Observing
1290 Words
*Isla*
The nightshade company is spread across the clearing in pairs and trios now. Some spar with wooden blades. Some drag weighted sledges over roots and stones. One poor bastard is hauling himself hand over hand up a rope while a supervisor times him without mercy.
Caelen stands near the far edge, half-turned toward a rough table someone has hauled into the shade. Maps are spread across it, pinned with knives. Two senior warriors stand with him, speaking low.
Even from here I feel that wrong pull in my belly. It is infuriating. He hasn't touched me. Hasn't smiled. Has barely given me three sentences that weren't an order. Still my body notices him as if the rest of the world is background and he is the blade in the center of it.
He looks up before I can look away.
His gaze lands on my wrapped shoulder, then the papers in my hand. A single nod. Approval, maybe. Or simple acknowledgment that I obeyed.
It should not warm me. It does.
Cedric notices where I'm looking and his whole posture changes. Not larger exactly, but stiffer. "You don't owe him gratitude for this."
"I don't recall saying I did."
"He enjoys forcing people to their edge."
"So do half the instructors here I am sure."
"You know what I mean."
Liora whistles softly. "Ah. Now we're having the interesting conversation."
"Liora," Cedric says.
"Oh, don't supervisor me. It makes you look old."
We reach the drill line. Caelen does not come to meet us. He waits where he is, making us cross the last stretch under his eyes. By the time we stop before him, my pulse has climbed for reasons I refuse to examine too closely.
Cedric speaks first. "She should not be here long."
Caelen's gaze remains on me. "Can you write?"
"Yes."
"Can you observe without speaking unless spoken to?"
"Yes."
Liora grins. "Questionable, but I support her growth."
Caelen ignores that. "Good. Sit there."
He points to a flat stone near the map table, close enough to see the drills and far enough to stay out of the way. Useful. Not gentle. Precisely what he promised.
Cedric folds his arms. "And if she worsens?"
"Then the healers will treat her again."
"That is not a plan."
Caelen finally looks at him. It is only a look, but it slices clean. "It is sufficient."
The air between them goes tight as a drawn bow.
I sit before either of them can turn me into a rope in their private tug of war. The stone is warm from the sun. My leg protests the bend. I set the papers on my lap and begin.
At first I only record what's obvious. Who tires fast. Who overcommits. Who loses their head when hit. Liora talks while she works, even when she's dragging a weighted sack twice her size, mostly to insult the sack and threaten its bloodline. A broad-shouldered boy with a broken nose refuses to ask for help and nearly drops his partner on his own foot. A narrow-faced girl with shaved temples moves like she's always planning two steps ahead, but flinches every time someone shouts behind her.
Patterns emerge.
Who compensates for weakness with speed. Who wants to look brave more than they want to learn. Who listens when corrected.
The work steadies me. Observation is a kind of distance, and distance I can use.
Near the end of the hour, voices rise low and urgent behind me at the map table. I keep writing, head bent, as if I hear nothing.
"Closer than last week," one senior says.
"Tracks could still be rogue," says another, though he doesn't sound convinced.
"Rogues don't strip a boundary post to splinters and leave no bodies."
My charcoal stills.
Caelen says something too quietly to catch. Then a different voice, older, clipped with command. "The cadets hear none of this. Panic helps nothing."
I glance up without moving my head.
The map nearest me shows the Academy grounds, the training forest, the river road. Farther north, ink marks s***h across the border line in clusters. Someone has circled three of them hard enough to nearly tear the parchment.
Fear changes people. I know my father's version of it, hidden under anger. I know my mother's, drowned in fussing. Here, on the faces of armed warriors who should fear nothing, it looks like restraint pulled too tight.
My skin goes cold despite the sun.
Pup tales drift through memory, ugly and half-laughed off around winter fires. Wargs with rotting muzzles. Wargs that kept thinking after the mind should have gone. Wargs that traveled in silence.
Stories for children. Stories for fools.
Caelen's eyes cut to mine.
Just once. Sharp. Knowing I heard enough to know something is wrong, if not what.
I drop my gaze back to the page at once and keep writing.
When drills end, he comes to collect the papers himself. His fingers brush the edge of the stack, nowhere near my skin. Near enough.
"You saw more than most," he says.
It is not praise. It is worse. It matters.
"I saw what was there."
His green eyes hold mine for one dangerous second too long. "Exactly."
Then he takes the notes and walks away.
Liora flops down beside me, sweating and filthy and triumphant. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Did our terrifying lord of moss and murder approve your scratching?"
I look at the place where he stood until it becomes foolish. "He didn't object."
Her grin turns sly. "That's practically a sonnet."
Cedric appears with a waterskin before I can answer, and just like that the spell breaks. "Drink," he says.
I take it because I am thirsty, not because he told me to. "You really are impossible."
"And yet here I am, preserving your life."
Liora leans back on her elbows. "Brotherly. Deeply brotherly."
Cedric stares at her. I laugh before I can stop myself.
That startles all three of us.
The sound feels rusty coming out, but real.
By nightfall my shoulder aches deeper, slower. My leg drags. In the barracks, Nightshade is all rough voices and sore bodies and the smell of damp socks. Someone tosses Liora half a stolen apple. She splits it with me without asking. The broad-shouldered boy with the broken nose nods at us like we are already something like allies.
I sit on my cot before sleep, pull the old leather laces from my bag, and work the knots loose one by one with my good hand.
Liora watches from the next cot, already half under her blanket. "What's that?"
"Nothing."
"Mm. Secret tragic ritual. Very mysterious."
I smooth the worn leather over my knee. The motion calms me. Grounds me. Gives my hands something useful to do while the day replays its sharpest moments.
The tree. Cedric's face when I called him brotherly. The map with the clawed border marks. Caelen's quiet, exact voice telling me to look up.
I should be humiliated still.
Instead I feel something steadier settling under the pain. Not confidence exactly. Not yet.
Leverage.
Liora's voice goes soft in the dark. "We made it, then?"
I glance at her.
She means all of it. The company. The hurt. The humiliation. The impossible standard.
I tuck the laces beside my pillow, next to the knife and the spare wrap. "Yes."
She smiles without opening her eyes. "Good. It would be boring without you, Limpy."
Outside, somewhere beyond the barracks walls and the training grounds and the watchfires, something is making armed men whisper over torn maps.
Inside, I lie awake a little too long, shoulder throbbing, mind sharpened instead of dulled.
Observation, it turns out, can be its own kind of weapon.
- Writer
