A Stranger to Command

by Sherwood Smith

  Furtive exchanges of looks: Wards?

  “Think of ’em as magical walls.” Senrid gestured with his hands. “Anyway, the comms are going to the scouts. Yes, I know Norsunder has to have been behind all their deaths before. All we can hope is that they don’t know the new ones. A few of my picks might surprise them.” That sudden, unpleasant toothy grin. “So anyway, there’s nasty rumor in the east. A renegade Chwahir who actually knows how to command. All I can gather is that Norsunder doesn’t trust him because he’s hard to control. They like efficient obedience. This Kessler Sonscarna is efficient at dealing death, but he’s not so quick with the obedience.”

  Senrid paused for the inevitable rustles and whispers. “Yes, he’s related to the terrible old king of Chwahirsland, and no, I don’t know if they will sic him on us. My guess is, they want to use us, not slaughter us. Based on that guess, well, I’ve promised Keriam and the other commanders that I will run if Norsunder crosses the border in force. I know the Norsundrians want me—Detlev told me so before he got me last time. He doesn’t waste breath on empty threats.”

  Now they were all silent.

  “So they won’t get me.” Senrid gave that grin again, but his fingers drummed on every surface within reach as he walked back and forth across the front of the room. “Nor are they going to get you, I’ve decided. They’d love to have all the training you get. Just take away your brains, and they’ve got ready-made low ranking commanders to fight and die for Norsunder.”

  More whispers, which ended with a shush from the rear.

  “Here’s the new orders. You won’t speak ’em until—if—when—it happens. When I disappear, that’s the signal for you to take the entire academy and vanish. We’re going to practice that in new games until... well, we’ll see. Anyway, you’re going to call it a game, and we’re going to make it fun at first.”

  Shevraeth grimaced. He could hear tension in everyone’s breathing around him. A game that wasn’t a game—life and death, though they were all game-playing age. They shouldn’t have to—

  Nobody should have to.

  Pay attention!

  “. . . hiding places, but also the skills of vanishing into crowds. That’s what I’m forcing the cavalry to do, if the attack is by magic. It’s going to be part of training everywhere. Cav will blend themselves into horse studs, stables, training centers, ironmongeries. Foot command into cities, into the mines. Norsunder should not be able to lay a hand on anyone with training that they could enchant and use against us, or against outsiders. Got it?”

  The boys and girls saluted, some exchanging looks.

  “That’s it. Rules for the first games will come down soon. Remember: to the academy, it’s all new games, because everyone is sick of Dish Field and Sweat Hill and our traditional campsites. Don’t use the word ‘traditional.’ Use the words ‘old’ and ‘boring.’ I know some of the older Jarls will be getting up on their hind legs and barking at me about tradition at the games, so I want their little boys, and the girls, too, all talking about old and boring camps, and new and exciting games. Nothing about tradition.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s all.”

  They got up, now everyone talking at once as they filed out. Shevraeth caught Senrid’s gaze, and was not surprised to see the flick of a hand meaning ‘stay.’

  So he sat down, waiting for the inevitable questions by some that required Senrid to repeat everything he’d just said. Some people need that, Shevraeth thought: everything repeated to them. It must be reassuring. Or maybe they don’t get all the new ideas on the first round.

  But at last they’d cleared out, leaving Shevraeth alone with Senrid, who still shed tension like water off a dog’s back.

  When Senrid saw Shevraeth tense up, he tried to control his own emotions. This foreigner, related to him so distantly, hadn’t made his unity—what the Old Sartorans called dena Yeresbeth—but his kids probably would, if he ever had any. Meantime, he picked up on people’s moods without being aware that he was doing so. Senrid had to work to get his own mental shields up.

  He said, “A quick question.” (Knowing the answer, but he’d learned it relaxed people a little when you follow the forms, especially when everything else was changing rapidly, and not necessarily for the better.) “You want to be sent back now?”

  Shevraeth, as expected, rejected the idea before he even spoke. It was the twitch of irritation between his brows, the slight withdrawal, that expressed his opinion more forthrightly than his polite “No thank you.”

  Senrid also knew why. Three years here had not changed Vidanric Renselaeus’s Remalnan loyalties a whit—but he’d been away long enough for the question not to call up automatic notions of patriotic duty. In fact, from what Senrid had learned about Remalna during a couple of covert visits, it would be difficult for anyone to feel any sense of patriotic duty... that is, not in the immediate sense. The kingdom was under worse threat from a rotten king—a king fast becoming evil—than from Norsunder, so Shevraeth didn’t worry about going home to help defend it. He wouldn’t be allowed to, and the king might arrange one of his ‘accidents’ if Shevraeth tried.

  Shevraeth saw it first as a question of cowardice, and that much was habit of three years here.

  As for the long-term sense of patriotic duty, well, that was why they were here right now, alone, with no witnesses so that Senrid could ask the question he’d been evolving in his mind off and on for the past year or so—ever since he’d figured out why the Sartoran-trained Prince of Renselaeus had really sent his son here.

  He had chosen this day to ask his question, and this moment, because he wanted to be looking full in Shevraeth’s face when he asked it.

  Not that it was going to take question form.

  “You understand the why of the new plan?” he began, approaching the matter obliquely.

  Shevraeth’s brows lifted at the sudden shift in subject, but the momentary resentment was gone. Shevraeth was not a resentful person by nature. “I believe so,” he said with his customary caution. “The idea is to preserve lives by having the academy hide either in some remote place, or else in plain sight in some city, doing tasks related to what we—they—we have learned? Since no army, no matter how well trained, can fight against magic.”

  “Yup,” Senrid said. “It was Keriam’s idea. And it took me a couple of years to get used to it, so that means it’ll probably take ten—twenty—maybe a generation for Marlovens to get used to it. But here’s the real plan, the plan behind the plan, you could say. I want the people to learn something besides fighting. Because, as a friend of mine who also got stuck with a throne at way too young an age pointed out to me not too long ago, if you train an army in nothing but fighting, well, they’re going to want to fight, right? Which is why her kingdom—which is roughly three times the size of yours—hasn’t a single warrior. Not even one. Whereas here, everyone, including me, has been raised up thinking of war as a way of life.”

  Shevraeth’s brow furrowed as he considered the insight, and Senrid sprung his trap.

  “Which is what you are going to need to consider when you become king of Remalna.”

  And watched Shevraeth’s face drain of color, followed by a flush of angry red. Anger—a repudiation so violent it was almost nausea—made him flinch.

  And Senrid struggled to hide his relief. He had judged right. He had, he had!

  But he wasn’t going to show that, either.

  Shevraeth raised a hand, struggling to assemble words strong enough to deny the very idea. Senrid cut him off with all the scoff he could muster. “Oh, spare us both the humble disclaimers. You reached the age you are now knowing you’d one day be a prince, so what’s so stunning about a single rank-step up? Or are you ready to fight me in order to preserve the very idea of Galdran’s royal rights?”

  Shevraeth’s mouth had opened. He shut it, and swallowed painfully.

  “Go on,” Senrid said, as if he’d spoken. “Why did your father send you here, if you really were going to
go back and spend the rest of your life hiding all the skills you learned?”

  Shevraeth swallowed again, shocked, sickened. “I am. Not. Going to go back and lead a revolution. Get people killed.”

  But Senrid sat on the edge of his commander’s desk, swinging his leg and smiling with the twisted, knowing smile of...

  Of someone who had already trod every step of that path, and at a far younger age.

  Senrid, watching carefully, saw realization cool Shevraeth’s thoughts like snow on fire. Numbing snow, that chills you right down to the bone.

  “One day,” Senrid said softly, “Galdran is going to go too far. By that I mean he’ll be threatening and endangering more lives than any revolution would. It happened here, with my uncle, and I had to act, ill-prepared as I was. Young as I was, though I never got much of what anyone else would call a childhood, which is mostly protection from adult responsibility, far as I can see.”

  Shevraeth opened his hands, his gaze steady. “Go on.”

  No more of that courtly ‘your majesty.’ And even less of that wretched ‘My father says.’ Good. “It might be the week you return. It might be in twenty years. Or, you may never have to do anything—he might challenge Norsunder, or try to scrape together an army and seek to smother the wrongs he’s committed by making war against one of your neighbors, and conveniently die in battle. More likely he’ll linger at the back and send that bully of a cousin, or nephew, I forget his name, the one he made a baron last year. If I were him I’d look to Mardgar first, as they have the best harbor at your end of the continent. Though they are fiercely good at defending themselves—and he’d have to get through Renselaeus first, wouldn’t he? So... what can you do to prevent that?”

  Shevraeth swallowed again. His skull seemed to be ringing like a struck bell. Someone else said with his voice, “I can go back and train Renselaeus’s Riders. So that no one crosses our borders.”

  “Exactly. Test all your ideas there. Try what works for the people you live among before you have to use it. Not many rulers ever get that chance.”

  Shevraeth looked stricken, so Senrid said, “Best get back now. You seniors will be running the first hiding games with the little ones first. Scarfle ’em good if they get by without being seen. Make the first and second-year colts long to be in on the fun. Stad will have the plans. But everything else as always.”

  Shevraeth nodded absently. Senrid watched him go, relieved beyond measure. He’d initially taken Shevraeth into the academy because he was a distant relation—because he was curious how a distant relation would handle himself—because he wanted to test the academy with a foreigner among them—for many immediate reasons. He hadn’t thought ahead about the future effects. Now he was learning to.

  Shevraeth obviously had thought a lot about kingship in the theoretical sense. He was probably getting plenty of grim news from home, which was partly why Senrid had given him the magic case, so he wouldn’t be worrying for the six months in between courier trips.

  Senrid had made a lot of mistakes ever since he’d fallen into kingship, but this was one of the few things he was going to count as a success. Because when he snapped his verbal trap, Shevraeth’s first reaction had not been the glory and glitter of crowns. His thoughts had gone straight to their neck-bending, back-breaking weight.

  FORTY-TWO

  Shevraeth never remembered walking to the barracks, where the seniors were singing old songs and drumming. He was too busy arguing with Senrid in his head.

  By the next day, while his body went through the motions of lance drill, contact and staff fighting with the rest of his House, archery practice, knife fighting with the small boys, sword drill on foot and mounted, then cavalry maneuvers mounted, he had shifted to arguing with himself.

  Of course his father wasn’t cold-bloodedly raising him to take over the throne.

  Well, it was true that Galdran Merindar was a rotten king.

  Of course there were plenty of heirs, even if the king did not produce or name one. Galdran hadn’t married yet, and what was he, fifty? Near it, anyway. And he hated his sister. Though that would not stop her from ruling, if he died. Either her or her children.

  Fialma would be even worse as queen, but the marquise was trying to marry her off to foreign princes to gain power and more wealth. Flauvic?

  Shevraeth was fighting from horseback with the second-year colts as he considered Flauvic and Fialma Merindar.

  Fialma had always been loud, nearly unmanageable, and cruel. The very first time he saw her, he remembered her shrill, shrieky voice when the court children were all going in to be served iced fruit on a hot summer’s day, and she’d pushed her way past everyone saying that she was to go first because her uncle was the king, and one day she’d be a queen. And when one of the girls (he couldn’t remember which) laughed at her, saying she couldn’t marry her uncle, she’d screamed that she would be queen of Colend and pushed the girl into the ornamental pond. Then there was a flurry of adults and Fialma was borne away by her smiling mother.

  The next day she’d been sulky but quiet, her eyes red. That had happened frequently; the girls later reported that Fialma tried to catch small animals in order to ‘punish’ them, and she only smiled if she was caught at it. By the time Vidanric was fifteen, all the local animals around Athanarel Palace hated her even more than he did.

  Flauvic had never done anything like that. But still, Shevraeth had never liked Flauvic. It wasn’t because the adults cooed about his prettiness and perfection. They’d cooed over how handsome Savona was, and above all they’d cooed over Tamara’s beauty. Shevraeth never cared about how much the adults liked Savona’s looks. If anything, he felt brotherly pride. As for Tamara, pretty or not, he had learned to stay away from her when she was temperamental, but he’d always liked her when she laughed and did generous things. Flauvic had never laughed—now that Shevraeth thought about it, he wondered why he’d never noticed. Flauvic had never laughed, young as he was. Smiled, yes. It was his mother’s smile, cool and knowing, and it never reached their watchful Merindar eyes.

  “Shevraeth. You all right?”

  Shevraeth looked up. “Mmmm?”

  Marec opened his hand toward the horse under Shevraeth. The animal gazed over the fence after the others, who had been freed to run around the paddock. The mare’s ears twitched. A first-year girl waited by the halter.

  Senelac and the older girls were nowhere in sight.

  “Oh.” Shevraeth’s face heated up. “Ah.”

  “So I repeat. You all right?” Marec said over his shoulder as he walked away.

  “Oh, fine. Sure.” Shevraeth leaped down, handed the reins to the waiting girl, and ran to catch up with him. “Just day-dreaming about—”

  Marec grinned. “Girls.”

  Shevraeth forced a grin back. “Right.”

  The mess bell rang, and they found themselves surrounded by the rush of hungry boys. At the senior table talk was fast, covering games, lessons, and duty.

  After lunch, it was Shevraeth’s turn for perimeter patrol. He set out on his long walk all round the academy, his mind slipping into memory. Flauvic—who never did anything wrong, but who used sarcasm, in his soft, precise voice, as a weapon. Not that he did it often. But—

  “Got you!”

  “No, you didn’t—”

  “I saw you!”

  The small boys snickered, running toward the passage between the lower and upper schools.

  “You’re dead,” Shevraeth called, realizing where he was and what had happened. “If he saw you, you’re dead.”

  The boys stuttered to a stop, one with mouth open, the other hopping about, crowing, “Five points for us! Five points for us! Five points for us, ha-ha, Sniffer!”

  Sniffer ignored the enemy, scowling at Shevraeth. “What’s the use of a game where you don’t take prisoners, and get to fight free?”

  “A game in which you’re dead if they find you,” Shevraeth said.

  Sniffer sighed, and h
is rival followed him to the barracks, teasing all the way.

  Shevraeth continued on to the lower school. His ears registered the sound of a small boy breathing above his head. Bad idea, to hide along a fence top—but it was not his part to search or to comment on hiding places, only to see that the rules were obeyed.

  The voices of small boys ricocheted off stone in the distance. Play, no problem. So he did not break stride as his mind ricocheted to golden-eyed, statue-perfect Flauvic Merindar. Shevraeth recalled the relief he’d felt on learning that Flauvic was being sent to a foreign court to be a page. That had happened not long before his father sent him here to Marloven Hess. Flauvic had mostly ignored him, concentrating his knife-sharp tongue on Savona, the obvious leader of the boys. Until the last couple of years Flauvic had always won verbal duels because Savona lost his temper so easily—even though Flauvic was so much younger. Savona had finally learned to control his temper and even to turn Flauvic’s fleering jabs into jokes. Then Flauvic was gone.

  Gone to a foreign court, no doubt studying kingship. The marquise would see that her son be named heir if she could. He was smart, he was being trained, and he was a Merindar.

  So that was that.

  . . . for the rest of the day.

  When Shevraeth lay down to sleep that night, his body tired as always, his mind flared right up like a Fire Stick, this time presenting him with all the adults he knew. Why not any of them? Why, for that matter, he thought later, as he turned over for the fourth time, not his father himself? He was only ten years or so older than Galdran.

  The urge to slip into the rec room and write a letter was strong enough to cause him to sit up in bed, but then he lay down again. If he was certain his father had the letter case, he would. But for the first time, he didn’t want Savona reading a letter first. He wasn’t even sure he wanted his mother reading it. The subject not only seemed fraught with danger but it was, well, kind of embarrassing, if anyone misunderstood. They might think he had suddenly decided he was going to be a king, when it wasn’t that way at all.