Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  Speir contributed to the sparring court as cheerfully as she had pushed a mop in full view of the third lunch rotation. Douglas’s charges seemed genuinely overawed by her, which was only in accordance with reality. It went so well that Douglas could nearly ignore that he was about to travel to Ryswyck and confront Barklay in person.

  Then their travel permits came through, and Inslee informed Speir, Douglas, and the senior staff that he intended to send a volunteer unit of twenty-five soldiers to take a short training course at Ryswyck while the council sat. And Douglas’s spirits fell with a clatter.

  The morning they left, Douglas paced the length of Speir’s tiny quarters while she packed her rucksack. His own rucksack stood where he’d dropped it outside her open door; Speir’s wall lamp provided the only light in this pre-dawn hour.

  “Douglas,” she said, not looking up from wrapping her prayer bowl in a cloth and fitting it among her linens, “stop pacing and start breathing.”

  He turned to glare at her, but made an effort to slow his steps. “This is going to be a disaster, you know,” he said.

  “I don’t know that,” she answered calmly. “Breathe, Douglas. You’ll want to set an example for our unit.”

  He said: “You realize they’re escorting us, not the other way round.”

  “Yes,” Speir said, “I’m aware. It’s very kind of Inslee to provide them.”

  “Though it’s probably not going to work,” Douglas said, coming to a stop in the middle of the floor.

  Speir fastened the straps and slung the rucksack over her shoulder. As she passed him toward the door, she smacked his shoulder lightly, a bracing, comradely touch. Douglas stirred himself out of his inertia and followed her.

  On the airstrip, they found their soldiers waiting next to the shuttle: the promised twenty-five who volunteered and could be spared, along with a young lieutenant. Inslee and Amis were there to see them off; the rain was light, but the wind buffeted them harshly, whickering their hoods one way and then the next, and Inslee made no attempt to speak to them over the roar of the sea. He saluted them sharply and then made a half-smiling, maternal gesture, sweeping them toward the shuttle.

  Douglas stowed his pack, strapped himself in next to Speir, and held his jittering knees still.

  Breathe, he told himself.

  ~*~

  Speir’s calm lasted all through the journey, swaying with Douglas and the others in the shuttle, transferring to the tram-spur, then onto a smaller shuttle. Even through the moment she caught sight of Ryswyck Tower through the porthole, a moment when Douglas’s lips clamped down nervously, Speir’s hands rested quietly on her knees, and her heart sat within her at just the right weight.

  That ended abruptly when they disembarked and collected themselves on the airfield. Behind her the shuttle’s engines were powering down, their soldiers handing out packs to one another, Douglas giving occasional orders and glancing about uneasily in all directions at the tower and the field-front and the other craft parked nearby.

  But Speir’s eyes were locked on the half-ancient pile of the main block of Ryswyck, and her feet and her heart had become immovable stones.

  She felt the sweep of Douglas’s gaze encounter her at last; he turned to the unit and gave them directions, and they formed up loosely, packs on shoulders, to plod ahead, boots splashing in the grass. The rain was very light, and the sky a pearled gray overhead: she had forgotten the green of these coastal hills, though the rock was the same all over Ilona.

  “Speir?” Douglas said, when they were out of earshot.

  Speir’s dry throat seemed to turn inside out as she swallowed. “I can’t do this,” she croaked out. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can,” Douglas said briskly, a ploy that on any other day would have worked, but though he started forward himself, Speir’s body remained stubbornly locked where she stood. After ten steps he realized she wasn’t moving and turned round.

  “Come on, Speir,” he said.

  “I can’t.” She was starting to breathe too fast. “I have to go back.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Well, now,” he said slowly, “here’s a novelty. Speir the intrepid, afraid?”

  If he’d meant his gentle mockery to shake her into anger, he’d hit his target. All her joints suddenly unlocked.

  “Novelty! As if you know what you’re talking about!” She glared at him, which seemed to give him so much satisfaction that she felt ready to punch his face all over again. “As if you haven’t been counting your own knuckles all the way here!”

  “That’s so,” Douglas said, grinning in that maddening way he had, without even smiling. He turned and walked on toward Ryswyck, and this time did not stop.

  Furious, Speir stalked after him, in quick strides to make up the distance of his long ones. She knew he was getting from her exactly what he wanted, and it only made her angrier. With the anger her calm returned.

  “You’re a bastard, Wat Douglas,” she said when she’d drawn level with him. “And I hate your guts.”

  Douglas grinned outright and kept moving.

  “I’m not going to be branded with your fear!” she said fiercely.

  He stopped so fast she nearly overshot him, and turned to her, his smile utterly gone.

  “But would you, if I asked you?” he said.

  She understood his drift at once. “You mean, you want to portion both our fear to me?”

  He glanced back grimly at the airfield, and forward to where their soldiers were collecting near Ryswyck’s main doors, waiting for them. “One of us is going to need their hands free,” he said. “Better one of us keeps the fear than both, aye?”

  And if it’s me, she thought, you can face him. “You didn’t ask me this before you knew I had any fear myself,” she said.

  “No,” he said simply. “Nor did you ask me.”

  He had a point. In fact she hadn’t even thought of it. It must have shown on her face, because Douglas cocked her a sardonic look.

  “Were you waiting for me to ask you?” she said, trying to discover as she said it how she felt about that.

  “It would have helped,” Douglas said. “But you didn’t know how. And neither did I.”

  It wasn’t quite an apology, which was fine, because Speir wasn’t sure she wanted one. It wasn’t a defense either: Douglas had ceased to put up any more defenses against her. The simple fact was enough to grapple with: she could have asked Douglas to bear a burden of hers. She could ask him at any time to do so. She had known she could punch his face—or wrestle him down to a bed—but this had simply never occurred to her.

  This would need thinking about. In the meantime….

  “I will keep your fear and mine,” she said to his eyes. “For this.”

  He bowed to her, closed hand to heart. They turned together and caught up with their soldiers where they waited. As they did so, the doors swung open under their long rain-sill; Stevens, and a few Ryswyckian lieutenants, came out to usher them in. Stevens’s expression was sober—grim, even—as he nodded them in after their unit.

  Speir saw why when they came inside. The main entrance hall should have been lined with a selection of senior officers come to welcome them, plus a scattering of cadets and junior officers free enough to indulge their curiosity. But the hall was crowded with people, and those people had too many ribbons of too many colors.

  She remembered suddenly the other shuttles parked on the airfield, and realized what Douglas had clearly observed the minute they arrived, realized that they had walked unaware into a reckoning for which they were not prepared.

  “Welcome to my comrades from Cardumel,” Barklay said, drawing Speir’s attention where he stood to the side, next to a big-shouldered man with the most ribbons of all. “We are glad you have arrived safely, and, I hope, well. Lord High Commander—” he half-turned to the man beside him— “let me make known to you my other guests at Ryswyck: Captain Douglas and Field-Commander Speir, with their unit, of Cardumel Ar
my Base.”

  “The pleasure is mine,” said Lord Selkirk.

  7

  Because he was watching for it, Barklay saw the expression disappear from Douglas’s face. He responded with the old grave courtesy as Barklay introduced him and Speir to Selkirk, to Adjutant Lord Cartier, to General Fleek, Rear Admiral Taronas, and the rest of the retinue of assistants and bean-counters and board-of-ethics seatwarmers. To his secret gratification, Douglas neither flinched nor cringed at the exalted names.

  Neither did Speir, but she was very pale. Douglas presented their unit, who stood to well-disciplined attention in their fortunately-tidy fatigues. Selkirk commended them calmly; Barklay summoned Captain Stevens to conduct the Cardumel soldiers to their lodgings among the student body. Barklay was determined to treat this as he would any other training course; Speir’s gaze crossed his as he was giving Stevens his instructions, as if to comment on his very thoughts, before she returned it properly to the middle distance of quiet attention.

  Oh, how he had missed them both, missed them both together: as the soldiers took their instructions and filed away with Stevens, Douglas and Speir stood facing the assembled commanders from Central along with all the Ryswyckians who had found a good excuse to be in the front hall, and the balance and grace of the two of them seemed to dissolve the chaos of their meeting. Barklay could only wish the effect would be permanent.

  He was heartened, too, to see a balance between them; he had known that that would not be guaranteed, had known what he was risking setting Speir at Douglas. Inslee’s secondhand report had been only marginally reassuring. But the fading bruise under Douglas’s eye and the neat lines of adhesive on Speir’s knuckles underlined the unspoken unity in their stance. Or at least it would to Ryswyckian eyes.

  “Captain Douglas,” Barklay said; “Field-Commander Speir. I had planned to reschedule this afternoon’s match in favor of attending to the hospitality of our guests. But perhaps the two of you might be persuaded to give a demonstration for the benefit of your soldiers and the observation—” he couldn’t help laying a little emphasis on that word, and saw Selkirk repress a snort— “of the Lord High Commander.”

  Douglas glanced at Speir: You field this one, was his clear import. Speir bowed, closed hand to heart. “General Barklay, sir. The soldiers at Cardumel have for good and ill already benefited from seeing an open-hand match between Captain Douglas and me. And as you know, General Inslee has forbidden us to spar with each other, and has not reversed his order. But we serve at your pleasure and the Lord High Commander’s.”

  Barklay ignored the susurrus of glee among his Ryswyckians, and the tacit commentary of Selkirk’s half-lidded gaze. “Of course, Field-Commander. Perhaps not an open-hand match, then. I hope to hear that you have not neglected the use of the foil in your sparring?”

  “We are likely to be a bit off form with the foil, General Barklay, sir,” Douglas answered. “But like Field-Commander Speir I would be pleased to oblige you.”

  Selkirk, Barklay saw, did not miss Douglas’s dry tone, or the irony of the phrase pleased to oblige you, addressed as it was almost wholly to Barklay. Selkirk said: “I respect General Inslee’s judgment in this matter of private sparring, and I feel sure I can make it right with him to allow for one public bout with foils, for a…beneficial demonstration. Let me defer to your custom, General Barklay.”

  Selkirk’s courtesy was damask steel. Neither Speir nor Douglas missed its edge: they looked expectantly at Barklay for his answer. The chaos was not dispelled, he thought; it was merely kept at bay. “If it pleases you,” he said to them.

  Speir and Douglas turned to one another, assessingly. “Your turn to initiate,” Speir said lightly.

  Douglas’s eyes crinkled for the briefest of moments. “I beg the privilege of challenging you to a match of foils,” he said.

  “I would be pleased to accept,” Speir answered, the gracious authority of her voice carrying through the room. “Short or long?” she asked, but, “Long,” they both agreed at once, and proceeded to establish the use of shoulder-pad, headguard, tape-for-gauntlet, and Ryswyckian combat rules. They asked Barklay to let their witnessed agreement stand in place of the usual contract; he consented, smiling at both their poise and the quiet excitement of his school at the prospect of a good match.

  A good match that might possibly be the last one. Barklay wouldn’t let himself think about that.

  ~*~

  The match was put back on the schedule, leaving enough time for Speir and Douglas to settle into their quarters in the senior officers’ block and get changed. Selkirk, too, dismissed his entourage to their quarters and said to Barklay merely that he would look forward to their conversation after the match and supper.

  Barklay retreated to his office, pausing only to agree with Marag about his judging strategy for the match and catch Stevens in the corridor to make sure the rotas were briefed for the afternoon schedule. He sat at his desk and stared disconsolately at the polished table and the tea service cabinet. Would this demonstration match help him maneuver Selkirk’s wrath away from Ryswyck and toward himself? Or would it just concentrate Selkirk’s vengeance on the people Barklay least wanted to see hurt? Barklay didn’t know; he had lost control of the tempo of this fight, and he hated that.

  Given the circumstances, he did not expect Douglas to seek him out. So he was surprised when the knock came on his doorframe and he looked up to see Douglas there, still fully dressed in his rock-gray fatigues. Barklay nodded him in, diffidently. “Captain Douglas.”

  Douglas came in to stand before his desk and came right to the point. “What’s Selkirk doing here, sir?”

  Douglas’s gaze was calm as ever; calm and implacable. Barklay had been right to guess he would be angry. Barklay sighed. “He is here to take depositions, he says.”

  “Depositions about what? For what?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Barklay said.

  “Is this situation a change from what you invited me to, sir?” Eyes dark and relentless.

  “Yes,” Barklay admitted simply.

  “You couldn’t get ahead of him, could you?” Douglas allowed himself one sigh. “And you never did tell me what he has against you, not because it’s not relevant, but because it is. Whatever it is. He’s going to ask for a deposition from me, and he’s going to ask for one from Speir, and you won’t have any touch on what comes of it. Will you.”

  “I’m sorry, Douglas.” It was all he could say.

  “That’s not good enough, sir.”

  “It’s all I have,” pleaded Barklay. “Let me make the most of it. I will acknowledge my fault before everyone, if you ask.”

  Douglas half-turned on a sharp inhale. Turned back. “You think you can solve this using the language of Ryswyck. But the language of Ryswyck was invented by you. Do you think these commanders who have descended upon you care if you own the fault? They’ll hardly even know what it means. I have told you this, sir. I told you before ever Commander Jarrow set foot on this campus, and you didn’t listen to me then or any time since. I thought you were just being obtuse, but it’s been so consistent I started to wonder. And you wouldn’t even leave me the option of saying you cared nothing for me or for my opinion.” He took another breath, nostrils flaring. Barklay said nothing, caught between awe of Douglas’s candor and grief over his wounds. “You founded Ryswyck on the premise that you can care for someone and still hurt them on purpose. That’s what’s on trial here. That’s what you don’t know how to defend. Is there nothing more to it than that? Is all this just a sink for the poisons in your soul?”

  Barklay wondered if Douglas could hear the suppressed disgust in his own voice in the words all this. Even if Speir hadn’t told him about John Selkirk, Barklay could see that he had laid a burden on Douglas that might crack his heart to lift.

  And he couldn’t take it back.

  “Find out,” Barklay whispered. “If ever you loved me, Douglas, find out the truth and hold to it.”

&n
bsp; For a moment he thought Douglas wasn’t going to answer. He turned and went back to the doorway; then paused and looked back at Barklay.

  “You always say if,” he said, softly. “There is no if. Sir.”

  And then he was gone.

  ~*~

  Dark and light clouds scudded over the arena dome as the student body gathered. Barklay made sure the Cardumel unit had been given good seats below the headmaster’s dais, where he sat with his decorated inquisitors. Selkirk sat relaxed next to him, watching the students come to their seats with a placid smile. The smile was not a good sign: had Selkirk put up any resistance to Barklay’s show, Barklay would have had hope of engaging him. But Selkirk seemed happy to indulge Barklay in what he probably saw as a last rite, before Selkirk brought down the hammer.

  As if to confirm Barklay’s suspicions, Selkirk observed mildly, “It’s been a long time since I was here to watch a match. Little seems to have changed.”

  “The traditions have worn well,” Barklay said. “Each generation, of course, takes a particular grasp of them. It’s not often you see a foils match these days; the format, I regret, is not as favored as it was when we were young.”

  “Not even with your innovations to the discipline?” Selkirk’s eyes were on Marag, who stood at the base of the judge’s perch waiting for Lieutenant Rose to call order for the arena chant.

  Barklay shrugged. “Call it more amalgam than innovation. But I imagine the weapon would be more popular unbated.”

  “And, of course, more deadly,” Selkirk murmured, as the whole arena rose for the chant.

  “Precisely.” Barklay’s answer was lost in the host of living voices singing John’s incantation. Selkirk did not join them; he rarely joined chants as he could not carry a pitch, but today he did not even move his lips. The merest filament of hope, Barklay thought, and probably foolish at that. For a moment the serenity passed from his once-friend’s face, in the changeful light from the dome, and it occurred to Barklay that Selkirk would have had double reason to defer his right as chief mourner to sing his brother’s dirge. Had there been someone at the funeral he could defer to? Selkirk had refused Barklay an invitation, so Barklay didn’t know if John had had friends left enough to attend.