Noble Beginnings (22 page)

There, the most talented unit of fighters
hadn't been ready and waiting for a breach. Instead, it had come
without warning, and almost spelled out disaster for the Queen from
nearly the first hour of the siege. But it had been filled at the
last minute by a reserve, saving Farlan from disaster...a reserve
made almost entirely of newly recruited women, with only a handful
of experienced fighters nearby to protect them from the King's
army. The reserve had been so decimated that when Dorran finally
arrived back at the main camp at the end of the day after several
hours of helping to patch up the city walls as best he could, the
main camp was still trying to make an accurate count of the
casualties.

"Edith!" Dorran had spent a frantic ten
minutes searching the overflowing healer's tent for her familiar,
mousy-brown crop of hair, only to end up finding her outside the
tent, arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes were steely and fixed
on nothing, but her face was deathly pale.

"You were on the other side, fighting in the
first breach," she said, not looking up at him. It was obvious that
it wasn't a question.

"Yes," he said. "I'm so, so sorry. How
many…."

"Dozens of casualties’ altogether," she
answered. "I think maybe two dozen injured, about a third of them
severely. Most of the rest don't know how to fight through pain, it
will distract them. If this happens again, they'll just die faster.
And that's leaving aside infection, a possible lack of healing
supplies..."

"Stop," he said warily. "Let the others worry
about the healing. Remember, our job is only to keep going as long
as we can. Leave the past for the past and the future for the
future, right? That's what Vernis always says."

She nodded, but when she spoke, her voice was
bitter. "Vernis doesn't have to deal with untrained soldiers.
Twenty-three good women are dead because they were unwilling to
admit that they weren't ready for the battlefield, or because they
had piss-poor luck, or both, but what does it matter? And those are
just the ones they've officially counted; never mind the injured."
She sighed. "I want you to know that I don't blame you or your men
for being elsewhere when that breach opened. You know that,
right?"

"Yes," he lied. That's what they were doing,
he knew, exchanging lies in the hope that someday in the future,
Edith actually wouldn't blame the men that hadn't been there, and
he wouldn't blame himself for leaving her with untrained soldiers
to be slaughtered.

"They fought well," she said quietly, after a
long silence. "Better than they should have, for the amount of time
they had to learn to fight. I've never seen anyone so fierce."

Dorran sighed and stood, holding out his
hand. "While things are still quiet, let me help you with the
injured. Are you fit to stand?"

She nodded, taking his hand and pulling
herself up. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but knew that
it came out as more of a grimace. She returned it, however, and
deep down, under all the heartbreak that he was still too numb to
process, Dorran felt the same surge of affection that he'd had for
the young girl who'd told him in that flat voice that her older
brother had been killed in battle.

"I'm glad you're still alive," he said
gruffly.

She nodded, eyes dark. “Me, too," she
replied.

CHAPTER XX

That night, Dorran had gone to sleep with the
horror of the day's tragedy fresh in his mind. While he hadn't
known any of the women Edith had trained, he knew Edith herself,
and the depth of her guilt and loss left him profoundly shaken and
if that weren't enough, he kept imagining row upon row of Myriel’s,
or others like her, valiantly fighting and dying for their country,
never standing a chance.

He fell asleep with those images still
running through his mind. A few hours later he was woken by the
alarm bell again.

Remembering the training they had run several
times before the King's army's arrival, he was out of bed, fully
dressed, and halfway on his way to the muster point before he
realized that it was still dark out. When he reached the muster
point, he was surrounded by groggy soldiers asking the same two
questions: What time is it, and What's going on?

Dorran shoved through the sluggish crowd to
the front, where Vernis was yelling at a knot of confused and upset
commanders, many of whom were arguing with him simultaneously, a
few of them yelling at the top of their lungs.

"What is it?" he demanded, hoping his abrupt
noise and question would kill the hubbub.

"Let me try putting it this way," he said.
"They are on the walls. They will be through in minutes if the
walls are not defended."

Dorran understood several things at once.
After a second, he snapped a hand out to one of the commanders.
"You! Make sure Lady Nora's got her child forces ready some of
their pranks could work wonders in the dark. As for the rest of
you!" He turned to the rest of the commanders. "Get your people up
to the walls. Do whatever you do in the daytime, but with as little
light as possible. Light can help us, but it could also hurt
us."

Then he raised his voice so that it carried
over the still-disgruntled crowds. "The King's trying to pull a
fast one on us!" he yelled. "All units, report to your leaders and
move out! Night or not, we're not letting him break through!"

There was a confused cheer that nevertheless
showed more enthusiasm than the muttering had, and the units
started splitting off to meet with their leaders. A bit more
shouting later, they were operating almost at top speed.

Dorran made the Guard wait a few extra
minutes for Nora to show up. She arrived disheveled, in what looked
like a nightgown with a dark cloak thrown over it. This combined
with her dark hair left her looking like a floating face in the
darkness.

"They're attacking now?" she asked, sounding
more flustered than Dorran was used to hearing from her.

"Yes," he said shortly. "We were wondering
whether you have any tricks to pull out of your sleeve."

Nora thought for a moment, then nodded. "I'll
go fetch some now," she said. "It might be a while, so keep the
enemy forces back while I'm gone...?"

Dorran nodded. "We'll do our best."

Nora dashed off back the way she had come,
and Dorran turned to his forces. "All right," he called. "Everyone
ready to fight?"

He got a chorus of raspy but alert-sounding
assent.

"Good," he said grimly. "Let's hold them back
as long as it takes."

It ended up taking the rest of the night and
well into the morning. Dorran had never found the sunrise to be
quite as hideous as he did that morning, when the pinks and reds of
the dawn accenting the blood splattered on the ground and the
capital walls and the preternatural stillness of the early morning
broken by creaks and clashes and horrible screams and groans. Then
the sun rose, and images which had been bad enough in the dim or
gray scale shades of the wee hours was cast into lurid color and
detail.

The fighting continued through the morning as
well, only beginning to die down when the sun hit its peak in the
sky. The capital, with the air over its roofs and streets
occasionally wavering in the unusually hot day, fell silent, and
the soldiers on both sides were left to recoup their losses.

The Guard had fared well they'd stayed in the
area of the main gate, beginning by aiding Nora's force in their
mainly aerial attacks on the men below. When their attempts to
scale the wall had died down, they had resorted to use of the same
battering rams they had used to create breaches last time. Dorran,
remembering the tragedy that had occurred last time, was among the
leaders urging caution in assigning too many troops to a single
breach. Dorran held his particular force, as one of the swiftest,
most independent, and most thoroughly trained, most firmly in
reserve, sending out troops of no more than ten men at a time to
each reported breach. He himself struggled to balance his time
between the front lines and the center of command, where he could
make sure the balance of their forces was not disrupted.

By the end of the fight, he had an entirely
different problem than he'd had after the first battle. he, the
commander, had no idea where any of his troops were. He'd kept a
few of his men with him at all times throughout the fight, but had
no idea what had happened to the rest of them. Exhausted and with
several new wounds to show for the night's and morning's work, he
returned to the healers' tent in hopes of gaining reports on his
forces.

On the way back, as the sun beat down
overhead and he lamented his already-empty water skin, he occupied
his time with trying to devise the best solution to keep his force
mobile and divisible while lowering the risk of losing individuals
or groups in a battle with multiple critical points. By the time he
had arrived at the healers' tent, he had decided that having a
series of smaller leaders under him might help to avoid chaos in
the future and was trying to decide which of his men might make
good initial subordinates.

At the tent, there were enough healthy
soldiers and healers helping that despite the amount of patching up
to be done he didn't have to wait too long before he had an extra
set of hands helping him smear salve where he couldn't quite reach
it. He thought he saw Myriel once, sweeping quickly between two
desperately injured patients, but lost her so quickly in the press
of surrounding bodies that he couldn't be sure.

One person who he was able to find, with
surprisingly little difficulty, was Edith. She had bandages wrapped
around her stomach when he found her, and was getting more wrapped
around her lower ribcage.

"You all right?" he asked, suppressing a
wince as he dabbed a bit of salve into a cut his arm.

"Fine," she said curtly.

He looked over at her warily. "And your
fighters?"

She looked away, making a face as the healer
helping her tugged experimentally on her bandages. "Better than
yesterday," she said. "Though, of course, that's not at all
difficult."

He nodded. "So, are you still allowing them
to fight, or...?"

"I direct them into the fray a few at a
time," Edith said. "I try to make sure that no group goes out
without at least one experienced fighter, and I tell them to stay
together and not allow themselves to get separated. They're not
fighting as well as they did the first day," she added
dismissively, "but they're surviving to fight again, which seems
more important."

Dorran could only agree with that.

"What about you?" Edith asked. "What's it
like, being captain of the Guard?"

"Not hard, on the battlefield at least," he
answered. "Part of being in the Guard is that you can trust the
people you're leading to know how to fight independently. Aside
from directing the force as a whole, I haven't had to give out any
orders at all."

"Hm." She pondered this as the healer
finished tying off the bandages for her ribs. She pushed off the
table and stood, wincing slightly as her weight adjusted. "Can you
imagine what it would be like to fight in a normal army?"

"Of course," he quipped back. "All I have to
do is look at the enemy."

She paused to consider that. "That's true,"
she admitted, then added. "So then I suppose this is something like
how my father and brother died..."

Even though the effects of the war were
omnipresent in Farlan, it was still possible to forget about the
scars it left on those he cared about. "I suppose it might have
been," Dorran admitted quietly. "I would say that it's like how my
father and grandfather died as well, but I think they were
commanding fighters I suspect they died in routs. And neither side
have seen any of those yet, so far as I know."

"You didn't see me with the girls," Edith
reminded him, and chastened, he fell silent. "Though...that wasn't
quite a rout," she admitted a minute later, her tone quiet but
proud. They held their own fairly well."

"I believe it," Dorran said. By now they had
wandered out of the healers' tent, and Dorran took a breath of what
remnants of once-fresh summer air they could get in what had
become, in essence, a huge battlefield. He stared up at the sky; a
few thin, distant white clouds were scattered overhead, but below
that was the low-hanging smoke that meant someone was starting in
on the work of burning bodies. He said his goodbyes to Edith and,
too tired to consider going all the way back to his lodgings, found
a place to lean out of the way and drifted off under the light of
the mid-morning, edging into noon.

Dorran awoke a few hours before evening when
the sun disappeared behind the castle, his face almost numb from
the burns it had taken from sun and wind.

He spent the next several hours patrolling
the wall with small patrols, but it appeared that the enemy was as
exhausted by the strange timing of attacks as were the capital's
defenders. He went to a brief strategy meeting that evening, but
there was not much new to say. Vernis and several of the older
soldiers predicted that now that the King's army had tried
attacking in the dark once, they would stick to more normal battle
times in the future, and Dorran saw no reason not to believe them.
They also said that the next large-scale attack might signal the
end of the army's strength, but Dorran didn't know whether or not
to believe that, and decided on private pessimism in the meantime,
just in case.

After the meeting, with twilight falling over
the capital, he wandered quietly around the outer streets, from
campfire to campfire. He saw Kell waving to him from one and waved
in return, but didn't come over. He watched a circle of children
around a fire from a distance, listening as one child awoke wailing
from a nightmare, or after a day like today, perhaps only a memory,
and the other children converged to comfort their companion. He
considered stopping by the temporary lean to that had taken the
role of a mortuary, but feared he lacked the heart to see faces he
recognized there. He promised himself he would return when the
night was over, but when he found his feet carrying him to the
infirmary instead of to his small tent near the outskirts of the
capital, he did not intervene.