Chapter 66: The Sergeant

"Water boy."

Her voice was low and flat. It was the same voice that had said you are looking across a pool of blood, and Aren felt it go down the back of his neck like a drop of cold water.

He looked up slowly, but not all the way. A water boy didn’t look an officer in the face. He looked at the iron badge at her collar and waited.

"Your shoulder."

"My lady?"

"Captain." The word was very precise. "What happened to your shoulder?"

Behind her the four officers had stopped too. One was frowning. Another looked bored, like men do when their commander stops to talk to the furniture.

Aren reached up slowly and touched the purple marks, as if he had forgotten they were there. He let his face go a little red, which was easy, because he didn’t have to pretend.

"A girl, Captain."

The bored officer laughed out loud.

Kaela didn’t. She looked at the bite, and then she looked carefully at his face, the dirt in his hair, the thin cheeks, the cracked lip that had split again that morning. He could see her measuring him as she must measure everything: height, weight, the width of the shoulders.

The man in the pool had been taller in the dark. Everyone was taller in the dark.

’Please let me have been taller in the dark.’

"What girl?"

"From my village, Captain. Down the valley." He kept his eyes on her badge. "She was angry with me."

"Why?"

"I think," Aren answered carefully, "I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been."

The bored officer laughed again, and even the frowning one smiled a little. Kaela’s face stayed exactly as it was. She looked at him for one more breath, and he could feel her deciding whether a water boy from the farms was worth another minute of her day.

"Boy!"

The shout came from the Aldermere side of the yard, loud enough to turn every head near the cistern.

A man was coming toward them, old and grey-haired, broad in the chest and short in the leg, in a stained leather apron over a sergeant’s coat. His right sleeve was empty, folded up and pinned flat at the shoulder, and he walked with the rolling, impatient stride of a man who had been shouting at young soldiers for forty years and saw no reason to stop.

"You!" He jabbed a ladle at Aren. "Forty men waiting for water in the cook tent and you’re standing here making eyes at Imperial officers." He stopped beside Aren and looked at Kaela, and his voice didn’t get any softer. "Apologies, Captain. The boy’s new. Doesn’t know his place yet. I’ll teach it to him."

Kaela looked at the old sergeant, and something passed between them that Aren didn’t understand. It wasn’t friendship. It was the cold respect of two people who had stood on opposite sides of the same battlefield and both remembered it.

"See that you do, Sergeant."

She turned and walked briskly on toward the iron gate with her officers behind her, and she didn’t look back.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

The old sergeant waited until the black armor was through the gate. Then he grabbed Aren by the collar with his one hand, quite hard, and steered him across the yard toward the grey side of the fortress without a word.

He didn’t let go until they were behind the cook tents, among the stacked firewood and empty barrels, where nobody could see them.

"Name."

"Ren."

"No it isn’t." His eyes were pale blue and very sharp in his old face. "But it’ll do. I’m Varro. I feed the King’s army." He pointed at a big iron pot on a trestle by the fire. "Pick that up."

Aren picked it up easily. It was full of cold stew and it was heavy, and he held it the way he held everything now, without thinking about it.

"Carry it to that table."

He carried it obediently to the table.

Varro threw the ladle at his head.

Aren never saw it, and he didn’t actually need to. The air moved behind his left ear and his head was already tipping right before he knew why. The ladle went past him, struck a barrel and clattered to the ground.

He set the pot down calmly, and then he turned around.

Varro was looking at him with no expression at all.

"Huh."

He walked over, picked up the ladle and examined it as if it had done something interesting. Then he looked at Aren again, slowly, from his boots to his face, the same way Kaela had, only longer and with more understanding.

"Water boys from the farms carry a loaded pole like it’s trying to kill them. Their shoulders go up to their ears. They walk on their toes because they’re afraid of tripping." He tapped the ladle against his palm. "You carry it like it’s a coat. You walk heel first. You turned your head away from a ladle you didn’t see, the right way, at the right time. And you stood in front of the Voss woman and lied to her face without a twitch, which most officers in this army couldn’t do."

Aren said nothing.

"So either you’re something very strange, or something very dangerous. Or both." He paused. "I don’t need to know which. I’ve stopped needing to know things. It’s very restful."

"Why did you help me?"

"Help you?" The old man snorted. "I was saving the Captain the trouble. She’s got enough to deal with this week without pulling a farm boy apart in the middle of a peace summit." He looked toward the iron gate. "And because I fought her brother. Ten years ago, at the Grey Ford. Best I ever crossed blades with. I lost this to him." He moved the shoulder with the empty sleeve. "He died the same day. I’ve never had anything against the family since. Hard to hate a man who takes your arm properly."

He turned the ladle in his hand.

"But you’re not here to listen to old men. Here’s the thing, Ren. You move like someone who was taught by a book and a beating. You’ve got good instincts and good legs, and somewhere along the way something gave you a body a lot stronger than it looks." His pale eyes narrowed. "And nobody ever taught you how to stand. Not once. You fight like you’re trying to get away from the fight."

Aren thought of the Pools, fighting with his eyes shut, turning away from every blow, never once holding his ground. He thought of the Warden in the snow, planting his feet in front of a village.

’He’s right. That’s the annoying part. He’s completely right!’

"How do you know?"

"Because I taught the King’s guard the sword for twenty years before the Grey Ford." Varro tossed the ladle carelessly onto the table. "And because I just watched you stand in front of a woman who could kill you without breathing hard, and every part of your body was looking for the nearest door."

Neither of them spoke. Behind them in the cook tent, somebody was singing badly over the pots.

"Come back after the last bell. Behind the woodpile. Bring nothing. Tell nobody." He turned back toward his fire. "And, Ren."

"Yes?"

"Whoever bit you," the old man added without looking round, "I’d stay well away from her for a while."

Aren went back to Roderick at dusk, along the ridge, the long way.

Roderick listened to all of it in the hollow with his knees pulled up and his cloak around him, and when Aren got to the part about the bite, he put his face in his knees and laughed until his shoulders shook.

"A girl from your village," he gasped when he could breathe. "You told the commander of the Imperial army that a girl from your village bit you."

"It was true. Mostly."

"Which part?"

"The part about being somewhere I shouldn’t have been."

Roderick laughed again. Then he stopped and looked down the mountain toward the Imperial side, where lanterns were lit along every wall and torches moved back and forth across the slope above the mine.

"You won’t get back in there. Not now. I went and looked this afternoon. There are men at the vents. All three of them."

Aren had fully expected it, but it still landed hard.

[Rank D: Blood Tempering. 9%.]

Nine percent. Two days before the Summit, ten days of Summit after that, and the only place within a hundred miles where he could finish was guarded by an army that wanted to kill him.

He thought about it until the moon came up. Then he went back down to the fortress.

The last bell rang over Kharn just after dark. Varro was waiting behind the woodpile with a long stick in his one hand and another lying at his feet, and for two hours he explained nothing. He said again, and knocked Aren down, and said again. Twelve times. Fifteen. By the end Aren had learned the only thing the old man said out loud all night: Stop looking at the blade. Look at the hips. The hips never lie.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 64% → 65%.]

When it was over Aren was bruised in places he hadn’t known could bruise, and Varro sent him off with two empty buckets.

"Cistern. The cook tent needs water for the morning. Go on."

The cistern was under the central yard, down a long stair cut into the rock. The water boys came in the evening and again before dawn, and in between, nobody went down there at all.

Aren went down the stair with a lantern and his two buckets, thinking about hips.

He heard it before he reached the bottom: a dull, flat sound, again and again, flesh on stone, and under it someone breathing hard through their teeth.

He stopped on the last step and lifted the lantern.

The cistern was a long hall of black water held up by stone pillars that stood in it to their knees. At the edge of the water, under the nearest pillar, someone in a plain shirt with her sleeves pushed up was hitting the stone with her bare fists.

She wasn’t training. She was hitting it, left, right, left, with all her weight, as if the pillar had done something to her. Her knuckles were split. There was dark blood on the stone, and her hair had come loose from its tie and hung over her face.

She stopped abruptly.

She turned her head slowly toward the lantern.

"You," said Captain Voss softly. "The water boy."