter than the rest. Odd. Peering, discerning, he could see when Flik looked at him that he had a streak of brown in one blue eye as well. It seemed odd that he had never noticed any of this—he supposed the small flaws had been mostly hidden under dirt before. Was it a large amount of scars and skin damage, maybe?...
He could also see more lucidity in those eyes, more awareness, a sober focus, even… even a bit of lifted spirits. He wondered why. Being out on the road, perhaps? But he didn’t know Flik well enough to even guess.
It was time, at least, to learn how he fought.
Finally.
He did not hold tightly on to the fact that he had been waiting for this; he let it flutter around his head, and perch, and fly. He couldn’t let enmity take hold of the two of them. It would be a disaster. He couldn’t hate Flik. He had to be stronger than hate, like he was stronger than pride with Valeria.
Cleo approached him with his staff, panting. He had left it in his tent, assuming no one would fight him; this would be the last time he made that assumption. He smiled at her, and she raised her hands, shook her head, and walked away.
He hadn’t heard what the announcer had said. When he raised his eyes to Flik again, he realized he had been focusing on him so intensely, he had lost what else had gone on around him. Before he had a chance to be embarrassed, he realized that Flik’s eyes had never left him.
What was he thinking about?
Was he thinking that he didn’t know Tir well enough to know what he was thinking?
Is that what he hoped for? Or not?
This man, who had intersected his destiny, and tried to wrest it away; how was he supposed to handle him? At arm’s length? Should they be close instead? Should he have been outcasted like he had been advised? What should he be considering? Did it matter, really, how he felt about it? Did it matter that he didn’t know? Shouldn’t he be, instead, worried about—
Flik raised the staff as if it were a sword, gripping not quite the middle. “For Odessa!” he said.
Tir felt the heartrate he had actively been calming slam against his ribcage, surge, and spike right up into his head. That was fucking it with this tool. Did he think that Tir was fighting with him for any other fucking reason than that??
“YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” he heard himself bellowing, his voice almost cracking with frustration. “WE’RE BOTH FOR ODESSA!”
He hit the ground with his right foot and dove. Left foot, right, and he was almost in range—he spun his staff to the front, left, and then right, and Flik was so close he could see the sweat on his face—
—
His stomach hurt. The bits inside of his stomach hurt, all of them. The spleen, the intestines, the gallbladder, the bladder, the lungs, fucking everything. They all hurt. For good measure, one of his ankles was pulsing, pain like a light in the dark, and his right hand wasn’t happy. His head hurt, an ache in the crack that caused his concussion like a memory.
The pain was his only awareness, for a minute. It was if his body could only see red pain, could only taste red blood. It wasn’t horrible. It hurt, but it came and went, pounding with his heart.
He sensed blue magic. He could feel the blue magic flowing with the tide, coming in, and out, with the waves of pain, foam on the sea. It hurt less… and less… the tide ebbed away.
Slowly, he became aware that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t where he last remembered being. Valeria—he remembered Valeria called him up to the ring. His gut rolled with the remembered pain, embarrassment, and panic that being called out by her caused. What had he done wrong? Had he failed in being her leader? How could he fix it? Was she proud of him now? Had she done this to him?
He remembered what he did. No. Not Valeria. It was Flik. Fucking Flik.
He opened his eyes. The room… the tent was lightly spinning, but it wasn’t very bright, so he could handle it. The first person he saw was Mathiu Silverberg, whose runes were glowing.
He rested his head back on the ground again. Panting with the effort, he tried to say “I’m getting tired of waking up in pain and seeing Mathiu hovering over me.” He didn’t even get close. He said something like “I’meeeing taaahrd… of… hharghhh,” and then he started coughing. Even he could tell that his first attempt was nothing like words.
Mathiu nodded and replied like he knew what Tir said. Then he advised Tir lay back for just a little while longer as he tried to fix him up as best as you could. “I’m not totally sure what’s wrong, though, so bear with me.”
He grit his teeth and lasted through another few minutes of someone else poking around inside his body before he got sick of it and sat up. Sore, but not so much so that moving made him feel sick. He impatiently pushed Mathiu’s hand out of his face and said, “I’m geeing sick uff.. uff wahing up in p pain… pain and seeing Mathiu.. hoffering over me.”
“Wh..what was that, Sir?” asked Gremio anxiously. Gremio was, though close to his other side, keeping his worry to a respectable hover, palms extended, but not grasping at Tir.
“I SAID,” Tir grunted, with everything in his beleaguered body, “I’m getting sick. Of waking up. In fucking pain. And seeing fucking. Fucking Mathiu Silverberg. Hovering over me!”
“Stop hurting yourself,” said Mathiu instantly.
“Does it hurt badly?” Gremio asked.
“No… no, not anymore.”
“You’re welcome,” Mathiu continued.
“Alright, thank you,” Tir sighed, hanging his head a little. He nervously checked the back; nothing wrong with it. Just paranoia. “Fuck… I don’t remember what happened…” he admitted, staring at his own lap. “Flik must have really kicked my ass, though.”
“Not... really,” said Viktor. It occurred to Tir that he should check to see how many people were in this damn tent. It was his own, to his surprise; someone must have been pretty determined to trek him here. No wonder it was dim, he and Gremio only kept one low light. It seemed, though, that he had already identified everyone in here. Mathiu was, as he mentioned, hovering over him to the right, pulling down his shirtsleeves now that his work was done. Gremio was to his left, sitting on his haunches. Viktor was sitting across from him, basically in the entrance of the tent, where they usually laid their weapons at night. Indeed, he had taken a hold on Tir’s staff, and was rolling it in a loose grasp. He tilted his head from side to side. “Well… yes, really, but no at the same time.”
“Viktor…” Tir sighed.
“Well, he did just pummel you. You lost hard. Sorry. I thought you’d like to know right away.”
Tir groaned, lowering his head again. “Fuck. That… yeah. I remember rushing at him, and… nothing else. I must have run headlong into a fucking deathstrike.”
“Not hardly!” Viktor grinned, at the same time as Gremio said, “No!”
Of course, Gremio silenced himself quickly after his outburst, after Viktor stared at him with glittering, amused eyes. “Not hardly,” he repeated. “You went six, seven, maybe eight strikes at him. I wasn’t sure. Most of them hit him and you were driving him back hard. Then he realized you could use a staff in the style of a vengeful mother-in-law with a broom and took out wrath I hardly knew he had in him on your midsection. I think you creeped him out a little.”
Tir shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t remember a thing… not after I charged him. I barely remember that. My head cuts out after… basically after he got into the ring. It’s pretty cut-up after that.”
“Well, trust me. Neither of you did bad. He just did better.”
“Viktor…” Gremio complained.
“What? He did. You don’t have to worry about one thing; this crowd will be following him into battle. Everyone knows you’re a non-stop pain machine with some kind of horrifying dark sorcery and you still bit the dust when he came for you. I’m hoping to not hear any whining to the tune of ‘but we don’t even know if he can fight’ and ‘why should I follow him?’” He leaned a little further forward and lowered his voice. “You’re going to have to stop stealing all of the good speech-making, though. He has to sound good occasionally, too.”
“Well… fuck… sucks for him,” grumbled Tir, offended. “Maybe he should get better at it.”
“I think he’s making fun of you, Tir,” Gremio supplied.
“What? No! ‘You fucking bastard’ is an inspired war cry! I’ve used it myself!”
Tir lowered his head into his hands. “I… I did say that, didn’t I.” Then he snapped up again. “Wait, you were watching? I thought you would have left with Val.”
Viktor winced and shrugged awkwardly. “Yeah… she might be a little mad, but think of it this way… she would have wanted to see the fight, and how would I describe it to her if I hadn’t been there? Well, that’s what I’m planning to tell her.”
“Uh huh,” Tir nodded.
“She’ll understand,” he said, waving his hand. “Besides, I’ll say something cool to her, like… ‘back on your feet again? Knew you wouldn’t stay down.’ She’s a girl who likes feeling tough, she’ll love it.”
“You swine ,” Gremio said.
Tir made a noise of agreeing disgust.
“Hey, talk shit to me when you have my success,” Viktor smiled, with an unnecessarily cocked eyebrow. “Lemme know when either of you have someone of Valeria’s caliber swarming on you. Or anyone at all.”
Ouch. Gremio looked a little like he wanted to start snapping ankles, so Tir knew the situation had to diffuse… even though, honestly, he felt that himself.
“But she is feeling alright?” he asked.
“Sure thing. I took a look at her, I’m not heartless. She’s kept fighting through way worse, but she will be resting for a while. Not your fault; she left that thigh wide open, and it was a stupid opening.”
“…You don’t think she threw the match?”
“Threw the match?” gasped Viktor, immediately offended.
“Sorry! She’s just so skilled—I was shocked that I found an opening like that.”
“Threw the match. I don’t THINK so. No, she would never. And don’t you go suggesting that to her either, unless you want to break her poor warrior’s heart. No, she put herself into that. Like she always does.” He leaned forward, his dark eyes sharp. He clutched Tir’s staff in a tight grip. “You’re skilled, you little asshole. Don’t doubt that.” He gestured at Tir, at his folded hands under his head. “That rune isn’t the only power you have. You’re a sharp one. That’s why you have to be careful.”
“That’s…” Tir exhaled. “That’s weird. That’s just what I was thinking about… just before I fought him. I was thinking about…” he shook his head, finding his eyes on his staff, still in Viktor’s grip. “I was thinking about… that I want to hate him so much. And I think I do. I just… it’s so stupid, but I feel so angry. It should be over. But it’s not. We made an agreement, everyone is in their positions now, but I just feel…” he breathed sharply again, letting the hot air rush out. “Weird. I didn’t feel so mad about it at the time. But now, I do.”
“You’re not… in touch with your emotions, exactly,” Viktor agreed.
“Well, thanks. But… that’s what I was thinking about that… I mean, understand it or not, I have to put it aside. I have to say, you know, alright, Tir, you don’t like him. But he’s here, and you’re both fighting this battle, for freedom, for Odessa…” he put a hand on his forehead again. “And then that fucking… bastard…”
Viktor laughed at him again. “That was why you lost your head? Oh, shit. And I can’t even tell you whether he was trying to needle you or not. He’s self-righteous, sure, but also completely dense. One-track-minded. He might have not been thinking of anything at all, honestly.”
Then, he sobered up. “As someone who knows you both pretty well… you’re both suffering hard. I know you’ve been through a lot, too, even if some people don’t see it, or don’t realize it. And you’re absolutely right. Both of you could get to be a problem if you keep being so explosive. You can contain yourself pretty well… but that doesn’t change the fast that you have some underlying issues you haven’t handled. And he’s doing even worse. Either of you could probably lead alone, but you can’t do it together if you keep making assumptions about each other and never communicating.”
Tir sighed. Tears were prickling at his eyes, but he shoved them back. Viktor always fucking knew. “That’s… yeah. Yeah. That’s just what I thought. When I was trying to size him up… I realized I couldn’t because I knew so little about him. That’s… stupid. Long-term, that’s stupid. We put each other into opposite chairs at the table but we still have to talk. Goddess damn it. I hate him.”
Viktor started laughing again, but the air just wasn’t cleared for Tir. He just.. he just felt like he was always fucking up, and… “Viktor?”
“Yeah?”
“How do you handle underlying issues? Like, how do you do that?”
He really sounded pathetic on that one. Almost as small and stupid as he felt.
“Oh,” Viktor said, quietly, “Tir.”
Mathiu stood up. “I’ll have to make sure Flik is actually alright, then,” he said. “He was the one who ended up standing but, as you say, he had some frustration vented on him. If I have a read on him, he’s pretending he isn’t hurt alone somewhere right now.”
“Yeah, I’ll… yeah,” said Viktor, and awkwardly opened the door for him. “Don’t’ get eaten by the mob. Tell them the commander’s right as rain, he’s just…”
“What, sulking? I’ll tell them he was physically devastated and needs rest instead. Thank you.” With that, he left.
“Okay…” growled Viktor, tugging the door shut behind him again. “Okay, whatever, you’re probably right, doc. Anyway, Tir…”
“Nevermind,” Tir mumbled. “Nevermind that. It’s…”
“I’m not going to never mind that. I heard it, and I don’t unhear what I heard. If you don’t want to talk about it, ok. But… motherfucker.” He tugged on his hair, as if even he was having a hard time with this one. “Look… I don’t walk away if someone calls out for help in a fight, you know? And this, either…”
Tir was silent.
“When I was young… look, my father was a deranged alcoholic. Think about what a man who’s all pain inside can do to his family, and I’m sure he did it. Mom was already beaten down to nothing, she couldn’t do anything. I can’t remember half of the things. I became a mercenary in order to hurt people, Tir. It was the only trade I knew. And I spent years doing it. Just hunting, killing, and hurting inside. I know about pain. Don’t think I don’t. And let me tell you, I know every wrong way of coping with it. If I know how to do anything it’s how to do shit wrong.
“The thing I’ve learned to do is to fucking help people. Do something to better someone else’s life. Do what you wish someone had done for you. It’s the only thing that will help you.
“Oh, don’t cry, Tir. Please, don’t cry.”
—
Like an invalid who suffered a fever and desperately hoped their life wouldn’t slip away, a tenuous hope wouldn’t let his heart rest: maybe Viktor was right, and he didn’t have to be strong. Maybe he had to be honest, and honorable, and kind.
But he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t stop feeling the fear, either, that those were the words of weakness, encouraging him to grow soft. And once he did, someone would snap him up. Someone like Flik, or Milich, or even his father. Someone would wait for him to grow into an honest, kind, and honorable man, and devour him whole.
So many people were dead. So many people were depending on him. He couldn’t afford to be wrong.
Neither Valeria or Flik gave him injuries serious enough to hinder him in the next few days, he was only a little sore. Flik might have damaged him badly or burst an organ if he had had a better idea of how to use a staff; or, to give him more credit, he probably would have hurt Tir less if he had a better grasp on the weapon. Despite any nightly declarations he was unlocatable all the day after; Tir had already been considering giving up looking for him, or any of his officers, in the train when an offer came to have dinner with Valeria instead.
Dinner with Valeria was just dinner with everyone, but he sat with her, Viktor, and Lorelai, and a couple of other rotating soldiers and shield women that seemed to be part of Vik and Val’s intimate court of sub-barbarians now. Tir wondered briefly if any were former companions from Pannu Yakuta that she had picked back up; almost certainly. It was hard to tell which former imperial was from where or even if they were a former imperial by now; many had abandoned older plated armor for leather armor or piecemeal now, or else officially scratched off all of their insignia. Valeria, herself, had taken to be unarmored while in camp, wearing a red dress and her arms on her waist, like an elf-maid or a bandit woman.
Oddly, dinner was… not much to speak of. No one at the table wanted to be squabbling, not one here disliked each other. Valeria commended him, whether or not he thought he deserved it; Tir felt like things were going well until he had to ask where the hell Flik was at anyway.
Didn’t know. No one know. Couldn’t keep track of him. Just the way it was.
Tir felt himself restless, frustrated, no one he could turn to when he felt like lashing out, no one who he couldn’t afford to be careless around, except...
And so it was, only two days after their last fiasco, that he found himself looking for Luc.
Maybe Luc wasn’t the right choice. Maybe he should talk to Gremio. Gremio would always listen to him, always understand. But he just felt so mad right now. It was under the surface now, cooled, but like magma is ‘cooled’ under a layer of hard rock. And he just didn’t want to be calmed down. And… and he hadn’t really faced the fact that they were on the road again, and they’ll be sleeping in the tent together, and…
Sheena either. Maybe Sheena would help him work through it but he always felt so stupid around Sheena. He knew being mad about something he had already agreed to was stupid. He knew. And Sheena…
And as for Kirkis, though he used to trust him more, he hadn’t had the opportunity to spend much time with him recently, now that he had an actually upper command actually demanding his attention, and, to be honest… he always felt like he had to be better than he was around Kirkis. He felt like he had to be the guy who avenged war crimes and took down fortresses. Not stupid and angry and stupidly angry. But Luc…
Damn, what WAS is about Luc? How fucked up he was just made him feel comfortable. Was he just trying to make himself feel better by hanging around someone even worse off? But his power… the ease with which he could control even Soul Eater, take anything Tir could possibly dish out at him, he… it was like the opposite effect Kirkis had. Luc made him feel like he wasn’t all that bad. Damn, what WAS it.
He was starting to feel more than a little weird about it by the time he finally found the mage haunting the back of the train, which Tir had realized he preferred to. He took a perch like a tired bird at the back of any wagon not really being attended, often with animals or among boxes of supplies. Where the wagons swayed like a field of grass and the only sounds were hooves and clucks, Tir could understand how he felt comfortable. He certainly wasn’t a people person and he knew he had been living alone or with only one other person for some time.
When Luc caught up to him that night, he had his eyes on the stars. There was a parchment in his lap, mostly untouched. As long as he watched, he was staring at the sparkling stars.
“That’s the celestial river climbing up the horizon, so the Cupbearer is ascendant,” Tir spoke, from the back of a wagon several yards away, “Stars like the Chiyu, Chisyu, and Chisei will be coming into their power, and the moon… the moon should be in Teni’s house, I think.” He smiled, casually regarding the startled mage. “How was that?”
“…Well, you’re right,” Luc admitted testily. “I’m impressed.”
“I read the books you gave me. And when you go on about it all the time when we practice.”
“I have to know where the stars are so that I don’t do anything STUPID in casting magic.”
“See, I still don’t understand how that works,” Tir nagged him. “I know that it’s important. I know that it matters to the runes and I know that being born under a Tenkai star like I was means something. But you still won’t explain about that.”
“It’s difficult,” Luc complained. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, try me,” Tir retorted. “If we’re going to be doing more runeless magic, I’m going to need to know.”
Luc appeared suddenly behind him, with a slight breeze and a little bit of yellow-green light. It made his skin prickle, as usual. He felt a little more awake with Luc right next to him. He always did. “Are we?” he asked.
“Are we what?”
“Doing more runeless magic?”
“We are. Or at least more like you did the other day. I want to go back to Scarleticia.”
“Of course you do,” Luc muttered moodily. He leaned a little into Tir’s space. “To do what?”
“Figure out what’s going on in there. Viktor says all the intel disagrees and we can’t get the truth.”
“Looked like a castle to me. They’re probably spreading rumors to scare people.”
“Well, I’d like to know for sure before we attack it.” Tir tilted his head. “So? How do the stars work?”
“How do the stars work. Lord of light. Look, each star has attributes, which you already know. That’s why they say that which star has power when a person is born is significant. You know which star is in power by its ascendancy—that’s when it’s coming over the horizon. That’s a set time every year. We count 108 stars as stars of power, instead of the thousands of stars in the sky, for one simple reason—they pass right through, or close to right through, the ecliptic ring.”
“The path of the wandering stars.”
“And the sun, and the moon. Right. The wandering stars, and the sun, and the moon, all pass through the same wide circle in the sky.” Luc made a wide motion, with two fingers, to denote a path clear to him and vague to Tir. “At an angle from the curve of the ground. We have watched it over time. They all go through approximately the same path, with the sun and some of the wandering stars deviating throughout the calendar year; ancient magicians divined the average line that all the wandering stars pass across and noticed that 108 stars were significantly close to that path. Whichever one had come over the horizon most recently at the time of your birth is the one that most influences you.
“But not everyone is said to be truly born under a star. That happens for two reasons: One, when your ascendant has just barely risen over the horizon when you’re born—that is, when you’re born at the same time as a star. …So to speak. If I have your birthdate right—and you should actually have a birthdate and birthtime, if you can find a way to look for it in Gregminster—I suspect that was the case for you. That is, that you were born right at the rising of the Tenkai star. That’s… a significant influence. Someone born when it has been over the horizon for a day’s time wouldn’t have been as heavily influenced.
“Incidentally, from what I have gathered an anomalous number of your commanders have been in this situation. I’ve been starting to wonder of the potentially celestial nature of your enterprise because of it.”
“Dude. What the—"
“The other way to be strongly influenced is to suffer a conjunction. The wandering stars don’t necessarily circle the earth once a year like fixed stars do—as you already know. They have much more eccentric patterns, though they do all stay in the ecliptic. They pass through the sky in different ways, year to year; some have more predictable patterns, like the silver planet, or the red planet, but the gold planet and the dark planet are almost unpredictable; they have long cycles, wide ones, that a person isn’t likely to see in a life time. The copper and grey planet simply take a very long time to pass through the sky, so their influences can cover many years, even whole generations… a conjunction is when a wandering star happens to be passing very close to your fixed star at your birth. It’s a true conjunction when their light shines together.
“What this means varies… in its core, it’s a complication of the original meaning of your birth star. Each of the 108 stars are associated with one of the 27 true runes, even if people don’t realize that’s why they have these connotations; four stars per rune. They come in 27 ‘seasons,’ four stars each, with two ‘bleed’ stars that are close to their neighboring seasons and two ‘pure’ stars that are in the center of their season. Some will go as far as to associate each of the 108 stars with different magical subtypes. Leknaat has them memorized too, but I always have to look it up,” he admitted. “Tenkai, since you must be curious, is pure Sovereign Rune, in the middle of the Sovereign season. Bad luck you got snatched by Soul Eater instead.
“The wandering planets have more… esoteric associations. No one’s sure of their origins, really. Popular association, maybe. The silver planet, community, communication, relationships, water magic; the golden planet, turmoil, physicality, passion and strife. Disorder, of some kind. She’s associated with lightning. The red, fire, expansion, conquest. Copper, guidance, leadership, loftiness; wind and the sky. And the spirit, sometimes. Grey planet, the slow planet, is associated with earth, boundaries, termination, stability, keeping things. The dark planet, slow and strange, related with time, death, conclusions; she’s hard to track in the sky, because she’s not visible, and gives no light, but the other stars react to her passing by. They dim. It can take her years to go from one star to another; her conjunctions are rare and meaningful.”
“Were you born under a dark planet conjunction?”
“That is a fair but inaccurate assumption. I was born to the Tenkan star, in Wind’s season, early spring… during a conjunction of the copper star. It was a perfect choice,” he bragged.
“Uh huh…” Tir said, with a raised eyebrow. “Sounds like you chose it yourself.”
Luc faltered.
“So… The Sovereign and Wind seasons must actually be close to each other, if you have an early spring birthday,” Tir guessed, trying to warm him up again. He had actually read a lot of this from the new books Luc had given him over the downtime in the castle, but not all of it. And it was kind of cool to see him relaxed again.
“Yes… they’re bordering even. Where you’re born matters, too. Wind season isn’t early spring farther north, it’s late winter, so the mental associations are a little different. And they say that if you go very far away, the rising stars are completely different. I’ve seen a few charts, and I understand how they work, but… some of the stars’ rising times are completely different. I’m not sure how you would accommodate for the fact that you might have a different rising star in a different country. Does it matter more what we see on the horizon, or how the stars are moving, far above?...”
He trailed off again, clearly uncomfortable now. Tir wondered if maybe he was making up a birthdate—he probably didn’t know when he had been born, unfortunately. Most people weren’t exactly sure, since their parents reckoned by seasons, not days on a calendar, like his father could. He hadn’t failed to notice that Luc lived without family and never discussed having any. He certainly lived like he had been raised by wild animals.
Well, if he wanted to be born under a special star, then fuck it, he could be. What did it matter? He was one of the best masters of Wind Magic Tir had ever seen and had the actual fucking True Wind Rune attached on his body anyway. Let him be special.
“So how does it affect magic?” Tir prompted. “Am I going to be better at… Sovereign magic? Is that real?”
Luc sighed witheringly. “Not necessarily. You find natural gifts in people born in unique celestial conditions, but it’s not necessarily magic. Remember? The silver star is associated with communication, community, peacemaking… someone born under a conjunction of a passive star and the silver star will likely grow up to be a peaceable person, or a person skilled at making social connections, or, controversially, someone born under an active, domineering star and a conjunction of the silver star might be very skilled in getting their way no matter what other people say… and neither of them have a clue why. You always see something, even if it’s not immediately apparent, or on the other side of the coin from what you’re expecting. The first light of the Tenkai star shining in the winter, a rising ruler, a bleak, winter rebellion… do you think the Emperor is surprised? Do you think your father is? They just hoped it wouldn’t be this way. You have to learn that you were born with people watching. They predicted this. They just thought you would be working for them.”
“How do you know that they know this kind of?—Leknaat. Leknaat’s been working with the Empire for years… Generations.”
“I’m sure she did your birth chart. I wasn’t there, but I can assume… did she tell you she’d been ‘looking forward to meeting you?’”
“She said… she said she saw a heavy destiny for me.” Tir watched the stars, seemingly still, doing nothing, fixed, icy, white. “And she had already seen it, I suppose.”
“Clear as day. Well, night.”
There was a time of silence.
“…If it helps… you never know how the stars will be expressed in a person. They detail your… tendencies.”
“I understand how it works.”
“Well, sorry.”
Tir told himself to stop being so bitter. Luc was caustic, he could be harsh, but he was telling him things he needed to know. Alright, so what if it made him emotional? Was that relevant? Those fucking shards of broken glass in the sky didn’t seem to think so. “I begin to see how this is relevant to when we do or don’t want to cast complicated magic spells…”
“Hm. It’s not like the stars will stop you…” Luc murmured. “But you can chose a more or less stupid time. It’s more like… fighting against fate will wear you down over time. Magic… will want to follow the seasons, flow in the river of time. Trying to swim against the current leaves you behind. You think about the type of magic you’re casting, when you want to do it… if you time it right, when the stars are watching, when the earth outside is showing you the season of fire or water, you can have results greater than you expected. Or different.”
“So. Tell me when you want to go back to Scarleticia. And why.”
“I don’t! But if you fucking insist—”
Tir burst out laughing. Goddamn, this kind of thing was why he liked this guy so much. He went from dismal to hilarious without ever shifting his completely natural woe-is-me demeanor—
Hold up, who the fuck said that he liked this guy?
“Then about two weeks from now would be my preference. We should be shifted into the Tenyu star and barely into the Beast season by then, which is when just about everything is fair game. Real spring, everything will work well, except for dark magic, death magic, limitations, what have you.”
“Everything but Soul Eater?”
“Why would Soul Eater ever not work great? She’s a bitchy overpowered trump card. No disrespect, ma’am.”
“Please don’t talk to my hand. I get that you’re a mage but that’s REALLY weird.”
“Well what the fuck am I supposed to do, tell me that. I’m not just going to address you as a possession of Soul Eater’s, I’m not that kind of freak.”
“There is that kind of freak??”
“Look, mages are the worst subculture on the world. I’m willing to say that. We have each found our own unique ways to lose our fucking grips on reality. And decency. Wait until you meet a few more, you’ll see.”
“Viki seems totally fine.”
“How… how did you say that with a straight face?”
Tir winced. “Alright. Alright. Point taken. I meant she’s decent.”
“A decent mess.”
Tir giggled. To his delight, Luc managed to crack a smile too. “Look, let’s not pick on Viki. She’s defenseless.”
“If you mean in a battle of wits, yeah, maybe.”
“The point I wanted to make,” Tir continued, “is that could be a little late. We’re hoping to already be on our way to Scarleticia then—maybe—if Matt and Flik make up their minds between themselves. If we drive fast we might be almost there. It’s pretty late to wait until Tenyu is rising…”
“Well, it’d be the best time, which is what you asked for. I even explained why. That’s already two things I’ve done for you today, which is honestly enough.” He huffed and turned away from Tir, hands on his hips. Examining the sky, he worried his lip. “Alright, we could do it on the last night before the Beast season too. The transition night is capricious, and that’s one of the worst, but the mixing powers might work in our favor for once, between Wind and Beast. Both good for travel.
“…Hey, was it just your birthday then?”
Tir was surprised he asked. “Yeah. Not long ago. Means it’s been over a year since… since I was settled in Toran, at least. Quite some time since all of this began…”
“We really are almost the same age. Huh.”
Tir looked at him once more. He didn’t usually spend a lot of time looking at Luc. Instinctually, he had come to realize it made Luc nervous to be watched, and he didn’t want Luc nervous. He wasn’t mentally over the period of time when Luc was a dangerous mystery. Physically, he could feel-remember Luc being at his throat. It wasn’t long ago. Different from tussling with Sheena or Gremio or even Flik—Luc didn’t spar, he wasn’t a warrior; if he fought, it was an attack.
That visceral violence could tingle at his throat but his eyes saw—a friend, he thought. A friend who didn’t have to be friendly, because he was being honest. Luc had too damn much pain in him; he couldn’t act past it. He just couldn’t be better than it and had given up trying.
Tir could understand, to a degree. He always understood where Luc was coming from, even when he felt he couldn’t really know what he knew. He felt the pain, the fear, the recursive isolation. There was—he thought—a camaraderie that passed back and forth between them, an understanding. A knowledge out of time, that you don’t gain with bantering words, something you have, something you know, when—when your stars were right, he supposed. He wondered what star Luc was really born under.
Luc was becoming a familiar mystery now, a sound that came rumbling from somewhere you never had discerned. What he still did not know he already understood. He just did. And looking at him now, he thought he could see the young man he really was, the man struggling underneath the mystery, the human that just wanted to be, bound down by magic, stars, and powers, and pain.
“You should really take Breath off for a while,” he said.
“What?”
“I mean that you’re already a formidable mage, a scholar, a traveler, and, apparently, a decent revolutionary instigator… have you considered being a man?”
“Hah—” Luc choked at him, then sulkily turned away again. “Seriously? That’s not how it works. You know that’s not how it works.”
“You and he have a good relationship. He lets you take him on and off. Couldn’t you agree to go without for a while so that you grow up a little? You can’t train as a warrior with a body you have, at least.”
“I don’t want to be a warrior.”
“Well, don’t you want to be an adult?” Tir asked, seriously. “People don’t respect you enough for the work you do. And the knowledge you have.”
“I—do you really think that? Really?” Luc shook his head, which is how, in the dim light, Tir could see he was blushing. “Honestly? I think people think I’m frightening. If I were older, I honestly think people would just find me intimidating. I would just stick out worse. I guess. I would… I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe they should find you intimidating! Maybe you are. Maybe you’re an ultra-powerful, freakishly talented battlemage and everyone should fucking step lightly around you.”
Luc snorted, somewhere between surly and amused, right snugly in bitter. “Maybe you have that covered.”
“…Do you think?”
“…Seriously? Yes. The only people stupid enough to fight you are… noted stupid people.”
“Goddess.”
“Seriously. You’re intimidating enough.”
“I look fifteen.”
“…Yeah, that’s… that’s part of the problem. You still look fifteen when you bathe in dragon blood. Or go full-tilt at guys twice your age with intent to slaughter. It’s uncanny. You’re doing fine.”
“Well, I wish I didn’t look fifteen. I should… I should be older by now. I should look… taller. Tougher. Dammit, I should look—”
“…You’re not afraid of looking like your father?” Luc whispered, slightly under Tir’s rant.
“—Hotter. What?”
“What?”
“What?”
They stared at each other, equally disappointed. “…Hotter?” Luc sighed.
“Well—” Tir balked. “Well I! I should be seventeen! I would have at least been taller, right? A little taller? And I still have baby fat! I hate it! Why am I talking to you about this??”
“You… you brought it up.”
“It’s just…” Like a wagon that hit a rock with its front wheel, Tir continued to bounce on for a couple minutes, hitting onto and off of words, before he slid off of the road entirely. “It’s not fair. Dammit. It’s not like. I mean. Not that I ever get. I would just like the option, you know??”
“I… have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I just know I’m supposed to be older by now and I hate being treated like a child!”
“What the fuck.”
“Sometimes it’s just—like—I’m not a child!! I’m a goddamn adult and maybe I want a boyfriend. Girlfriend! Shit.”
“I didn’t want to hear that. Can we go back to talking about stars now?”
“Please pretend I said girlfriend.”
“Don’t involve me in this. I didn’t hear anything. I wasn’t talking to you. I don’t even know you.” Luc used his hand to actually hide his face from Tir, mortified.
“I just really don’t need people to know—”
“Why are you talking to me? I don’t know you.”
“Like this is really fucking important!! No one!! Except Sheena, who already knows, unfortunately!! No one can know about this!! Probably Viktor too, I have to admit that Viktor probably sees fucking right through me somehow…”
“Please sir, stop harassing me, I’m just trying to get home. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“LUC…”
“Lord, I wouldn’t tell anyone, Tir!” Luc snapped, holding up both hands to the side of his face like horse blinders. “I don’t even know anyone and why the fuck would I put myself through the embarrassment of saying what you said out loud when it was already fucking withering when you said it! Why would you do this to me?? Don’t you have people to talk to about this?? Real people?? Can’t I be, like, a magic and battle plans friend only?? Acquaintance!! Shit.”
“Dude,” said Tir.
“Can you pretend I didn’t say that? Ideally forever?”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Wow. Good night. Yeah, bye. Good fucking night. Lord of heaven…” Luc was still muttering with increasingly frantic fervor as he vanished, vanishing on a gentle gust of wind, which seemed to come from the night and leave with it.
He wondered why he was smiling like this. He covered his face with his hand.
When he saw the glittering lights above, the sky that Luc had vanished into, for the first time, he could see people. Mostly in the brightest lights, the Heavenly stars, the ones he and Luc belonged to, the ones easiest to memorize—a dark universe full of little, brilliant lights in a dance, influences, wishes and fears, twined together in a map more complicated than anything on the war table, their feelings, their memories, their hopes, their connections, working for, against, around each other, and dizzily, he saw—he really wondered—he really wished they were connected.
There was something not just rewarding but right in the work of warming up someone like Luc, who had so much trouble around people. It felt like mercy, and like really helping, which he was desperate for.
He wondered if people felt that way around him, sometimes.
Tir didn’t notice Gremio coming into the wagon. He had been focused on Soul Eater’s vicissitudes, the ebb and flow. She pulsed with a gentle light when he focused on her, in and out, with the pulse of his own blood. He knew she readily poured out battle magic, the power to rend and rip—he wondered what else she could do. Luc could use True Wind to do all kinds of things that wasn’t just hurting people—he could summon creatures, teleport, fly, make weather… Soul Eater was supposed to be the runs of life and death. The pulse of light, in and out, the pulse of blood, forth and back, a red wave on a pale shore… life was meant to be in her power too. But how was that? Could she heal? Could she create? Could she summon? And if she wouldn’t why not? Like black beasts in the red ocean, Tir felt he saw something… saw in his mind’s eye monsters and men, dead and dying, swelling and crashing in the tide. Too many. Bit of flesh, rivers of blood… it was too many. Too full, too full, and a thousand more died every day, mangled flesh and dragon’s teeth.
“Tir,” said Gremio’s gentle voice, “is something the matter?”
Tir’s vision faded like mist and he wondered what he’d been seeing at all. It seemed like gross imagination. “I… sorry. I was lost in my head.”
“I could tell.” Gremio pulled off his outerwear, and his clothes stuck to it with sweat, sagging down when he finally extracted himself. “That’s fine. I was just concerned that something was wrong.”
He had noticed that uncomfortable overlay now that he was sleeping beside Gremio again, less stark than it once was. He could feel, strongly as he always had, the days when Gremio was a protector and a father, a strong and dependable shield, when sleeping with him would have meant nothing, and he could feel the present, where Gremio was a friend, a confidant, a brother, and something very much more. They used to clash horribly; now, they had had enough time to sink into each other. It would feel okay, he would be sure it was fine, and then something would happen, like seeing eyes in the tree branches, that would make his skin prickle and his heart jump in his throat. The dissonant contrast would assert itself, the uncomfortable, jagged canyon between what he remembered and what he felt now, how badly they clashed… then then earth would sigh, and shift again, and the gap would close up. And it would be fine again, he would be sure that it was fine. He didn’t feel hungry, he had what he needed, and anything he felt… that belonged to him. He could keep it to himself.
He jolted like that when Gremio’s sweaty clothing stuck to his skin, when he took them off and shook out his golden hair. A part of him removed from reality said that this was his, this different person, friend, confidant, brother, and something else, and that he would kiss the curve of his shoulder, where the sweat had turned into salt, because that’s who he was to him. When he loved him so much, what else was possible?—
Asserting its reality, this delusional part of him was shoved away, but lingered, as if in a back room of his mind. Tir had pulled out another shirt to hand to Gremio. They had managed to pack more than one change of clothing this time and it had made everything about ten times better, honestly. “Here.”
“Thank you,” Gremio smiled. “Are you starting to feel better?”
“Am I?... Oh, you mean about the fight? Yeah, but I wish I could get ahold of Flik again. To talk to him!” he hastened to add, when Gremio gave him a sour look. “It seems like I can’t find him anywhere.”
Gremio nodded. “From what I’ve observed, he mingles. He really wants to be seen like he’s part of the army… the same as everyone else. It might work for his image, once he’s done being so antagonistic. I suppose that’s not fair, considering the shock he just suffered.”
Tir huffed. “Yeah. I know. But he has to stop being at odds with me. And… me with him.”
Gremio began to run his fingers through his hair, already oily and thick from the road, and the sleepless days before they set out, coaxing it back into a neat tail. “Well… I hope he’s willing to reach out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… If you’re willing to reach out to him… I do really hope he’s willing to reach out to you. Otherwise, we’re faced with a situation of the sensible person always making allowances and the insensible person doing whatever he wants. A situation I’ve seen too many times already.”
“Well…” Tir didn’t know how to feel about that assessment. He wanted to believe it, which made him not want to believe it. “We’ll see. I’m trying to reserve judgement on him for as long as he’s in mourning. But… on the other hand, now is the time for him to be clear-headed. That’s kind of important… now.”
“Well,” Gremio shrugged. He found nothing to say about that, it seemed. Tir could remember tying his hair back for him.
Nope, wrong memory to call up. Time to think about something else. “You know… I’m a little concerned about Viktor too. Not in the sense that I think anything gonna happen to him, but it’s…”
“Hard to watch?” Gremio continued for him. “Oh well. They were close before this; I’ll give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that Flik needs someone to support him and Viktor can serve as that person. He’s… emotionally agile. Intelligent. I find him grating but I suppose his variety of… tough love… or, rather, tough to endure love might be… comforting? To some.”
Tir grinned. “You’re trying so hard to compliment him.”
“Well, in the spirit of avoiding infighting, which we’re trying so hard to accomplish…”
“No, I appreciate it. I know you don’t like him. You don’t have to. He was pretty caustic to you too.”
“You’re telling me. If I had to be called Blondie one more time… as if I’m a little girl.”
“Do you think he meant it?”
“Pardon me?”
“The act like he thought you were a cute girl? Do you think he was just joking?”
Gremio flushed, snapping out his blanket with undue force. “Well, I realize he’s the man’s man, but I hope he realized I’m not a girl at some point.”
“No, I mean…” Tir’s face was hot. He always felt like there was a door in front of him, filled with people who were going to test him, when he brought up subjects like this. It felt impossible to open it. “Do you think he was… attracted to you?”
Gremio carefully laid down the sheets. “Well… that one, who can tell? Young… Tir, you have to understand, that there are such men in the world… why, no one is sure, but…”
Tir felt himself smiling. Maybe he should be anxious or offended, but he wasn’t. “I already know, Gremio.”
“W-What?” he startled.
“Cleo explained it to me when I asked about him. I know how it works.”
“Oh… oh, of course…” Gremio had flushed pretty darkly. Tir didn’t think the subject would have embarrassed him this badly, but now he spent a stupid amount of his day thinking about this kind of thing every fucking day, so maybe he had gotten a little biased. “I only thought… pardon me. I’m sorry. I’m getting worked up.”
Gremio had put a fist on his heart. Concerned, Tir slid up to him. “Hey… hey don’t worry about it. I was just curious whether you think Viktor is serious or kidding around about that kind of thing… I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
Gremio shook his head. “Don’t… don’t be concerned about it. I’m sorry.”
Tir could tell something was wrong, but… these days he tried not to push Gremio too hard. He didn’t like seeing him like this, now that he knew how strong he could be. “Let’s worry about something less heavy. Like whether or not we’re really going to siege Scarleticia.”
Gremio groaned and fell awkwardly onto his side. “Good night, Tir.”
Tir smiled. “Oh, you’re tired now?”
“Extremely.”
Tir stretched out his shoulders, his elbows, his wrists, and then flopped down dramatically in Gremio’s direction. He didn’t quite make it, so he rolled once or twice, until his head his Gremio’s chest. Then he rolled again, so that he was lying, perpendicularly, over his torso, grinning as the older man grunted and tried to flex away. “Tir!”
“What?”
“You’re too heavy,” Gremio whined.
“Too heavy?? What, for a big guy like you?”
“Whether I’m tall or not I have a soft stomach like everyone else.”
“Not… really…” Tir muttered, patting an experimental (maybe too much so) hand on Gremio’s midsection. “It honestly feels mostly like muscle to me.”
“Well… you’re not a young boy anymore, young master. You’re bigger than you seem to think you are.”
Tir noticed whenever Gremio slipped back into the ‘young master’ business like that. It cropped up at odd moments; not necessarily when he was tired or distracted, like one might think.
Tir didn’t have a flawless theory as to why it showed up sometimes and not at others, but… maybe Gremio felt it too. The two side of their relationship, crashing unevenly with each other. Maybe he was trying to call up the older half sometimes.
“Say, Gremio,” he said, a little uncomfortable in his tone. He rolled over so that he could look Gremio in the eyes—big fucking mistake. Had he forgotten he was on Gremio’s body or something? He was so close to him when he rolled over to brace himself on his elbows. One of his hands had accidentally ended up between his shoulder and his neck, where he could feel his pulse. Damn it, fuck. Damn it!
He hated how close it fucking felt. So much careful time reasoning out why he had chosen to kiss him and trying so hard to shove it away and it felt like yesterday and so compelling now that they were close.
“Sir?...” Gremio asked.
“…Sir?” Tir asked him. Sir was new. He didn’t think Gremio had ever called him like that.
“Ah—I’m sorry. I slipped back to—”
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t put yourself under me like that.”
“Ah—”
Tir hosted himself up onto his elbows. He felt light-headed. Stupid. He had to just shake this off. “With your words, you—look, I said I wanted us to be more like family.”
Gremio didn’t struggle up like Tir did. “You… said something rather like that.”
“I don’t want to be Sir to you…”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
“And I definitely don’t want to be like my father to you!”
Saying something like that made his dizziness fall away like he had ripped a cobweb off of his face. Gremio didn’t look like his stomach plummeted or he felt like an awkward, stammering fool, though. “Tir—you aren’t like your father to me. He—he was my master.”
“Well, you call me young master. It’s the same thing. And Sir—”
“I’m trying to stop! I just forget sometimes. Sometimes I just—it feels like all of this hasn’t happened, and we’re at home, the two of us, though… though…” looking to the side, he trailed off.
Tir thought about it. His heart hurt weirdly. What if they just pretended they were at home, in Gregminster in the winter, with a fire in the hearth and everyone chattering happily downstairs?... His heart hurt weirdly. But pretending they could be in the past, safe and away from battle, deliberately clashed with keeping the relationship they had now, first names, one wagon to sleep in, a staff and an axe—that was the point.
But the feeling of peace, nostalgia, security was so compelling, but the thought of being in those roles again, young master and slave, having no power, no rights, no awful decisions to make…
“I get it,” Tir admitted, quietly. “Sometimes all of this feels like too much.”
“I suppose…”
“I was really acting like a kid,” he reminisced, “even when I didn’t think I was. Begging my father for a stupid position in the army, as if that would make me grown up, believing I was getting special attention because there was something special about me, fucking around on pointless missions, going immediately head-to-head with Luc the first time I saw him, totally fucking undaunted by the insane battle magic he was doing—I had no idea what kind of trouble I was in. In general. Not even with Luc. I was hopping happily down a staircase that led to a prison like my Dad has… like Kwanda had.
“And… and the bandit girl. I can’t imagine acting that stupidly now. I just…” he shook his head. “Even how slowly I acted and how stupid and optimistic I was on our journey to the forest of the elves, I can’t imagine acting that way now, and it was a little less than a year ago.” Slowly, he settled back onto his elbows, to take the strain off his arms, folding them on Gremio’s chest. “But am I giving myself too much credit, assuming I’m doing so much better now?...”
“Tir…” Tir couldn’t see Gremio, he had laid his head on his chest. “I don’t think you’ve acted so stupidly. If anything, we did you a disservice… not by allowing you into the army, by keeping you from responsibility for so long before then. You were unprepared.”
“Yeah,” said Tir bitterly, “that’s just another way of saying I was immature.”
“What else could you be? You were raised like a housecat almost much as like a boy. Most boys your age were out on the street, making friends, learning, figuring out the basics of social life… you were raised in a box. Now… now I can see that was my fault… Teo’s, and mine. Good gracious, that felt unusual. No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
“Do what?” asked Tir, lost.
“Call your father by his name. I thought I would try that too. Oh, no, that was mortifying .”
Tir heaved himself back up, one more time, to stare at him, stupefied. “What, like you never called him by his?... Of course you didn’t. Why would you?”
“Precisely!” Gremio insisted, flushed. “Why would I?”
Tir was smiling a little again. How he loved this weird man. It was hard to ever guess what he was thinking, but once you managed to puzzle it out, it was always something kind.
“You only started calling me my name when I asked,” he said. “But maybe you should make the decision to stick it to dad and call him whatever you want.”
“Oh, no. Not me. Leave that business to someone else.”
“Do you still… care? For him? Or is that how you ever felt about him?”
“…Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“…Your father saved my life.”
“I know…”
“Gave me a house, food, clothing, medicine, everything I could possibly need and then some. I didn’t even have to ask, he simply provided well for the people he was responsible for. That was love as I always knew it. My… my mother…”
“You loved him?”
Gremio blanched. “Well—” he sighed, looking tired. “Well, yes. Yes. I seem to come to love people eventually. It’s a problem I’ve always had.”
He couldn’t imagine. How beautiful. He was always so reserved—to imagine there was so much silent love in him. A house, food, clothing, medicine, service, providing without being asked; love as he knew it? Really, the two of them acted very much the same, it was only that Gremio was Gremio, self-sacrificing, kind, and considerate, and his father…
…He didn’t know his father very well.
“I’ve loved a few people,” Gremio said quietly. “Mostly when they showed me they cared about me. I knew too well to not bother otherwise. Everyone else can talk about him how they like. I knew the man I knew. And I won’t make a fuss about it, and I won’t place him before you, but I knew the man I knew.”
Tir didn’t want to touch the feelings in him right now. Instead, he said, “that sounds like a pretty first name basis relationship to me.”
“Tir! Oh, you can be…” Gremio sighed and ran a hand down his face. “I don’t have to wonder where you got that clever tongue.”
“What, from dad?”
“Are you joking?”
“Are you?”
“I forget that he never acted… your father acted in a very strict way around you. That was part of his care too, I think, even if he… even if we both went too far, making up a safe, little world for you. But around the other generals, for example, around lieutenants, lawyers, or worse, nobles—ha. Not a word gets past him. Memory like a net. You won’t see what’s coming for you when he decides it’s time to call you out. I watched a hundred people underestimate him at the dinner table, because he seemed so quiet, so agreeable… almost a better diplomat than a fighter.”
“Gremio?”
“Yes?” he asked, taking his hand from his face, where it had been hiding, alternatively, scorn and a blush.
“I want to kiss you again.”
“W-what?”
“Why is that?”
He had meant to steer the conversation more firmly away from his father. It was making him uncomfortable.
“I don’t know why . What am I saying, I’m sure you don’t know either. Or maybe you do? You seem—you seem to have answers to a lot of the questions I have. You know a lot. A lot more than I ever guessed. It makes me wonder what you do know. And sometimes, I don’t know what you say when you answer my questions, so sometimes—I just don’t dare ask.”
How could he insist so much that he was different, different, from his father, but nothing at all about them seemed different? He couldn’t even get rid of this wicked possessiveness.
“No, I should—you know I feel like I’m falling apart sometimes. I just spit out words I don’t mean. The same thing was happening with Luc today. I just kept saying what I really thought. Viktor said it’s my temper but even when he pointed it out I just couldn’t keep it. And when it’s fucking direly important on a national scale that I manage to get along with people and KEEP MY TEMPER, I had better get a handle on it!! I went in to fuck up Flik the second after telling myself to calm down and not let my emotions get the best of me. But I feel like I don’t control myself at all.”
He had loved his father. He had loved him.
“I don’t want to end up like dad. I don’t want to end up like Kwanda. And I just. I see myself. Just like him. Just like them. All the time. A little princeling. A second coming. ‘A rising ruler, a bleak, winter rebellion…’ I remember making the choice to do this and now I feel like I don’t have any choices. There’s nothing I can do, ever. I’m stuck in the wheels. And I just can’t stop it at all.”
Just a year ago he couldn’t understand how a person could sink to depths like Kwanda had, or Kraze or Kanaan had. Already, he was beginning to understand. In just the few fucking days since meeting Flik…
“No,” said Gremio, quietly. Tir felt, unanticipated, gentle fingers touching the side of his face. He had turned his face away. “No, Tir, you just don’t understand. I knew all those men. I saw what happened to them. You’re not like that.”
“But—”
“You’re just not like that. You… even in a child, you can tell. I knew that your father had some weaknesses and I can tell they’re being exploited now. I knew General Rosman was too emotional and frankly not intelligent enough for his position and we both know that he had been completely overpowered. Probably never even saw it coming, may he rest in peace. I know General Oppenheimer and I’m not surprised he’s playing games with human lives because he was always a conniving, unfeeling, narcissistic bastard. General Shulen, cold-blooded, power-seeking, no surprise no one’s heard a word from her against Windy’s coup or about the war. General Hasan; resting on his laurels. Too full of himself, stubborn, and proud to admit that he or anyone has to change in his old age. Our Emperor himself?... Well. Far be it from me to say. But his heart… his heart is too big sometimes.
“They have problems , Tir. Most of us do. But most of them are simply too proud to admit something is wrong and too comfortable in their positions to risk actually rebelling. That’s not just something I figured out now. I had to watch years of completely preventable bloodshed caused by poor decision-making and the inability to admit that the people in charge had problems . Attitude problems, even, or petty jealousy, or insecurity.” Gremio’s flush faded into a pretty pink as he narrated. Tir could see the twitch in his brow as he remembered stupid squabbles, hasty mistakes, botched recoveries… “You just don’t have that problem, that complacency, that need to be secure so strong that you’re willing to sacrifice for it. I… well, I do. I want to… to feel like everything is the way it always was and nothing has to change. But you’re willing to change, to face the challenge of instability if it means we’ll all change for the better. I admire that.
“You’re different. I know you have a lot of the same problems, some of them inherited, but you’re different. Trust me. I knew you and I knew your father. What enticed him into the nightmare he’s living now won’t entice you.”
“And what Is that?”
Gremio shook his head as he searched for words. “…It’s hard to summarize… I can see it. It’s like pride, but it isn’t quite. It’s the wrong side of dignity, and respectability. Not the side that encourages decency, chivalry, and honesty, but the other side. Oppenheimer has spades of it, Shulen… it’s a need for things to stay the same, I suppose, the demand for the status quo, for respect and to not be questioned… needing stability. It makes them all complacent while at the same time it makes them insecure. They’re horrified that they might be exposed for having been wrong instead of willing to make things right.”
He’s describing the lust for power, Tir thought. Did Tir genuinely not have that? Did he genuinely not care if he had the reins or not? That couldn’t be so. What made him so fucking mad about Flik if not? What had he even been so mad about, anyway? Surely it was Flik’s recklessness and overconfidence, his willingness to risk so many lives to have it his own way. His unwillingness to listen to reason too. That’s why Mathiu hated him. But Tir…
“You’re just different. You don’t care how people see you, you care if you’re actually doing things right. And you really care. You were born under the right star, I suppose. I think it’s wonderful.”
Tir was shocked to the heart. “Gremio…” he said, turning his cheek into those gentle fingers.
Gremio pulled himself up onto his other elbow, exhaling with the effort of it. When he lifted his eyes again Tir could see the colors in them, the little slight gradations of green, like how the sun looks in a tree in full summer, a hundred living lights.
Gremio tilted his own head to kiss him, not moving Tir an inch, even with the hand set delicately on his face. His lips were warm; so was the breath on his cheek, mingling between them.
Tir couldn’t feel anything for a second, anything but dry, warm skin, and then he felt a blow, like a sword’s strike—no, more like the blunt strike of the staff, because it spread all through him. A point of contact in his stomach soaked his body with its emotion, bled into him, but it wasn’t pain. It was like clarity, sheer alertness, everything waking up at once to feel this as much as he possibly could; the extra pressure those fingers put on his cheeks when they bent just slightly; the brush on his forehead of soft yellow hair, the muscles that shifted under his legs as Gremio sat up to sink into him.
Tir fit his lips to Gremio’s. It felt like a tingle of sparking magic on his skin, the hot, sourceless, indefinable prickling, usually nonexistent, now omnipresent. After the heat sank in he could smell Gremio too and it made him light up, tensed the muscles of his stomach and his thighs. Gremio moved his lips against his, as if he were pronouncing a strange syllable, another language, but Tir knew exactly what it meant, and tried to repeat it—a bit of a purse, a bit of parting, the pushing forward, into a bit of warmth and wetness and, and—and Gremio drew back from him, though for half a second, Tir tried to follow him forward. Then he realized, with the same instincts he used in battle, that Gremio was backing up on purpose. It wouldn’t be wise to follow him. That could be any kind of trap, he had to reassess—
Gremio slapped his face as gently as a person could possibly slap, no more than placing his palm on his cheek, and pushed him away. “Go to bed, young master,” he said, softly. “You’re worried about nothing.”
“…Young master again,” Tir said vacantly, having mindlessly turned his head to the side when Gremio had ‘struck’ him. He was staring at the wall; with his whole heart he was focused on the strands of blonde hair gently settling down on the pillow in his peripheral vision.
Gremio made a noncommittal hum, as if to say, ‘yes, I called you that again. And?...’
Well, Tir was going to let him off the hook. He really didn’t have it in his heart to badger him about titles, or worry about what titles meant right now. It felt like he had nothing in his heart; nothing but hot air, hot air rising from the fire, furnace-like, floating. He had put his own hand onto his face where Gremio’s had been, instinctively. “Well, I think I’m worried about something .”
Gremio sighed fondly. “Go to bed, Tir.”
With that Tir knew it was time to just call the day a bust, roll over, and try to sleep. He settled down next to Gremio with the greatest amount of contact he dared; surely he could sleep by his side. Surely he could. Surely there was nothing wrong with doing that.
Gremio turned his face away from him; he had to shuffle in his sleep, try a dozen different ways to find a position that didn’t aggravate his bad knee, bother his sore muscles, disturb his closing wounds…. Tir found it easy to mold himself to, much harder to pull away from. He could feel a dull, painful echo of another night, when he told himself surely he could sleep next to Gremio, surely he could have that much… he hadn’t escaped from that. All of the words about it being better for both of them to draw some lines and not let himself dream; why had he even done it? He was too weak, and he knew it. Something about Gremio’s kindness, his quiet voice, how he soothed him, this wonderful scent, the one he could smell right now as he pressed his face to his bent back, the scent that made him ache inside, made him feel like he should be touching him; maybe he could live without it, but if it was in front of him, he couldn’t not take it.
Gremio thought he didn’t have it in him? Yes he fucking did.
He only hoped Gremio wasn’t wrong about him being willing to change.
—
He had a dream that night, not one he would have expected.
His line of sight followed Luc’s arm to behold the night sky.
There, in a clear line, bright as the sun, disastrously close stars were pointing to a place on the horizon. It went beyond the spires of beautiful Scarleticia, beyond the high walls of Gregminster, beyond rushing plains and fertile forests, to a glittering place he knew not, and a man he could not discern. The glittering place turned into a ruined castle, broken and smoldering. It looked like his Toran; it looked like Kalekka, which he had never seen; it looked like his father’s house; then it looked like a place he had never seen again, with a name Luc could pronounce but he could not.
When he looked to Luc he was taller than him and he got a strange certainty that he had seen this before. And then he thought that maybe this wasn’t him. He asked to see Luc’s rune, because Luc was the person who came with Breath; when he looked down, his own hand was nothing but snarling, gyrating, swallowing darkness, like water swirling down a drain.
Dizzy, he looked up again at the high heavens, knowing something was wrong, wondering what had happened; a white, spiraling star was just crawling up the horizon, a new ascendant, its arms spanning the sky, its glittering core like a crystal of ice, so brilliant it should have hurt his eyes. “What’s that?” he asked Luc.
Luc did not reply. Tir thought that he had walked down the hill, was far away now, and he had heaved himself as far out of a small castle window as possible to see the heavens. The massive, brilliant, swirling star took up everything. When he looked down there was a clearly delineated mark on the ground; a swirl in the grass matching the one in the heavens. Master Kai stood across from Sheena; it was time for training, and he was late. He had slept in. How had he slept in like this?? It was fully light outside.
Odessa tried to stop him as he ran down the steps, steps that just kept multiplying. He felt a dread certainty that he had seen this lowering spiral staircase before, that it was or wasn’t Toran’s… “Listen,” she said, “You’re all going to die when you go to battle against Milich Oppenheimer unless you shape up and do it right.”
“How?”
“Find the traitor and stop him. I knew what he was doing and I should have told someone.”
“There isn’t a traitor. That’s a lie. They were trying to blame Gremio--”
“There really is a traitor.”
Something about this really didn’t feel right. Tir stopped hopping down the steps; the walls, the slanting sunlight, the number of steps, felt so… dammit, there was something, something. But it all looked how it really looked. Odessa looked like herself too. “But we’ve been unchallenged for so long. No trouble, no fighting…”
“Think, Tir. How would you be at peace like this if your enemy wasn’t content with you being at peace? How would they let you live if they thought you were a threat? Someone is watching you. He advises the emperor to take his time, use caution, put on an outward show of grace and poise, not act hastily. They’re acting like they don’t even notice you. They’re acting like they don’t even notice you.
“Gregminster fears a damning disaster like Kalekka more than they want a swift victory, this time. You’re going to be an example of their good judgement, not their military prowess. Kwanda had made himself immensely unpopular, you look good for tearing him down. They’re waiting for you to slip up and do something they can punish you for, or else General Shulen would have ran you to the ground already. She’s right there, and she’s just waiting to do it!
“Think, Tir, think. You’re worried for a reason. You can’t enjoy the quiet and you don’t relish the victories for a reason. Something isn’t right!
“Flik can’t see it. They’re keeping Flik in the dark. You already sensed that. He’s too miserable to command like he says he can and he’s going to drag some of your best men down with him if you let him. You’re worried because you’ve already seen so many warning signs , not because you’re jealous or crazy! I’ve surrounded you with trusting people, honest people, who can’t see that the very core of the army has rot . Who is it? Who hasn’t shown you their heart? Where did we come from? Who built this army? There are people trying to pull the strings here and some of them are succeeding while you two fight—”
Tir could see the dream stop. It stopped. The sound cut out, the wind stopped flowing. Odessa disappeared first. Then the castle. Then the sunlight.
Then the training ring appeared, a great, branching spiral. Then the grassy hill it was on, then Sheena, shirtless, black bandages wound across his chest, holding the sword. Then Master Kai, on his other side, with a great staff.
“If your enemies line up before you,” groaned Master Kai, in an old, cracking voice, “one after another, to be felled, where should you be looking?”
“To my back,” said Tir.
“If you have a plotted course, all of the stars in alignment, and a pathway straight as an arrow in front of you, where should you be looking?”
“To my back!” said Tir.
“And when your heart has never been more sure, your conviction never more strong, and you know you could have not possibly made the wrong choice, then where should you look??”
Tir swung around to block Sheena’s strike before it came. Then Sheena came in low, steadying his unwavering sword—
He awoke before the battle could complete, startled by a noise outside.
It was Flik, drunk as an absolute skunk, rapping at the beams of his wagon with a bottle.
“McDohl,” he was slurring, “we gotta talk!”
“I will tie that drunken mercenary up to the back of the wagon and drag him,” Gremio growled from his pillow.
“No you won’t,” Tir groaned, voice creaking with sleep. He didn’t feel rested. He felt tense, like he had slept with his muscles clenched. It was past dawn, but hardly, and bits of a dream he knew was important were leaking out of his ears, and he would like to try to catch at them but Flik, the complete fucking terror, was whacking at his actual wagon with an actual empty bottle of liquor. The fucking weapon. “I’ll talk to him. Tara, ok, I’m up!”
Tir wrenched open the stiff window, dusting its milky pane absently with his hand as he shoved it into place. The rust covered mechanism stuck oddly out of the wood when active—was this dwarven work?... “Up here, asshole,” he shouted out the window.
Flik was only a few feet away when Tir finally caught his attention. The man, still able enough even when sloshed (or how would he do anything) caught Tir’s eye and shuffled remarkably quickly into view. He reeked when he came close, but he didn’t stumble and waver, it was more like he walked with dedicated care, absolutely employing everything in his power to not look as drunk as he was.
Tir was going to have to assume he was always more drunk than he appeared, then. What was the Flik scale? Was a one ‘sober’ or ‘just one beer in the past hour?’ What constituted a five? Would he call his current state a seven or an eight? Perhaps this was as bad as it got? Surely not. There had to be an ultimate drunkenness, a further level which constituted a Flik of no conceivable use.
Tir almost reached down to brace Flik when he slapped a hand on the windowsill to glare at him. It didn’t really come off as intimidating, not this time. Tir heard Gremio putting himself together in the background, satisfied there was no immediate danger and perhaps not wanting to deal with Flik again.
“Hey,” said Flik, “What if we skipped Scarleticia?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What if we just didn’t siege Scarleticia? We’re looking for the guys in the field. Our guys. And the towns in the country. General Oppenheimer doesn’t control the countryside. People hate him there. We gotta do Garan because it’s like… right in the way. But what if we just didn’t do Scarleticia?”
“Drew… them… out to fight instead?”
“Like, just didn’t do it,” Flik emphasized again. “We have a fuckin garrison out there. We have guys. We promised we’d get them out of the West. What if we got them, went around the country, recruited, just took the fighting force with us?”
“You want us to turn Antei? I think?”
“Yeah! Hell yeah. Show them the light. The people are on our side already. It won’t take much to convince them that the tide of history is on our side. NO need to kill their brothers, fathers, sons in a big bloodbath. Let them see the army just marching through instead, we have numbers, we have the time on our side, when they see we have the support of the ordinary countrymen, their kin—”
“Hold on, hold on.” Tir waved his hand. “Let me see if I got you right.”
“If we made it clear he have the moral high ground—”
“Hold on!! You think it would make a better point… if we made a peaceable entry into Antei, rather than aa bellicose one. That we would catch more flies with honey.” Did that match the facts as he had them?
“Sure. They already want to be with us.”
“Then why aren’t they? Is everyone that scared of Milich?”
“Yes?”
“Really?”
“…Yes?”
He probably wasn’t sure. It was probably more complicated than that. Probably. The problem was, Tir wasn’t sure either. Something about this entire Antei, Milich, Scarleticia problem was so shifty, so hard to grasp. It seemed like no one was certain entirely. “Right, then I’ll have to think about it.”
“Listen, the best way—”
Tir put a palm up to the window just in case Flik was literally going to stick his inebriated mug into his wagon. The stench that foreran it was enough. “I’ll think about it, Flik. If we’re going to make this a diplomatic play, then it gets to be my choice.”
“What, it becomes your choice to not fight?”
“Well… wouldn’t it be… your choice to fight? Huh.”
“That’s just the same thing.”
“Shhh…”
“So wait, if I run the fights and you run the not fighting, but suddenly you run things if I chose not to fight, do I stop that by making it fighting, or,”
“Shhh. Please stop.”
“Who makes the choice if we’re fighting??”
“Matt?? I don’t know.”
“No fucking way.”
“Sure, alright. I guess it had to be a popular consensus thing.”
“Man, but what if we need to fight?”
“Flik, can I just… can I ‘not now’ this whole conversation? Can we bench it?”
“See, is that your choice?”
“Please, Goddess, no. Look man, I’m going to think about what you said, Goddess knows I don’t want to siege Scarleticia, Goddess knows I’m worried about what will happen if we try to take on a fortress with a reputation like Scarleticia at the fighting force we’re at, before we—”
Weed out the traitor.
The traitor.
Odessa said that.
Was that… was that real?
“…But… how would we take some kind of… moral high ground, some peaceful road… if we’re going to take down Garan first? Should we skip Garan too?”
“We can’t skip Garan, it’s the only way through!”
“Wait, but isn’t the point of making a moral point, you know having a sense of moral consistency? We don’t fight or we do. Oh, fuck, don’t say—”
“And who makes that fucking choice?”
“Leave. Leave my wagon.”
“It’s a serious problem!”
“Apparently!! Look, we’ll have another fucking meeting every day this week no matter what, we can bring up that taking point too. If you—”
“It’s Tir’s choice, we made that explicit,” said Gremio. He had finally sorted himself out to his own satisfaction and hobbled up behind Tir. Tir just hadn’t thought he would involve himself in a drunk argument with Flik.
“Hm?”
“We made it clear in the initial deal that you make the choices in war time, to begin when a battle has commenced. The power to decree whether there is a fight or not is not yours.”
“Did we say that?” asked Tir.
“Well that doesn’t fuckin make sense,” Flik argued, trying to turn to Gremio and not quite making it. Amazing, since the window was not that fucking big. “How are you going to give a man rule over a kingdom but not the choice of what the boundaries of his kingdom are? Fucking crazy. I get a say, at least.”
“I figured it was if we all agreed?” Tir hedged.
“Who’s we all? Flik contended.
“Well—”
Well, fuck. Who was ‘we all?’ The two of them, Matt, certainly Viktor, his voice always mattered, but where did it end? It was hard to argue with Kirkis, but did that mean he had to be considered in a choice? Did he have to become content with a plan first? What about Valeria? No one wanted to disagree with her, but did she have to agree with a choice? Clearly not, if she had quietly disagreed with the entire last week. LePant? Humphrey? Did they get more power from being here longer, or should that even be important? Was it just the most vocal of the inner circle? Every Lieutenant? None? But not even Matt had agreed with the choice Tir and Flik had made to divide command. It seemed that… up until now, when enough people agreed, or someone with enough force demanded something, everyone eventually bent. What would happen if there became too many people with that kind of clout? Who ended up having the deciding vote?
Who was he okay with having that kind of power?
More importantly, was someone already doing it? If he looked back, tried to think of who always got his way, of who tended to force his ideas, no matter what—Goddess, he couldn’t even come to a certain conclusion.
When you forfeit power for a moral high ground, who takes it from you?
“I’m not sure about it,” said Tir. “I’m not sure. Give me some time to think.”
“Alright,” said Flik, sounding reluctant, then suddenly, with much more certainty, “Alright. Alright.”
“If you want to try to skip it—I can see the appeal. But we need to think seriously about when, and how, we eventually handle the Antei region. It… this place is… politically convoluted. It seems. And the problem of Garan is much sooner. We’ll have to talk… sort this out….”
Have as long and drawn-out a stupid fucking talk as possible, so he could watch everyone with new eyes. Eyes that saw their hearts, not their pretty faces.
“Ugh…” Flik coughed. “Yeah.”
“Sober up first, will you?” Gremio asked calmly. Then he snapped the window shut. “Doesn’t sound likely, I think.”
“No way he’ll show up anything but hammered.”
“That too, but I meant skipping a battle in Antei.” Gremio slipped back into the wagon, grabbing the lantern to turn it out. “I’m sure it’ll be hard to resist sending someone after your army, now that you’ve fled the castle. I admit that Antei had its own factions, but that doesn’t change the fact that Milich has a large army and you’re about to be in his territory.”
“Right. I get why Flik thinks we could gather his people… well, what if we could draw them into open plain combat instead? Fish him out of the castle?”
“And risk his targeting his own people?”
“…Why would he?”
“Newly recruited, they would be easily targeted, easily killed. Once killed, their families will be convinced that this brand-new revolution was just a flash in the pan, they’re not safe, they had better capitulate to the strong, home-grown Lord who will kill them right now.”
“…Hm,” Tir agreed. “…Do you think he would?”
“….He might.”
“….Gremio… I’ve been hearing a lot of people who don’t know Uncle Milich say a lot of awful things about him.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t really like what I’ve seen either.”
“No.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“What part?”
“That he’s… so awful?”
“…As awful as Kwanda?”
Tir stopped in putting on his shoes. “You can’t think.”
He shook his head. He drew a hand down his face. “There’s no way.
“He’s. He’s so smart. A brilliant strategist. Clever. Dad always said so. He was…” Tir lost his words. “And if he was… I couldn’t imagine….” He pushed back his hair.
“I don’t know,” Gremio admitted, very quietly. “I don’t know. It’s only a suspicion. But to me… as someone who does know him, fairly well… this whole thing so far, the secret information from Antei, the secret spies to Antei, the intrigue, secrecy, open traps, silence on the official front… it has felt to me just like Milich, and not like him at all.”
“’Just like him, and not like him at all,’” Tir echoed. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. I thought it was because I just didn’t know him as well as I thought I did. But if that’s how you feel too…”
“It’s a suspicion,” Gremio insisted. “Nothing more. I don’t want to believe that he’s been tricked either. It doesn’t sound like him. But… if he was… if he was tricked, that’s something we absolutely have to handle. Milich, in the power of Windy… that’s a danger to the Empire. To everyone. His bad traits, magnified, used like that… If he’s just like how Kwanda was, that’s….”
“Bad,” Tir summarized. “So I need to know for sure. I need to know, for sure, if Milich Oppenheimer is his own man or not.”
“Once upon a time, and by that mean just a year ago, a little more, I could have written him a message, hell, I could have walked to his house, knocked on his door, made a request to his Man of the House…”
Tir had stopped listening.
—
Gremio stepped down off of the wagon, and raised his hand to help Tir off of it.
There wasn’t a person in the world less likely to need help stepping off of the wagon, and by the numbers, few who were less likely to take offense to it. Even if Tir wasn’t developing a fatal mass of insecurity and overcompensating in his prefrontal cortex at the time he would have been annoyed that Gremio was suggesting that he might need help.
Except he wasn’t. He was just thinking that Gremio looked beautiful, and that his skin felt rough, but dry, and it made his own prickle.
When he stood on even footing by him on the ground he wondered dreamily if maybe Gremio would kiss him again. But of course he wouldn’t, but the thought made his stomach church around like soup in a cauldron, his head rise like steam. The sun was just warming up the earth on another late-winter morning and he felt too warm for the weather, like he might start melting the frozen ground, and when Gremio pulled away to walk, he felt like he was pulled with him, that invisible energy going forward first.
Something in him was certain he was going this way, and it was falling forward faster, faster than the childish reluctance could possibly keep up.
—
This is the round table that set down to the next, even more awful meeting: Tir, with Gremio on one side of him, Apple on the other, and Luc somewhere, awkwardly behind him, as usual. Valeria was refusing to skip out; she was sitting by Kirkis, who was here maybe 50% of the time now, and Rubi, who was inexplicably here just about all of the time. Humphrey, Varkas, Sanchez, Mathiu. Viktor, Flik, with two of his officers; the winged woman was gone. Eileen LePant, but not her husband or her son; Lorelai, looking tired. Some of the troublemakers were gone, but certainly not enough.
This is what Tir thought of them each this time, trying to look with new, suspicious eyes.
There was no reason to doubt Gremio. The thought was preposterous.
But he wondered how Gremio really felt about his colleagues back home in Gregminster.
He didn’t know as much about Apple as he should. Yet he couldn’t doubt her. She was so uncomfortably forthright about her emotions and opinions; he would be surprised if her volatile person contained a clever trap. She was a pretty new addition to the rebellion anyway.
Luc. Luc, he reflected, was his problem. No, he had come to think of Luc as his problem. He was Leknaat’s choice; but why? She was that he would be ‘of use.’ Did she see a use for him? And what could it be? Was she referencing his use of the star tables and his power to divine someone’s birth star? His rune? Some yet-unforeseen ability?
He wondered what star Luc was really born under. He wondered why he liked him.
Valeria, he would be dishonorable to doubt. She was honest and loyal. Unpredictable. But loyalty seemed to cause some unpredictability, since true loyalty was so extreme. He wondered how close she was to some of the Great Generals. He wondered if that was disingenuous about him.
He wondered the same thing about Humphrey.
He noted he didn’t know that much about Humphrey, really.
(It may be him.)
Kirkis had been his friend, he thought. Kirkis had a lot of secrets. He seemed to have become a different man in the last year. After the death of everyone he knew. That was so obvious it would be embarrassing to say aloud. Yet, events such as the destruction of the elves was something that drove a person to extremes.
Like Tir. The two of them were bonded by that very instance.
Did he look like Kirkis, he wondered? Sharp, suspicious, ready at every instant for another disaster?
Rubi he knew not at all, and did not trust. He was such a remarkably untrustworthy person that he felt compelled to take him at face, or half-face, value. One felt no need to distrust such an obvious person, but to assume not to trust them.
Hm.
Varkas, the thief lord. He had always been in league with Odessa and her army, and had always been a man of honor. Unreproachable. Odd, for someone in his position. Of course, he led honorable thieves, who fought dishonorable lawkeepers…
(It might be him. It isn’t impossible.)
Sanchez. You know, Tir hardly ever spoke to Sanchez. He kept records of practically every head of cattle, hilt of sword, and bolt of cloth the army bought, traded, sold, used, ruined. Maintained correspondence with agents in the Empire’s lines and on the Empire’s side; their own spymaster. It seemed too obvious. It surely wasn’t him.
(It might be him. You hardly know him.)
Mathiu.
Mathiu was a thorny question. A whole thornbush of a person. Tir had got to know him early on and still didn’t feel like he knew him. In control, two steps ahead, hard to read, disorganized and unaccounted for. Always working, ever harried and stressed and low on time. He was running a lot a lot of Tir’s army. Intractable, unextractable, he would be almost impossible to weed out of the army if he had to be. Odessa’s brother. She had always wanted him on the front lines. He had not wanted to be there. What were his reasons? Tir didn’t know. Omnipresent and absolutely unknown. Impossible to avoid, he didn’t know if anyone knew him.
A big, obvious, danger. Viktor trusted him. Gremio did. Almost everyone did. He made good choices. Hard choices. Choices that kept people alive. Which he consistently had, after all. He was a turncoat. Almost everyone in this room was. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. He had told Tir a story, probably a true one, with witnesses, about massacre and near-death leading to a final change of heart about the people he had been serving. Really, it was the same thing that had happened to him. Everyone was dead, and his head had been cracked open.
The other way to think about this, he thought, as Mathiu tapped the table with a hand that had a glittering Starlight rune on it, was that he and Mathiu were Odessa’s recommendations, the ones she wanted to help run the show, despite reluctance on both their parts. Tir was General Teo’s son, an odd choice if any was. But Mathiu had been her own brother.
Had she trusted him too much? Had she just wanted to?
All of this beside the fact that Mathiu was running so much of the show after so much pushback against him even being here that Tir wasn’t even sure he could extract him if he had to.
What were Mathiu’s goals? Was he okay with the army being set to accomplish them? Because they were.
(It could be him. And if it were, it would be devastating.)
Then, Viktor.
His pulse increased. It couldn’t be. That would be ridiculous. Viktor had trusted him with so much personal information, coached him, shown him his heart—he was a mercenary. He was skilled in manipulation. But he just couldn’t be a traitor. He was so serious about this. He had loved Odessa, and Flik, and basically everyone in upper command so much.. It was…
Tir was upset because he wanted to believe Viktor loved him.
He… he had to focus.
He watched his coarse chocolate hair and his sparkling black eyes in his periphery and he made himself think.
…He should ask Viktor what he thought. He was a strategist. He was a merc. He was a skilled manipulator. He did know how to mistrust people and how to see and use their bad sides. If Viktor suspected someone of foul play, Tir should too. He would ask him. If Viktor was right, then all was well. If Viktor led him to suspect the wrong people… then he should suspect Viktor.
(It might…)
As for Flik…
Yeah. Duh. He was a traitor. He had kind of already betrayed them. He had literally tried to snap the army in two. He had threatened bodily harm to most of upper command and followed through on a few threats. Flik was actively working to destroy them, even when he wasn’t trying, because he broke this whole fucking operation into histrionically rancorous factions. Flik proved he was as much a danger as he could be as hard as he could already. Tir couldn’t be more on edge around him than he was.
But Odessa had absolutely trusted him. His drunken, stupid heart was absolutely, completely in the game until the end, however quickly he brought it on himself. Odessa doubted his skill, or his wisdom, not his integrity. Tir was worried, much more worried, about which person, or people, had decided to keep him in the dark.
They really, really didn’t want Flik at this table. He wondered why. Surely his close friends, like Viktor, would have been reluctant to put him through the pain. Ashamed of letting her die. Waiting for a better time. The others… it seemed at least a few others hadn’t wanted him at all. They had been depending on Tir to wrest the army away from Flik.
Why?
Was Tir trusting someone that Flik would see right through? Was Tir really a better leader than Flik, or was Tir ignorant of something Flik would have known?
All of this was both more enlightening and way, way less fun that going round-table about how devastatingly attractive various members of upper command were or were not. Wait, was there a correlation? Was trustworthiness related to attractive potential? Were they inverse? Did attractiveness increase with trustworthiness? Surely not. Gremio was the most of both of those things, and Flik was almost as beautiful as he was a useless man Tir couldn’t depend on, as much as that hurt him to admit. Not to even try to apply the word ‘trust’ to Viktor or the word ‘attractive’ to Matt, which, ew, and ouch.
Valeria had to be attractive, right? Everyone acted like she was, so, definitely, probably—
“That’s stupid,” was the first thing that broke Tir out of his contemplating, and it was a good thing, too, because he wouldn’t have wanted to be zoning out for much longer. He tuned in because the voice was Luc’s, and he had been replying, which was not in his habit, to Viktor, which was certainly not his habit.
“…Is it?” asked Viktor, looking to the side, as if to scrutinize the statement himself.
“…Yeah. You’re not accounting for their spellcasting ability at all.”
“…I’m not? “
“No.”
Viktor smiled a little, tilting his head. “Well, I’ve accounted for the amount of magicians we think are active in the troops, the known magical power inherent in Scarleticia and the General himself, the connections—”
“You’re not thinking about their communication speed. All they need is one good teleporter, or even a scryer, and then every one of your calculations is wrong, because they could have already gotten an emergency message broadcasted a week ago, and even gotten a reply.” He was waving his hands wildly as he argued, as if distracting from his face, which was a little pink. He tended to speak with his hands, though, and sometimes created little bursts of wind. It was funny in class when he accidentally sent his papers everywhere and started cursing. “And when you think the strings are all being pulled by an evil, rune-bearing old witch? You’re pulling your cart over October ice. If you bet on being able to send information better than high-level, practiced spellcasters,”
“ Harmonian!” Viktor shouted, first pounding his fist on the table and bringing it back up to point at Luc.
Luc stopped his rant in his tracks, wild gesticulation frozen where it stood.
“You’re Harmonian or else I’m an elf. I couldn’t place your accent for nothing and you didn’t give anything away, but now I got it.”
“What—why are you so sure suddenly?” Luc asked, flushing.
“No, no…” Mathiu idly waved a hand, looking into the same distance he was. “I heard it too.”
“’October ice?’” Viktor gloated. “Where the hell does it freeze in October?”
“I think it’s a common saying in Harmonia proper,” Mathiu continued vacantly. “I know I’ve heard it before. Rings a bell. Maybe from back during the Highlands incidents? Maybe…”
“Pulling a cart—”
“Right, over a river. But it’s risky to do in October.”
“So, where else are the rivers definitely frozen by November?”
“I think it varies by the year.”
“That’s some Harmonia Harmonia, though. They don’t spit derision like that in the territories, that’s Crystal Valley kind of talk. Real old Imperial Bastard talk. October ice!”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Anyway, I knew you were from up somewhere, but I just couldn’t quite pin it down. But goddess’s tits, October ice. That’s so fucking Harmonian. Could you swear by all the saints and the light of the dawn next? I haven’t heard that in ages.”
“He says things like that all the time?” Tir interjected. A quick glance behind him confirmed what a rustle of papers had suggested to him: Luc had vanished. “Viktor, you scared him.”
“Then he was scared of the truth.”
“Seems a little rude to me,” Gremio interjected. “He’s been living in Toran for probably about as long as he remembers. He’s as much of a national as I am.”
“Eh, point taken.”
“But please, gentlemen, getting back to the point of the fortifications and intelligence of the Antei area, to decide our best—”
“Bad time to ask where or what ‘Harmonia’ is?” Tir asked, kind of not wanting to listen to Mathiu ‘summarize’ the ‘debate’ again.
“Great Goddess of Mercy, Tir,” Viktor groaned, slowly putting his forehead into his hands.
“….Yeah,” Apple agreed, from his other side, dipping her pen. “Bad time.”
—
The meeting actually dissolved into chaos after Tir admitted he didn’t even know where or what Holy Harmonia was. He was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one in the room and Mathiu was maybe overexaggerating a little, but he wasn’t allowed to come back into the debate room until he could fill in a map of the continent, which, okay, whatever, Mathiu.
It was left to Apple to make sure he at least had these names memorized, and she seemed to only be her normal amount of reluctant to do so. It wasn’t even hard, alright; The former Kooluk territories, which were mostly principalities now (and under threat from the Scarlet Moon) were the southernmost territories above the South Sea; the Scarlet Moon, called Toran by free people, was above it. To the southwest there was a blend of warrior tribes between the two countries that didn’t really hold allegiance to anyone but themselves. Skirting the western edge of Toran, above these warrior territories, were dragon territories, and to the West of these, badlands, once occupied by people, now, mostly barren, de facto Scarlet Moon possessions.
(That was his father’s work.)
Further dragon islands and wild islands lay beyond those badlands; above them was the Tinto Republic, an allied neighbor which changed its leader regularly. To the east of Tinto and above the Scarlet Moon were a mess of warring principalities which the Empire had been dissolving with regularity for the past few decades; Tir could name all of those, thank you. The absorption of small Northern States by the Empire had actually been relevant to his war effort. Above these were the wild Grasslands, which Tir knew a lot less about. They were much like the warrior tribes of the south, Apple explained; not very centralized but divided by family lines and hunting territories, uninterested in conquest. To the far northwest, The Zexen Confederacy, which was a relatively new state, the state of the Free Knights, the land farthest North and relatively unknown; finally, hulking unnaturally large on the map, taking over the whole northeast—
“Holy Harmonia,” she said, with annoyed finality. “It’s capital city Marid of the Crystal Valley.”
“Holy how?” Tir asked, incredulous. “And why is it that big?”
“Two reasons. Because the majority of that northern land is frozen half of the year and nearly uninhabitable, so no one wants to take it from them, and because they were once a powerhouse like no one else on this continent, Sir . They used to control almost all of it and have only lost territory in the past two hundred years. And Holy because—”
“Almost the whole continent? Bullshit.”
“…No. The Imperial Rugner Family of the Scarlet Moon seized the lands of Toran after the last Harmonian High Priest’s death about 200 years ago. That is the same Imperial lineage that rules the land now, just in case you were wondering. We haven’t changed hands since. I’d have to look it up again but I’m relatively certain that Harmonia extended essentially to the Southern coast, though they probably didn’t quite cow all of the warrior tribes to the west. Or didn’t care to.”
“That’s like… the whole thing. Wow.”
“I just said that?”
“How did they have that much power?”
Apple did a wavering thing with her hand to show that she wasn’t sure she bought what she was about to say. “From what I’ve read, a technologically and magically advanced army that swept everything that existed before them. They were just that much farther ahead in innovation than everything else. Most of the southern kingdoms, including us, are still using Harmonian equipment, Harmonian models, Harmonian theories of state that we’ve just updated and localized with time.”
“This sounds like a lot to have never heard of.”
“It’s not my fault you’re so poorly fucking educated.”
Tir impatiently tapped the wood of Apple’s desk with her quill, probably pissing her off. It was hard to tell when she was so pissed off. “So why did they stop being so powerful.”
“Well…” she pursed her lips to one side. “From what I’ve read… their subject territories assimilated too well and were able to use their technology, magic, and superior statesmanship against them. They taught their territories how to self-govern so they could stay at home and the territories learned too well. That’s why we try to be so authoritarian in the south. We remember how Harmonia didn’t work. Too bad trying to keep everyone squashed under your thumb forever doesn’t work for you either. Anyway, it was too much territory to keep forever. Harmonian sources, which I can’t read, so bear with me, suggest they had a line of strong priest-kings that eventually faded in magical power and became too weak to rule. ‘The priest-king died, and was replaced by the scholar-king.’’ I remember that clearly. Weirdly poetic way to say they waned in power and became preservers rather than conquerors. Weaker king, stronger colonies.”
“So, ‘Holy,’ because…”
“Because they used to be ruled by priests. Well. They always have been. Still are. Their priests and nobility are the same and their king is called the ‘high priest,’ though sources give this… nebulous impression, I guess, that the high priests now are not the same as the high priests then. They still bother their neighbors in the North from time to time but they’re not the power they once were and having an alliance with them is just formality, because I can’t imagine either the Scarlet Moon or Harmonia wasting the time and energy to actually pester each other even if we felt so inclined. They’re not really a threat any longer.”
“Male priests, male King? And male Gods?”
“I believe so? I never really cared about religious superstition.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Apple,” Tir continued impatiently. “Luc always swears by Gods and ‘saints.’ I noticed it before but never had a chance to ask him.”
“Dead giveaway. Can’t think of any other territories with male gods and male priest-kings. If you literally had a single clue about world history you would have already known this.”
“I do have a fucking clue about world history, I’ve just mostly been concerned about the surrounding area, you know, the one I’m going to war with.”
“Okay—”
“I didn’t even have a fucking clue where or what Kalekka was before I joined the army. I wasn’t sure DRAGONS were real until then. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where the five generals actually served even though I knew them all personally. I can fill in most this fucking map by myself now and it wasn’t easy to learn all this, alright?”
“Okay!”
“It’s a few fucking gaps Apple!! And if they’re not even a threat anymore, why would I even know about a crumbling old Empire?”
“Don’t you want to make a crumbling old Empire, you unbelievable birdbrain?” Apple snapped. “What did I just tell you the Imperial Rugner family did 200 years ago?”
“They took their territory away from Holy Harmonia.”
“Which had previously been their almighty rulers, never before conquered. And how did I just say they did it?”
“They learned and improved upon the tactics of their masters and beat their own game…”
“Yes, holy shit, Tir. Good job, baby bird.” Apple hit the map on the table with the palm of her hands, several times, to emphasize her passion when she said “Do you realize you have one the pre-eminent, most learned scholars of political history within the same camp of you, a short walk away, at all times? Someone who served in the Imperial court as intelligence, a strategist, a political advisor? This can be as simple as knowing how your enemy works and getting ahead of them! In fact, that’s all it is! If a local popular noble can take his country from a Holy Emperor without, by the way, a single drop of blood, the lot of you, with an army, and all the great minds you could possibly want, can surely manage the same!”
It was weirdly heartening to know even Apple, who barely had feelings, cared. “Alright. Alright, I get it. Can I read whatever you’re reading?”
“…Can you?”
“Ouch.”
“I mean, that too, but I more mean that Professor Silverberg has awful handwriting.”
“….Does he?”
Wordlessly, Apple reached behind her head, opened a locked drawer, slid it open, and grabbed a random sheaf of paper from it. Tir took it from her hand with highly raised eyebrows. He slid down his gaze, reluctant to stop observing the madwoman, to read.
“…Thing one? Not sure how much of this is stolen. Not asking questions right now. Thing two?... This is fucking awful.”
“He writes quickly to be able to capture every idea that enters his head at the speed he actually thinks.”
“Disgusting.” Tir flipped through the cramped, faded pages; years of work of a mind from another Empire. One that he had believed in. Dates, times, long, long paragraphs, edited as soon as they were written… “Apple?”
“What?”
“You think this is possible.”
“Overthrowing the Empire?”
“Yes.”
“Of course it is. It happens all the time.”
“Huh.”
“Why?”
“I know… a lot of very smart people who are thinking it’s not possible. Some of them are trying to run this thing.”
“Well, they’re letting their emotions run their thinking, because it’s possible. There’s a fucking guide for it. Professor Silverberg wrote it. Most of the copies have been burnt, by the way. I just have one of his drafts. If you would stop thinking like a panicked rabbit you would know that you’re already running down the right track, you just have to stick to the path, keep going, don’t get panicked and turn around or get bogged down by a stupid siege, and for fuck’s sake, someone just push that elevated consort off of a cliff. His hysterics are threatening the whole revolution.”
“….Do you….. mean Flik?”
“Yes.”
“Elevated consort.”
“Well? What would you call him? Is ‘ladder-climbing paramore of the deceased former Commander’ much different? It hasn’t been anything but chaos since he showed up when we were well in hand before. Why on earth are we out of the road in a precarious position taking an attack route no one else even agrees on otherwise? What on earth made you all concede so much power to him?”
…Something about that wasn’t quite right, but he didn’t remember what right now.
“…Alright,” he finally said. “Just… give me your best history and I’ll get a good skim of it in my ‘free time,’ I suppose. The time not taken up by Luc, wherever he is now, I suppose.”
“Make sure you ask him if he can retranslate a couple of sources when you find him again,” she said, either not sensing or not giving a single fuck about the difference in the mood of the room. “I know some of these are translated badly, everyone knows that, but we’ve never really had a better translator. Or not one who didn’t have too much political interest in mind. He reads his own language, yes?”
“…He writes in it,” Tir agreed, remembering magic books, magic circles, magic text on the cold stone ground.
“Well, that’s a good sign. I guess ask him why his Empire is crumbling into ruins and how we can replicate that failure, while you’re at it. I know a whole lot of people just dying to know.”
We will summarize the next handful of days before they made their way to Garan: no new choice was made. Several plots were debated harshly and a better way around the fort was not found. What they were doing after they took it, though, was still up in the air. Simply rescue the separated forces and bring them back to Toran Castle? Parade around the countryside recruiting? Lay siege to Scarleticia at once, before they could lose time?
Tir had been won over, despite his best intentions, by Flik’s point of view. Many had, mostly because they were motivated by not attacking a fortress they knew so little about. What Tir thought they should do, he wasn’t sure. But he did know that he certainly didn’t want to go head to head with Milich before knowing why his castle provoked such awe and fear, why his region was such a political nightmare, where the man himself stood in terms of personal autonomy and loyalties, and he wouldn’t figure out any of that if he couldn’t find fucking Luc.
There were concessions made to the thought that they might not need to siege Garan if they could sway it, and risks taken to see if that end could be accomplished. When he was met, Mathiu’s contact was sent with a risky message of potential peace.
“I think all you really did with that was warn them you were coming,” the man, Chapman, confided to Mathiu, Tir, and Viktor, as he settled a large, bead-spangled bag off of his back and onto the ground. He rolled his shoulders, looking tired as tired can be, and kicked metal boots, rusted but fringed with filigree, up onto the porch of Mathiu’s ‘office.’. “I didn’t get anyone too serious about it.”
Chapman had been an armorer before multiple accidents, evidence of which Tir could still see on his shaky arms, had caused him to quit. He now sold from the best armorers in the area. Whether he had been a supplier to the Imperial army once or had always been more of a bandits and mercs guy, Tir wasn’t sure, but he was one hell of a bandits and mercs guy now. Still, they had let him into Garan just fine, and out of it, though he hadn’t gotten a sunny reception for his message from the Liberation Army.
“They already knew we were coming or they were blind and deaf,” Mathiu sighed. “All this was was a potential out of getting bogged down in armed conflict.”
“All this was was PR, don’t lie to yourself,” Viktor countered, accepting a bit of rolled up god knows what from the merchant to smoke. Tir decided to not get involved; it smelled vile in a way he couldn’t place, spicy, like he had cardamom and cloves rolled into his narcotics. And maybe he did. “I can’t imagine why Garan would roll over for us unless they were run by a sympathizer, and they’re not. We’re just making and sending copies of the peace offering so everyone knows we made it. If Gregminster is playing good guy, we can too.”
“I don’t know about them trying to look like the good guy so much as them trying to look above it all. Either case, I’m stuck on your side of the line for what, two, three years now, until y’all stop being the coffee hour talk of the day,” the merchant grumbled, pulling a weirdly intricate metal box out of his pack that lit up with flame after his shaking thumb had fiddled with it long enough.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Viktor smiled, leaning forward for a light of his own all the same. The box made a snapping sound when it made fire, like cracking ice, and Tir could just barely see it glowing red.
“Hey, I’m as happy here as I was on the other side of the line, and like to get good business here too. I’m just recognizing that tensions are getting to be something serious, and if I’ve drawn a line, I’m stuck on one side of it. So get me customers and get me good work or else you owe me for every day of wages I’m losing in your camp.”
“Are you the man who was getting us information out of Antei?” Tir asked him bluntly.
“One of a few, I imagine.”
“He was the one getting me news instead of propaganda, yes,” Mathiu confirmed.
“I told y’all what I saw. If it was trouble, it was trouble. If it was lil birds chirping, it was lil birds chirping. Honestly, it’s been quiet in Antei, and quiet in Rikon and Teien, but that’s because the boys’re all gone. Sure enough something’s happening but mostly at private locations. Army is built up, government, tax collectors, officials re-elected everywhere, replaced with the Boss’s men, new names for the cities and the streets, new streets too, everyone hopping mad about change… but there are no clashes, no talk of war. Rumors about what was happening outside in the East died down and everyone stuck their noses into local business again. Scary talk, rebels against the Emperor, fighting, massacres, but no one cares anymore when they change the name of Main Street or ship in a new judge from the Capital or relocate farmland. We’re kept busy with little things changing around here constantly and no one can focus on the big picture that the whole Empire is shifting around.”
“You mean General Oppenheimer is distracting his citizens with cosmetic changes?” Mathis asked.
“Definitely not cosmetic. They’re mad for a reason around here. He’s replacing everyone and everything with something he, personally, approves of. How he’s getting away with it, I don’t know, but he’s being King Oppenheimer in his own little palace. Gregminster doesn’t seem to care, you never hear nothing about the Emperor here. Oppenheimer seems to do what he wants uncensored and most thinking people don’t like what he’s doing. Those that don’t think don’t like it either, come to think of it.”
“And he’s gathered an army, but at his castle?” Tir pressed.
“I assume. I won’t go there. I was asked but told them I’m a dang cripple and I can’t do no work for them. All I do is hawk now. My knowledge of it is he’s got his army at his castle, and a couple of points ‘round the country where no one lives but he has his own business. Just reeking of ratshit all that, for sure absolutely nothing good going on, but I’ve not been in. Can only give approximate locations, too, based on where the men march to and don’t come back from. The few what do can’t give real specific points, I mean these places are in the middle of nowhere.”
“Milich is sending able-bodied men, tons of them, to places on the map where no one lives and no one can locate, and they’re not coming back?” Tir summarized.
“That’s it,” the merchant confirmed, putting a few short, sharp coughs in his elbow. “I can go on and tell you what a few men say but I’d rather take a rest first.”
“Do that,” Mathiu agreed. “We’ll need to talk for quite some time about what you do, and don’t know about Scarleticia.”
“You’re really going for her?” Chapman shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll follow y’all all the way there. He’s got a lot, a lot of folks there, strange magic, harsh punishments. He’s built an anachronism of a goddamn fortress and he’s built it with magic. I’ll tell you what I know but I’m not doing the full trip. Now, the further I get from Antei, the better.”
“You can split off in a bit and head toward Toran,” Viktor encouraged him. “We all but cleared out the road behind us.”
“I told ‘yall already,” Chapman pressed, holding up his cigarette, as if in salute, “get me some customers, and I’ll stay. If there aren’t any, I’ll be taking my money and heading out. I know it’s not going to be safe around here if y’all have your way--”
“Oh, very rude,” Viktor complained.
“But I’ll stick around unless the lake grows dry.”
—
The walls of Garan were not so high as the walls of Pannu Yakuta.
They took even less time to be breached.
Tir had met Flik in the gray dawn, after they had spent a nearly silent night arranging themselves around the Fortress. Why not? Garan had already known they were coming. Lights began to appear on the walls around three; by the time the morning sun began to gleam on the waters that rung the fortress round, her occupants were lining the walls, straining to look down on the army of many colors massing before them. They were giving Tir the most uncomfortable sense of Déjà vu.
Flik appeared oddly silently, because Tir only knew his presence by the horse reacting. The man idly patted it on the withers. “When will we strike?” asked Tir in a whisper.
“Have we got contact?” asked Flik roughly. Sounded like he hadn’t even spoken to anyone yet in the day.
“No one has approached us. Do you want to wait to talk?”
Flik seemed to think about it. “No.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yeah.”
“We did send an offer of peace.”
“We did ‘n they laughed it back out,” Flik argued. “And they’re organizing canons up they’re and they’re not gonna not use them.”
Drowning. Drowning in drink. As if he was under the lapping waves right now.
Oddly he was standing straight, eyes as fixed on the fortress as if she were drifting away from him on the tide.
Tir could agree that there was almost no way to settle this without violence now. It might feel senseless emotionally, but… he knew this army. This was their job, and, just as the men at Pannu Yakuta, or the tax collectors in Gregminster, they had become so bore with peace that they had been making trouble anyway.
“So, when, then?” Tir asked.
“You got what you need?”
Tir nodded.
Flik nodded as if in response, his head bobbing as he did. “Tell Leknaat’s boy to tell everyone ten minutes. I want us to start simultaneous. They’re set to deflect waves with their equipment, we’ll do best crashing in at once.”
“Luc,” Tir began.
“I heard,” he groused. Unlike his typical pattern, Luc was one of the only people who had slept last night. Why would he have to waste time getting into position, after all? Now he was in badly-fitted but well-dyed leathers someone had likely forced him into, unwashed hair shoved back in a ponytail, eyes puffy and bleary. It was a good thing teleporting was walking to him, or else Tir would have been very hesitant to entrust him with eh start signal. “But don’t the fuck move before I get back, because I’m not just gonna float around the battlefield looking for you again.”
“Should I make room on the horse?” Tir asked sweetly, sweeping off imaginary dust from the saddle.
Luc vanished. Tir heard Gremio sigh beside him.
“How unusual,” said the lancer, his axe unsheathed and hanging almost to the ground where it dangled from his right hand, “to be standing and waiting to fight, as if we were waiting for tea to brew.”
“And it’s fuckin’ cold,” Flik groused, trying to scrub back his scraggly hair from his bloodshot eyes.
In the night, and the earliest morning, Tir had always felt, people were different. They seemed more alike, less themselves. No one was awake enough to be themselves yet, certainly not at their worst. The misery of a grave-fire could certainly unite people, and the discomfort of a cold morning seemed to as well, to a lesser extent.
“Gremio?” he asked.
Gremio had been stretching his shoulders to prepare for the abuse they were about to undergo. “Yes?”
Tir wondered how he was to ask this. “Take care of yourself.”
Gremio side-glanced him, then looked back ahead to the cold stone. “I refuse.”
“Gremio.”
“Your direct orders were that we take care of each other. I’m afraid I can’t—”
Tir huffed, a smile quirking on his face. “What?”
“I’m afraid I just can’t disobey your orders just because you say so, Tir. ‘Sir’ Tir already commanded—”
“What, now we have to do what ‘Sir’ Tir says?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“But aren’t I him?”
“No, you’re distinctly being ‘Tir’ Tir right now.
“Well, how do I get to be Sir?”
“You simply cannot.” Gremio shook his head, the picture of seriousness. “It can’t be faked. The difference between Tir and ‘Sir’ Tir is insurmountable.”
“Wait, when do I become Sir?”
“I decide.”
Tir burst out laughing, falling on the neck of his horse. He saw Gremio’s shoulders shake with a chuckle, but that was the time they had.
—
ORIGINAL NOTE
To some degree, posting WBWTD was always a project in which I was posting up an old, unfinished fic for the sake of posting it, slightly increasing the archive of Suikoden fic out there, opening up something I spent a LOT of time on for public viewing. I didn't expect myself to cut off quite so soon; I remember being sure I would get at least to Soniere, since I spent so much time leading up to it. Damn. Unfortunately, this appears (as they say) to be all that's in the book.
Never saying die aside, I'm sure WBWTD will never reach its planned bad-end conclusion (He's not making it out of Sheherazade) and I likely won't write any more of it. I wanted it to exist out there, on the wild internet, my weird aborted baby, half a series I loved beyond reason and half personal psychological gaynst. God rest you.