Fire and Honor

by M. S. Parker

  5

  When I finally found my voice, sort of, I asked what probably seemed like the most inane question ever. “What siege?”

  Whatever game he was playing, I didn’t feel like playing along anymore. For someone who'd served in the military, joking about things like sieges wasn't funny.

  But still...there were those gunshots I heard.

  Something was going on, and I needed to find out what it was. I was proud to serve my country, but my family was still my first priority. If they were in danger, I needed to understand the enemy.

  At this point, though, I wasn't sure if the enemy was out there somewhere, or here, sitting across from me.

  “The English,” Gracen said. “They arrived in early April. The city’s been under siege since then.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “The British are our allies. Why would they attack us?”

  He stood up and stretched, obviously impatient with my questions. “While the siege of Boston may perhaps be news, I can't imagine that there's a corner of the colonies that isn't aware of the rebellion.” He gave me a hard look. “Things will only get worse if you ask me. They named George Washington Commander in Chief. After Lexington and Concord, things will probably just get bloodier.”

  The words threw me back in time...or was it forward?

  I was suddenly at home again, a high school teenager too bored to do anything useful with her time. Bruce had gone to Virginia Beach on spring break with a couple of his cousins. He'd blown off my concerns, but that didn't stop me from worrying about what he'd do when I wasn't around to remind him that he had a girlfriend. I hadn't made too big of a deal about it though. I didn't want him to think that I didn't trust him.

  Still, I needed to get my mind off of things, and the only way to do that was fill my time with something useful.

  The only problem was, I had no idea what.

  I walked into my brother’s room. Ennis was resting his head on the palms of his hands, textbooks open around him as he studied for his upcoming finals. I strode in like I owned the place and plopped down on the bed, sighing loud enough to get his attention.

  “Not now, Honor,” Ennis said, flipping a page as he compared one text to the other.

  “I’m bored,” I whined, grabbing one of the many texts that were strewn all over his bed. “Give me something to do.”

  “Honor, seriously, I have work to do.” His irritation was clear in his voice, but I didn't pay any attention to it.

  It was an older brother's job to be annoyed by his little sister.

  “What is this stuff, anyway?”

  “It's called history, Honor. Maybe you should think about checking it out sometime. You know what they say about people who don't learn from it.”

  I scowled at him as I stood up and walked over to his desk. I peered over his shoulder. He had notes scribbled everywhere, the textbooks in front of him taking up half his working space. I squinted as I tried to read the small print, then quickly gave up. He wasn't wrong about my dislike of history. What the hell kind of major was that anyway? What did someone do with a history degree besides teach?

  I knew for a fact that Dad felt the same way. The only reason he'd agreed to pay for a year of college before Ennis enlisted was because he hoped my brother would figure out the futility of what he was doing.

  So far, it hadn't worked.

  “If you want to make yourself useful, you can summarize this,” Ennis said, pushing one of the textbooks aside and pointing at a passage he'd highlighted. “You do know how to do that, right?”

  I glared at him. I wanted to be a pediatrician, and I had the grades to support my ambition. Math and science may have been my strong point, but I wasn't a complete idiot when it came to English.

  Except, as I tried to wade through the dense prose I was supposed to be summarizing, I wondered if maybe I was an idiot. I barely got to the end of one sentence before I forgot the beginning of it.

  “Too much?”

  “Who the hell writes these things, anyway?” I snapped as I set the book back down in front of him.

  He chuckled and sat back, rubbing his eyes. “So, all you’ll ever know about American history is what you see on TV, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Why bother? It’s over and done with. The past is the past.”

  Ennis shook his head, wearing that condescending smile that drove me nuts. “That’s not why we learn history, Honor.”

  “Enlighten me then, oh wise one.”

  “If we know what we did wrong before, we can prevent it from happening again.”

  I raised an eyebrow, a little skeptical. “And how have we been doing so far?”

  “Terribly,” he admitted and gave me a sideways glance. “Probably because not many of us care to read about the past.”

  I punched his shoulder before looking back down at the textbooks and frowning. “So, you think we’ll stop making mistakes if we study all this stuff?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” He didn’t sound too convinced. “Maybe we’ll just understand the present and know how to better handle the future.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not buying it.”

  “Take this, for example,” Ennis said, turning a few pages back to find what he was looking for. “The Battle of Bunker Hill. The English charged up Breed’s Hill on June 17th, 1775 and defeated the colonial army there. In the process, they suffered so much loss that their initial plan of breaking out of Boston was lost. The battle resulted in a stalemate, but the fact that the colonial army had stood up to the British was enough to motivate Washington and keep the Revolution going.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “We lost,” I said. “How was that a motivator?”

  Ennis sighed and shook his head. “One day you’ll realize that numbers don’t matter, and sometimes even a win or loss of a battle doesn't matter. A small loss can be seen as a major victory if you look at the grand scheme of things. I guess maybe that's what I mean by learning from history. It's the ability to see the big picture.”

  I looked at Ennis, still skeptical, but I didn't want to ask for clarification. I didn't think he'd talk down to me, but I was pretty sure he'd bore me to death. He saw the look on my face and pushed at me, laughing as he did it. Closing the text book he'd read from, he tossed it at me.

  “Read, Honor,” he said. “It might just save your life one day.”

  “You don’t need this?” I asked, wondering just how much time it would kill.

  “Not now,” he said. “Give it to me after you've had a chance to learn something that isn't about numbers and theorems.”

  I read several chapters, I remembered, and had been pleasantly surprised by how interesting it had been when I looked at it the way Ennis had. If he did end up going into education, his students would be lucky to have him.

  I sat silently, staring at Gracen as he walked around in small circles. This had to be some sort of mistake. A Revolutionary War re-enactment actor who hit his head during the accident.

  Except it didn't explain the lack of city lights. The absence of my car and the highway. Before I could second guess myself, I forced the question I didn't want to consider.

  “What’s today’s date?”

  He thought a moment before he answered. “June sixteenth.”

  That, at least, was right, but the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach made me ask for clarification. “What year?”

  He crouched down in front of me, his gaze fixing on me in a way that made me want to squirm. “That is an odd question to ask.”

  “What year is it?” I asked again, unwilling to get into any unneeded arguments.

  “I had heard that education in some parts of the colonies was lacking, but I hadn't realized how much so.”

  I glared at him and ignored the insult. “The year,” I demanded.

  He hesitated, eyeing me closely, as if he wasn't sure if he should be worried about me. “Seventeen seventy-five,” he finally said.

  All the air left m
y lungs, and I leaned back.

  Fuck me.

  What the hell happened?

  6

  I remember the first time I truly felt like I had no control over the world around me.

  I'd been on my first tour, out on a reconnaissance mission that was supposed to go smoothly for a newbie medic like me. I'd been barely nineteen, freshly engaged, and still trying to wrap my head around where I was. I believed in what I was doing, and growing up in a military family, was aware of the risks.

  Knowing something and then knowing it, however, were two totally different things.

  Needless to say, my unit had been attacked in an area that we'd thought was safe. None of us had been prepared for the assault, and we'd lost two soldiers before I'd even had a chance to get to them.

  It was my first time witnessing death firsthand, deaths that I knew weren't my fault, but that I still blamed myself for. Logically, I knew that if I would've gone after them, I'd most likely have been killed too, and even if I hadn't, I most likely couldn't have saved them anyway. It hadn't taken away my guilt though. I told myself that there was nothing I could've done, that the entire thing had been completely out of my control, and a part of me knew it, remembered how the chaos had felt.

  That was one of those moments that had forever altered my way of thinking, my way of seeing the world, and I knew it wasn't only due to the deaths, but rather the stark realization that I had no control over any of it.

  This was another of those times.

  I leaned back against the tree, my mind caught in an endless spin as it tried to make sense of my situation. A part of me still wanted to believe that it was all a show, the figments of a mad man’s imagination. He was tricking me. It had to be that. It couldn’t be anything else.

  But it wasn’t like I could actually prove him wrong. My ankle made it almost impossible to get up on my own, and at the moment, I wasn’t even sure if it would help. If Gracen was as deranged as I knew he must be to expect me to believe his story, he would be on me before I managed to get more than a few steps. And based on what I'd seen, there wasn't anyone around who'd hear me if I yelled for help.

  I looked over at him as he lay on the ground in the protection of the brush, his hat cocked over his eyes as he snored. He'd fallen asleep for about an hour before but had already woken twice at the slightest sounds. Between my ankle and not knowing the terrain, I had little hope of being quiet enough to escape without him knowing it.

  I rested my head against the tree behind me, weighing my options. I knew my training would be next to useless with my ankle, unless he was stupid enough to come too close. It was the cane that worried me. It was a weapon that could be an issue if he was willing to use it. At that moment, I wished I'd revealed to him that I was a woman. Men had a habit of underestimating women, so if I tried to do something, he would probably try and grab me instead of using the cane. That would put me at an advantage.

  I watched him turn over, and when the next couple gunshots fired without waking him, I knew this was my most likely opportunity. I rolled over slowly, the twigs under me snapping as I moved. I kept my eyes locked on his back, seeing if the sounds would wake him. I remembered how my father could sleep through a marching band, just to wake up at the sound of my brother’s cough from across the hall.

  I prayed Gracen wasn’t similarly tuned to breaking twigs.

  When he still didn’t move, I risked pushing myself up, placing most of my weight on my good leg as I used the tree for support. The pain in my bad ankle had subsided, but I decided against trying to see how much I could use it. With any luck, I could get far enough without testing it too much, and, by morning, I'd be far from here, and the swelling would have gone down.

  I started to move in short hops, looking back once or twice to see if he'd woken up, but his back was still to me, and it didn’t seem like that was going to change. Feeling bolder, I quickened my pace, quickly pushing through the trees until I found myself on an open plain.

  That was when I realized that Gracen wasn’t crazy after all.

  There was no highway. There were no flashing lights from distant ambulances or the honking of cars. There were no towering buildings in the distance or the familiar Boston lights shining back at me. As far as I could see, the city I knew didn't exist.

  I could see Boston, but it was nothing like the Boston I knew.

  Gunshots blasted again, and I finally realized what was weird about them. They weren't the gunfire I'd become accustomed to in the army. Those weren't modern guns. Even if there was some sort of rational reason for why I kept hearing shooting from Boston, I could think of no reason as to why they'd be using old-fashioned guns.

  I didn't know how or why it had happened. I had no explanation for any of it, but it didn't matter.

  I was in the past. In 1775 Colonial America, to be specific.

  I tried to remember what I'd read in my brother’s book and realized that walking towards Boston would either get me killed or worse. The battle would be across the river, but still too close for comfort. Even if the British soldiers assumed that I was a man, I doubted they'd be inclined to be compassionate to someone sneaking around the night before a battle.

  Even though I now knew that Gracen was telling the truth about where – when – I was, he was still a stranger, and I didn't know where his loyalties lay.

  I did, however, know that I'd feel more comfortable with colonists than I would with the Brits. I didn't know where the army was, but I figured I would have better luck finding a “rebel” colonist out there somewhere than trying to sneak past the British army in Boston. My ankle was slowing me down, but I didn’t stop moving. I needed to get as far away from here as possible, especially since I knew exactly what was going to happen tomorrow.

  I found a road, keeping to the tree-line as I followed it, ready to hide if anything seemed out of the ordinary. My training was starting to kick in, my senses more alert, the darkness around me slowly becoming more comforting. I tried to make as little noise as possible, stopping as often as I needed to rest in the hopes that I wouldn’t collapse from fatigue. The truth was, I didn’t know half the extent of my injuries, and I had a feeling that my ankle was the least of my worries. The knot on my head throbbed in time with my pulse, which wasn't exactly comforting.

  I heard the sounds of footsteps ahead, and I quickly pushed deeper into the woods. I crouched down, making sure to keep my weight off my bad ankle, and watched the road. I listened closely, and soon, the sounds of men came closer. A few minutes later, they appeared, their coats brown, their muskets held against their shoulders as they patrolled down the road.

  Brown coats, not red ones.

  Colonials.

  This was my chance to get with people I'd be able to trust. I pushed myself to my feet, but just before I could make my presence known, something hard hit the back of my head.

  My knees buckled as the world around me started to go dark, and the last thing I knew before I passed out was that a pair of arms kept me from going to the ground.

  I came to with a deep, excruciating pain in the back of my head that made everything else I was feeling in my body seem like mild aches.

  My vision swam in and out of focus, and when I was finally able to blink the world back into proper view, Gracen was sitting a few feet away from me looking like he'd just been to hell and back. His hat was missing, his curls in wild disarray. His overcoat was draped over his shoulders like a cape, and he was holding his cane in both hands.

  I tried to move, and it was only when I couldn’t that I realized my hands had been tied together behind my back. The ropes dug into my skin, and I had a feeling that even if I were able to break free, the numbness would render them useless for a while.

  I glared at him, but he merely raised an eyebrow in response.

  “Untie my hands,” I demanded.

  His grip on his cane tightened even as his frown deepened. “Do you have any idea what you could have done?”

  �
�I have a pretty good idea, actually,” I hissed. “I'm not as stupid as you seem to think I am.”

  “You almost got us both killed,” he hissed back. “You’re a sympathizer, aren’t you? Or is it more than that? Are you a spy? A soldier?”

  “None of the above,” I said. And it was true. Technically. The army I was a soldier in didn't actually exist yet. “I just needed to get away from Boston.”

  “Why?” Gracen asked. Then, before I could decide whether or not to answer, he spoke again, “On second thought, don’t answer that. I can’t risk being seen with you. My family can’t be tied to sympathizers.”

  I struggled against the ropes, stopping only as they dug deeper into my skin. There was no way around it. If I wanted to leave, I’d have to talk my way out of this.

  “Listen, I’m grateful for what you’ve done,” I started, “but I can’t be here. I need to get home. There’s no reason for me to be here.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t let you go now. It’s too dangerous, and since I’m the only one of us who seems to understand how much, you’re staying put until dawn.”

  I regarded him carefully, weighing my options and quickly realized that I didn’t actually have any. “What then?” I asked.

  “Then you will be free to go,” he said. “You shall go your way, and I shall go mine.”

  I wanted to tell him that dawn would be a little bit too late, that the gunfire we were still hearing wouldn't stop but would become louder, closer. That by the time the sun came up tomorrow, things would get much more complicated.

  But I kept my mouth shut, unwilling to risk giving away who I really was and the time I was actually from. Besides, I doubted he’d believe me. I didn’t believe it myself, and I was living it.

  “So we wait?” I asked.

  He nodded and sat back, his eyes fixed on me as he tried to find a comfortable position. I tried to do the same, but my hands made that an impossibility. Between that and the insanity of the last few hours, I doubted I’d get any sleep. From the way Gracen was looking at me, it was a fair bet he wouldn’t be sleeping either.