A Warrior's Sacrifice (21 page)

"It has made us, as a species, weak. Too concerned with dreng and jendr and caste to defeat our enemies."

"You think I'm weak?" Phae stood. Chahal rose to meet her.

"Both of you shut up," Corwin said.

They turned their heads towards him, shocked by the ice in his voice. "You can argue all night and won't get anywhere. So just shut up and pull yourselves together."

Something broke within both of them — Corwin could see it deep in their eyes.

"I don't need this," Phae said, grabbing her helmet from the bed and walking out the door.

Chahal didn't say anything; the set of her teeth and curl of her lips communicated enough. She took up her helmet and left as well.

Kai and Corwin looked at each other.

"You should talk to Chahal," Corwin said.

"Me?" Kai snorted a mirthless laugh and lay back in his bunk. "I'm not her superior officer." The shadow of the bunk above hid dark eyes hooded in both anger and sadness.

Corwin clenched his jaw, alternating sides as he thought. "Fine. You stay here so I don't have to chase after you either."

"Don't worry about me."

Corwin took up his helmet and rifle and left. He didn't want to be a Psychic Medic, along with a Void Commander and a Quisling — too many masks to wear. At this moment, though, he needed to act the part.

Wickting Republic,
he cursed to himself. It was jendr to admit to mental distress, for it showed weakness; and it took an order from a superior officer to force a soldier to visit the Medics for such an injury, and even then it could take months or years to heal. Corwin didn't have time for that; they'd be thrust back into battle tomorrow or maybe the next day. He needed them functional.
Now.

A medipatch would do. Or a hot knife to cauterize the wound.

Corwin found Chahal only a few meters from the door. She had not violated operational security and wandered off to be alone and had instead stayed within eyesight of Phae and their bunks. Phae leaned against a tree at the edge of the forest.

"Want to tell me what's going on with you?" Corwin asked. Despite his attempts to add some warmth, his voice was cold.

"They never talk about this in combat school," Chahal said after a few moments.

"What?"

"The nightmares. Insomnia. The faces of the Sentients we kill. The smell of death that lingers on our boots and in our hair and … and…" She trailed off and looked without seeing up into the sky.

"My family was so
proud
that I had made it into the Maharatha, proud for themselves, proud for me. Wickt, I was too, but…" She ran a gauntleted hand through curly hair matted from sweat and combat.

She shook her head, eyes still unfocused. "The First Exiles provided detailed accounts of their exploits down to the cultivation of food and the fabrication of hide clothes, but somehow they missed the kind of mental trauma that combat creates."

She signed and squatted, dragged a finger through the dirt. "The only mention of combat we have are the tactics they used, the numbers of allied to enemy dead, and the heroic stories of victory against insurmountable odds. Where's the rest of it?"

Corwin almost answered the hypothetical question with something noncommittal. He stopped himself in time. This was a real question, one for which she
needed
an answer; something that would help her reconcile her tumultuous feelings in the now and the contradictions presented in the texts that defined her life.

He worked his jaw as he reached for an answer and instead struck upon the long-forgotten memory of a story.

"When I was young," Corwin said, "I would join my brother and cousins when the warriors of my family returned home from a raid or salvage operation or trade and we would ask them questions. 'How many were there? How many did you kill? What did you do? How did they die?'

"At that point in our lives we thought of combat as a game, and when one of our family didn't return and the mourning started, we joined and mourned alongside the others, but well, we were children, and what did we know of death?

"When the greetings ended and questions started, some unknown signal brought my Grand from the trucks. He'd gather us up and tell stories, ending always with the same one.

"Once there were two dragons, one with black scales, the other with white scales, and these dragons played games of war with each other for eons and were the best of friends. One day, the black-scaled dragon found a treasure so powerful that it hid it away at the center of a volcano. Over time, the black dragon began to drift away from its youthful playmate, away from their games, spending more of its time admiring its treasure.

"The white dragon became jealous and followed its friend to the volcano. The white dragon hid among the crags as the black dragon withdrew its treasure from its hiding place. It was a silver mirror.

"The white dragon confronted its friend. 'You desert me for a mere looking glass?' it bellowed and in a fit of rage dashed the black dragon's head against the rocks, killing it. After the battle, the white dragon took up its friend's treasure. In it, the white dragon saw only itself reflected."

Corwin sighed, feeling nostalgia and remorse bubble up for a moment. He stomped it back down. "I never understood the story until after my first raid with the warriors. I was seven then, maybe. I was different when I got back."

He put a hand on Chahal's shoulder and looked her in the eye. "No amount of storytelling or writing or film can prepare you for war. Violence and killing thrusts that kind of self-knowledge on you, whether you like it or not, and it makes you different in a way no one else can understand unless they, too, have killed."

"I want nothing to do with it anymore," Chahal said, eyes closed hard to block out whatever it was she saw.

"Too bad," Corwin said. The response startled Chahal. "You can't go back now. You can't quit. You can't unlearn what you've discovered about yourself. You can only accept it. You are a murderer. And so am I, and so are Phae and Kai and the Guard General."

"But I … I don't — "

"Doesn't matter. You will keep on killing,
must
keep killing, because if you don't this war will force your siblings or cousins or children to learn what you have learned."

Chahal clenched her jaw and nodded.

"And remember, just because you kill, it doesn't mean you must
enjoy
killing."

"W-what did you do to deal with the trauma of combat, your family I mean." Her voice started out weak but gained in strength as she spoke.

"Our Grands served the same function as the Psychic Medics here, except they've been through war; they knew what it was like."

"You've been doing this longer than I have, how do you … how can you keep your mind in check?"

"Push it down. Lock it away. When you have time, bring it back up and deal with it in digestible chunks. Above all, come to terms with the fact that you're a killer. You're no better than the Choxen."

Chahal's head snapped back, eyes widening in surprise.

"We aren't. We killed an entire Quisling family: women, men, elders, children — we killed them all and locked those few that survived into a cell. We're no better than they are … except we didn't like it."

Chahal nodded and looked at the ground. "No, we didn't. I understand." After a deep breath, her eyes hardened — a reflection of Corwin's own. "Thank you, sir." Her voice echoed the steel in Corwin's.

Two paces away, Phae acknowledged Corwin's presence with a grunt and a jerk of her head. "I noticed you spoke with the Exilist first."

"She was the first one I came to," Corwin said as he stopped beside her, gazing back at the damaged complex with her.

She snorted.

"What's bothering you?" Corwin said after a few moments.

"Nothing's bothering me. I just needed some time away from Chahal and the Variant."

"You are lying to me," Corwin said without looking at her.

Her head jerked, face showing surprise before she closed her eyes and shook her head. "Everything is getting muddled."

Corwin kept quiet until she was ready to speak again. "When we were young, everything was black and white: Humans are good, Siloth are bad; dreng is dreng and jendr is jendr, and there is no way one could be the other based on the circumstances, and the IGA was here to protect us and help Humanity. And that was that."

She pinched the bridge of her nose with armored fingers. "Now the IGA sticks us with religious zealots to follow them into death and, and…"

"Nothing is like it seemed," Corwin finished for her.

"Yeah! Right! Everything is muddy. Shades of gray." She shook her head. "And you know, and family, they're supposed to be there for you to help you, right?"

The abrupt shift of her mental track surprised Corwin. "I … I guess so. If you're lucky enough to have the right kind of family."

"I
don't
." She looked him hard in the eye. "I took your advice while you were busy chatting with Chahal; I split myself off from my family. I am now Dreng-less." She grabbed Corwin by the ears and pulled him close for a kiss. "I'm free of them!" She let go and twirled, arms flung wide like a little girl, spinning for the thrill of it.

"In just the few minutes that I've been free of them, I've already had half a dozen requests from Maharatha families for adoption!"

"Congratulations," Corwin said. "What are you going to do?"

"Come with me into a new family."

"They will never take me. I'll be just as much an outcast as you were."

"No, it'll be fine…"

"It won't be fine," Corwin snapped. "They will never accept me, and I will never accept them."

"What if we made one? Just us two. The first in the line of Family Shura." There was hope in her voice.

He shook his head. "No. I don't belong here. I'm not a part of the Republic or the Republic's ways, understand?"

There was fear in her eyes, real fear. Corwin had seen that same fear in himself those first few years he was in the Republic, when he'd felt adrift in a foreign culture. That fear hadn't been there just a few moments before. Then she had been full of hope.
He
had cut her loose.

But he didn't mean what he'd said, not really. He'd been surprised by her, and in his surprise he had acted from an instinct born from battle after battle with himself and his feelings.

It wasn't a connection to any family she wanted — it was a connection with
him
. Phae offered Corwin the one thing that he had lost so long ago: love, belonging, a family; and she in turn needed the same.

Phae turned to leave, her hopes dashed like Corwin's. He longed to cry out to stop her and tell her all the things that he'd only just now realized, for if she left, he wouldn't get another chance.

Instead of words, she felt a change in Corwin's Sahktriya and turned. She saw pain plastered across his face. "Well?" She crossed her arms.

"I … I don't know." She turned to leave again. "No! Wait," he said, crossing the distance in a bound. He took her arm and held her fast. "I don't deserve you." His emotional wall had broken, and there was no going back now; the flood threatened to unseat and drown him.

Corwin's arms fell limp at his side, head and shoulders hanging like an untended marionette. "Everyone I ever … they died…"

"I won't."

"No, you don't understand … I … they…" he couldn't bring himself to admit out loud the part he'd played in his family's deaths. If he hadn't begged to go… He felt the wall reforming, but it was made of crystal this time, brittle and fragile.

"I get it. You're damaged, I'm damaged, whatever."

"No, you don't understand, I…"

"Stop it," Phae said, and she hit Corwin in the head. It was more shocking than painful, an open-hand slap that caused Corwin to stumble a step, but it served its purpose, and the pain forced him back into the reality of the present.

Phae grabbed on to Corwin, armored arms twining about his torso and clamping on tight even as Corwin tried to pry her free, to escape the clutch of someone who, after all his years alone, cared for him. Burying her face in the exposed skin of Corwin's neck, she held on until he finally gave in and sagged into her embrace.

Holding Corwin up, Phae waited until he'd regained himself. Corwin's own legs took over, and he reached up and hugged her closer. Three tears slid unbidden from his eyes. Rolling down his cheeks, they combined into one stream to fall into Phae's dark hair, lost. A soft breeze dried their trails, and only Corwin and the wind knew that they had ever existed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kavin felt Its victory pulsing, throbbing with after-battle glow. Its hand strayed once more to the fist-sized orb that lay in a bag on the seat beside. Except for the driver, a lowly underling, Kavin was alone. It had planned things that way, to keep any others away from Its secret prize. It longed, however, for the sweet release of subjugation and intended to subjugate Brixaal as soon as the raiding party returned to base.