Rank

The sheen of polished brass always reflected a certain arrogance, and it was immediately evident in Paske, the officer who sat behind his desk, waiting. Short blond hair, square tanned face. Cold eyes. It was an attitude that Freya found grating but not one she usually paid much heed; it was simply the attitude of rank and she was accustomed to it. It made her task no easier. His eyes called her worthless.

"Discharge." It wasn't a question, more an accusation. "Now. As we mobilize. Now, as we speak?"

"I couldn't come earlier, sir. It was a difficult decision and I only made it today." She wanted to drop into a squat and hug her knees, anything to keep the cold shame and dread from spreading out through her flesh. But she was here now, the approach had been made. "Now," she added, shrugging apologetically. "This morning. Sir."

"This morning." Another sneered accusation and she nodded, tacitly accepting the charge of cowardice. He had scrolls in his hand, and he flicked the curled edge of one, then another, down to better see the reports written there. Drawing one free from his bundle, he tossed the others aside and used a silver-capped cane to spread his chosen document wider across the table. "It looks to me like you've passed all your fitness assessments. You have regained an acceptable range of movement, I see. There is a note here from the medical officer who conducted your last battery of tests specifically praising your levels of strength and endurance. 'Remarkable tenacity' he's written here."

Using the heavy silver spur on his cane as a pointer, he sat back, opening the document for her appraisal, waiting for an answer to a question he hadn't asked. Freya leaned closer, clamping her hands into fists and holding her breath to keep it from trembling. The markings on the page were meaningless to her; if they had not been upside down, they would have made no more sense, but she searched them urgently for a clue or an excuse.

The study drew boiling blood up into her ears. "I, ah …" Humiliation slipped from her lips with the attempt at speech, and she sucked in a deeper breath, stretching her cramped lungs. "I did my best. That's all. I tried hard to pass and to be fit to fight. But…."

"That's all we ask. And look," he tapped at a red mark which cut across the inky lines of text, "– it was enough. Look!" He jabbed again at the scroll, reprimanding a stupid child. "See there? What does that say?"

He held his cane against the red marks, tapping them impatiently as she stood mutely staring at the unintelligible symbols that would decide her fate. She glanced up at his face and read the contempt in his features on the instant, but the page before her offered no such insight. Nothing.

"It says, 'Application for physical evaluation. Critical impairment of joint mobility and function.'" He tapped another block of writing, also marred by crimson slashes. "Here, what does it say here? Can you guess? It says, 'Recommendation: immediate medical discharge'" His words were growing louder and sharper, raising red hot shame.

At that moment she might have withdrawn. It was too much to be so embarrassed, and to stand like a fool with her weaknesses held up to ridicule while she begged to be allowed to take the coward's way.

If not for the fact that Dragan waited in the yard below with the weight of his life thrown against her, she might have dignified herself with a nod of deference and returned to the field. She could have taken her chances with the casting of the lot.

There was no room to move and no answer to her humiliation but anger, and it fed on the ice in her tormentor's glare. "That's what I'm here for," she managed. "I want my medical discharge."

"You can't have it!" Paske rose forward suddenly, pushing his face into hers, forcing her to blink and give ground. "You have been passed fit!" he bellowed, shoving the report up at her. "Repeatedly!"

"Sir," she responded automatically, pulling herself erect, her spine and shoulders straightening.

"Read it!" He shook the useless page at her. "Passed! And again, 'Recommend assessment'. Passed! Can't you read?"

"No, sir."

"No, so take my word for it. Four, no five times you have had the opportunity to accept a medical discharge and refused. Now you have been marked fit. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir. I am not stupid, sir."

"Are you not? Let me be the judge of that." He stepped back, picking his cane from the desktop and slapping it thoughtfully down his thigh. Against the thick woolen pleats of his thegn, the bar made a hollow thwack, suggesting just enough violence to make Freya flinch. Violence she could answer. That she understood. "Why now?" he asked the air.

"Why sir?" She steadied her breath. "I don't believe that I can fight. I want to. I want to believe I've been able to train hard enough to be as good as I was, but I don't. I can't."

"The medical officers think you can. You were adamant they should pass you fit. What changed your mind this morning?" Again he tapped the cane, the ornate silver hook tangling in fabric and rattling against a studded boot. He caught a sharp breath and turned suddenly, lifting the cane to point at her chest. "I know you, don't I?"

In better circumstances, Freya would have speculated aloud that everybody knew her. In the mess hall or on the parade ground she would have wagered blood on it; she would have hawked the sour taste of certainty from her mouth and spat it at his feet. Here though, she chose to meet his interrogatory glare with silence.

"Yes." He chuckled, nodding his head slightly. "Yes, I do."

He moved back to stand by his desk, tucking the cane under his arm rather than relinquish his hold, while he freed his hands to straighten the documents he had earlier discarded. He read, nodding and clucking to himself, making an occasional small noise of surprise or admiration. "Something of a hero? Quite a record and previously uninjured. Favored by the gods, are you?" He looked up, "Or just lucky?"

Frustration burned. It rolled through the muscles of her back and neck, clenching in fists and strangling the breath in her throat, but she said nothing, only glared her defiance at the wall and willed the harm she could not move to inflict. In everything about him there was the reek of toad.

The brass on his breastplate shone where no verdigris had ever had cause to bloom. The skin of his face was smooth even if there was some silvering at his temple. There were no marks of the sun or the wind or snow in the softness around his eyes. He sat his chair, and rolled his papers, and judged his reading more useful than horsemanship. He handled a cane where there was no sword for him to hold. And he had a sneer to sharpen his words where words were all he had in abundance.

"And here you are at the end of your contract, almost." The twisted lips turned into a smile. "And your partner is done, I see. Is he lucky, too?"

"No sir, he's good. Very good." Words she would have awarded herself if she could; if they had not amounted to an admission of fitness to serve.

"Is he? And I suppose after so many seasons together he could have been relied upon to carry you and your injury. No chance of him bringing a slur against your great name, is there? But a new partner, that would be a different story, wouldn't it? No certainty there. None at all.

"Tell me," he stepped up close, "How do you weigh the risk of death in battle against the threat of tarnished glory; a failure on the field or a coward left behind?"

"There is no risk to balance, sir." She stole what she could of Dragan's passion, using his arguments as if they were her own. As calmly as she could, she said, "There are only certainties. If I fail in the field, and I will, there will be no partner to carry tales. He will be dead beside me. No question. There is no chance I'll return in disgrace. I will be a corpse among the corpses, and whoever you assign as my partner will leave this citadel a dead man."

"Noble, then? You'd rather the shame of being recognized as a coward than to risk the life of a partner. The name, the face that has inspired the best in our young warriors for years now, remembered at the last as the one who slunk off into the mists to hide." His grin widened.

"A medical discharge, sir. There is no shame in that." The lie tore something inside, something hot that throbbed.

"You can't have a medical discharge. You are fit and I have the reports to prove it. I know it. You know it." He turned away, walking slowly toward a wide arras worked in swirling greens and browns that covered most of the chamber wall. "Everybody knows it," he smiled.

His hands were pink, the nails immaculate, and his fingertips soft and rounded. The heavy weave of his thegn showed no sign of pilling or rub or unnoticed threads tugged loose. Even the segmented leather laminate that hung down his thighs fell from the bands of a gilded girdle. No blood or marrow grease had ever dried and stained his skin. The grime of battle and the shit of fear had never crusted under his fingernails, and yet he had the gall to call her a coward.

She was fit. Fit enough.

From below, the calls of men assembling, falling into marching columns, laughing, living, clapping shoulders and vowing their blood, one for another, rose like the perfume of better days. Out there, somewhere below this toad in his clean stone tower, was the life she knew, and its call was stronger than she could easily bear.

Men died in battle. They knew that, all of them, and yet they stood together, ready to walk out into fear and blood and glory. It was not Dragan's choice. He could not force her to this humiliating place. Out there, they knew her. There was at least one strong young arm she knew would be raised without question if she called for a new partner. If he lived or died….

"Can you read a campaign map?"

"Yes sir." Maps were the mainstay of any battle plan. Scratched in dust or burned into leather, they shared the vision of one with many. A campaign map could be no different.

"This is what you're running from." Standing before the vast arras, he clapped the stiff oilcloth with his cane and Freya stepped forward peering into the mess of color, frowning. Words and symbols rose into focus; dotted lines traced their way over the surface, some black some red; arrows noted circles large and small. It was like no map she had ever seen.

The sneering toad watched her.

The maps she knew showed landmarks; peaks, waterways, crossroads, and they were marked by their likeness. Here the things marked were known by their words, and she could make no sense of it. A river snaked through it; that was all she could easily recognize.

"We're here." He snapped the silver spur against the map, and where it rested she saw there was a likeness of Orlik citadel, tiny squares that curved around the pale circle of the tarn. Instantly her vision widened. She was not looking at a mud map, not the square of a field where a river ford was easiest, but a vast area wider than the valleys and peaks, spreading further than the cities to the west.

And there they were. She didn't need the words for them; she could see the neat grids of the streets she had once known. It was an easy five days' ride west to the city of Talsiga, so the area shown away to the east of the citadel was at least equal to that.

Behind their ancient fortress, the land rose steeply into the vast boulder-strewn passes of the Delian mountains. That was where the empires, like two massive bovids, locked horns and shoved until the bedrock of their lands were driven up into the sky. And where the resulting ranges rushed from north to south, there on the map were the snow fields and cliff faces, the narrow paths and the wide rich valleys between.

It was extraordinary. Treks that would take a troop a week of murderous slog for every league they gained were shown here in the length of a finger. Parts of the mountains where even goats could slide to their deaths, here were flat beiges and grays. She reached to trace a journey with her finger, trailing from the fortress walls through the dense foothill forests, and on upward toward the active front lines, just stirring with the spring thaw and ready to draw blood.

A month or more she could study this map and still wonder at its magnificence.

Paske the toad was smiling again. "No, I can't give you a medical discharge. I won't."

Freya snapped her attention back to the discussion at hand, ready to concede. It was not Dragan's choice; she could not let it be. She could return to her life on the front. Some choices cost more than life.

"But I think I have another solution." Sliding the polished cane through his hand like a slick span of phallus, he grinned and sent ice prickling through Freya's gut.

(Editing credits, with thanks, to Essie Holton.)