For Idlesse: Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, PG-13
Dec 24, 2015 3:27:20 GMT 10
Rachy, max, and 2 more like this
Post by Seek on Dec 24, 2015 3:27:20 GMT 10
Title: Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost
Rating: PG-13
For: Idleness
Prompt: 4. Third Company of the Own returns to Corus after the war
Summary: A look at the men of the King's Own and what they do after the war is over.
Notes and Warnings: I feel a bit disingenuous about labelling this a PG-13 fic. Because in truth, it is. But it does imply at some darker themes, which I'm going to warn for. Warnings for suicide, and for substance addiction included.
-
The armistice is declared in spring, and the peace treaty follows soon after. Yet, things drag on: spring bleeds into summer, and it is in the languid heat of summer that Third Company is finally sent back to Corus for whatever they’re supposed to do when they’re not at war.
Ingrey hunches down in the saddle and tries not to think of everyone who isn’t riding with them. He can’t remember the last time he’s had a good night’s sleep, for all that they weren’t supposed to be killing each other once the armistice was declared. Lofren, Wolset, Fulcher, Tarrish and Rossin; it’s been two years, and he still expects to see them riding with the squad.
Can’t believe that he’s there and they’re gone; reduced to ash, somewhere, on Scanran soil. As Lady Kel prepared to move the men and children out, he’d passed by the pyre, and surreptitiously taken a pinch of ash.
Dom saw, of course. He did the same. So did the others.
It’s what makes him a decent sergeant, Ingrey thinks, staring at the man’s back as Dom rides ahead of them.
Dom understood. Always did. It just wasn’t right to leave all of them lying on Scanran soil.
It’s hard to say why he still feels a bond to men two years dead. The squad’s changed so much since then: new faces come and gone across battlefields and ambushes. He thinks about Matthias, smeared with faeces and mutilated because they couldn’t get to him before the Stormwings did; of Petrin, torn to pieces because he’d taken point and walked straight into a Scanran ambush and their shaman was better than the squad’s mage.
He thinks about how he’s bled out his veins with men like Artair and Weskes, and they still feel like strangers to him.
Mostly, he wonders what it’ll be like to sleep without expecting a sentry’s warning; to look at the stars without having to think about streaks of arrows. To listen to birdsong and to not wait for when it falls silent.
He wonders what it’ll be like to go back to Corus and the barracks and to fall in and to go back to everything else, as if the past years are a dream from which they’re only just beginning to wake.
And he wonders if this is what it feels like to be the ones left behind.
-
Lerant stays with Third Company.
It’s all he knows how to do, really. He has no further life outside the King’s Own, and he’s in no position to inherit Eldorne.
Even as men turn in resignation letters and recruits join, all bright-eyed and staring at the Knight Commander as though he’s a god fallen to the earth, Lerant remains. He does all of Lord Raoul’s chores, cares for his armour; all the little tasks that Kel had done, for four years, now fallen back to him in her absence.
Once or twice, he does think about going back.
Lerant knows his swordlore; he’s no squire, but he’s the son of a noble family (albeit disgraced) and a child of the hill country, with its superstitions and traditions, and he knows that a drawn sword must be blooded, for fear that it’ll turn on its wielder when continuously drawn for no particular reason.
It’s a thought that returns to him, as he balances his drawn sword over his knees and carefully sharpens its edge, removing the nicks from Scanran blades and axes.
But then, Dom enters the room and laughs and cracks some sort of stupid joke about how he’s still there, and it doesn’t take much effort to find a barbed response he half-means and somewhere in the middle of all that, any desire to leave, any feeling as though he’s a sword that can’t really fit its scabbard has disappeared.
In any case, it really doesn’t make any sense: he’s fought and served in the Own for longer than half the men in the barracks. The colours of the King’s Own, he knows far more intimately now than the colours and sigil of Fief Eldorne. This humble barracks of sanded wood and cramped bunks and holly and rowan hung—crookedly—on the windows from last Midwinter is more home that the echoing empty halls of Fief Eldorne; than the bitter expressions of his family.
But for all of that, coming back to Corus doesn’t feel like coming home. Not quite.
He breathes out his disquiet and returns to sharpening his sword, to polishing it to a mirror-bright sheen.
-
Qasim ibn Zirhud sets pen to parchment and hesitates.
It’s hard for mail to reach men of the King’s Own when they’re deployed in the field. He knows this: has returned from previous deployments to see a bundle of messages tied up with twine and left on his bunk.
This time, he’s been out of the barracks for over three years. He closes his eyes, breathes the familiar scent of wood-polish and clean sheets. Someone’s left a bundle of fresh herbs burning on the fireplace and the open windows let in a slow summer breeze.
This isn’t a fort, he tells himself. He’s back in Corus now, and the war is over.
He wonders, for a brief moment, if this is how it was like for Zirhud ibn Tuhal: the constant feeling of being lost, the war only a breath away, memories trapped in the glint of sunlight on restless amber.
He presses his head to the smoothened pine of the desk.
He’s spoken to Zirhud, in the intervening years; sometimes, he catches a glimpse of what might very well be his father in the Moment of the Voice. But mostly, that silent communion is between him and the Voice-Who-Is-King. The Voice shows him a thousand deaths, between the sand and stars and the watchful fires of the tribes; shows him burning fields, salted, and the killing devices slaughtering their way through villages.
You have done a good thing, Qasim ibn Zirhud, the Voice-Who-Is-King says, sensing the restless direction of his thoughts. Do not doubt it.
He doesn’t. The Bazhir have fought and defended their freedom for generations, from father to son, fighting against Northern incursion, against the ancient foe: the hillmen, against the insinuations of the Nameless in the forbidden city.
He is a warrior, and son of warriors. He knows the importance of the sharp sword, the language of the spear-point. He knows the ways of the desert, knows why a man might decide to turn his back on the desert and leave.
He begins to understand why Zirhud ibn Tuhal speaks in silences; what his father leaves unwritten in his letters from the desert. He begins to understand why Zirhud ibn Tuhal came back and why Zirhud ibn Tuhal never really came back.
Dipping his pen into ink, Sergeant Qasim ibn Zirhud of the King’s Own begins,
Father…
-
In Dom’s mind, there is a room with a great many boxes that bears a startling resemblance to his old room at Fief Masbolle.
Dom has a number of masks, and he’s an expert at taking them off and putting them on as and when necessary. He regards himself as a fish: flowing through the currents of life, sensing and reading those subtle fluctuations and whorls that mark eddies; places better avoided.
Even now that they’re back in Corus, some of the men have difficulty sleeping; cry out for lost comrades in the middle of the night. Dom wakes them up when it’s truly bad, deftly dodges the reflexive punch, the fumble for a nearby dagger. He holds Lerant’s shoulders when the man wakes up trembling and laughs at the man’s inevitable barbed comment, tells Ingrey that there’s nothing to be ashamed of when he weeps.
He slips back into barracks life as if they’ve never truly left; as if the war has only been a bad dream.
It’s terribly easy for him: just another mask, memories stored neatly in a box labelled ‘DO NOT OPEN’ in his neatest handwriting.
The war is over, and the summer is ahead of them; ripe with the promise of lazy days. He turns a blind eye to some of the minor infractions. There’ll be time for that, in autumn, when the dry leaves fall as rain; when empty bunks swell with fresh recruits.
There’s a time for war and a time for healing, and as Dom slips through the hallways of the barracks, he can sense that most of the men need a time to heal.
So he goes easy on them; becomes the guy who brings on the laughs, the confidant. After all, he knows what they’ve been through. He’s lived through it himself. He manages the men with the consumnate skill of the leader that he’s shown flashes of becoming, that, or so Dom likes to imagine, he’s secretly being groomed to become.
The week after they return, he organises a company dinner at the Jugged Hare, and Lord Raoul insists on paying for it out of his own purse.
-
Volorin throws back a glass of whiskey and pounds it down against the table. There’s more water than spirits in this glass; he can barely manage a bleary-eyed stare at the innkeeper, who meets his eyes, arms folded across her chest as she says, “I think you’ve had quite enough, don’t you, Sergeant?”
The ivory skull-beads at the tips of his braids clack as he shakes his head. “Not nearly, Mistress,” he mutters, and he isn’t even really slurring yet. One or two words are harder to enunciate, but that’s about it. He’s had stiffer drinks in villages bordering Scanra, where they make spirits from the potato crop.
Easthome was a good posting. Pity about the raiders.
He remembers ships and homes and villagers set aflame; imagines, even now, that he can smell the stink of burned flesh, of soot and ash.
“I’ll have another round,” he says, because why the hell not. War pay on top of a sergeant’s pay means he’s got quite a bundle of coin to be spending, and they’ll be on the road again eventually. Just some downtime to recover, if they can recover, and then they’ll be out in the realm because the realm needs them, and emergencies don’t wait for the Queen’s Riders or the King’s Own.
“No,” says the innkeeper, tartly.
“’ve got coin,” Volorin says, and shakes his coinpurse, and is surprised to find it lighter than he remembers.
“No,” the innkeeper repeats. “You’ve drunk far more than I should’ve let you, Sergeant, and it’s bad for business if I let soldiers get roaring drunk in my inn, you hear?”
“I’ve got him, Mistress,” someone else says, and Volorin fixes his glare on a grinning Domitan of Masbolle instead, as the man bundles an arm around him and drags him out of the bar and says something about coming back to settle later.
“My lord’s going to throw a fit if he realises you’re getting drunk like this,” mutters Dom, out of the corner of his mouth. “You know your squad’s on duty today.”
Volorin swears. He’d forgotten. Or he’d remembered, before the drinks began, and had resolved to limit himself to two drinks, but the second led to the third, and so on. The sharp, clean burn of the whiskey purifies him, numbs the weary hole he seems to be carrying around in his chest.
“How many fingers?”
“Two,” Volorin says, “And a third behind my back.”
Sheepishly, Dom produces the offending hand. “Sober enough, then.”
“It’ll take more than that to get me thoroughly drunk, Masbolle,” Volorin retorts.
“Not from the number of glasses I could see,” Dom says, soberly. “Look, you’re another sergeant, I know, and it’s none of my business, but just between the two of us—”
“You’re right,” says Volorin. “It is none of your business.” He steadies himself and walks away. He can hear Dom calling after him, but his blood is up and he strides off, down the street, ignoring his counterpart. The alcohol is a pleasant haze in his blood, but he’s still functioning.
In his mind’s eye, ships burn.
-
Corus is a cage.
Denton of Nond doesn’t know what to do with his spare time. The idea of taking leave from the squad and returning to the green pastures of Nond…just doesn’t appeal to him. He spends the first few weeks in the training yards, beating up dummies, practising his horsemanship, mending his kit, and acting as though the war’s never ended, until the restless energy bleeds out into the rest of his squad.
When they were at war, things were simple, Denton thinks. He had a purpose. Intellectually, he knows that it’s only a matter of time before the Own get deployed again, but the waiting and waiting irks him.
He practices hard and waits for the day the call goes out to the Own. It’s a dangerous task, and with the Own at quarter-strength, they ask for volunteers.
Denton goes.
It’s a skirmish just south of Uley’s Grove, beating away bandits who’ve appeared in the restless shortages that follow war.
He knows how they feel.
They take the next rotation to the north. In a strange way, the work, the violence keeps him grounded.
He sleeps well at night.
-
Artair doesn’t.
But then, no one else in his squad has held together what’s left of a squadmate after a Scanran battlemage blew him apart from the inside with a spell. They haven’t had to clean bits of Hestor off their gear, and as far’s Artair’s concerned, that makes the difference.
Ingrey looks lost; he always has, since they joined up together. They find Weskes dangling from the window two weeks after they return to Corus, and bury him together and mourn.
And that’s the final straw.
He dreams, on most nights, of Hestor piecing himself back together, of Hestor asking him: why are you alive? Why didn’t you save me?
He couldn’t do anything. He’s got the sharpest eye in the squad, but his bow was stowed on the saddle of his packhorse, then. And he hadn’t seen the shaman, until it was too late.
But still, he dreams.
And then he finds Weskes, and something dies in him; or he realises that the kraken has chewed him and that he can’t find the spark that used to be there.
That night, he writes up—neatly—a letter of resignation from the Own.
He dreams of sea salt; of the clear breeze, of glassy seas, and a fisherman’s nets in his hands. He wakes up smiling, knowing he has made the right decision.
Rating: PG-13
For: Idleness
Prompt: 4. Third Company of the Own returns to Corus after the war
Summary: A look at the men of the King's Own and what they do after the war is over.
Notes and Warnings: I feel a bit disingenuous about labelling this a PG-13 fic. Because in truth, it is. But it does imply at some darker themes, which I'm going to warn for. Warnings for suicide, and for substance addiction included.
-
The armistice is declared in spring, and the peace treaty follows soon after. Yet, things drag on: spring bleeds into summer, and it is in the languid heat of summer that Third Company is finally sent back to Corus for whatever they’re supposed to do when they’re not at war.
Ingrey hunches down in the saddle and tries not to think of everyone who isn’t riding with them. He can’t remember the last time he’s had a good night’s sleep, for all that they weren’t supposed to be killing each other once the armistice was declared. Lofren, Wolset, Fulcher, Tarrish and Rossin; it’s been two years, and he still expects to see them riding with the squad.
Can’t believe that he’s there and they’re gone; reduced to ash, somewhere, on Scanran soil. As Lady Kel prepared to move the men and children out, he’d passed by the pyre, and surreptitiously taken a pinch of ash.
Dom saw, of course. He did the same. So did the others.
It’s what makes him a decent sergeant, Ingrey thinks, staring at the man’s back as Dom rides ahead of them.
Dom understood. Always did. It just wasn’t right to leave all of them lying on Scanran soil.
It’s hard to say why he still feels a bond to men two years dead. The squad’s changed so much since then: new faces come and gone across battlefields and ambushes. He thinks about Matthias, smeared with faeces and mutilated because they couldn’t get to him before the Stormwings did; of Petrin, torn to pieces because he’d taken point and walked straight into a Scanran ambush and their shaman was better than the squad’s mage.
He thinks about how he’s bled out his veins with men like Artair and Weskes, and they still feel like strangers to him.
Mostly, he wonders what it’ll be like to sleep without expecting a sentry’s warning; to look at the stars without having to think about streaks of arrows. To listen to birdsong and to not wait for when it falls silent.
He wonders what it’ll be like to go back to Corus and the barracks and to fall in and to go back to everything else, as if the past years are a dream from which they’re only just beginning to wake.
And he wonders if this is what it feels like to be the ones left behind.
-
Lerant stays with Third Company.
It’s all he knows how to do, really. He has no further life outside the King’s Own, and he’s in no position to inherit Eldorne.
Even as men turn in resignation letters and recruits join, all bright-eyed and staring at the Knight Commander as though he’s a god fallen to the earth, Lerant remains. He does all of Lord Raoul’s chores, cares for his armour; all the little tasks that Kel had done, for four years, now fallen back to him in her absence.
Once or twice, he does think about going back.
Lerant knows his swordlore; he’s no squire, but he’s the son of a noble family (albeit disgraced) and a child of the hill country, with its superstitions and traditions, and he knows that a drawn sword must be blooded, for fear that it’ll turn on its wielder when continuously drawn for no particular reason.
It’s a thought that returns to him, as he balances his drawn sword over his knees and carefully sharpens its edge, removing the nicks from Scanran blades and axes.
But then, Dom enters the room and laughs and cracks some sort of stupid joke about how he’s still there, and it doesn’t take much effort to find a barbed response he half-means and somewhere in the middle of all that, any desire to leave, any feeling as though he’s a sword that can’t really fit its scabbard has disappeared.
In any case, it really doesn’t make any sense: he’s fought and served in the Own for longer than half the men in the barracks. The colours of the King’s Own, he knows far more intimately now than the colours and sigil of Fief Eldorne. This humble barracks of sanded wood and cramped bunks and holly and rowan hung—crookedly—on the windows from last Midwinter is more home that the echoing empty halls of Fief Eldorne; than the bitter expressions of his family.
But for all of that, coming back to Corus doesn’t feel like coming home. Not quite.
He breathes out his disquiet and returns to sharpening his sword, to polishing it to a mirror-bright sheen.
-
Qasim ibn Zirhud sets pen to parchment and hesitates.
It’s hard for mail to reach men of the King’s Own when they’re deployed in the field. He knows this: has returned from previous deployments to see a bundle of messages tied up with twine and left on his bunk.
This time, he’s been out of the barracks for over three years. He closes his eyes, breathes the familiar scent of wood-polish and clean sheets. Someone’s left a bundle of fresh herbs burning on the fireplace and the open windows let in a slow summer breeze.
This isn’t a fort, he tells himself. He’s back in Corus now, and the war is over.
He wonders, for a brief moment, if this is how it was like for Zirhud ibn Tuhal: the constant feeling of being lost, the war only a breath away, memories trapped in the glint of sunlight on restless amber.
He presses his head to the smoothened pine of the desk.
He’s spoken to Zirhud, in the intervening years; sometimes, he catches a glimpse of what might very well be his father in the Moment of the Voice. But mostly, that silent communion is between him and the Voice-Who-Is-King. The Voice shows him a thousand deaths, between the sand and stars and the watchful fires of the tribes; shows him burning fields, salted, and the killing devices slaughtering their way through villages.
You have done a good thing, Qasim ibn Zirhud, the Voice-Who-Is-King says, sensing the restless direction of his thoughts. Do not doubt it.
He doesn’t. The Bazhir have fought and defended their freedom for generations, from father to son, fighting against Northern incursion, against the ancient foe: the hillmen, against the insinuations of the Nameless in the forbidden city.
He is a warrior, and son of warriors. He knows the importance of the sharp sword, the language of the spear-point. He knows the ways of the desert, knows why a man might decide to turn his back on the desert and leave.
He begins to understand why Zirhud ibn Tuhal speaks in silences; what his father leaves unwritten in his letters from the desert. He begins to understand why Zirhud ibn Tuhal came back and why Zirhud ibn Tuhal never really came back.
Dipping his pen into ink, Sergeant Qasim ibn Zirhud of the King’s Own begins,
Father…
-
In Dom’s mind, there is a room with a great many boxes that bears a startling resemblance to his old room at Fief Masbolle.
Dom has a number of masks, and he’s an expert at taking them off and putting them on as and when necessary. He regards himself as a fish: flowing through the currents of life, sensing and reading those subtle fluctuations and whorls that mark eddies; places better avoided.
Even now that they’re back in Corus, some of the men have difficulty sleeping; cry out for lost comrades in the middle of the night. Dom wakes them up when it’s truly bad, deftly dodges the reflexive punch, the fumble for a nearby dagger. He holds Lerant’s shoulders when the man wakes up trembling and laughs at the man’s inevitable barbed comment, tells Ingrey that there’s nothing to be ashamed of when he weeps.
He slips back into barracks life as if they’ve never truly left; as if the war has only been a bad dream.
It’s terribly easy for him: just another mask, memories stored neatly in a box labelled ‘DO NOT OPEN’ in his neatest handwriting.
The war is over, and the summer is ahead of them; ripe with the promise of lazy days. He turns a blind eye to some of the minor infractions. There’ll be time for that, in autumn, when the dry leaves fall as rain; when empty bunks swell with fresh recruits.
There’s a time for war and a time for healing, and as Dom slips through the hallways of the barracks, he can sense that most of the men need a time to heal.
So he goes easy on them; becomes the guy who brings on the laughs, the confidant. After all, he knows what they’ve been through. He’s lived through it himself. He manages the men with the consumnate skill of the leader that he’s shown flashes of becoming, that, or so Dom likes to imagine, he’s secretly being groomed to become.
The week after they return, he organises a company dinner at the Jugged Hare, and Lord Raoul insists on paying for it out of his own purse.
-
Volorin throws back a glass of whiskey and pounds it down against the table. There’s more water than spirits in this glass; he can barely manage a bleary-eyed stare at the innkeeper, who meets his eyes, arms folded across her chest as she says, “I think you’ve had quite enough, don’t you, Sergeant?”
The ivory skull-beads at the tips of his braids clack as he shakes his head. “Not nearly, Mistress,” he mutters, and he isn’t even really slurring yet. One or two words are harder to enunciate, but that’s about it. He’s had stiffer drinks in villages bordering Scanra, where they make spirits from the potato crop.
Easthome was a good posting. Pity about the raiders.
He remembers ships and homes and villagers set aflame; imagines, even now, that he can smell the stink of burned flesh, of soot and ash.
“I’ll have another round,” he says, because why the hell not. War pay on top of a sergeant’s pay means he’s got quite a bundle of coin to be spending, and they’ll be on the road again eventually. Just some downtime to recover, if they can recover, and then they’ll be out in the realm because the realm needs them, and emergencies don’t wait for the Queen’s Riders or the King’s Own.
“No,” says the innkeeper, tartly.
“’ve got coin,” Volorin says, and shakes his coinpurse, and is surprised to find it lighter than he remembers.
“No,” the innkeeper repeats. “You’ve drunk far more than I should’ve let you, Sergeant, and it’s bad for business if I let soldiers get roaring drunk in my inn, you hear?”
“I’ve got him, Mistress,” someone else says, and Volorin fixes his glare on a grinning Domitan of Masbolle instead, as the man bundles an arm around him and drags him out of the bar and says something about coming back to settle later.
“My lord’s going to throw a fit if he realises you’re getting drunk like this,” mutters Dom, out of the corner of his mouth. “You know your squad’s on duty today.”
Volorin swears. He’d forgotten. Or he’d remembered, before the drinks began, and had resolved to limit himself to two drinks, but the second led to the third, and so on. The sharp, clean burn of the whiskey purifies him, numbs the weary hole he seems to be carrying around in his chest.
“How many fingers?”
“Two,” Volorin says, “And a third behind my back.”
Sheepishly, Dom produces the offending hand. “Sober enough, then.”
“It’ll take more than that to get me thoroughly drunk, Masbolle,” Volorin retorts.
“Not from the number of glasses I could see,” Dom says, soberly. “Look, you’re another sergeant, I know, and it’s none of my business, but just between the two of us—”
“You’re right,” says Volorin. “It is none of your business.” He steadies himself and walks away. He can hear Dom calling after him, but his blood is up and he strides off, down the street, ignoring his counterpart. The alcohol is a pleasant haze in his blood, but he’s still functioning.
In his mind’s eye, ships burn.
-
Corus is a cage.
Denton of Nond doesn’t know what to do with his spare time. The idea of taking leave from the squad and returning to the green pastures of Nond…just doesn’t appeal to him. He spends the first few weeks in the training yards, beating up dummies, practising his horsemanship, mending his kit, and acting as though the war’s never ended, until the restless energy bleeds out into the rest of his squad.
When they were at war, things were simple, Denton thinks. He had a purpose. Intellectually, he knows that it’s only a matter of time before the Own get deployed again, but the waiting and waiting irks him.
He practices hard and waits for the day the call goes out to the Own. It’s a dangerous task, and with the Own at quarter-strength, they ask for volunteers.
Denton goes.
It’s a skirmish just south of Uley’s Grove, beating away bandits who’ve appeared in the restless shortages that follow war.
He knows how they feel.
They take the next rotation to the north. In a strange way, the work, the violence keeps him grounded.
He sleeps well at night.
-
Artair doesn’t.
But then, no one else in his squad has held together what’s left of a squadmate after a Scanran battlemage blew him apart from the inside with a spell. They haven’t had to clean bits of Hestor off their gear, and as far’s Artair’s concerned, that makes the difference.
Ingrey looks lost; he always has, since they joined up together. They find Weskes dangling from the window two weeks after they return to Corus, and bury him together and mourn.
And that’s the final straw.
He dreams, on most nights, of Hestor piecing himself back together, of Hestor asking him: why are you alive? Why didn’t you save me?
He couldn’t do anything. He’s got the sharpest eye in the squad, but his bow was stowed on the saddle of his packhorse, then. And he hadn’t seen the shaman, until it was too late.
But still, he dreams.
And then he finds Weskes, and something dies in him; or he realises that the kraken has chewed him and that he can’t find the spark that used to be there.
That night, he writes up—neatly—a letter of resignation from the Own.
He dreams of sea salt; of the clear breeze, of glassy seas, and a fisherman’s nets in his hands. He wakes up smiling, knowing he has made the right decision.