A Stranger to Command

by Sherwood Smith

  There was little talking among the cooks, who listened wistfully, longingly, or resentfully—depending upon their natures—to the laughter and yells of the flag-game as the shadows lengthened, melded, and then strengthened into the blue of nightfall.

  At last, at last, they were done. And not too long before the watch change. The boys stampeded back, then they were too busy to think as everyone had to get their share, after which the cook dishes all had to be dunked and stacked for morning.

  Marlovair and his cooks were looking wearily around the neat cook tent when Stad appeared at the tent flap, the lantern light on his face from the side made his expression seem hard.

  “Attention,” he said, before anyone could speak.

  Now they couldn’t talk, unless asked a question.

  “You’re now on guard duty. You two under the wing captain on the search team, for we’re running a rescue game tonight. You are all prison guards,” he said, sweeping the rest of the cook riding with one hand—leaving only Marlovair.

  Stad turned his way. “And you are stock-post on the picket.”

  Without waiting for a response, he whirled, batted aside the tent flap, and was gone.

  Stock post on the picket. That meant standing there all night with the cart horses and the rads’ remounts. No one made night raids on horses except on the big games with the seniors.

  Marlovair stared at the swinging tent flap, waiting for it to lift again, for Cousin Van to re-enter, smiling, and say, “Stung ya! You really believed it! Now go take command of the raid team.”

  But nothing happened until the other boys began to move. Marlovair felt their covert stares, but he ignored them. Shock, disgust, anger, and underneath it the sickness of betrayal were so strong he couldn’t seem to think past it.

  A shout from outside, “Get moving!” snapped him into motion.

  His jaw tightened. A challenge, maybe? They had set out to be perfect, so even if he didn’t get to be a roving guard on the game, or even a guard protecting whoever was the prisoner they were rescuing (which was fun if the search team came your way, because you got to scrap), he’d be the best horse picket ever. And Cousin Van would feel really bad when he discovered who got him his position of command, oh, yes he would.

  Marlovair stood by the animals, watching in every direction. For a time he wondered if Cousin Van would send some sort of sneak attack that he alone could repel, and thus earn House points, but nothing ever happened.

  The sky gradually clouded over. Occasionally the cold breeze brought distant shouts as the attack team breached the perimeter of the POW camp. Excited voices rose, the words smothered by distance, followed by hooting and cackling laughter. Then torchlight bobbed about wildly. Finally the lights moved toward camp. Centuries later a pair of boys from Squirrel House showed up for the second bell to dawn watch, which meant they wouldn’t have to do morning chores.

  “You’re relieved,” one said shortly.

  “You have the post,” Marlovair answered in a formal voice.

  They didn’t respond. He bit down on questions about the game and walked away. His shoulders twitched when he heard a whisper, then a snicker.

  He made his way to his tent, where half the others were already asleep. Puzzled, angry, worried by turns, he dropped into sleep—and then jerked awake when a rough hand punched his shoulder. The bleak, blue light of a rainy dawn outlined Stad, who said, “Cook tent.”

  “What?” Marlovair squawked, sitting up in his bedroll.

  Stad said softly, though by now everyone in the tent was awake, their open, staring eyes reflecting the blue-gray light, ”Are you arguing with an order?”

  “No.”

  It was within the rules—but barely.

  Marlovair got up, dressed hastily in the cold air, neatened his bedroll, and stamped to the cook tent—to be told by those already up that he had water-carrying duty. He got stuck lugging pails and pails of water from the river to the cook tent.

  When the meal and clean-up was done, it was back to horse-picket duty as the real game was set up. By now he knew that the impossible had happened. Instead of making Marlovair into second in command in all but name, Cousin Van—Stad—had made him a butt. Why? Why?

  Everyone was still on their best behavior, thus he was forced to follow his own campaign, which had become a disaster. He couldn’t even make his feelings known by covert resistance, because he wasn’t ever in speaking distance of Toss or Snakeface, who were apparently (as far as he could see from across the fields) opposing captains on the day game-raid. No one else spoke to him, so he couldn’t talk, much less command.

  And at dinner, again he was on water duty, and again all alone. Alone slogging back and forth to the freezing river water, bringing water for all the tents. The rain had ended, leaving a clear, balmy night, but he was still wet, and still numb from all that water duty. No one ever had cook tent three times on one game, unless he, or they, had ten or more defaulters. But was Master Askan around to see or hear, and land on Stad for his total unfairness? He was not. His silhouette was way out there in the soft rain as he rode the perimeter, looking for non-existent danger.

  After water duty, Marlovair was stuck right back on horse-picket, marching straight out in his still-wet clothes, his fingers like numb icicles by midnight.

  This time, it was Stad himself who came to relieve him. “Go to sleep,” he ordered, after the formal phrases of watch change.

  Sick, betrayed, Marlovair burst out, “Why?”

  Stad whirled around. For a long, sickening time, Marlovair gritted his teeth. By now the beautiful glass castle of his future expectations had been shattered, and he waited miserably for the breeze he’d earned for backchat to an order.

  But Stad snorted, then said, “Because, you little wolf turd, you’ve come within a heartbeat of destroying my life. And you’re so full of swank you don’t even see it.”

  Pain flashed through nerves and brain, leaving Marlovair sick and numb with shock.

  Stad said in a low, soft voice, “I have worked hard. I earned my position. I practiced all winter every year to keep up with the best. To be better than the best. And every spring when I came back I got up before dawn to get extra practice. Every day. Eight years. So I’d be the best. And all—all! For nothing. Because of you.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up. I don’t give a spit for what you think.” Stad actually turned his head, hawked and spat into the grass, and the deliberate rudeness was more shocking than any epithet. “No one would tell me. It’s tradition, we don’t rat out friends, we don’t rat against families. I thought you boys were acting like the scrubs because you’re stiff-rumps about rank.”

  “But rank means leadersh—”

  Stad flicked up the back of his hand with deliberate, unsmiling violence. Marlovair’s teeth clicked.

  “Evrec—my riding mate for eight years—wasn’t even talking to me any more. I couldn’t even find Marec, he was so busy avoiding me. I almost had to use a knife to get Baudan to tell me.”

  Marlovair kicked at the turf. “But—you should be rad in our House. Or even Squirrel House. Which means next year you’ll be Danas Valdlav—”

  “Shut up. Do you think I’d take it if it came to me like this? Because of who my relatives were in the past? Or worse, because a pile of stinking horse apples like you and your House made life so impossible that Keriam was forced to make a change so we can do what we’re supposed to, which is learning to fight Norsunder?”

  “But you’re just a second-rad in the seniors! That always means—”

  “I’m a rad in the seniors because that’s where I’m needed. That’s what command means. Not flags, not heading the column because of your family name. It means putting the right man in the right place. They decided they needed me as second-rad in the seniors. So I serve.” Stad’s voice sharpened.

  Marlovair trembled. He couldn’t speak. He knew his voice would shake.

  Stad smacked his fist into his palm as he s
truggled for the right words. “If the king sends me to defend the west. Say, in ten years. Not because he has faith in my command. But because there are too many fools like you in the army who will only rally under a Jarl or someone related to a Jarl. If he has to send someone like Ret Forthan to do the real work, while I parade around with the banners of our ancestors and spout old ballads. Do you think I want that? I want him to tell me to command in the west because I can. Because he knows I can, and so he can send Forthan to the east, and he’ll know he can.”

  “But I—Dad even said—the king—”

  Stad turned away, his entire body stiff with fury. Then he rounded on Marlovair. “And you—You! Have been trying your hardest to take my earned command away from me. I wanted you to feel, just for one day, what that will be—oh, I’ve said enough.”

  He turned his back, jerking his thumb toward the camp in dismissal.

  Marlovair took a few loping steps toward the camp, but when the tightness in his throat and chest broke on a sob, he whirled about and raced parallel to the camp, just running, paying no attention to where he went, because his vision was blurred by tears.

  When he found himself in the scratchy hedgerow beyond the camp boundary, he tried to force himself through with the intention of running himself to death. The stiff twigs and the sharp-edged leaves were too strong in their scratching resistance, so he flung himself down and wept for the first time since he was small.

  He cried until he was hollow inside, then rolled over, his head pounding in time with his heartbeat. When Cousin Van’s words whispered over and over in his head, the tears welled again.

  What now? Fall on his knife? Except you don’t do that in the academy—that is, he could, but he knew no one would be impressed. Because he wasn’t doing it for anything. There was no Norsundrian threatening Talk! Or die. He wasn’t protecting anything except his own feelings. They’d call him a coward for that.

  But how could he bear—

  Footsteps. He sat up, struggling to contain his breathing.

  Coming this way! The inner perimeter! The hedgerow had always been the camp perimeter when they came here. That meant he was out of bounds. By a spear’s length... which was the sort of back-of-the-hand rule-testing they’d been doing to Evrec for the past month. If he was caught here, Master Askan would think—

  A silhouette emerged from the copse to the east, starlight clear on the features of the foreigner. Not Master Askan. It was none other than the stupid foreigner, the other rad on duty.

  Oh, yes, there were far worse things to bear. And he’d fallen into one of them.

  He held his breath, but his chest hiccupped twice. The sound seemed louder than a thunderbolt. Yet the foreigner did not start, or speak, or even change his gait as he slowly approached, eyes sweeping northward and westward. He wasn’t asleep on his feet, not with the starlight glowing as tiny pinpricks in his eyes. Maybe the idiot was squiffy with illegal drink, that would explain his blindness and deafness, except how could he walk so straight?

  Step, step. The foreigner’s feet rustled through the wet grass, passing not an arm’s length from Marlovair, who lay absolutely still, his breath held almost to the fainting point—

  Gulp!

  Another hiccup!

  But the step didn’t falter, the pale blond head kept moving as he surveyed the darkness beyond the perimeter, everywhere except these bushes.

  Marlovair lay until the footsteps had passed out of hearing, then sat up. The foreigner kept marching slowly along the inner perimeter until he vanished into the darkness.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  If Marlovair went missing, Shevraeth knew he’d be in trouble for not reporting the breaking of bounds—after the lights out trumpet, yet—so he worried a little as he finished his round. His first instinct when he’d heard that wild weeping had been to make as much noise as he could as a warning to whoever it was to get back in bounds.

  But Marlovair, as it turned out to be, didn’t hear him until far too late. So Shevraeth had sustained a short, intense inward struggle between duty and what he knew his mother would expect.

  A very short struggle. It only took two steps to realize that in a contest between rule-bound duty, where no life was in the balance, and mercy, he would always choose mercy. Even if it was for the most obnoxious brat he’d ever met. But the depth of that misery was not faked, not from a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Shevraeth’s anxiety only lasted until the end of the long, wearying patrol. On his soft-footed return through the camp as dawn was lifting the eastern shadows, he peered through the open flap of the tent where he knew Marlovair was supposed to be, and though the inside was too dark to see any specific figures, it was easy to count the deep breathings he heard there. No one missing.

  Later that morning, as the boys began breaking down the camp for the return to the academy Shevraeth sensed Marlovair studying him covertly, probably with anger, certainly with worry.

  Marlovair would have to figure out that no one would know, nothing would happen. It would no longer be an act of mercy if he said anything at all. It would be an intolerable gesture of moral ascendance—and after the way Stad had rough-ridden his own cousin all weekend, it didn’t seem as if any more was needed on that score.

  The boys finished loading the tents and cook gear onto the cart, and they started back. Many of the boys were still watching Marlovair for clues on behavior. He marched as silently, eyes front, as he had on the way to the camp, and so—gradually—everyone else fell in line as well. Stad rode alone at the front, and Shevraeth, not seeing any sign that he wanted company, dropped back to ride with Master Askan behind the tent cart.

  o0o

  Some days later, he and Senelac sat side by side on a rooftop.

  It was the first warm evening of the season, the soft air drifting by with enticing smells from cookeries, underscored by the astringent freshness of the blooming plains. The entire city seemed to be outside, judging from the festival quality to the noise. Everyone welcomed the first hot days after a series of long rains.

  “Our communications have got so complicated. I can see the reasoning. Should say, I remember the reasoning,” Senelac corrected, bumping her shoulder against his.

  They had been put on the same team for the latest comm run. Someone was entering the city, and had to make it to the king with a message. Senelac had abruptly told Shevraeth that she and he were teamed, and she’d picked the place for them to sit and watch over the stables—guarding against whoever the newest comm team had picked as courier.

  He said, “First assumption. Norsunder can’t torture a place.”

  “That’s where everyone is agreed.” She thumped against him again.

  “After that is where we part,” he responded, seeing at last where she was going.

  She opened her palms in assent. It was strange, how she liked his proximity—and he definitely liked hers—but she kept her talk on business. How could Savona possibly have thought she was anything like Tamara, who seemed (from report) to have two subjects of conversation: herself, and court gossip?

  Senelac breathed deeply. “Someone is making wine-sauce,” she said on a sigh. “Now I’m hungry. Anyway, so we leave messages. We don’t hand them off person to person. Less to see by chance, and one life at risk is preferable to two. But a place can’t do anything. We know that’s the weak part. Someone has to pick it up.”

  Shevraeth waggled a hand. “We do seem to keep circling that. I don’t know if there’s a way to get round it.” He extended fingers as he counted conclusions after missions. “The easiest method, the golden cases, is apparently out because Norsunder seems to have ways of breaking the magic protections on them and waylaying messages. A code carried by hand on ordinary paper can be broken. A person who knows a code can be broken. So now we’re doing this secondary code, with the pinholes, only known to those at the top—but what if a Norsundrian holds the paper up to a light? And it’s going to happen, especially if they lurk about in the night as eve
ryone seems to believe.”

  She shrugged, her shoulder thumping his arm again. She liked it when he thumped her back, something it was difficult to bring himself to do. Wrestling and playful punches and the like had been scolded out of him and his court friends by the time they were ten. You didn’t bump princes, and princes ought not to let people thump them. You kept a personal distance—the higher your rank, the greater your distance.

  Probably self-preservation, Shevraeth thought now, distracted. Though it’s come to be a marker of rank. Ordinary people can stand together, shoulder to shoulder, but princes are solitary, surrounded by rings of servants guarding space. Kings with the most space of all.

  “. . . and finally even a place is not risk-free. The enemy could be lying in wait.”

  Shevraeth had been over this ground so many times he was bored. He knew the subject of communication while under siege—or worse, occupation—was important, but it was also something he couldn’t see using at home. Ever. So he said, “That’s where we come back to every courier being known, rather than everyone unknown.”

  “The risk being exactly the same, just shifting from your friend being in danger to what if the unknown passing you the message is a fake?” And when he did not answer, she chuckled. “You’re sick of it.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. You get that flat tone when you’re hiding your feelings, and why hide your feelings unless you’re sick of the entire subject? Besides, most of us are too.”

  Us.

  “Stad admitted it yesterday, when I saw him coming out of that conference with the seniors.” She grinned. “And I asked him what he’d done on that last game of yours to get those Jump House brats in line, and he gated me so hard my nose and toes still hurt.”

  ‘Gated’—with a group, it meant shut in or shut out. With a person it meant what in court was called the cut, where you severed public notice of someone or someones, and not only did not speak, but walked right past as if they did not exist. The final cut was if you walked directly into the person’s proximate space, knowing that they must drop back.