All I Have

Dragan sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Twelve years. Twelve hard seasons.

"There were years I loved it, I can't deny that. Loved it, in the early days. We were indestructible. There was nothing to fear out there because we had nothing to lose. I fought hard and stayed alive because I didn't consider the possibility you might get hurt. Now, I can't think of anything else. And I don't want to go back out there."

She frowned, her face aching as she strove to read the complex lines of his expression. There were too many implications hidden in his words, too many terrors, and her heart was flogging her pulse hard up into her temple and kicking her stomach. Lurching to her feet, she strode to the balustrade and threw herself double, retching up bile, straining against the cold stone railing. Convulsions surged through her again and again, until her legs buckled and she folded down, shaking, onto her knees.

Strong hands pulled her back, turning her easily. Shaking her head at him as he squatted in front of her, Freya wiped a trembling hand across her mouth, and said, "Let me get this straight. You won't re-sign for this campaign because you think you can't cut it, but you'd send me out there to trust my luck with a new partner, alone."

"You don't have to go." His eyes were pleading now, but his logic, if there was any, was way too illusive for Freya to catch a grip.

Closing her eyes, she rested her head back on the carved stone of the balcony and coughed away the bitter taste in her throat. "Don't I? Okay, so you tell me how I break my contract three months early, stay out of the brig, live as a civvie without my payout, and live down the humiliation of failing at the only thing I can do." She opened her eyes and they filled with angry tears. "And tell me quickly because I'm due at Roll Call, yesterday."

"Get yourself discharged. Medical. Use your shoulder. Just stall them off, dodge them. Hell, stay to train the new intake if you have too; it's only ninety days. At worst they'll keep you here while you argue the point. That way you'll get your pay-out same as everyone else." His explanation had become urgent; his hands were open, pleading, or measuring a place for her between life and death.

She looked at his hands as if to gauge their capacity, and shook her head. "I can't. I can't run away now. I can't make my whole life a lie. I can't choose to fail."

"You can choose to live. As for failing, or disgrace, this is not all you can do; it's just all you've ever known. You know how many ways you can lose, but you have no idea how many lives there are to live.

"Every off season, while you stay here, training up, celebrating with the girls, and playing with the boys," he stepped back from the words, turning to pace, "I go back to the mountains. I check the vines, I sit on the slopes with the sheep, and I think about the way this whole empire works."

"You're not the only one who can think," she interjected. "But I decided long ago not to do it. You think too hard, you freeze up. Better to keep moving and don't think about it." She rested her head back again, closing her eyes on his agitation. Her stomach was settling, her body overriding the cocktail of dread, washing it down with resignation.

Ignoring her, he kept on his thread; he hadn't finished and his point was too important. "How long have we been at war? Two hundred years? Three? Every year there's a new threat. We need to take more land. We need to defend land against someone else. Every year another group of kids come through here, just like we did: poor, starving, never thought about doing anything else because that's what the sons of poor men do. They go to war.

"Meanwhile, the merchants get fatter. Trade goes on across the front lines; the economies grow. The rich get richer, the poor breed up kids to go and fight. Nice little system of attrition. And what do we get? Shit to live on, trying to get to the day we're paid out. Fifteen years, for what? And how many of us get there? How many of the cavalry girls you trained with are still alive?"

He paced his narrow circuit and came back to stand in front of her. "Freya, how many people have we killed?"

There was no answer to that. She had no intention of holding onto gory receipts for the cost of her profession. Answers like that made nightmares. "I don't want to listen to you anymore." She held up a trembling hand for help to her feet, grasping his wrist as he pulled, and crying out involuntarily as her weight tore at the misalignments in her shoulder.

Her left hand flew to the scar and she tried to turn away, but he refused to release her right hand, stepping sideways to hold her attention. "You can do this. It will work. It's a solution that means your life."

Rounding on him, pulling her hand back sharply, she snapped, "This is my life! This is all I have. You have a family, some rocky shit heap of a farm, and some ugly, fat-ass farm-girl waiting for you. Look around you. This is what I have.

"You're right. I couldn't wait to join up. I had no family and no food. Back then my choice was this or prostitution. It still is. You know those girls. Have you looked into their eyes?

"You can't make this life and all I've done a lie. What I do is important and I'm good at it. I made myself someone here and you can't take that away from me. You don't have the right to do that, not to me, not with what we've been through together." She tried to walk away, but the balcony was small and the fear and anger in her gut were too big to burn in silence.

Her voice rose as she strode back to confront him. "You spend the off season away. You go back to the hills and fuck your sheep. This is my home. It's the only home I've ever had."

He stood for a moment in the wake of her indignation, his silence pleading. Then he turned away, lumbering wearily in toward the washroom as the horn sounded Roll Call.

Freya dropped onto her pallet, straightened and relaced her boots. From the shelves, she took her greaves and fastened them tight around her calves, cinching the buckles up tighter than she intended, acknowledging the pain as the first of many. She threw the gauntlets down at her side, rifled through her pile of clothes for a cloak clip, then strode back out to the wooden box, and pulled out the brass buckle. It would do.

When she looked up, Dragan stood in shadows by the doorway, dressed, slouching crookedly, hands on his hips. A last long breath blew over the stubble on his chin.

"There is no 'fat-assed farm-girl'," he said quietly.

He dropped stiffly into a squat, pulling his boots on, taking greaves from the pile beside him, and buckling them into place. She wanted to stop him, to hold him still and make him explain himself, but she was paralyzed by hope and fear.

"My father is old. I go back each year and try to work enough food out of his 'rocky shit-heap of a farm' to keep them going 'til I can get back again. It's not enough, I know. But I always promised them I'd be back for good. Every year, I tell them again, things will soon be better."

He stood, pulling mail over his tunic, and settled the cuirass into place over it, buckling it in at the shoulders and sides. "They have my pay-out. It's not enough to live on, anyway." This was an explanation that told her nothing she wanted to hear. She wanted to stop him; she wanted to thank him. She was too ashamed to move.

He straightened the cloak over one arm, under the other, shoving the cloak clip through the rough fabric, and paused to face her squarely. "You figured on dying out there, anyway, didn't you? You just didn't want to do it alone."

Tears burned up into her eyes and down, running over her cheek like he'd opened a vein. There was no rubbing them away this time, and no way to answer his bluntness. No room for denial. She shook her head at him again, wishing they could start over, from the beginning. He had taken away the only thing she could trust, and now he was giving it back broken.

These were things she had refused to acknowledge for herself, and here he held them up before her like an accusation. He couldn't do this. It was unfair. "But I wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid." Her voice broke. "Until now."

If she went back to the front, he would go, too.

It was all she had wanted. He was ready to die beside her and now, stripped of brutal glory, cold and tactless, it was too much to ask. She had never considered the need to ask. He'd just always been there. Nausea resumed its gnawing, but there was no room in her consciousness for it now. It was just too unfair. Trembling had seized her body. She was hot and cold and her stomach lurched and threatened. Her hands were too weak to clench and her breath came in sobs. "This is too hard," she whispered. "Why didn't you give me time to think?"

"I only decided last night. You were busy, so I got drunk instead."

A fist pounded on the door behind him, and a voice demanded, "Assembly, soldier. Fall in, now!" This was not how it was supposed to be. Nothing was as it should be. There was nothing left to trust.

"One way or another," he said, "we walk out this door together, now. I'm asking you to trust me. For the last time, come home with me. Come be a fat-assed farm girl." He smiled again and the room slipped sideways as she fought to breathe. Everything had shifted

Swallowing hard over dust and acid, she whispered, "Don't smile. You don't know how terrified I am." If her feet had moved, it would have been to follow the life she knew. It was all she knew and the only happiness she'd ever known. But no part of her would move; even her hands were no longer her own.

"I do." He walked to where she stood, weak and frozen by too many loaded choices. "But I'm scared of any life without you in it and scared to follow your stubborn ass knowing we'll die out there for nothing. If this was combat, you'd sure-as-shit know which way to go."

He was standing too close, too near to the fire; sweat was blistering across her lip and clamming in her palms. Her heart was going to stop, or choke her on its rush.

"Okay." Her stomach lurched again, her own voice echoed.

"Yes?" His hands were on her shoulders, his eyes searched hers.

"I don't know what else to do. I don't…." Tears kept running down her cheeks and he tried to wipe them away. She felt so damned small beside him, she always had. Some things, at least would not change. "I don't know how to be, Dragan. I don't know what to be."

"You will be fine."

"But…." How could she put into words fears she could not even name. Out on the field, death might come. It was there as it always was, in the places she knew and understood. An end. But this, this choice he brought was a vast unknown, and it had no end. "I don't know how to be a farm-girl. I won't know what to do."

"You'll learn." He ducked his head, leaning in close so she could not look away. There was no way to avoid his eyes or the question she was fleeing. "Will you do this? Will you try?"

"All right. Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes." Her head went light, spinning and she stumbled forward. If she fell against him, she was unsure, but he caught her and held her still. She pressed her cheek against the cold hard leather on his chest, closed her eyes and let the howling black panic rush like a tornado, until at last it exhausted itself, and her, and leaked away. It left behind weakness – pitiful, soul sapping weakness, and she leaned on his strength.

It was no way to start a new life.

"Okay, let's do this. Yes?"

She nodded, trying to draw deeper breaths. She had no idea what she was going to do. She had no thoughts she could call her own.

"You want to sit?"

She nodded again and stepped back, opening her eyes to find the bed a few steps behind. She sat staring at the fire without seeing it, and he sat beside her.

"There's no hurry now," he said quietly. "When you're ready. The world will wait."