Noble Beginnings (21 page)

He smiled at her anyway. "Thanks."

He saw a flicker of some strange emotion in
her eyes, but then she was raising him to his feet, all business,
and leading him behind the curtain, where Nora stood to give him a
seat beside their mother. Dorran sat gratefully, closing his eyes
for a moment in pain and exhaustion before opening them again. He
wanted, with a perverse sort of curiosity, to see the ceremony
performed on Tam, to see what it looked like from the outside.

Tam took the same position as Dorran had,
kneeling with his hands behind his back, and waited while Myriel
took a moment to re-heat the brand. She asked him quietly if he was
ready, and then, with one hand on the back of his gray head to hold
it steady, brought the brand forward to touch his skin.

The old man let out a small grunt of pain
when the brand was applied to his forehead, but otherwise stayed
silent throughout the ordeal. Dorran watched with a mix of horror
and fascination as the brand was removed to show a reddish-brown,
angry-looking set of moons on the man's forehead. He wondered what
his own face would look like with the brand as another young man
was led to kneel before Myriel, who remained careful and stoic
throughout the procedure. The room slowly began to fill with the
faintest smell of scorched flesh, and Dorran fought to keep the
expression of faint disgust off his face. Turning to look at the
rest of his family, he saw that Thea looked grave, Nora stoic, and
Adhara a little pale. He reached out a hand and took one of the
ones clenched tightly in her lap, grateful for the obstruction of
the curtain.

"Are you all right?" he asked quietly, as
another man groaned under the hot metal.

She nodded. "It's just...strange to see you
and your friends brand yourselves to serve. I always thought I
would spend most of my life serving you, but..."

Dorran smiled faintly. "You're the better
leader by far," he told her, squeezing her hand. "I've known that
for years. Let it be my duty to protect you, little sister. I know
you're going to be a wise and just queen someday."

Her eyes were dark when they met his, but she
nodded.

The ceremony lasted only a little longer
after that. By the end of it, fully two-thirds of the men in the
room were branded, the rest looking uncomfortable. As soon as there
was a short gap of hesitation between volunteers, Dorran spoke up,
saying, "That's enough for tonight. Know that I think no less of
you if you have elected to forgo the brand, but I want you to
spread the word, the queen's guard can use all men devoted to the
service of the queen."

There was a flurry of smart salutes, and then
the men filed out, talking quietly but excitedly to one another.
Dorran found himself exchanging embraces and quiet words with his
mother and sisters, whose eyes kept being drawn to his forehead.
Dorran wondered whether that would ever go away, or if it would be
something he'd notice for the rest of his life, though that was, he
supposed, more or less his intention in the first place.

"I should help Myriel tidy this up," he said,
once they had exchanged a few last awkward pleasantries. "Good
night, Addie, Nora, Mother."

He bowed formally to them, and they smiled at
him a bit awkwardly as they made their way out. He stood still for
a moment in the room which was now empty except for him and Myriel,
and savored the lack of expectant eyes. Then he turned to Myriel,
who was burnishing the brand carefully with a clean cloth. The
small brazier had already been put out, and the only remaining
light in the room came from a few torches on the walls.

"Thank you," he said, walking over to the
last of the chairs and beginning to stack them. After a moment,
Myriel finished her own task and joined him. "I never would have
been able to get that together without your help...to say nothing
of the rest of it."

"I'm much obliged, my lord," Myriel said
simply. Given the lateness of the hour, Dorran assumed that she was
tired and not in the mood for conversation. They moved the chairs
into the hallway in silence; Dorran told Myriel he would make a
point of moving them in the morning, and she didn't argue. She also
agreed, with a small smile, when he offered to walk her back to her
chambers.

"I've helped Berta with healing before, and I
will again," she said on the way there, tone carefully light, "but
before today, I'd never branded anyone."

He realized how much sense that made, and was
belatedly impressed with how calm she'd been throughout the ordeal.
But then he realized "I'm sorry," he blurted out. "I was only
intending to ask you to brand me, and having it be you was your
suggestion in the first place, but…"

Myriel shook her head slightly. "Actually, it
was truly an honor."

Dorran ceased his frantic efforts to
apologize. "Well, if you see it that way..." he said uncertainly,
then added, "It was an honor for me as well."

She took a look at his forehead, still
bandaged and salved, and raised an eyebrow. "Could you do me a
favor, my lord?"

"What is it?" he asked.

"Tell me why you chose a brand," she said.
"And why on your forehead? Please don't answer if you don't want
to, of course, but I was wondering."

"Because I'll never be able to avoid who I
am," Dorran explained. When Myriel raised her eyebrow at him in
incomprehension, he held up a finger for her to wait and tried to
come up with a more detailed explanation. "When I was younger, I
trained myself to be a good soldier. Part of being a good soldier
is knowing how to get along with others, work as a unit, and often
not stick out. I got so used to following orders or working as a
seamless unit that I forgot who I was and the duty that put on me.
This," he said, indicating the brand hidden under the bandage,
"will both establish me as a servant, not a ruler, of Farlan, and
at the same time, mark me for who I am. I chose this brand for
myself, and I intend to wear it with pride. No matter the outcome
of the siege or whatever may next come to pass. I wanted to prove
once and for all that I would serve Farlan however I could for the
rest of my life. As much as a brand could do that, anyway."

They walked down the hall in silence for a
few moments as Dorran wrestled with a lingering sense of
embarrassment, wondering if he'd said too much.

"If it helps to hear me say it," she said,
voice quiet and honest, "your loyalty to your family and your
people already seems like something that nobody could ever
erase."

"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.