~ DAVID ~

“I’m concerned about your ability to lead.” The woman in David’s office was blunt and to the point. Lieutenant Anna Bennett had come through the door only ten seconds before insinuating that he wasn’t fit for his position. In all his years, David had never seen someone quicker off the mark.

Lieutenant Bennett was one of his least-favourite subalterns. She was a lickspittle to her superiors, forever sucking up to try and win their favour. When David was the same rank, she had been the bane of his existence. But much as she went out of her way to appease the higher ranks, he knew she was short with those in her charge. She hated the green recruits she always got lumped with—her words, not his. Today, her lips were pursed tightly.

“Sit down,” he said, careful not to let his façade of cordiality slip. People who tried to say he wasn’t doing his job right were the worst, without exception. They were almost always the sort who had never held real responsibility, living in fantasy worlds where the military was somehow isolated from the realities of politics. Any fool could command in a vacuum. When several hundred people were pushing back against your ideas from every possible angle, it was a little more complicated. He often felt it would have been really satisfying to just punch the lights out of one of those little twats, but that was the road to a court martial and a dismissal.

Bennett sat as bid. She didn’t look happy about it. Her face was as sour as the bitter lemons that grew on the sweltering plains of Opteris. “I’m not afraid to escalate this,” she said, as soon as her bottom touched the seat. “General Bradshaw will hear it if it isn’t sorted out, don’t think he won’t.”

Ah. She was one of those types. “Back up a step,” he said. It was hard to keep the smile on his face. “What exactly is the issue here? I can’t fix anything if you don’t tell me what I’m fixing.”

In response, she slapped her hand on his desk. When she removed it, he saw that she’d left behind three small photographs. They were the standard portraits every soldier had taken prior to their boarding the Eia, likely the only photographs any of them had ever had. Two men, both with their hair cropped into identical styles—one grey and one a reddish-brown—and one woman, her long hair tinged pink. He knew who they were. Robert Bartley, Thomas Warner, Eilidh Cailie. The three missing soldiers. He might have guessed that this was Bennett’s problem. It wasn’t as if she ever wanted to talk to him about anything else.

“These three have been missing for coming on three months now,” said Lieutenant Bennett. “And yet the efforts to find them seem to have been suspended. There’s a very real risk that they could be in danger, and such a casual disregard for the lives of your own soldiers is frankly inappropriate for an officer of any level.”

“There’s no need to exaggerate the issue, Lieutenant,” he said coolly. “Your soldiers have been in my thoughts since the day I arrived here.”

“So why aren’t you sending search parties out to find them?”

David sighed. “At this stage, it’s not a good use of resources.” Lieutenant Bennett started to complain, but he talked over her. “I know what you’re going to say. But that’s the fact of the matter. You said yourself, it’s been over two months. There’d surely have been some sign of them by now—the fact that there hasn’t tells me that they’re probably dead. There’s nothing to be gained by sending soldiers away to walk over the same land they’ve searched several times already.”

“They’re not dead,” Bennett sniffed, straightening her back. “I was their commanding officer. I’ve a flawless service record, never lost a single soldier—you can look that up.”

“I won’t,” said David. “Look, don’t feel like you’re being blamed for this. Every officer’s had a death in their command. If you like, I can refer you to Doctor Paysen.”

“I don’t need a therapist,” shouted Bennett. “I need my soldiers back.”

“And I’m doing all that I can. Orders come from General Bradshaw, I can’t help what he’s saying.”

She shook her head with clear disdain for his answer. “Captain Clifford, I urge you to reconsider. It wouldn’t take a large search. Just a few men. Please.” Her voice piped as she finished speaking. A nice touch. It was an age-old ploy but it tugged just a tiny bit on his heartstrings.

Still, her face annoyed him. “It’s out of my hands.”

Bennett leaned a shaking hand on David’s desk, her voice cracking. “Captain, I’m begging you. Make this right. I’ve been pulled from my command, given no duty and no soldiers. What have I done to deserve this? Why do I have to be left out in the cold?”

David rolled his eyes. “You’ve not been pulled from your command. You’re on rest.”

“I’m rested.” Bennett’s voice was raised now to a quavering shout. “Let me take a search out myself, half a dozen men, that’s all I need. Just don’t leave me furloughed and tell me it’s for my benefit.”

He sighed. Bennett was proving to me a problem, somehow even more so than she’d been every other time she’d paid him a visit. He didn’t like problems. Problems could take a hike straight off a high cliff, for all he cared. And Bennett was really grating. She seemed to be content to blame him for her own carelessness—and it was carelessness, there’s really no other way to just lose a quarter of your command. But fuck him for trying to do his best within the scope of the rules, apparently. If finding the missing soldiers was so important to Bennett that it overrode the imperative to follow orders, she could take the initiative herself to look for them, and with it the inevitable consequences when General Bradshaw learned that his instructions had been ignored. Instead she seemed content to mope around while expecting David to stick his neck out.

They weren’t his soldiers. He didn’t know them. If they were dead it was sad, and he’d be the first to offer his condolences, but sleep would come no less easily to him.

An idea came to him, a means to be rid of Lieutenant Bennett. “General Bradshaw has been talking about the need to make a fortification outside the borders of the valley. I suggested the place where you first made camp. The plateau fort, I believe it’s called.”

Bennett looked at him. “Plateau Watch. I know it. Sergeant Malleston’s command.”

Obviously she’d done her research. “Sergeant Malleston is serving as the interim commander, yes.”

“Interim.” Bennett spat. “That should be my command. I’m a lieutenant, a ranking officer, but it has to go to a sergeant instead. We all know why that is. Bradshaw can’t bear the thought of a woman in a powerful role who won’t fuck him on command. So at the first opportunity I’m made a scapegoat, left to wither on the blacklist as a warning to anybody else who might start getting ideas about her bodily autonomy.”

David shook his head, and brushed a strand of overlong hair out from in front of his eyes. “You aren’t being scapegoated,” he said, “so don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s true,” she said. “Don’t act like it isn’t, just because it’s never happened to you.”

“I’m promising you it isn’t true,” he said. “Lieutenant, I can give you four score soldiers and the command of Plateau Watch. You’re right, it belongs to a lieutenant. From there you may lead any searches you wish. But the fortification is the priority. It needs to be properly built up and properly maintained. If I find that you’re letting your search for the missing soldiers interfere with your assigned duty, I will have to recall you.” It wasn’t something he’d been planning on doing. Bradshaw had been leaning towards leaving Malleston in charge, and David had thought of giving the command to Lieutenant Jackson, maybe old Lieutenant Tastock if Jackson turned him down. Both were better-suited than Anna Bennett, daughter of a poxy whore, four times promoted through sympathy and fortuitous timing. But it got her out of his office, which was a positive if ever he’d seen one.

To his surprise, Bennett smiled—the first genuine smile he’d seen from her since they came to Essegena. “Isn’t it nice not to live in Bradshaw’s thrall?” she said.

“Careful,” David scolded. “I shouldn’t cast aspersions, if I were you. I can still take the command back.”

Bennett nodded. “Sorry, Captain.” She thanked him and promised not to let him down, and then she left. Sweet respite. The lingering echo of her voice rattled around the insides of his skull well into the evening, not even dulled by a half-hour of eyes-closed. Almost enough to make him wish he drank.

He was making serious plans to break with a lifelong tradition and get his hands on a bottle of something strong when at last someone knocked on his door. Distraction, at last! “Enter.”

“Thank-you.” Governor Ballard was the one to walk into the room. His face was red from too much sun, the skin parched, and seeds of grey were beginning to show at the roots of his hair. Chris Ballard had begun to turn grey midway through his thirties, but he was religious in his application of dye. Sometimes David wondered if even Caroline knew her husband no longer had the natural umber of his youth. The gilded kepi in his hands would normally keep his hair from view, but without it the grey was obvious.

Ballard marched over to David’s desk, his hand clasped behind his back, and sat down on the chair, setting his hat down on the desk as he did so. “David, I have a favour to ask. But first I need to know that I can rely on you.”

He frowned. “Of course,” he said, uncertain.

“No matter what?”

“Chris, we’ve been friends since we were kids. You know me. I’ve always got your back.”

“That’s excellent news. Truly.” Chris looked at him, held the look for a good second longer than he normally did. It was discomfiting. “Do you remember what we used to dream about? All of us, in Borrowood?”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“The dynasty?” They’d had lofty dreams. Armand Heramey had been the first one to talk about it. Imagine if they could take over all of the Unity, a dozen upstarts from Borrowood. Armand had got the idea from a relative, no doubt. The Herameys were descended from the kingmakers of old, a family rich in heritage from the island of Ivyne. The rest had scoffed at first. Their families weren’t rich. They came from lines of workers and paupers. But in time they’d all adopted the idea. It was their solemn vow, in the waning days of their time together.

After they’d scattered to the winds, the Borrowood Dynasty was forgotten. Half of their number were dead, now, or far away from here. Here they were four. David shook his head. “You should forget about it, Chris. Godsouls, we were only children.”

“And now we’re men,” Chris said. “I have a plan... Part of a plan, at the very least. Borrowood can be a reality. Everything we dreamed about can happen—here, on Essegena. I do need your help, though.”

“It’s treason.”

“It’s not treason.” Chris spoke softly, quietly, almost lovingly, his eyes looking past David. “How could it be? I am the Governor. There’s no realm for me to betray.”

“And if your plan fails? Damned Bradshaw already hates me, do you think he’d take a kind view of a coup? He’d see us hanged if the law allowed it.”

Chris looked to the ground. “Whatever else he is, the General is a shrewd operator. He’s not going to seek vengeance that will hurt his own cause.”

“Yeah, he’s smart,” David said, “which is why you need to be careful of him. Whatever you have planned, you know he’ll fight against it. There’s a good chance he’ll win.”

“He won’t win.” Chris was looking up again now, staring past David, with a burning intensity in his eyes. “Dead men can’t win.”

David shook his head. “No. I’m not going to be party to murder.”

“It’s not murder if it’s in war.”

“And you want to bring a war here? Is that it?”

“If it proves needful.”

He found himself laughing. “Forget it, Chris. I’d go a long way to support you, but that I can’t do.” They’d been there, on Tol Manase, the last time war had eclipsed the Unity. Maybe only for the tail end of it—maybe sheltered from the very worst. Still, David had no desire to see another. The shadows of war hung over all corners. Half of Tol Manase was still abandoned two decades on. Even tiny Borrowood had its monuments, the red plaque of a hundred names devoted to the men of the village who’d died abroad as soldiers, and the burnt shell of the old manor house on the hill where once a defiant lord had made his stand.

David still had dreams of that defiant lord’s face. Lianol Ontay, Lord Ontay the Stubborn, was nothing more than a shade in the history books. Twenty years and some change when his father was lured away and murdered, a fraction more change when he himself was laid to rest. In David’s mind, Lord Ontay was a handsome young man with an untameable curl in his hair.

Old Mother Maud was the butt of every young man’s jokes as he drank in the inn. She was a wizened, dust-bunny crone, forever wearing the shroud of an ancient time. And she knew things. David used to visit her in her house, when he was younger. To his parents she was a frail old woman who could benefit from the company. But she was so much more. Her walls were filled with artefacts from Borrowood’s long centuries past. The very air always seemed to electrify when she touched them.

She’d ply David with stale cakes and a drink of something caffeinated, and tell him stories. Every time she was somebody different, another tragedy of the town. The names had never left him. It wasn’t just Lord Ontay. There was Edwin Macaulay, who had lived in that house when it was still brand new. He was recently betrothed to his childhood sweetheart. He liked to pick the sweet berries from the groves downstream from the old mill. He was trying to grow a beard for the first time. He’d died in defence of that stubborn lord, still a boy more than a man when a dirk stuck in his belly and left him weeping at the thought of home.

Then there was sweet Frances Irdingley, who wove roses into her hair and sang songs in the shade of the churchyard. She’d been crowned the fairest maiden thrice in a row at the autumn fayre, when a jealous milkmaid pushed her to the bottom of the deepest well in Borrowood. She was scared of the dark, and the well was black.

The others told him not to believe her. She was senile, they said. Her stories had no basis in fact. Yes, there was an Edwin Macaulay on the red plaque. And yes, the prettiest headstone in the churchyard was devoted to a Frances Irdingley. But there was nothing stopping Old Mother Maud from using those names to make her stories seem real.

David insisted that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Old Mother Maud was a Foresleeper, one of those who saw the future in obscurities. Why couldn’t she see the past as well? The stories were so real. The crone seemed to be taken over bodily by the innocent dead whose lives she recounted. When she cried their tears, the trees outside would always howl with a mourning of their own. You had to be there to know it, that’s what he told them.

So one day Caroline and Freya had come with him to see Old Mother Maud. Her face had darkened when she saw them on the doorstep, and she’d insisted that they leave. “There’s sickness in those girls,” she said. “Theirs is the life of pestilence. When the war is over, naught but their shadows will remain. I won’t have them here.”

He’d never managed to convince the others that Old Mother Maud wasn’t a con. Freya had spent the next week crying herself to sleep. Apparently, she’d had a little girl crush on him. She thought he’d brought her to Old Mother Maud to humiliate her into leaving him alone. Ian Fitzhenry had come to him one evening, apoplectic, to tell him that his trick was overly cruel. Freya didn’t deserve it. There was no use in trying to explain that there was no trick, so he’d made a show of apologising to Freya and stopped talking about Maud.

The last time he’d seen her, it was a few days before he left Borrowood to join the Unity. Back then, war still sounded like an adventure. “I’ll not be seeing you again,” she’d told him. “Not in this life, nor any other after.”

By the time of his first visit home, Old Mother Maud was dead.

He could see her now, in his head. She was Edwin Macaulay and Frances Irdingley and all the others from her stories, all the names on the red plaque, all the billions of war dead. Walk away, she seemed to scream. Turn your back from this.

“I hope you don’t think I’m turning into a tyrant, David.” Chris seemed chipper all of a sudden, like the young man who’d had those Borrowood dreams. The grey hairs seemed out of place on this face. “Nobody should need to go to war to do the right thing. I don’t want to see a single drop of blood spilt for the sake of this place. I won’t bring the war, I promise you, but if war is brought to me I need to know I have your back.”

Somewhere in a grave in Borrowood, perpetual motion had been achieved for the first time as Old Mother Maud turned over and over.

David spoke with a sigh. “If war is brought to you.”

A smile washed over Chris’ face. He exhaled, his shoulders falling to relaxation, and found the decanter David kept on his desk. It was empty. There were few things that tasted worse than wine, almost all of which were toxic to an absurd degree, but for some reason people seemed to expect him to have some on hand. He’d found through experience that if he told his visitors he’d just run out, they’d drop the matter, but if he tried to explain that he hated wine and couldn’t stomach having any on hand, they would invariably start recommending their favourite vintages.

“You shouldn’t keep an empty decanter,” Chris said. “I always half expect you to fill it up one day.”

“We both know that’ll never happen.”

“It doesn’t need to be wine, you know. Anything fermented will do fine.”

“I’ll think about it.” He wasn’t planning on thinking about it.

Chris sat down across from David, and crossed his hands over the desk. “Do. Now, I came to speak to you about a favour.”

“Have you not already asked?” David was confused. “If war doesn’t count as a favour, what does?”

Chris reached into his trouser pocket and pulled a small glass bottle, a cork stopper in the top and a musty old label to block all view of the contents. It had been sealed with red wax. “This. Keep it hidden. It didn’t come from me, you understand? I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

David furrowed his brow. “What is it?”

“Not important,” said Chris. “Just make sure it’s somewhere safe, for when you need to use it.”

“How will I know when to use it? I don’t know what it is.”

“You’ll know.”

This was a Chris that David hadn’t seen before. His nostrils were flared, his eyes piercing.

David took the bottle and stuffed it into a coat pocket. He could put it somewhere safer later, but for now it would do.

As soon as the bottle was out of sight, Chris became his calmer self again. “I’ve been putting things in place for a long time. Decades. I had an epiphany underneath the Ontay house.” When they were all much younger, much more foolish, they used to go up to Lord Ontay’s house on the hill, crumbling ruin as it was. Usually they’d get spooked by the outer fence. By the time they got to the front door they were all ready to bolt. Chris was thirteen by the time they worked up the courage to actually go in. His brother Charlie stayed outside, and Caro too. They were too young. David had balked as well, claiming that he didn’t care enough to enter. He didn’t like to admit that he was just as terrified as the younger kids.

But none of the others had been scared, and Chris least of all. He’d been the one who kicked in the remains of the door and lead them inside. But as they walked through the house’s rooms of rotting wood, he’d put his foot through a decaying floorboard, falling down into a strange cellar beneath. The others had tried to pull him out, but none of them had the strength, and he’d been left alone in the dark whilst they tried to find the cellar door.

Chris always swore he’d seen nothing in the darkness down there. Could it be that was a lie?

“It was supposed to be the perfect kingdom for me and Dani, untouchable. My wedding gift to her. I went so far as to source a crown, to make her a queen. That wasn’t meant to be. The work is still there. I’ve been speaking to people, making connections, putting things in place. Bradshaw thinks he owns the soldiers here, but I had more of a say than he realises. Jackson will stand with me, if it comes to it. Reilly too, and Chalmers. Half a dozen lieutenants.”

“Don’t rely on that,” David warned. “I know soldiers. I am one. Most officers are in it for the prestige. If they think Bradshaw’s a better proposition, don’t expect them to answer the call.”

“Bradshaw will be the one rebelling against the government,” said Chris. “He’ll never not be on the back foot.”

“If war happens at all. I’m not convinced things will play out the way you expect.”

Chris shook his head. “No, it’s not just me. The plan’s sound. Written by Reyda Bell Torrent herself.”

It couldn’t be... “Reyda Bell Torrent the Commissioner?” Chris nodded. She’d been a big shot in the Unity government for a time, on the back of an impressive strategy of campaigning. Her actions since she retired from public life were unknown. Apparently she’d been colluding with Chris on his grand strategy.

“All Bradshaw has is the military,” said Chris. “Anybody with a scrap of brain can run him in circles in a debate, and defeats in the council chamber are bound to stick in his craw. It won’t take long for him to snap. When he does, there’ll be nothing left to him except the soldiers he commands. What do you think the Lickspittle General will do then?”

David grimaced. “Don’t hate me for saying it, Chris, but this whole plan makes me uncomfortable. I’ve got no love for Bradshaw, but to goad him into starting a war... It’s madness, utter madness, and even if by some fluke it works, innocent people will die. You won’t get the paradise you want.”

“The plan’s not to force a war,” Chris assured him. “The plan’s to be ready for one if it comes. Don’t feel you have to take part, if you don’t want to. You were always the outsider in Borrowood—it wouldn’t be a change for you to be the outsider here too.”

David rose suddenly, his chair toppling beneath him. It wasn’t his fault he’d never connected with the others, not the way they all seemed to. He tried for years to feel a part of the gang. Chris even led him to believe he’d been successful. If that was just a falsehood... he clenched his fists, and looked down at the table. “You have my support, Governor. Now can I have my office back?”

“I knew you were dependable,” said Chris, a cheery note in his voice. He left the office, and left David alone.

When he was gone, David reached into his pocket and with shaky hand withdrew the glass bottle. What’s in you, he wondered. What doesn’t Chris want people knowing about?

The bottle gave no answer.