Regin's Field, Kingdom of Taruschkan

⸻

3rd Awaiting, 678th Year of the Common Reckoning

Morning light streamed too brightly into the tent where Jakob lay sprawled across Gerta's ample bosom, which rose and fell with the gentleness of lazy slumber. He wanted to claim that as his own doing but his companion had done more than enough for the both of them last night; in the end, he was content to call it a draw.

Now that he thought about it, there was little about Gerta that he could not call ample, which was just the way he liked it. His finger traced a line up her right thigh near the hem of the thin blanket that folded up over her side but covered nothing else. The day was yet cool and so he clutched at the fabric to pull it over himself when Gerta's hand swatted at his.

"Get your own," she slurred, a warm smile parting thick and redded lips. Her shoulder-length hair fell in dark curls across her freckled cheeks.

It occurred to Jakob then as it had many times before that Gerta must have been a great beauty in the days of his father. Perhaps she had been slimmer then, her now-lined face flushed with youth rather than delight, before time and births he had never asked her to number for him had brought a softness to her waist and belly that gave way pleasantly to his touch. But at present he found no need for great beauty; only constancy, vigor, and will, which the peddler held in surprising abundance for a pikeman far too many years her junior.

This is soldiering, he thought, and there's nothing like it in the world.

His thoughts wandered to what he might do with her to mark another morning on the march when the tent flap was thrown completely open, exposing the inside of the tent and everyone in it. Where privacy had been only a moment before, now a sergeant armed with a baston and two pikemen took its place.

Lodric, Jakob realized as he squinted in the sunlight.

He hated Lodric.

The other two soldiers looked too fresh for Jakob to have much of an opinion on yet. One was a redheaded whelp and the other on the right had shaved his head, probably on account of lice. If they yet survived the coming march and siege long enough, then perhaps Jakob could grow to hate them as well.

Jakob's hand sprung for the blanket again but found no purchase. The sergeant grinned at that, revealing a broken front tooth under his greasy black mustache, while the pikemens' gaze fell rather on Gerta. The one on the right blushed, looking no more than a boy. Jakob could not blame them for it but at the same time, he also felt the rising urge to put out their eyes with his thumbs. Only shock froze him in place.

"We have orders to take you to the captain," Lodric said, air whistling through the shattered gap in his smile. "At once."

Gerta squinted at the three soldiers but otherwise did not stir or even move to cover herself. Nothing she could show them was something any man in this company had not seen before.

Well, except perhaps for the boy.

"What is it this time, Lodric?" she asked. "Your lieutenants lose their sidearms at dice again?"

The sergeant's scarred face flushed for a moment.

"Not you," Lodric spat back. "Him."

His gaze shifted back to Jakob and he found himself truly at a loss for what he had been caught doing this time.

Gerta only scoffed.

"Can I at least get dressed first?" he asked, hoping to appeal to Lodric's good humor if not his sense of pity.

The sergeant did not tell him no but only gripped the thick baston in his fist harder and tapped it against his knee with greater impatience.

Jakob scrambled for his hose and pulled them on hurriedly, along with a stained shirt. He could lace them up on the way. His shoes were by the tent flap where he had left them last night but Lodric did not look eager to wait long for him so he stuffed his feet inside, leaving the soles of his hose bunched up awfully.

The two pikemen stepped back outside and gripped the weapons of their trade as if in preparation for trouble. Jakob regretted only that he was unprepared for any.

"After you," Lodric said and gestured gracefully with his baston.

Jakob did as he was told but snuck one last glance back at Gerta before the tent flap closed. The peddler winked once and then rolled back over to sleep. Nothing for as long as he could remember had made him wish himself back in that tent as that.

Instead, Fortune had set her hand to meddling in his affairs once more. Under different circumstances, he might have found himself lucky to be the object of affection for two women. Gerta's charms, however, were too easily won and Fortune's whims too easily swayed. There could be no peace caught as he was between a pair of fickle lovers.

All around him, the camp of the Company of the Star readied itself for the march. Pikemen packed away what few tents they had; those who slept under the stars only pulled on their clothes or stood around dwindling and smoking campfires.

And gawked at the sight of Jakob being led about as if he were a prisoner. He felt the eyes on him as if they were tongues of flame but refused to show it. Let them wonder how they affected him. The truth of him was not theirs to know.

So Jakob only walked on, grinning as if nothing were amiss and fiddling with the laces on his hose and shirt until they would not fall to the ground and give the assembled company something else at which to stare.

One pikeman, a burly lieutenant whose name Jakob had never cared to remember, gazed at him with a hungry smile, as a rabid dog might when set before a basket of ducklings.

"Morning," Jakob said to him, which set the other soldiers around the lieutenant to howling laughter.

There was no hiding then, he thought. Not from Captain Reral nor the over five thousand men under his command.

Jakob felt a sudden shame well up inside him and stamped it out as best he could. He should have grown more accustomed to being so exposed by now, and not merely because he was still pulling on and tying his underclothes. No, it was a deeper shame that rose up from a deeper fear than he ever wanted to confront again. One that none truly knew yet many suspected, which was bad enough on its own.

The captain's tent loomed ahead, peaked in the center on high wooden poles and jauntily striped in the Company of the Star's red and yellow livery. On each flap hung a rising star quartering a tall knight's shield with the arms of the Houses of Reral and Marament. Old Joris Marament was now long in the grave but something at least still remained of him. How much of Jakob would remain after this, he could only guess.

Lodric snapped to attention when the guards at the captain's tent opened the flap for him.

"Sir!" the sergeant barked and saluted with his baston.

Inside, Captain Reral stood with his back to the entrance. His cuirass gleamed over the top of an elaborate doublet of cream-colored silk slashed with red and embroidered with gold thread. Beside him stood a table piled high with documents: maps, orders, letters, and other such things not meant for Jakob's eyes.

Heavy hands fell on Jakob's shoulders next and he found himself on his knees. It must have been surprise that kept him from fighting back; his better judgment had long since fled.

The captain only stared ahead at a tapestry he had commissioned some time ago to mark the Company's defeat at Valest when he had been a pikeman about Jakob's age. Snow-capped peaks worked in white thread rose into a sunlit sky as figures afoot and ahorse danced to their deaths upon a field of brown chaff, where some five hundred men had fallen as Oravian wheat before the Anaschen thresher.

Jakob knew little of tapestries but assumed it was fine enough work. What he did know was that most men would not have commissioned such a work to mark a defeat but in that and many ways, Norianic Reral was not like most men.

"Leave us," the captain said, still not turning to face his visitors. He did not need to. The broken-toothed sergeant and pock-faced lieutenant retreated with only a nod. Silence settled on the captain and Jakob as the tent flap closed behind them.

The captain tossed a familiar piece of cloth at where Jakob knelt on the tent's elaborate rug.

Jakob's gaze drifted first to one of the amulets he had sold for far more than even he had anticipated. Protection against enemy shot for his fellow soldiers, protection against hunger for himself; that had been his motive. But now that he saw even that fragile promise had run out and left him at the mercy of a more immediate danger, he turned his attentions to the rug and its intricate Irritaschian designs. One could truly lose themselves in those twisting lines and shapes, or at least he hoped so.

"A cunning forgery, I admit," Captain Reral said, "but obvious. The Testator's seal should be in green wax, not red. And I must wonder at whom you conspired with to write them, unlettered as you are."

Jakob wondered if he should take that as an insult or a compliment and settled in the end on a little of both. A forger and a cheat he may be but one thing he was not was a telltale. Besides, Haren had not the stomach nor the blood for punishment that Jakob had.

"This is not the first time," the captain continued.

No, Jakob thought.

"Nor is it the second."

No.

"Perhaps if it had been only the third..."

"Perha-" Jakob started but a withering glare from the captain left the word to die in his open mouth.

"You know, I am quite unlike many other men in my position. I rather believe that it is a man's ambitions, his actions, that determine his station in life, not simply his blood or the stars under which he was born. Do you agree?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps if you did, then I should not have to see you so often in this manner."

Silence passed too long between them and then Jakob had a terrible idea; he spoke it aloud.

"When else should you like to see me then, father?" he asked.

The captain weathered that provocation with only the faintest narrowing of his eyes.

"I could have you run through the gauntlet, you know."

"Why not?"

"I would order it myself if I thought it might actually teach you anything."

Was it pride that Jakob felt then? A knowledge that even the taint of bastardy was not enough to cause his father, the proud Norianic Reral, to forsake his own blood to torment?

If it was not pride he felt, then its taste was much the same. It was a taste he had savored each time that the lashes and cudgels usually reserved for other men had—by luck, by blood, or else by the grace of God—passed him by.

Jakob thought often as he did now that he was too unlike his father in some ways but in this one aspect they were precisely the same: namely, in believing that a man got what he deserved and deserved what he got.

It only stood to reason, then, that what he didn't get, he didn't truly deserve.

"I must thank you, then, for your generosity," Jakob said, making to stand up and barely restraining the grin that turned up the corners of his mouth.

It all but disappeared as his father squinted and rubbed his beard between his forefinger and thumb as he did before sending other men to die.

"But then I must think also of morale."

And at that, Jakob found himself truly speechless for the first time for as long as he could remember. His father—no, the captain—continued.

"What would the Company see in a captain's son who avoided the same education that I might give to them without a second thought? We cannot risk such sentiments spreading on the eve of battle. No, it would set an unfair standard for the men to see you given such treatment as they would not receive themselves."

"But Captain!" Jakob cried out first, and then, "Father..."

Captain Reral made a clucking sound with his tongue.

"Consider this payment on a debt long owed but never redeemed. If you are to live a soldier's life, as I promised your mother that you would, then you must receive a soldier's education. Pain is a most effective teacher."

The gauntlet, Jakob thought. Lines of soldiers with clubs and staffs on either side of him, through which he would be made to walk and live or die at their hands. He had seen it before; everyone in the Company had, at one time or another. He had seen men die of it just as easily as they had lived.

There were fouler punishments but none that might let him live, and that much was still in question. Unbidden, an image of Lodric appeared in his mind, towering over him twice as tall as in truth, waving that baston of his with gleeful abandon. Even before those cursed amulets, Jakob could have counted a dozen or more men who would forsake wine and women both to stand in the lines to beat him. Now, he feared that the captain may have to draw lots if only to lessen their number.

"Please," Jakob said but there was no strength in his voice. All his nineteen summers faded away as late spring snow and in that moment he felt the most like a child as he could remember.

The captain was unmoved.

"You are a strong boy," came his father's only reply.