Cole stepped down from the wagon rubbing his eyes. Guy had already left, cheerily saying his farewells before running off to make sure Cole's campsite wasn't going to spontaneously combust in his absence. Cole was not so lucky. Trapped in the wagon reading all day, half of his mind consumed with worry about the Capitol while his mouth ran ideas back and forth with Guy, and his chest ached...
Ached with what? How good it had felt to have Nika back? To be so glad to see him, to feel so satisfied after finally being held by the person of whom he had only dared to dream for the last five years?
Two months in... two months in... Cole crouched, hiding his face in his hands, his reserve of self-control temporarily overwhelmed. Even after working all day, Cole and Guy couldn't deny the idea that early battles of the war had Nika's indelible touch on them. None of their alternate scenarios paid out well enough to be called even close to certain. Too many of the ones painting Nika as a traitor paid out too well.
“Sir, are you all right?”
It was his driver, cautiously bending over him. Crouched, pinched, and pale, Cole realized, he must look terminally ill. He stood, smiling broadly. “Being trapped all day with plans is not my preferred mode of living, Brer.” When that failed to ease Brer's concern, Cole reached out, resting a hand on the man's shoulder, eliciting his hesitant but relieved smile in return. Cole managed a chuckle. “I suppose that the war aged even me. I had thought my work almost over, so relieved it all was ending that going back to it seems like dying.”
Brer laughed, glancing down at his feet. “I suppose so, sir. Nobody can fault you for that.”
Cole breathed a sigh of relief as his driver turned back to taking care of the wagon, but the man's voice echoing hollow and hesitant off the wood stopped him.
“Do you think the war is not over, then?”
Brer's miserable glance as he went up to unhitch the horses froze Cole. Faced by the doubt in his driver's face, Cole at first couldn't force a response. Slowly the man stopped his work, turning to wait with an expression full of earnest anticipation for Cole's answer.
“I thought...” Brer asked, trying to hide his desperation, “I hoped that catching the Comid General would end it. They can't keep fighting without a general, can they?”
Cole watched him carefully, false smile gone. “Well, surely you heard his address to his troops?” When Brer tried to avert his face, Cole's rueful chuckle spared him the embarrassment, “Or if you didn't see it yourself, you've heard of it. Camp gossip keeps us all well informed. I think, from that, that if the Comid rebels want to keep fighting their war, they will keep fighting their war. The Ainjir Army wouldn't have stopped if I had died.”
Some words were caught before they could pass Brer's lips. He twisted the leather in his hands. “I hoped to go home.”
Cole smiled at him and spoke with quiet reassurance. “You are going home, Brer.” The sympathy in his voice was true, but voicing the truth made Cole's teeth ache. “We're going to the Capitol to deliver prisoners, war ended or not. Where you can see your family.” And where Nika would be tried.
Brer smiled. He mostly needed the reassurance that Cole knew where his family was, that he wouldn't keep him from it out of thoughtlessness. Cole's terrible mood had no part in it; other people had other worries. He couldn't fault Brer for thinking he would forget; being driver to an executive officer was very similar to being the button everyone forgot to fasten.
“Yours, too, sir,” Brer said. “That should be nice.”
Cole smiled and said nothing, patting Brer's shoulder.
The driver went back to his work, while Cole wandered towards where his stewards waited for instructions. He would tell them the same thing he always told them: pitch his tent far enough away to be private, close enough to be easy to guard, and failing that, ask Guy. Still, he had to say it, even if they knew. That was how camps worked.
Cole may have handed over most of his administrative duties to Guy, but his grasp of them was not any less sharp. Were they not honed by making camp happen a hundred times for General Durante? For Horace? For all and any of the multitudes that had outranked him after he had graduated? They ordered him about like a servant. How could he forget the searing of a hundred instantly-made plans into his brain?
In the running of men from one point to another, he could trace the borders of individual units. In a few stray looks cast back and forth he could tell which supplies had fallen behind. The raising of tent poles could tell him which officers kept their men in practice, were demanding of them. The feel of the ground told him what sort of night they would have, how the morning would go. He had learned how to set camp until he no longer had to think about it, until it was part of him.
He could read a camp like a doctor read a body, hand upon each beating pulse point. Worse than a doctor, he felt, moving through a mêlée of tents being set and prisoners being shuttled off and the odd salute snapped out like a swinging flag. He was worse than a doctor... he moved through the body of the camp like a lover. He knew it. He felt it. People moving around him were so many rivulets of blood in the stream of his body, his army. He felt it making itself whole like he felt a waking lover beneath him. Always too passionate, was Esras Cole. Always too instinctive.
Dominicus Galen was the only one who ever called him passionate. The rest hardly knew his mind from the force that made the flowers bud just in time to miss the frost.
They didn't understand how to take something and learn it so well that it was as easily a part of them as thought was a function of the mind. They didn't know how to pull something close and know it, how to force it to be important. Nika called it passion.
'How do you like this, Galen?' he wanted to ask. He would have shoved and shouted. 'How does it strike you?'
'Accuse me again of too much passion. Watch my army make camp. Meet what was my lover after you left me.'
See everything that failed to fill your place.
Everyone knew the officer trailing at Cole's heel as he walked through camp. The jungle had begun to dump a fine mist upon their travailing, and clouded his insignia in mud, but there was no mistaking him beside their general.
They turned to stare, and many lost a tensioned rope or jerked a hammered hand in their distraction. It was a sight both rare and relieving to watch them pass. A few more daring, or more fearful, trailed surreptitiously in their wake.
The provost officer in Cole's footsteps had no idea what he was doing there. They could all see it by his confused face and rattled march as he tried to keep up. Cole cleared the half-grown mud beneath them as if it were hard packed earth, and they were competition runners – all without appearing as if he hurried, as if he knew the way with over-long, familiar, resignation. The poor officer trailed and slipped and held his hat close to his head, while staring into the faces around them for answers. Oh, how he wished he were somebody else.
They were reaching their destination. The others knew as Cole's eyes narrowed. As soon as the smoky figures of moving men came within view, they heard his bellow ring out, clear and sharp.
“Faeren Tain, of the Adar's Company of the Innogen's Bridge Battalion, serving under Lt. Brady!”
The entirety of the shaded figures grew erect, as portions of their own descriptions rang out. Feeling himself suddenly surrounded, the officer at Cole's side skipped steps to catch up, to cling closer to the high commander. Every figure, their uniforms growing into their dark blue hue as they came into focus, seemed pointed towards Cole and his surreptitious entourage, but only one looked down, his nerves averting his eyes.
He looked to his fellows for clues, and found none. He looked up again, “Sir?”
They still moved through, not slowing their approach. The raindrops began to sound in earnest. The edge of Cole's mouth twitched upward. Faeren Tain twitched, too, as if to get out of the way.
The officer at Cole's heels slipped in the mud, watching like a man unable to stop his barreling horse, while still moving his own feet through the muck.
Cole reached back and grasped the sheathed ceremonial sword of the provost soldier accompanying him, ripping it loose from its belt, the provost's man himself sliding back with a curse. Before Faeren Tain had time to put his hands up, Cole swung the sword across his face, sending him to the ground with a strangled, startled cry of pain.
He rolled in the mud. Cole spoke down at him. “You are Faeren Tain or you are one of his company mates, who loves him so you would not dare admit to being other than he.” He waited, briefly, but there was no answer but gurgling mud and disbelief. “You are in a squad in charge of twenty of my prisoners, one of whom could not eat today, because his jaw was shattered. You are this man, Faeren Tain?”
The soldier on the ground looked up, whites of his eyes shining through the gray dark that the high clouds cast over them with their rain. He seemed not to know who he was. Holding the stripe of red that drew across his face, slowly, he nodded.
Cole kicked him across the middle, rolling him towards the tent. As the soldier rolled to his hands and feet, Cole brought two hands to the sheathed weapon he held and slammed it across his back. Cole didn't need many strokes; each one was felt. He let the soldier fall, and get up again, once, then set him to the ground, with the clear demand that he would stay down. Stabbing the sheathed weapon into the ground near the soldier's head, he knelt to speak to him. “How do you like it, Faeren Tain, to be beaten by someone against whom you are powerless?”
Cole brought the weapon out of the ground, using the tip to tilt the soldier's shoulders up, so he could address his words to Faeren's face. “Do you think I fear you, Fearen Tain?”
He searched, in case the man had an answer, but the soldier merely averted his eyes, shaking his head while he tried to gain his breath again. Cole nodded. “You are correct. I doubt I would fear your entire company, should they decide they were my enemies. So here you sit, in the midst of all of your company brothers, all watching you be beaten, and who do they fear?”
The soldier's gray eyes wavered, but they also understood. The rain wasn't hard enough to produce the tracks of water running down his face. Cole frowned. He put the sword to the side to help Faeren over onto his back with his hand. The young man held his stomach, probably from the kicking, and Cole cleaned away the few spots of mud that stuck to his face, before he stood to address the rest of them.
He gave the sword back to the provost, and watched the figures stand in the rain. He spoke so all could hear. “There will be no more beatings. I do not like them.”
The soldiers shifted. They wanted to help their brother. Cole watched them, waiting until Faeren had control of himself, and could clear his face of shameful tears. He nodded to the waiting men.
They saluted. Cole turned on his heel and left.
Chapter Twelve
Captain Guy stood outside the prisoner’s tent, in the semi-pitch darkness created by the wavering, distant, and insufficient light of the guards’ torches. Heary and Lo – because of course it was Heary and Lo again – watched him from a few feet away. Guy’s knuckles whitened on the letter in his hand, held flat, so as not to crinkle it, but tight as a clerk with an unbudgeted penny.
Guy turned; the guards faced the camp. Guy faced the tent; the guards turned back to watch.
“He never said ‘put it in his hand,’” Guy whispered to himself, encouragingly and despairingly at the same time. “So just…don’t wake him up.”
Nika sat cross-legged at the back corner of his tent. Poor as the light outside was, when the tent flap peeked open, it set the empty wall beside him ablaze to his dark-adapted eyes. Sort of rude to just enter a tent without saying anything, but he supposed he was a traitor. Treason was rude.
He would have said something but he didn’t want to catch a beating, and anyway, what came into the tent wasn’t quite a person. It was a part of a person. It was a foot. Then it was roughly half of a person. It was a Guy.
Guy’s foot quested over the ground in front of him, for what Nika had no idea. Toes pointed like a dancer, he swept his foot in little arcs, inching just a little further in the tent each time, careful not to rustle the fabric or let in too much light.
In the spirit of maintaining respect for the individual he had just promoted, personally, over Cole’s objections, he tried to come up with a short list of reason why Guy might be sneaking into his tent in the middle of night. They were all uniformly stupid. He watched Guy's foot push his sitting cushion out of the way, then flail about in a one-limb display of panic, flipping it over and thus putting it forever out of his reach. His leg drooped in despair. Nika could believe this was happening for some uniformly stupid reason.
The tent wasn't large. It had no dangerous furniture. Guy couldn’t get lost in it. Probably. If he would wait for his eyes to adapt – or maybe even actually come inside – Guy would probably even be able to see him.
In his opinion, they should teach things so basic as adapting to transitive light situation to rank-and-file soldiery, but he supposed his opinion didn’t count for much at this point. It wasn’t like he had learned it at Academy anyway; his second-eldest sister Auriol taught him, during an adventure which had forever disabused him of the notion that quiet, modest, and proper, contradicted with ruthless, furious, and devilish. Comforting as thoughts of childhood were, if Guy didn’t do… whatever it was he was here to do… it was becoming dangerously likely Nika was going to get kicked before he could do it. Guy’s foot had almost reached the back of the tent; the poor walls shook, as he was apparently supporting his questing limb with one of the front supports.
Nika stood up, and removed the improvised cover from his oil dish.
The shadows inside the tent were increasingly blobby – and therefore increasingly strange and threatening – and except for whatever soft… thing that had scurried out from under his foot earlier Guy had found nothing on which to put General Cole’s letter, thus technically completing his delivery and freeing him from the awful fate of potentially having to wake up the General-of-the-Comid-Army-Who-ALSO-Had-Just-Threatened-Him-This-Very-Morning-With-Death-Or-Worse in the middle of the night. Each failed probe with his foot brought him inches closer to actually going into the tent, and also increased the likelihood that the guards would notice this was taking too long and start looking at him, though every time he ducked his head out of the darkness of the tent to check they were still standing with bored indifference, facing the camp.
It was just as Guy ducked his head back into the tent – most of his body was, at this point, inside – his back foot wiggling forward to give him a bit more reach, that General Galen uncovered the lamp.
Guy flinched away from the light – admittedly a bare foot or so from his face because it really wasn’t a big tent – and with one foot lifted and the other wiggling and only the rather weak front support to steady himself, immediately lost his balance. Several things then happened with both the intermingling causation and unbelievable velocity to which all such catastrophic disasters are prone:
A cool hand grasped the back of his neck, settling his balance – Guy yelped like a dog with a trodden tail – he seized and half-tore-away the tent flap, letting in more light, so Nika flinched – and then both guards bulled past Guy – and Guy thought 'Oh shit.'
One guard grabbed Guy, spinning him out of the tent flap, while the other struck out with the butt of his staff. Suddenly staring at the dim camp, Guy heard the sickening sound of wood smacking against flesh.
“Sneaking filth!”
“Captain Guy, are you all right?”
Lo was pushing Guy away from the tent, but Guy seized both front supports before they got clear, pulling himself back in, just to see Heary working General Galen over on the ground.
Precious moments slipped away while Guy goggled at how monumentally he had just Fucked Up.
“Stop, stop, stop!” Guy tried to get past Heary, but Heary had a staff, and Lo was trying to bundle Guy away from behind, and by both of their expressions, they thought Guy had utterly lost his mind, probably to some kind of vengeful rage, which had been the common way to lose minds of late. Provost officers, used to people with lost minds, had a nasty habit of protecting first, listening later. So Guy was being soothingly told to take deep breaths while one held him off with a staff and the other tried to get him to let go of the supports.
Guy did let go – to throw himself over the staff in Heary’s hand like a broken-necked game bird, shouting with such volume he surprised even himself.
“I ORDER YOU TO STOP!”
Both guards froze. With Hammerlyn as their commanding officer, this was the volume at which they were used to being commanded, complete with froth, so it struck a deep chord of deference within them even though the source was a bit peculiar.
The tent was quite crowded with four people in it, but Guy grabbed Heary’s staff and pivoted him around with it, such that now both guards had their backs to the tent entrance. Tugging wildly, Guy took the staff from his hands. Guy shook it, wordless and wild-eyed, and they stared at him.
Finally gathering some wit together, Guy whacked Heary with his own staff.
“Get out of here!”
They didn't move, staring at Guy like he had suddenly turned into an ambulatory root-vegetable. Guy gave Lo a solid whack, too, before shaking the staff menacingly over his head – well, near to over his head, it banged into the tent roof, causing the suspended oil dish to swing wildly.
“Get out!”
The guards looked at each other.
Growling, Guy brought the staff down, and started to physically shove them out of the tent.
“Get! Go! Get! Get!”
Once they were out, he stepped outside to chuck the staff after them. “Back to your posts, you dangling set of goats’ nuts!”
Breathless, Guy stumbled back, nearly knocking himself to the ground. Cursing steadily but softly, he first tried to rig the tent flap back up again – and was partially successful, tying some frayed threads together, which, for the moment, chose not to further tear. Then he turned.
General Galen lay quite still on the floor of the tent, eyes closed.
Guy dropped slowly to his knees – still cursing, just at a different tenor – hands raised before him. He tremblingly put the crumpled letter aside, on the ground. Tentatively, springing back several times, he tried to feel for breath with his hand before Galen’s face.
He was pretty sure Galen was still breathing. He couldn’t really tell, because he wouldn’t get close enough to tell, so he told himself he was pretty sure. Guy was also pretty sure there was now a definite limit on how long after this he, himself, would keep breathing. Really, it was a toss-up – would Cole or Galen kill him first?
At least, thanks to battle, he was fairly used to thinking he was about to die. It was almost comforting. It also prompted him to action.
He had always heard of unconscious people being doused or slapped awake. At least, that was how it went in plays and stories. He had neither bucket, nor water – and no desire to cross camp, alerting everyone to his idiocy, to retrieve a bucket or water. He had also never actually been around an unconscious person he had any desire to awaken. He didn’t particularly want to awaken General Galen, but he did want to know he was definitely alive and still coherent after what must have been the hundredth beating in the last couple of days.
It could be light taps. Several light taps – it was the stinging, right? So they had to sting, but light taps could sting, couldn’t they? Guy brought his hand up and swallowed hard.
He was going to slap Executive General Dominicus Galen of the Army of the Comid Republic, the military mastermind behind Ainjir's worst rebellion since Keadar-Ainjir himself had seized the country, executed most of the royal family, scourged the priesthood, and forged the pact of the Six Nations by sheer force of will, founding Ainjir as he knew it.
Guy took a deep breath. He brought his hand up again – took more deep breaths–
Galen's eyes opened.
Guy froze. He tried to get his open mouth to say something.
“How is your evening, Captain Guy?” He asked in a quiet voice, raspy with pain, but uncomfortably conversational.
Guy blanched, stuck with his hand hovering over Galen's face. “I-I-I... it was a misunderstanding….”
“I hate sticks – pikes, staffs, whatever – guards always have sticks. I hate sticks. Reminds me of Academy, where I also disliked beatings – receiving them, anyway,” Galen continued thoughtfully, wincing on the ground, “especially with sticks. I dislike them.”
“I'm… so sorry, …sir, I didn’t mean to….”
Galen’s eyes bored into Guy's until his apologies melted into uniform block of indecipherable muttering. Once Guy fell silent, Galen’s eyes closed.
Guy was properly fucked. Career ruined. Life over. All Cole had asked for was the delivery of a letter. Instead, Guy had gotten his… recipient… of letters… beaten. The only officer in all of the Ainjir Army willing to take him on after the debacle with Briar, and Guy had fucked up delivering a letter for him.
For his part, Galen had shut his eyes, so as not to strike Guy – probably repeatedly – and earn another beating, as Guy, like a great useless turd, hovered over him, looking for all the world as if he were daring himself to steal a kiss.
“Almost all day, I didn’t get hit,” Galen said, more to himself than anything. “I thought, maybe, I could stop pissing blood soon. I wish you let me know you had other plans, Captain Guy. I was looking forward to it.”
Guy apparently didn't have anything to say to that, which was something of a relief, as so far everything he had said was infuriatingly stupid.
But really, the worst part was that Galen couldn’t, in fact, lost his temper or berate Guy, because he had thrown his personal support behind Guy in front of Cole. Dense as Cole was being about it, Guy was Cole's protégé; Galen knew it. It was annoying that Cole was so obtuse about it, but this was a thing Cole did, for mysterious reasons Galen hadn't the delicacy of personality to handle. He may not have had the delicacy required for protégé-ing himself, but Cole was able to cultivate admiration and weigh the virtues of others, and he wouldn’t have chosen Guy lightly. For all he said that Guy still needed to grow, Galen knew, he would have already been tried by fire, tempered and tested. Cole’s protégé could only be of the best and most resilient kind.
Galen heard something like the snuffling of a mouse.
Opening his eyes, Galen saw that Guy had least stopped hovering. In fact, he had fallen back on his heels, eyes wide, staring off in the distance and… glistening with the start of tears.
When he noticed Galen’s eyes were open, Guy quickly took a deep, bracing sniff, running hands down his thighs as if they were dirty as he braced himself.
“I fucked up, sir. I'm sorry,” Guy said.
There was a little prayer Galen’s mother used to mutter in her delightful mix of Ainjir and Midraeic, so well tousled by her soft tongue that it took Galen turning it over in his homesick mind after a particularly horrible Ancient Languages class to realize her rather cute appeal to the seven dogs of the First Priest was in fact, an appeal to do something entirely other than what he had first assumed to the Measurer-of-Fate.
That is what he chose to say.
Guy, emotions back under control, returned his gaze to the middle-distance, contemplating the horrors awaiting a man demoted back to bumfuck literally days before the war ended.
Galen pushed himself up to sit. Guy felt his eyes prickle again – the Comid General looked like hell, the sticks certainly hadn’t helped, and his feelings about the health of his dire enemy had become intensely weird in a very short time – then Galen raised a hand and slapped him.
The noise called the guards, whose voices rang through the tent wall, their hands already rustling at the flap. “Captain Guy are you all right?”
Hand to his cheek, Guy stared open mouthed at Galen. At Guy’s continued silence, however, Galen pressed his lips together, raising his hand even further back as if to slap again.
“Yes!” Guy squeaked, and the hand Galen had raised turned into a fist which with brotherly – that is, well to bruising – force rammed into Guy’s arm. “OW-w-we’re fine!” His voice cracked slightly, Galen raised his fist again, ignoring Guy’s look of shock and pain. “I’m fine! Stop! Get back… get back to guarding, or whatever…”
The rustling stopped, the mud squelching under the guards’ most reluctantly retreating footsteps.
Rubbing his arm, Guy fell back on his ass, hurt confusion on his face. This seemed to offend General Galen, whose glower grew more furious, causing Guy’s hurt confusion to deepen, which deepened the glower – therefore hurt confusion – and so on…
“Guy,” Galen finally said, in a shockingly level voice.
“Yes,” Guy said, hesitating for full seconds before adding, “…sir?”
“You’re a Captain.”
“Yes…?”
But something in Guy’s halting acceptance of this truth seemed to cause Galen great pain, as he shut his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, muttering softly, “I made you a fucking Captain…”
“Sir?”
“Quit calling me ‘sir’,” Galen snapped, then sighed even more heavily, adding something in Midraeic before he addressed Guy more evenly. “It sounds stupid in Ainjir. I guess you should call me ‘General’ but that sounds stupider. Keep calling me ‘sir’ – whatever – just….you’re a Captain, yes?”
“Yes,” Guy said, stumbling into the pregnant pause where ‘sir’ would be like a drunken uncle into the wedding goose.
Galen grabbed his lapels, but not to tear his throat out with his teeth, as the expression on his face might have suggested, but to draw them straight, tugging and slapping Guy’s uniform into place. “Start fucking acting like it.”
He had ended his statement by grabbing Guy’s lapels again and giving him a little shake, but Guy nodding, and then saying “yes,” and then “yes, s-, Genera…sir,” had not stopped the shaking. The shaking continued, accompanied by a stare somewhere between ‘despairing’ and ‘unabashedly violent’. Finally, Guy managed to get his hands up, but as he put them to Galen’s wrists to get him to let go, he flinched – Galen cursed, elaborately, in Midraeic – so Guy flinched again.
“I should… yeah,” Guy cleared his throat, putting his hands down to push himself up to stand. “I should… there’s the letter, I’ll just re-emphasize my apologies and go.”
“No,” Galen said, backing his up by seizing the bottom of Guy’s jacket, yanking him back onto the ground. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
“I just…” Guy said, then he cast around, retrieving the letter and presenting it to Galen as he started to rise again. “I’ve disturbed you. Here’s the letter – I should go.”
This time, much faster than Guy was comfortable with witnessing, Galen rolled back, swept a foot out, and collapsed one of Guy’s knees, sending him back to the ground.
“Augh! What the fuck!” Guy shouted, cradling his knee, and rolling off the part of his butt that had hit the ground hardest, so that he rolled on his back like an upturned beetle. He would be feeling that for weeks.
“Captain Guy!” The guards shouted, their footsteps again rapidly approaching the tent.
“Fuck’s sake,” Guy said in a throaty roar, “when I need you I’ll call you, just get back to guarding, you pike-and-helmet turds!”
The footsteps squelched away.
“Better,” Galen said, his attention focused on the letter.
“I’m glad you’re happy with your letter,” Guy said. “Can I go now?
“No,” Galen said. He gave the letter one last look over, threw it aside, and scowled at Guy. “Sit up, you child.”
Guy frowned right back – Galen made a fist – Guy sat up.
“Better for you,” Galen said. “More like a Captain. Keep acting like a Captain.”
“Captains are assholes,” Guy said. “Every Captain I ever met was some dickhead noble with a purchased commission. Acting like a Captain looks like rocketing my nose to the sky, raining nonsensical abuse on soldiers in a clipped Capitol accent, and prancing about in a way that suggests I’ve neither seen nor participated in combat. Every Captain I’ve ever known took two years of Academy Preparatory when they were fourteen, and then lolled about on various fainting couches until half-heartedly buying a commission when their fathers failed to die in time for them to inherit. Captains are awful.”
“You are Captain,” Galen reiterated, as if the whole tirade slightly bored him. “Cole went to Prep. He was friends with the Prep cadets for a while at Academy.”
“What does that have to do anything?” Guy said, but some of the blood left his face, as he realized perhaps he had just insulted Cole in front of Galen. Though trying to piece out what such insult might mean in the terms of their unfathomable relationship gave him a headache, he felt it probably wasn’t going to get him on Galen’s good side.
“I don’t know, Guy,” Galen said, sighing and throwing his hands up (which made Guy flinch). “Cole certainly didn’t ‘loll about’ on any fainting couches – well, he didn’t ‘loll’ but he probably got on a lot of couches – that was before we met – and you’re a Captain now.”
“I don’t know what that means when you said it like that!” Guy semi-shouted, worried about calling the guards back.
Galen scowled at him. “Maybe the problem with the Captains you met was that they stayed Captains, Lieutenant Guy.”
Guy bristled, and started to correct his rank, but before he could, the implications finally began to percolate, and he fell silent, leaning back.
“Guy!” Galen barked into the silence, startling him. “Why are you here?”
“You won’t let me leave!” Guy threw out his hands towards his still-creaky knee.
“Eha! Fut’ore cucurbita! Guy, why did you come here?”
“To give you the letter!”
“The letter is stupid,” Galen said, with a dismissive gesture.
“I don’t care how you feel about the stinking letter! I was ordered to give it to you, I gave it to you, now with a ‘bid thee goodnight’ I’m going to go.”
He started up, and actually got turned all the way around and was about to take his first step towards the tent entrance when his standing leg went suddenly and painfully numb and he crumpled like the walls of Arcena (not that he would know that part of the Book, but Galen thought the analogy apt).
“What the fuck did you do to my leg?” Guy gasped, from the ground.
“It’ll be fine,” Galen said, picking up the letter and handing towards Guy. “Why did you come to deliver this letter?”
“What do you mean it will be fine? I can’t feel it!”
“You’ll feel me fucking breaking it if you don’t focus, Captain Guy,” Galen said, voice making a promise of his threat with its calm menace. “Why. Did you. Come here. Now. To deliver this letter?”
Guy stared. “I was ordered to.”
“Look at this letter,” Galen said.
Guy shrugged, trying to discreetly edge away. He resisted the urge to say that if the letter was unsatisfying it was hardly his fault.
Assuredly, whatever sweet nothings Cole had passed on to Galen in his surely-to-be-evidence-in-their-future-trial-for-treason correspondences weren't any of Guy's business. On pain of death, however, he read it; it was banal in the extreme. General Cole sends his regrets that he won't see General Galen until tomorrow.
Retrospectively, the lack of sweet nothings was disappointing. Cole’s reputation for seductive prowess went back to his Academy days, and there might have been something to learn from such a rumored maestro. Sadly, this letter wasn’t even interesting; the message was easily inferable from the fact that it was late and General Cole was not here.
But every officer tended towards redundancy, even disregarding the distressingly personal nature of Galen and Cole's relationship. Guy was just happy he wasn't stuck passing semi-treasonous lovers’ favors back and forth. For all his fear of losing his career, the minute he saw a single nosegay he was resigning his commission. He had promised himself.
“Well, sir, given the nature of your relationship to General Cole, I suspect it is either flattery or politesse that this letter came to you.”
“Please,” Galen said with a snort. “Cole is a fool, but he's hardly fool enough to waste your time with it, too.”
Guy felt his face get hot. “I would thank you not to speak of my superior like that in my presence.”
“Eha! What are you going to do about it, forever-Lieutenant?”
“I…I’ll just…” but truly, Guy could think of nothing. What could he do? Galen could kill him. Cole would probably be sad about it, but forgive him. He seemed to have forgiven him for an entire fucking war, what was one subordinate? “You’re the one that promoted me! You could at least respect your own promotion.”
“I’m fucking trying,” Galen spat at him, “but you are disappointing. Look at the letter, Captain Guy! Why are you delivering a meaningless letter in the middle of the God forsaken night?”
“How am I supposed to know it’s meaningless?”
“Look at the letter!”
“General Cole likes his privacy!” but Guy started looking at the letter again, if only to prevent another injury.
“You’re not a fucking servant, Guy,” Galen snapped. “You’re a Captain.”
Guy fell silent. He turned the letter over, then back again. He looked carefully at the fold.
“Talk,” Galen commanded, gesturing, once Guy looked up, to encourage him. “Cole always talks when he makes plans. So talk.”
“Am I making plans?” Guy asked.
“When are you not making plans?” Galen returned, as if the very notion puzzled him. “Keep yourself busy with orders and errands, Captain Guy, but you should always be making plans. Like Cole. Everything is plans.”
“Well, you're right, that it's meaningless.”
“I know. I said 'like Cole' meaning for you to speak your thoughts, not waste time trying to please me,” Galen said. His frown relented just long enough to let slip: “Cole does that well enough.”
“Ahhh…,” Guy said, hearing what Galen had said assuming that it was certainly true and that he wasn't going to think about it even a little bit at all. “General Cole's personal correspondence is always sealed with wax, both over and under the fold. He guards his privacy. This letter was well-folded, but unsealed, meaning it isn't actually personal correspondence.”
Galen blinked at him in a way that Guy was both surprised and unnerved to find encouraging.
“So,” Guy went on, “at the very least it's an obfuscation. I mean, handing me something that seems like personal correspondence, but is treated like an order, to be delivered at an odd time...”
“A personal time,” Galen said. “You should be on your own time by now; this is the adjutant officer's 'picket', the courtesy-time when your superior has no need of you, but you are still technically on duty, and must come if called.”
“I don't think General Cole would have expected me to read something he handed me like personal correspondence.”
“Because you are too dutiful, too proper; you have not yet completely learned to abuse your power the way Cole would want you to.”
Guy scowled. “General Cole is an upstanding officer–”
“Don’t pretend to be stupid.” Galen snorted. “Don’t repeat in private public foolishness. That is what Cole wants people to think, but you know as well I do how he acts. Or do you not reprimand his foolishness to his face?”
Galen grinned, watching Guy's affront turn into embarrassment.
“You are a good officer, Guy. Cole is a sneaky bastard.” He paused to consider. “Within limits. Not as sneaky as me. Though he is better with people.”
Better with people, thought Guy. “That doesn't mean he would expect me to read his letter.”
“No,” Galen said, nodding. “But what does he expect of me?”
Now Guy's blush couldn't be fended off. “Uh... well... I'm sure I don't know...”
Galen scowled, sitting forward. “Why would he make you spend personal time with me?”
“I'm really not... not that you're... it isn't... I don't...” Guy's ears went red, eyes fixing on anything in the tent but Galen.
“Deus, miserare! You are too like Cole,” Galen muttered, then he unfolded a leg and shoved Guy over onto the ground again. “Get your God-damned head out from the under the sheets.”
“How am I supposed to know?” Guy replied, shoving himself back up. “I don't know how Cole thinks.”
“What the fuck does Cole spend all his time doing but teaching you how he thinks?”
“You seem to have some idea of our relationship that’s very different from mine! General Cole has far better things to do than try to teach me anything – he’s a busy man, with some very weighty responsibilities, and I–”
“You are forced to go with him to all his meetings?” Galen interrupted. “Are made to take all his notes, perform all your tasks to his standards? To observe and comment on everything he does? To know and help him with things even when you know he is breaking rules or behaving in ways others would see as suspect? Sweet Mother of the Prophet, Captain Guy, I should beat you like a basement rug.”
“What, haven’t you been?” Guy snapped back, but flinched when Galen glared at him. “Whatever Cole does, he doesn’t beat me like anything, and I think you should either get to the point or let me leave.”
Instead of being shamed or mollified, Galen’s hand shot out and seized Guy’s ear, twisting it up as he yanked him forward. This time, at least, Guy had the presence of mind not to cry out, but it was a near thing.
“If you’re going to come here in the middle of night and disturb me by having me beaten with sticks, Captain Guy, then you’re going to sit here as long as I fucking want you to and answer my fucking questions, and this would all go much faster if you would get your head out of your asshole and start thinking with it instead.”
Rather than just letting go, Galen thrust Guy back onto his butt by his ear, then brushed his hands together, setting them on his knees. He stared pacifically at Guy, but it was hard to think that it was some kind of mid-violence rest state.
“Since we have started at too difficult a point, then maybe we should go back to something easier. Captain Guy, what did you and Cole do today?”
Guy hesitated, and since this didn’t incur immediate violence, went ahead and thought about whether he was supposed to tell Galen what they had done all day. General Cole hadn’t said that it was secret, but General Cole hadn’t said much aside from their work, and ‘deliver this letter to General Galen.’
Guy had been somewhat disingenuous in his denial of Galen’s summation of Cole’s relationship to him. It was true that Cole was teaching him things, and also that his teaching method used a lot more implication and assumption than ear-twisting and knee-breaking, which at this moment, Guy especially appreciated. It meant, on the one hand, Guy had a very free rein; he was meant to (and would get) all relevant or requested information, but it was up to Guy to figure out what to do with it. On the other hand, this method meant that Guy learned a lot of things through spectacular fuck-ups, for which he was generally solely responsible.
Which really put a new perspective on this whole debacle.
But surely Cole hadn’t expected him to fuck up delivering the letter? But did he have to? Perhaps he only intended for Guy and Galen to end up in the same tent. And what had Galen asked earlier? ‘What does Cole expect of me?’ Well, surely he expected Galen to be disgusted with – or at least notice – the uselessness of the letter, and maybe say something, or try to probe Guy for information to figure out why it was being delivered. And what had they spent the day doing? Well, Guy’s job was to try to figure out when Galen entered the war, ‘as precisely as possible’.
And, well, given the nature of the letter – unsealed, not private, useless – the point in the evening – Guy’s personal time, technically on duty but not – and the spare order – leaving it entirely up to Guy how he went about delivering the letter, but deliver to Galen, not to his tent or guards or anything – Cole had left, to his extremely circuitous mind, plenty of breadcrumbs for Guy to follow. Similar disasters had been sparked by such opportunities for learning.
So he looked up at Galen, who looked back at him, and finally smiled.