Fortress Walls

Chapter IV, Part 1

Twdich University Campus, Sagewick, West Norgath.

There were larger college towns in the Eastern Continent than Sagewick, but none more renowned than the town that boasted Twdich University. Nestled in the verdant western lands of Norgath, where the vineyards produced wine craved all over the civilized world, it was a school exclusively for the noble and scholastic elite. Twdich had graduated more famous kings and scholars than any other university, and the faculty were all distinguished professors, many of them alumni who had never left.

The campus was ancient and beautiful, old stone buildings with a vaguely mysterious air; dorms with oak doors, tall windows, and gabled roofs; a magnificent church; lecture halls like the hulls of ships. Student life dominated the quaint stone village of Sagewick and gave it its soul. Twdich owned not only the town, but five hundred acres of surrounding land, set aside for student recreation and outdoor studies.

There was not a young man or woman there who wasn’t fiercely loyal to their school, so the first week of the semester was always a chaotic, joyful party as students reunited with their friends and moved back into their old dorms. Two boys in particular, who had left home with heavy hearts, could almost forget their worries in the happy mess of settling in.

As second-year students, they’d been upgraded to a bigger room, and Phineas took the opportunity of the high raftered ceiling to not only claim the top bunk but also jump on the bed, reveling in the absence of a stuffy father and stuffy servants. The freedom seemed to be going to his head. Cass nearly had a heart attack when Phineas lost his balance and fell down the ladder, but the young lord merely sat up chortling at his friend’s horror and went to unpack his things.

They were nearly done when the door slammed open. They looked up, startled, to see a third boy framed in the doorway, a redhead, standing in the most dramatic pose he could muster.

“I have arrived,” he announced.

“Sutton!”

~

Lord Clade was working at the palace that day, and for once he hadn’t asked Hektor to accompany him, so the young aide had the larger part of the day off.

Outside, it was cloudy and cool—not too cold, but he didn’t like being cold at all, so he sat in Clade’s study, slumped at the lord’s desk, his knitting needles clicking along with the crackle of the fire in the grate.

He liked the quiet of his lord’s study. He had permission to be there any time, and no one else would dare to bother him, which meant his peace would go undisturbed for hours until Clade returned. But something was pricking at his mind, unsettling him, and every once in a while he paused his knitting and stared out the window, wondering what on earth he could be forgetting.

Eventually, perturbed, he got up and went down to the kitchen to make himself some tea.

It was a busy time of day for everyone except him. He slipped into the hot, crowded place, doing his best to stay out of the way as he snagged a teapot and heated water on the stove. While he waited, he washed a few dishes to make up for his interference. It was a sort of pact he had with the kitchen staff. As soon as he was done, he took the pot, a mug, and a sachet of tea leaves back up to the study on a tray and sat down to brew it.

He stared into the mug meditatively as he waited, as if hoping the fragrance of the tea would jog his memory.

He took a sip, scalded his mouth, and sat up straight.

Clade’s letters. That was it. It wasn’t something he’d forgotten to do—it was something he felt he should do.

He went to the desk and emptied one of the lower drawers, snapping the hair that he knew fastened it closed to alert his lord of any prying. He’d tell Clade later that it had been him who broke it. He piled the letters from the drawer on the desktop, pushing bric-a-brac out of the way to make room, and began looking through them, skimming each one for details and scribbling down the most important points of each on a sheet of scrap paper. Each one that he finished reading, he set aside in another pile based on importance. He gulped his tea and worked hard, warming to the task he’d set himself. He knew Lord Clade trusted him with delicate matters like these, and he loved his master enough to take this initiative to protect him. The sooner these were sorted and disposed of, the better.

After a few hours, he looked up, puzzled at the change in the light that filtered in through the window. Suddenly tired, he got up and peeked out the window. The clouds had cleared a bit; it was probably mid-afternoon.

He went back to the desk and gathered up the letters he’d sorted. The latest few he replaced in the drawer, the majority he stuffed in his pockets, and several he put in new envelopes, sealed, addressed, and broke the seals again. These few he slipped into the messenger’s bag hanging on the doorknob, which would be collected soon, to be delivered the next day.

He built up the fire in the grate then, feeding it into a roaring blaze with the letters he’d pocketed until the pile was nothing but undiscernible ashes underneath the flames.

When Lord Clade returned home around five, he found Hektor asleep on the desk with his head pillowed on his arms, hair tousled and hands ink-stained, an empty mug with tea stains in the bottom sitting nearby, and a look of content on his face.

Clade smiled fondly and placed a hand on his aide’s shoulder, shaking him gently. Hektor blinked and sat up, rubbing his eyes. When he saw who it was, he leapt to his feet and bowed. “My lord!”

“You look like you were busy today,” Clade said with a smile.

“I was. I’ll tell you what I did tonight, after supper. Would you like anything, my lord?”

Hardly awake a minute, and already willing to help. Clade looked at him fondly. “Some tea, Hektor, thank you.”

The boy bowed, collected his own mug, and trotted down to the kitchen again to make a new pot of tea.

Clade settled into his chair. Before Hektor returned, there was a knock on the study door, and the messenger came to collect his bag.

~

Tariq was exhausted like he’d never been exhausted before. He hadn’t expected the special training to be easy, of course, but he hadn’t known it was possible for any training to be this hard. In the outside world, it was September and the days were getting shorter. For Tariq and his fellow trainees, they got longer.

Captain Thierry didn’t have a shred of mercy in his hard soul. He worked the men like cattle, and already he’d dropped four of them from the corps simply for complaining about aching limbs. He pushed the remaining fifty-six to their limits and then past them. He lived under the philosophy that it was only the mind that grew tired and gave up—as long as the mind stayed strong, the body could keep going until it died. He did his utmost to impose this philosophy on the unfortunate group of young men he’d chosen. They would get up before dawn for a grueling workout while the rest of the battalions slept; they’d drag themselves into breakfast in the mess hall late, sweaty and almost too tired to eat, while their friends hid their smiles and were secretly very glad they hadn’t been chosen. After that, the trainees would follow the same morning schedule as the others, until the midday meal, when they attended another training session with Thierry instead of eating. This one, technically, was stealth training, but somehow it was just as draining as the first.

The rest of the army had the afternoon off until supper, split by two-hour watch shifts—each man stood his shift once a week. Thierry allowed his trainees an hour break. Most of them used it to snatch a bite to eat or take a short snooze, except the kid named Corbin Stoll, who used the time to study—he dreamed of attending a university when he’d done his service years. After the break it was back to work. They spent the afternoon fulfilling whatever task Thierry set them. None of them really understood the point of the tasks, or why Thierry insisted on such a bizarre activity instead of standard training; all they knew was that if they were late back, they would be sentenced to endless push-ups and pull-ups.

As for the tasks, they were always different. One day it would be a ridiculously difficult scavenger hunt, the next day a game of Capture the Flag with the entire city of Toragon as the playing field, the day after that some infuriatingly tedious job like alphabetizing all the books in the public library. The day that Thierry ordered them to touch every roof in the city by suppertime, two more boys requested to drop out. Thierry let them; he didn’t want men who thought the privilege of being an ESAIC recruit wasn’t worth the pain.

After supper, Thierry gave them a long break—two full hours off. They could do whatever they wanted with it, though he recommended they attend an evening service at the Cathedral of the Seven Archangels. Not all, but most of them did. They ended the night with a long run, mobility training, and a couple hours studying politics, statistics, and strategy. As for watches, those whose weekly shift was during the day traded it, under Thierry’s orders, for a night shift. When the trainees could finally sleep, they slept like the dead.

It was a punishing schedule, but Tariq, who didn’t like anything, almost liked it. The harder he worked and the more his muscles and the stump of his left leg ached and burned, the easier it was to forget his memories and nightmares and the thoughts that had used to plague him in the small hours of the night. He began to almost look forward to the afternoon challenges, and he would tighten the straps on his false leg to be a little stronger and faster, trying to match his comrades who all had two legs and were stronger and faster than he could ever be. After a week, the boy whom nothing could motivate prayed not to be dropped from the special training and gave every day his all so he wouldn’t be. For the first time in years, from sheer exhaustion, he slept multiple nights in a row without dreaming.

At the end of that week Thierry gave them their first test.

He didn’t tell them he was testing them, of course. He wanted to see the effort they put in daily, not the effort they would put in to impress him. He disguised it as routine training, simply replacing the afternoon quest with a four-hour workout similar to the morning one, split by a short break. The men worked too hard to notice him taking notes, or notice the General Zarael slip into the gymnasium to whisper with Thierry and look admiring.

When the four hours were up, instead of dismissing them for supper, Thierry made the dripping soldiers sit down, and he read off the names of those he’d chosen to drop—nearly half of them. Those who were called were a bit disappointed, but mostly grateful to be able to return to normal army routine, which now seemed as easy as eating cake.

When they were all dismissed, Tariq got up with the rest and walked slowly out. He wasn’t unhappy with his result, but something inside him felt tight and uneasy.

“Wahidan. Stay here a minute.”

He stopped and turned around slowly as the gym door shut behind the last soldier. Thierry still stood at the end of the gym, the general lounging against a pillar beside him.

“Come here, Private. Don’t look so suspicious. You’re not in trouble. I just want to talk to you.”

Tariq was pretty sure he was in trouble; he approached warily and stood at attention, his eyes straight ahead. He was trying very hard not to make eye contact with either of them, as if he might get struck by lightning if he dared to look directly at someone so far above him in rank.

“At ease, Tariq.” Zarael smiled at him, trying to sound reassuring.

To Tariq, ‘at ease’ meant ‘you can stop saluting but you better not let your shoulders slouch,’ so he barely relaxed.

Thierry gestured to one of the narrow benches that lined the walls of the room. “Sit.”

Tariq sat. He gazed at the dust motes swirling in the beams of evening sunlight that filtered in through the high windows and hoped it would be over soon. He was hungry.

The general glanced at his pocket watch, straightened, and came over to pat Tariq on the back.

“I’m afraid I have to go, but Tariq, don’t let him intimidate you. His bark is worse than his bite.” He grinned, glancing at Thierry, who glanced back, irked.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Zarael said. As he made his way to the door, he stopped to whisper something to Thierry. Thierry closed his eyes, whether in assent or exasperation, Tariq couldn’t tell. They both watched Zarael leave, then the captain looked at Tariq, who at last relented to look sullenly back.

Thierry hesitated, then sat on the bench next to Tariq.

“It’s Tariq, isn’t it?”

Tariq nodded once.

Thierry hemmed and hawed a bit. He hadn’t the slightest idea how to talk to a teenager in a familiar way. The boy was eyeing him suspiciously, and at last, the captain decided it was too much effort to try and be familiar.

“I wasn’t going to pass you,” he said coldly. “When the general first gave me the list of names, I didn’t even want to consider recruiting a cripple.”

Tariq was silent. He could’ve told Thierry that.

“Would you show me your false leg?”

Tariq stiffened, but the captain allowed a small smile to crack his stone face. “Don’t worry. I just want to see it, I mean no offense. I just was curious—you don’t move like it’s a normal wooden leg.”

Slowly, Tariq removed his left boot and rolled up the pant leg. Metal gleamed underneath. Thierry bent to examine it. At his request, Tariq bent and straightened the knee, and wiggled the foot.

“You made this?”

Tariq nodded.

“When?”

“I came up with the original design and built it when I was eleven. I was a metalworker’s apprentice,” Tariq explained.

“Eleven!”

Tariq shook his head, pulling down his pant leg and putting his boot back on, self-conscious suddenly.

“It didn’t work very well. I had to keep remaking it since I was growing, so I kept developing the design. It’s still not perfect—it’ll never be a real leg—but it’s as good as I’ll ever get it, and I’ve taught myself to adapt my movements to work with its flaws.”

Thierry was looking at him incredulously. He didn’t say anything, but he seemed to be expecting more. Tariq blushed. He’d never thought his prosthetic such a big deal.

“I just borrowed an anatomy textbook from the public library to come up with a design that mimicked the tendon and muscle structure in a human leg,” he explained, increasingly embarrassed. “I made it to read the subtle movements of my stump and move the rods and wires accordingly.”

There was a moment of silence. Tariq sat fidgeting.

“You’ve considered studying at a university, haven’t you?” Thierry said. “Studying science, or engineering?”

“No, sir,” Tariq said. He hadn’t. There was no way he’d ever afford it.

“Why not?”

The captain sounded like he thought Tariq should. He sounded like he thought Tariq belonged there, not the military.

Tariq didn’t like it. He scowled. “I just haven’t, sir.”

Thierry sensed his discomfort and backed off. “Sorry,” he said, distant again.

Tariq nodded tightly.

“And thank you for showing me your prosthetic. I was curious. I didn’t expect a cripple to pass my test, but you did. I’m impressed, I admit. You’ve got potential, Private, and I can see you’re working hard to achieve it.”

He stood up. “You must be hungry. You can go. Keep up the good work.”

Tariq rose and saluted. “Yes, sir.”

Thierry watched him go through narrowed eyes.

There wasn’t much suppertime left, but Tariq dragged his feet on the way over to the mess hall. He wasn’t sure what to make of the conversation. He almost felt a bit proud and happy, but at the same time he wasn’t happy—he was glad the captain thought he had potential, but he was afraid to be glad.

It was complicated, because he hardly knew himself. His whole short life he’d worked to suppress his feelings—life was easier for someone like him if he didn’t have them. He could tinker around with metal and screws all he wanted, but it wouldn’t ever change how people saw him. Before Captain Thierry, no one had ever cared that he’d made a prosthetic that let him move almost normally. All they cared about was that it wasn’t a real leg, that he didn’t have a real leg. It was why his original parents had abandoned him, why the orphanage had had to pay a man to take him as an apprentice. If anything, that prosthetic had only brought him more trouble, since those draft officers couldn’t have taken a boy in a wheelchair even if they could take a boy with a limp.

Now, here was this cold, distant man saying all these strange things, and it confused him. You have potential. I’m impressed. You made that at age eleven! Have you considered studying engineering?

It was something totally new and strange to him, and he couldn’t tell if he was happy or not.

By the time he reached the mess hall, he’d decided it was too hard to feel happy—feel anything—so he went back to the safety of feeling nothing at all.