Noble Beginnings

by D. W. Jackson

  "Thank you," he said again, so taken aback that it wasn't until she had curtsied to him, wished him good night, and turned the corner that he felt the full impact of the compliment.

  As he was drifting off to sleep that night, he raised a hand to the bandage on his forehead, remembering Myriel's rough, pale hand burning the brand of Farlan into his skin.

  This mark, he thought, will stay on me, stay on my skin. Forever. For some reason, the thought filled him with more joy than he had ever felt before.

  CHAPTER XIX

  The last week passed in a haze of rapid preparations. There were supplies to be stockpiled, plans to be made, and meetings to attend. Everyone in the castle had at least three or four urgent duties to attend to which sounded, in theory, as though plenty should get done, but what happened instead was that any two people that were trying to accomplish things had different priorities. Thus, random occurrences of shouting matches in the castle became remarkably common, so much so that everyone, regardless of rank, started getting involved in resolving them. At one point, walking down the hallway, Dorran heard not one, but three shouting matches going on in three different chambers.

  Thea, somehow, managed to stay aloof from most of the chaos. When she presided over councils, they went smoothly; when she asked questions, they were answered in a straightforward manner; and when she drew attention to a problem, it was solved quickly and with great attention to detail. The first few times she stepped in to resolve an issue, Dorran had been thoroughly amazed; after the sixth time, he had begun to accept that she was some sort of down-to-earth miracle. He tried the trick himself, in his efforts to coordinate fighters, but it didn't work half as well for him, captain of the Queen's Guard or no. In the end, he just focused on making sure that all of the fighters under his direct command and as many of the others as possible would have the equipment and training they would need when the King's army arrived.

  Three days before Nora's intelligence had slated the King's army to arrive, Dorran found Edith sitting by herself outside during the beginnings of a communal dinner in the barracks. Inside, the atmosphere was practically festive, with almost-even numbers of men and women of all ages talking and celebrating their opportunity to fight together for what they believed in. But Dorran could tell before he was within ten feet of Edith that she was in an entirely different sort of mood.

  He had suspected that deep down, Edith was still second-guessing her desire to lead virtually untrained women into a fight, but he hadn't been sure until he found her huddled in a corner, eating a light supper of meat and wine by herself and staring at the early evening sky.

  He sat down beside her. "You're not normally one to eat alone," he commented.

  Edith took a large bite of her chicken leg and chewed on it ferociously for a long minute. "They're not ready," she mumbled stonily around it, looking straight ahead.

  He folded his hands together in his lap. "And you can't tell them that or Mother, for that matter because we need every fighter we can get and it would just undermine what little confidence they have if they heard you say it. Right?"

  Edith nodded.

  Dorran rested his elbows on his knees and looked up at the sky. "You know, we aren't the only ones with a lack of trained fighters," he pointed out after a minute, trying to sound practical. "I'm sure the king's army is full of inexperienced troops as well."

  Edith gave him a listless look and set down her ravaged chicken leg. "Maybe," she murmured.

  Dorran felt for her, he could hardly imagine what it would be like to lead a group of fighters who were likely terribly unprepared into battle. "Well, they are reserves," he pointed out. "With luck, they won't see much direct combat."

  Edith just shrugged, and Dorran fell silent. Despite his efforts to cheer her up, their entire preparation for the siege had been making him slowly more anxious. Even without considering the women fighters and the army of prankster children they were relying on as actual strategies, their entire plan for defeating the King was reliant upon guesswork, luck, and faith, three things that Vernis, Tam, and all the rest of the old veterans had told both of them never to rely on if they could avoid it. But at this point, Dorran reflected, they had no other choice. They just had to hope that the King's forces would be weak enough, and his interests would stay directed sufficiently elsewhere, that they could avoid being overrun.

  The plan for the battle had been simple enough, at least where Dorran was concerned: the Guard, being made up of some of Farlan's most experienced fighters, were to work as a fast-moving unit that would rush to wherever the enemy made a breach and fight them off until supplementary forces could help them; then they would help to push the enemy back and close the breach. It was essentially an applied practice of the same "keep the line" drills Dorran had participated in since he was ten years old, so the theory of it didn't frighten him.

  In hindsight, the thought of putting it into practice should have frightened him much more.

  The morning of the battle came exactly when Nora had predicted, and their preparations went off smoothly at first. When he heard the alarm bells at the break of dawn, Dorran rolled out of bed, already fully clothed and in his boots, and had joined the mustering force within seconds. Together, they awaited orders; after only a few minutes, they were told that the enemy was threatening to make a breach in the south gate.

  The queen's guard set off in short order, in good formation and at good speed for a force on foot. By the time they arrived, Nora's corps of children fighters was reluctantly beginning to retreat now that their deterrents seemed to be becoming ineffective. Then it became a bit of a waiting game; the few people in the group that had arrows or slingshots with them shot them at the enemy, but the rest waited for the defense of the gate to crumble. Dorran's unit was stationed as the first human line of defense, ready to oppose the enemy as soon as they passed the gate.

  It was, Dorran remembered thinking as he watched the barely fist-size rocks flying halfheartedly over the gate and often missing both parties by a mile, a rather pathetic battle that told of the waning resources of both groups.

  Slowly, however, the King's forces brought the gate down. Skirmishes over the threshold became full-scale battles for dominance, and eventually the gate's housing crumbled and the enemy charged with it as an improvised shield towards the Dorran and the other fighters.

  Suddenly, the mass of people that had been behind the gate seemed a good deal more intimidating than they had been, but Dorran took a deep breath, adjusted his grip on his sword, and waited for the next advance. It was only as he clashed swords with his first true opponent that he heard the echoing, sound of a distant alarm.

  When Dorran returned to the main camp after the first battle of his life, he was exhausted, scratched, and bruised, and could feel the specters of the men who had died alongside and against him starting to crawl up and down his spine, but all of that was secondary, because he'd already heard rumors of much, much worse on the other side of the capital.

  There, the most talented unit of fighters hadn't been ready and waiting for a breach. Instead, it had come without warning, and almost spelled out disaster for the Queen from nearly the first hour of the siege. But it had been filled at the last minute by a reserve, saving Farlan from disaster...a reserve made almost entirely of newly recruited women, with only a handful of experienced fighters nearby to protect them from the King's army. The reserve had been so decimated that when Dorran finally arrived back at the main camp at the end of the day after several hours of helping to patch up the city walls as best he could, the main camp was still trying to make an accurate count of the casualties.

  "Edith!" Dorran had spent a frantic ten minutes searching the overflowing healer's tent for her familiar, mousy-brown crop of hair, only to end up finding her outside the tent, arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes were steely and fixed on nothing, but her face was deathly pale.

  "You were on the other side, fighting in the first breach," she said, not looking up
at him. It was obvious that it wasn't a question.

  "Yes," he said. "I'm so, so sorry. How many…."

  "Dozens of casualties’ altogether," she answered. "I think maybe two dozen injured, about a third of them severely. Most of the rest don't know how to fight through pain, it will distract them. If this happens again, they'll just die faster. And that's leaving aside infection, a possible lack of healing supplies..."

  "Stop," he said warily. "Let the others worry about the healing. Remember, our job is only to keep going as long as we can. Leave the past for the past and the future for the future, right? That's what Vernis always says."

  She nodded, but when she spoke, her voice was bitter. "Vernis doesn't have to deal with untrained soldiers. Twenty-three good women are dead because they were unwilling to admit that they weren't ready for the battlefield, or because they had piss-poor luck, or both, but what does it matter? And those are just the ones they've officially counted; never mind the injured." She sighed. "I want you to know that I don't blame you or your men for being elsewhere when that breach opened. You know that, right?"

  "Yes," he lied. That's what they were doing, he knew, exchanging lies in the hope that someday in the future, Edith actually wouldn't blame the men that hadn't been there, and he wouldn't blame himself for leaving her with untrained soldiers to be slaughtered.

  "They fought well," she said quietly, after a long silence. "Better than they should have, for the amount of time they had to learn to fight. I've never seen anyone so fierce."

  Dorran sighed and stood, holding out his hand. "While things are still quiet, let me help you with the injured. Are you fit to stand?"

  She nodded, taking his hand and pulling herself up. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but knew that it came out as more of a grimace. She returned it, however, and deep down, under all the heartbreak that he was still too numb to process, Dorran felt the same surge of affection that he'd had for the young girl who'd told him in that flat voice that her older brother had been killed in battle.

  "I'm glad you're still alive," he said gruffly.

  She nodded, eyes dark. “Me, too," she replied.

  CHAPTER XX

  That night, Dorran had gone to sleep with the horror of the day's tragedy fresh in his mind. While he hadn't known any of the women Edith had trained, he knew Edith herself, and the depth of her guilt and loss left him profoundly shaken and if that weren't enough, he kept imagining row upon row of Myriel’s, or others like her, valiantly fighting and dying for their country, never standing a chance.

  He fell asleep with those images still running through his mind. A few hours later he was woken by the alarm bell again.

  Remembering the training they had run several times before the King's army's arrival, he was out of bed, fully dressed, and halfway on his way to the muster point before he realized that it was still dark out. When he reached the muster point, he was surrounded by groggy soldiers asking the same two questions: What time is it, and What's going on?

  Dorran shoved through the sluggish crowd to the front, where Vernis was yelling at a knot of confused and upset commanders, many of whom were arguing with him simultaneously, a few of them yelling at the top of their lungs.

  "What is it?" he demanded, hoping his abrupt noise and question would kill the hubbub.

  "Let me try putting it this way," he said. "They are on the walls. They will be through in minutes if the walls are not defended."

  Dorran understood several things at once. After a second, he snapped a hand out to one of the commanders. "You! Make sure Lady Nora's got her child forces ready some of their pranks could work wonders in the dark. As for the rest of you!" He turned to the rest of the commanders. "Get your people up to the walls. Do whatever you do in the daytime, but with as little light as possible. Light can help us, but it could also hurt us."

  Then he raised his voice so that it carried over the still-disgruntled crowds. "The King's trying to pull a fast one on us!" he yelled. "All units, report to your leaders and move out! Night or not, we're not letting him break through!"

  There was a confused cheer that nevertheless showed more enthusiasm than the muttering had, and the units started splitting off to meet with their leaders. A bit more shouting later, they were operating almost at top speed.

  Dorran made the Guard wait a few extra minutes for Nora to show up. She arrived disheveled, in what looked like a nightgown with a dark cloak thrown over it. This combined with her dark hair left her looking like a floating face in the darkness.

  "They're attacking now?" she asked, sounding more flustered than Dorran was used to hearing from her.

  "Yes," he said shortly. "We were wondering whether you have any tricks to pull out of your sleeve."

  Nora thought for a moment, then nodded. "I'll go fetch some now," she said. "It might be a while, so keep the enemy forces back while I'm gone...?"

  Dorran nodded. "We'll do our best."

  Nora dashed off back the way she had come, and Dorran turned to his forces. "All right," he called. "Everyone ready to fight?"

  He got a chorus of raspy but alert-sounding assent.

  "Good," he said grimly. "Let's hold them back as long as it takes."

  It ended up taking the rest of the night and well into the morning. Dorran had never found the sunrise to be quite as hideous as he did that morning, when the pinks and reds of the dawn accenting the blood splattered on the ground and the capital walls and the preternatural stillness of the early morning broken by creaks and clashes and horrible screams and groans. Then the sun rose, and images which had been bad enough in the dim or gray scale shades of the wee hours was cast into lurid color and detail.

  The fighting continued through the morning as well, only beginning to die down when the sun hit its peak in the sky. The capital, with the air over its roofs and streets occasionally wavering in the unusually hot day, fell silent, and the soldiers on both sides were left to recoup their losses.

  The Guard had fared well they'd stayed in the area of the main gate, beginning by aiding Nora's force in their mainly aerial attacks on the men below. When their attempts to scale the wall had died down, they had resorted to use of the same battering rams they had used to create breaches last time. Dorran, remembering the tragedy that had occurred last time, was among the leaders urging caution in assigning too many troops to a single breach. Dorran held his particular force, as one of the swiftest, most independent, and most thoroughly trained, most firmly in reserve, sending out troops of no more than ten men at a time to each reported breach. He himself struggled to balance his time between the front lines and the center of command, where he could make sure the balance of their forces was not disrupted.

  By the end of the fight, he had an entirely different problem than he'd had after the first battle. he, the commander, had no idea where any of his troops were. He'd kept a few of his men with him at all times throughout the fight, but had no idea what had happened to the rest of them. Exhausted and with several new wounds to show for the night's and morning's work, he returned to the healers' tent in hopes of gaining reports on his forces.

  On the way back, as the sun beat down overhead and he lamented his already-empty water skin, he occupied his time with trying to devise the best solution to keep his force mobile and divisible while lowering the risk of losing individuals or groups in a battle with multiple critical points. By the time he had arrived at the healers' tent, he had decided that having a series of smaller leaders under him might help to avoid chaos in the future and was trying to decide which of his men might make good initial subordinates.

  At the tent, there were enough healthy soldiers and healers helping that despite the amount of patching up to be done he didn't have to wait too long before he had an extra set of hands helping him smear salve where he couldn't quite reach it. He thought he saw Myriel once, sweeping quickly between two desperately injured patients, but lost her so quickly in the press of surrounding bodies that he couldn't be sure.


  One person who he was able to find, with surprisingly little difficulty, was Edith. She had bandages wrapped around her stomach when he found her, and was getting more wrapped around her lower ribcage.

  "You all right?" he asked, suppressing a wince as he dabbed a bit of salve into a cut his arm.

  "Fine," she said curtly.

  He looked over at her warily. "And your fighters?"

  She looked away, making a face as the healer helping her tugged experimentally on her bandages. "Better than yesterday," she said. "Though, of course, that's not at all difficult."

  He nodded. "So, are you still allowing them to fight, or...?"

  "I direct them into the fray a few at a time," Edith said. "I try to make sure that no group goes out without at least one experienced fighter, and I tell them to stay together and not allow themselves to get separated. They're not fighting as well as they did the first day," she added dismissively, "but they're surviving to fight again, which seems more important."

  Dorran could only agree with that.

  "What about you?" Edith asked. "What's it like, being captain of the Guard?"

  "Not hard, on the battlefield at least," he answered. "Part of being in the Guard is that you can trust the people you're leading to know how to fight independently. Aside from directing the force as a whole, I haven't had to give out any orders at all."

  "Hm." She pondered this as the healer finished tying off the bandages for her ribs. She pushed off the table and stood, wincing slightly as her weight adjusted. "Can you imagine what it would be like to fight in a normal army?"

  "Of course," he quipped back. "All I have to do is look at the enemy."

  She paused to consider that. "That's true," she admitted, then added. "So then I suppose this is something like how my father and brother died..."

  Even though the effects of the war were omnipresent in Farlan, it was still possible to forget about the scars it left on those he cared about. "I suppose it might have been," Dorran admitted quietly. "I would say that it's like how my father and grandfather died as well, but I think they were commanding fighters I suspect they died in routs. And neither side have seen any of those yet, so far as I know."