Brelira Story Draft 1

Will’s popularity for getting Sam punished lasted precisely three days.

It wasn’t that people stopped being grateful. It wasn’t even that Sam’s punishment was unexpectedly cut short, at least not directly. It was just that the reason his punishment ended early meant that they suddenly had more important things to think about.

It started around noon, three days after Will and Sam’s fight. The whole squad was training in the yard, drilling in making a spearwall. It was arduous, unfamiliar work that required a great deal more discipline and cooperation than the group was capable of, and they were tired, frustrated, and looking for any excuse to take a break.

Their chance came when a group of half a dozen soldiers rode through the fort’s gates, their horses lathered and exhausted. Sergeant Carter halted their practice, prompting quite a few sighs of relief from the trainees, and called to the newcomers, “What brings you here in such a hurry, Lieutenant?”

The lead soldier dismounted, tossing the reins negligently to one of the recruits from another squad, who were currently assigned to stable duty while Will’s squad had use of the practice ring. He strode over towards them.

“We’re hunting a traitor,” he said when he got closer.

“Well, I assure you that there are no traitors here in the fort, sir,” Sergeant Carter said stiffly. Will felt a sudden pang of fear. Surely they wouldn’t be arresting anyone for Loyalism, so long as they weren’t outspoken. He and his family were always careful to be discrete, and Sergeant Carter was noncommittal enough about politics that Will still wasn’t sure exactly where he stood. He didn’t know the positions of the other boys in the squad, but he wouldn’t wish the fate of a convicted (or suspected) traitor on anyone. The High General was ruthless in maintaining his power.

Thankfully, the lieutenant only snorted derisively at that. “I’m not looking for traitors here, old man. We’re looking for a very specific person, who is a serious threat to the security of the realm.” He paused, and directed a hard gaze at Sergeant Carter. “All available personnel are being reassigned to track him down.”

“Do you have a description of this traitor? I’m sure the city watch would be happy to ask around to determine if anyone’s seen him,” Sergeant Carter suggested.

“He couldn’t have made it this far yet. We changed mounts every ten miles or so at the waystations, but he won’t have had such an opportunity, if he’s even mounted at all. And he has several younger children with him, which will probably slow him down considerably.”

“Small children? Has he taken them as hostages?” Sergeant Carter asked, concern evident in his voice.

“No. He’s dragging his family down with him. His elder son is fifteen or so, and might be a traitor right along with him, but the ten year old girl and five year old boy aren’t likely to be, unless he convinces them to defend their poor, wrongly accused father.” He spat, showing his contempt for such a man.

The sergeant was in front of Will, and facing away from him, so he couldn’t see his face very clearly, but he thought Sergeant Carter looked disturbed. “Do you have names and descriptions, so we can be on the lookout?” he asked.

“They may be using aliases, but the father’s name is George. Tall, brown hair, short beard. The older son’s called Alex, medium height, short brown hair. the younger two... I don’t remember, exactly. Brianna and Wesley, or some such.”

The sergeant stiffened. Does he know someone by that description? Or think he does? Will hoped not. He rather liked Sergeant Carter.

“We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for them,” he said, “And you’re welcome to fresh mounts from our stables, of course. If you need anything else, you’ll have to speak to Captain Jameson. His quarters are on the northern end of the second floor of the main keep. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to training these recruits.”

“Actually, Sergeant, there is something more I need of you. As I said earlier, I have orders to reassign any non-essential personnel to the hunt for this man.”

Sergeant Carter frowned. “I’m sorry that you’ve traveled all this way to be disappointed, Lieutenant, but there are no available personnel here. We barely have enough men to keep order in the city, and there are only three sergeants to train six score recruits. We simply can’t spare--”

“Six score recruits, you said? How long have they been in training?” the lieutenant interrupted. He was no longer looking at Sergeant Carter, but had instead turned his gaze to the trainees. Several of them had moved over to the shade by the armory, where they sat, laughing and joking, but most had stuck around to listen, curious. The lieutenant looked at them dispassionately, as though he was deciding which chicken to butcher for his dinner. Will suppressed a shudder.

Sergeant Carter hesitated again, clearly seeing where this was going. “This squad, nearly six weeks. We’ve one other with seven weeks’ training, two with four weeks and two with three weeks.”
The lieutenant nodded sharply. “That will do, I suppose. I have authorization to commandeer any soldier not required for essential functioning, and any squad of recruits with more than four weeks training. You will assemble the four eligible squads in the yard in one hour, with weapons, horses, and a week’s rations.”

“With all due respect, sir, they aren’t ready for active duty, and we don’t have half that many horses in our stables. We could, perhaps, give you the squad with seven weeks,--”

“I don’t think you understood me correctly, Sergeant. The High General has issued a blanket command for all available men with more than four weeks’ training to be reassigned to finding this traitor immediately. Requisition the horses from the townspeople if you must, but do it quickly. If we are delayed in leaving, I will not be pleased.” With that, he strode off into the keep.

Sergeant Carter sighed heavily. Turning to them, he said, “Well, you heard them man. You’re to leave in one hour. And mounted, no less, and expected to keep up whatever mad pace brought them from the capital in three days. Go pack, and get those fools over by the smithy to do the same. I’ll talk to the quartermaster about rations and weapons, and see what can be done about horses.”

They hurried towards their barracks, but Will paused, looking back at Sergeant Carter. “Sir? This is very unusual, isn’t it?”

The sergeant nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Do you think--”

“No,” Sergeant Carter interrupted harshly, “don’t think. Thinking will get you into trouble, particularly serving under His Lordship the lieutenant there. Speaking of which, you should be gathering your things. You wouldn’t want to be late.”

Will frowned, confused at the sudden shift in Sergeant Carter’s mood. “But--”

Sergeant Carter shook his head sharply, cutting Will off, and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Thompson. You’re not stupid. You know this is not a normal situation by any stretch of the situation. There is more going on here than meets the eye, and I have my suspicions as to what it is. I’m sure you do, too. But voicing those suspicions could get you into a great deal of trouble. Better not to be suspicious at all. Do you understand?”

Will did not, not fully, at least, but he nodded anyways. Of course, now I have even more reason to speculate about what’s really going on here.

“Good. Now, go get ready to go. You only had an hour to begin with, and you’ve wasted more than enough of it talking to me.”

Will hurried off to the barracks to gather his things, and spent the entire time turning the entire conversation over in his head, trying to figure out just what sort of man could cause so much trouble.

~~~~

In the end, it took much longer than an hour for them be on their way. Eighty people was quite too many for one quartermaster and two assistants to supply in such a short time, and the fact that they were half-trained recruits only made the task more difficult. Perhaps even more challenging, however, was the “requisitioning” of the horses. Requisitioning was a great deal like stealing, in most people’s minds, except that the thief came in broad daylight and you couldn’t even report it, because the very people you would report it to were the thieves. Naturally, as word spread, a great many horses suddenly went lame, or lost shoes, or got colic. By the time they had finally sorted out the false claims from the true and gotten on their way, it was late afternoon, creeping towards evening.

Many of the recruits (or soldiers now, he supposed, given that they were officially out of training and on assignment) seemed excited to be leaving the city in pursuit of a traitor. Will was not among them. He strongly suspected that the “traitor” was a Loyalist, someone who, like Will himself, eagerly anticipated and perhaps had even worked to bring about the return of the monarchy. If this man was a traitor, Will probably was, too. And even worse, he was a father with two younger children. If their father and older brother were executed for treason, what would happen to them? There had been no mention of their mother in the lieutenant’s description. Hopefully they had family who could take them in, because otherwise, they would likely be left on the streets or in an overcrowded orphanage.

Of course, Will had other, less noble reasons for disliking this mission. For one, he would much rather be following Sergeant Carter’s orders than the overbearing Lieutenant Brown’s. For another, they would be riding. There were perhaps five or six recruits out of the eighty who had ridden a horse before their brief training, and Will was not among them. The most experience he had was riding no faster than a canter in the safe confines of the practice ring for perhaps an hour’s stretch. Even that had left him sore, and from what he understood, there was a world of difference between that and riding hard all day over rough terrain.

Will was jerked rudely out of his contemplations by Lieutenant Brown riding to the front of the milling group of mounted boys and called out, “Attention! Soldiers, attention!”

After a moment’s confusion, most of them managed to turn their horses in his general direction, and bring them to a halt before they continued on past him and out the gate. Will had been given a docile old bay gelding, and had a considerably easier time than many of the others, but he was not looking forward to having to keep up with the more spirited beasts on his rather bedraggled looking mount.

When their movement had ceased, Lieutenant Brown continued, “What we are doing today is of utmost importance to our great nation. We are hunting one of the worst traitors the realm has ever known, and at the direct orders of the High General himself.” There was widespread muttering at this, some of it excited, but most of it less than happy.

Lieutenant Brown frowned at them. “I see some of you are conflicted about our mission. Let me assure that the man we pursue is not. As some of you may have heard, he murdered an elite soldier of the High General’s personal guard in his escape of the capital. I have no doubt that he would not hesitate to do the same to any of you, if given the chance.” He met the eyes of several grumblers near the front of the group with a hard look. “I hope for your sakes that none of you give him that chance.

“Our mission is of utmost importance, and time is of the essence in accomplishing it. We need to stop this man before he can escape into the wilds, where it will be much harder to track him. To this end, we will be splitting into four groups, determined by your training squadron.”

Will hoped desperately that whoever was being placed in charge of the other groups was more reasonable than the lieutenant, and that his squad was not the one stuck under Lieutenant Brown’s personal direction.

“Sergeant Daniels’s squad will be commanded by Corporal Douglas. Sergeant Jones’s more experienced squad will be led by Corporal Eddings, and his less experienced squad will be under Sergeant Taylor. That leaves Sergeant Carter’s squad with me.”

Will managed to suppress a groan, but he still sagged in his saddle. This is going to be awful. On joining the army, he had assumed that it would be two straight years of hell. Then Sergeant Carter had been much nicer than he had expected, and most of his fellow trainees had been decent. And now, of course, just when things were beginning to look up, he got stuck under this ass of a lieutenant. I should have known better than to think that an army tour could be anything less than completely terrible.

“Now move out, the lot of you! And keep up! Slowness and laziness will not be tolerated.” With that, Lieutenant Brown turned his horse and cantered out the gate.

Will gritted his teeth. He can’t make us ride fast all the time, he reasoned as he spurred his old, shambling horse to a trot, then a slow canter, joining the disorganized stream of horses and riders flowing out the gates and winding their way down the cobbled main street of the city, headed for the south gate. A lot of these horses are barely faster than a man walking, and I’m far from the only inexperienced rider. We’ll stop soon enough.

Despite the reasonableness of stopping to rest men and horses alike, Lieutenant Brown seemed intent on them getting wherever they were going in the absolute least time possible. They kept up their relatively fast pace until one horse literally collapsed, throwing its rider and breaking his wrist. Then, finally, they stopped. Will sagged in his saddle, exhausted, his legs feeling like jelly. None of the other boys looked any better in the fading orange light of the sunset, and the five real soldiers besides Lieutenant Brown were looking at them in pity. They, at least, seemed to understand how foolish it was to risk losing men and horses to exhaustion, and have even those who made it to their destination arrive too tired to do anything productive.

Lieutenant Brown, unfortunately, did not show the sense of his subordinates. The boy’s arm was put in a hasty splint, and he was practically shoved back on his horse. The entire stop did not take more than fifteen minutes, and no one had even had time to dismount and stretch their legs for a moment.

By nightfall, two more horses had collapsed, and four had thrown their riders, though only one of them was seriously hurt, with a broken collarbone. By that point, they had lost nearly as much time to such stops as they had gained by traveling at the ridiculous pace, and Lieutenant Brown allowed himself to be persuaded that riding through the night would do more harm than good. Even then, however, his ridiculousness did not cease. He insisted that they pitch their camp not only off the road, but hidden from it, so that if the traitors they were hunting came along, they wouldn’t be scared off by the soldiers’ presence. To further disguise their presence, they were forbidden fires, as the glow and smoke might ward off their quarry. He also ordered that watches be kept, no only along the roads and around the camp, but for several hundred yards to either side of the road, in case the traitors should somehow detect them in spite of all their precautions and try to go around them.

Of course, given the large area these watchers had to cover in the poor light of the waning moon, fully half of the men had to be on watch at any given time. This in turn meant that no one would be getting more than a few hours’ sleep that night.

Will’s squad was assigned first watch, and his post was near the easternmost edge of their line of watchers. He was grateful for the solitude, after the long day surrounded by eighty noisy men and horses who turned the air above the dry dirt road into a loud, dust-choked mess. But he would have traded any amount of people around him for the chance at a decent night’s sleep.

I’ve spent all day working. We had morning practice, and then we had to run around packing, and then we rode at a breakneck pace all afternoon. While breakneck would probably usually refer to a reckless gallop, which of course they had been unable to keep up for any sizable portion of the afternoon, Will felt justified in using the term as there had been some broken bones. Hopefully tomorrow will be more reasonable. I’m not sure how long any of us can keep up this pace before someone gets seriously injured. Well, more seriously than a broken collarbone, anyway. Of course, one would have thought that the first such incident would have had a calming effect on their leader, but it very clearly had not.

Dragging himself away from ever-frustrating and fruitless thoughts on the subject of Lieutenant Brown’s incompetency, he returned to his earlier musings about who exactly it was that they were looking for. It had to be someone important, that much was clear. Otherwise, there would not have been such a response. The High General himself had ordered that even half-trained recruits were to join in the hunt for this man. Such an unusual and extreme measure would not have been taken without good reason.

But what kind of man could possibly merit such a response? And why would he have his children with him? Had he, perhaps, attempted to assassinate the High General? Had he masterminded such an attempt, or possibly tried a coup like the one that had brought the High General to power twenty years ago? Those might, Will supposed, merit the scale of the reaction.

That still leaves the problem of why he would bring his family, though, Will thought, and why Sergeant Carter was so concerned about it. Sergeant Carter’s behavior was perhaps the strangest part of all this. He had seemed truly concerned and disturbed by Lieutenant Brown’s report, more so that Will thought he would have been if he had merely been supportive of the current government and worried about threats to it. He also felt that Sergeant Carter would not have risked notice like that unless he was too distraught to think clearly. So he probably knows this man, or at least someone enough like him that the two could be confused, Will concluded. Either way, it seemed likely that Carter had Loyalist leanings, given that it seemed unlikely he would assume this traitor to be a friend of his based on such a vague description unless he already knew that said friend was likely to be suspected of treason in the first place. Maybe they’ll let us go back and finish our training. Then maybe I could talk to him, get a feel for the situation, see if he’s part of a larger network I could get involved in.

Will yawned. His musings had managed to keep him distracted for a while, but now that he had worked out a solution to the most pressing problem, his exhaustion had returned in full force. It was suddenly hard to keep his eyes open, and the long grass around him looked like it would make a very comfortable pillow indeed. We’re pretty sure these people are on foot. Even if they were mounted, they wouldn’t make it this far tonight, not with a young girl and a five year old slowing them down. And Lieutenant Brown was almost certain to want to get an early start tomorrow, which meant that they would get a few hours of sleep at the most. He yawned again.

No one else is going to be able to stay awake, either, he thought, and I’ve already decided ten times over that this whole thing is ridiculous. Maybe if I just go to sleep for a little while, and then wake up before my shift is over...

He was aware, in some distant corner of his sleep-muddled mind, that these were excuses that would not look so good in hindsight, but he didn’t care. The grassy soil seemed to rise up beneath him as his eyes drifted closed and sleep overcame him.