As far as openings to a fight go, punching someone in the back of the head is about as good as you can hope to get. I felt the satisfying jolt of my fist meeting bone and shoving the sense right out of its target, then watched the soldier drop down boneless to the dirt. Gruin wasted no time seizing on his chance to shove the remaining two off him, barreling into one with a roar and leaving me to fight the last.

  The man clearly had more experience brawling than I did, but his main advantage was my fear. I thought soldiers were big, hard men doing hard things while hard. They are. The reason for this is not that they’re good at fighting, though. Most don’t get any serious formalised training beyond the use of their weapons, and grappling isn’t nearly so big an issue for a man in breastplate as it is for one in full plate mail.

  If I’d known that I wouldn’t have been so wired and cautious, and my enemy wouldn’t have had nearly so much leeway in the start of that fight. As things were I backed off and weathered his amateurish strikes, thinking there was some trick I’d fall into by doing the obvious. It took until my arms throbbed and my foe started getting short of breath that I risked a counter, one which landed hard and sent him stumbling away.

  There are, as I have said before, advantages to being big.

  As the flow of our fight shifted in my favour, I felt the newfound advantage bolster me and turned my defence to an attack. It didn’t last long afer that. A few hasty jabs, a sharp kick at the ankle and then I closed in and drove a knee into the man’s gut. He fell wheezing, spluttering, tried to rise and fell back down as I smacked a fist against his jaw. By the time I was finished, Gruin had long since put his own opponent down.

  I stood there panting for all of a second before turning and scrambling back to the position of my sleeping area, certain I’d be grabbed and pumelled by enraged sergeants at any moment.

  Of course, had I known the first thing about the army, I’d not have been worried at all. Soldiers don’t care about who gets beaten up by their fellows, and anything that doesn’t impede their actual work is considered a non-issue by those above.

  By morning, the five men we’d left in a heap had gotten back to marching and already knew better than to complain. Nobody wanted sergeants taking more of an interest in our affairs, and so the whole thing was quieted up and life continued as usual for the next few dozen miles of our journey. It was only any different for me, as I was called on more than once by Devyne for one conversation or another.

  I did not like Devyne. I didn’t particularly dislike him, mind, but with all his constant fawning there really wasn’t much to discuss with him, particularly when we had so little in common. On the other hand, I never missed a meeting with him, because they always came at meals, which meant I always got to eat something other than my bloody rations. Even the easily-preserved travel food of a noble was better than my shitty bread.

  But the most important and useful thing, of course, was getting a bit more insight than I’d have otherwise been afforded.

  “So what are we even marching towards?” I asked one morning, sheltered from the cold by Devyne’s tent as we ate. I’d slept badly the night before, but had quickly adjusted back to hard ground instead of feather beds. The real bane, the thing that left me truly sour, was the knowledge of how all my money had evaporated in one decision.

  Devyne was, of course, wholly ignorant to all such things, as he was to virtually everything else. Nobles.

  “I’m not actually sure myself,” he shrugged.

  My fork halted a few inches from my mouth, and I took a moment to process that.

  “You’re not sure,” I echoed, “about where we’re going?”

  “Well I know where we’re going,” he grinned, “just not why. Father said something about an incident on some lands we own a while away, and he wants me to oversee the expedition to investigate it.”

  I did my best to keep calm.

  “You must have some idea though,” I pressed, having gotten quite eager over my recent experiences to not be dragged into combat I wasn’t actually prepared for, “surely your father told you something.”

  He laughed at that. “Oh he did, but I wasn’t listening. Men like us hardly have time to sit around and talk when there’s danger to be battled, eh?”

  I wanted to fucking strangle him, and it was only with great effort that I managed to even hide the fact in my body language and face.

  “I’ve found myself surprised a few too many times to agree with that,” I choked out, “I prefer knowing what’s coming. If only because my associates are fighting alongside me.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Apparently it was the perfect choice of words, because upon displacing the subject of my cowardice from my life to someone else’s it took on a distinctly admirable note that quickly moved an answer out of Devyne.

  “Right, yes, well…I…Bugger, I hadn’t considered that but you’re right of course. Bloody hero, you are.” He smiled a shade more weakly, and I just nodded along in relief.

  Bloody hero. That meant more than I’d thought it would, a few months ago. It meant expectations, it meant pressure, it meant you couldn’t just do as everyone else did. It meant being the closest one to danger, the shortest to live, it meant distinguishing yourself every minute of the day just to be found adequate.

  It also meant that I would sacrifice everything and become a laughing stock for the rest of my life if I fell short of that impossible standard. So when I awaited Devyne thinking of whatever details he recalled about our destination, my life was essentially on the line.

  “It’s an old fort,” he said slowly. “Not one we’ve used in…a while, to my knowledge, but still ours. Recently we received word that something was happening in it, activity of some kind. We’re not sure what or from whom, but if this is real then it becomes a personal slight on my family. There were other details, I think a few suspected culprits, but I can’t recall them.”

  Despite the scarcity of his information, I actually had learned more than I’d expected to.

  “And there’s nothing on these enemies that you know of?” Devyne paused at my question, then sighed irritably.

  “I can…try to uncover more, if it’ll help you,” he offered, “but the officers in this army, they don’t exactly…listen to me. They consider me some youthful idiot only here because of who my father is.”

  That they were completely right in that assessment did not seem very diplomatic a thing to point out.

  “Surely you can pick up something,” I pressed instead, “if only so that they know the person watching their backs is actually aware of what he’s fighting.”

  He shrugged non-comitally, and we continued to eat in silence.

  It was a day after that when our forces finally arrived.

  True to Devyne’s words, we were approaching a fort. And I could see at a glance just why it had gone through such little use. It was squatting atop a hill and clearly one of the older structures, probably built at least a few centuries ago when stoneworking and labour pools were less potent than in the modern age.

  A consequence of this was that those centuries had not been kind to the place. I saw stones spilled out beside half-collapsed walls, where mortar had crumbled. Sighted towers that had once been a great deal straighter and steadier in their heights now made haphazard things by the ravages of time.

  It looked big enough to have fit the hundred or so soldiers now approaching it, once, though whether its innards had collapsed too much for such accommodations now I couldn’t say from the outside. Either way, our leaders didn’t hesitate an inch before sending us on.

  “Alright you lot,” my own sergeant—a nasty man by the name of Bakeswill—announced, “we’re going to be the first ones inside there to peer through the ruins. You should all feel honoured!”

  Bakeswill was perhaps the most repugnant man I’d ever met at that point in my life, though I’d encounter his kind more than once again. He seemed to take some sort of unique cruelty in abusing and humiliating his men, as if his job were somehow to cultivate fear.

  And he did cultivate it. Everyone was scared of him, scared of the missing equipment that would be found in their pack if they crossed him, scared of the vicious punishments he doled out for his own framing victims.

  Of course he’d found his true calling as a sergeant, and wielded all the authority and protection that position brought him like steel armour. He’d not tried to fuck with me just yet, seeming wary, I thought, of my association with Devyne. Plenty of the other men were bitter about that fact too.

  Nine of those men, Bakeswill included, would be accompanying me into a dark, old ruin with…no witnesses besides us, and enough structural stability that a great deal of violence could befall my body and be blamed upon falling rubble or collapsing ground.

  Provided I wasn’t alive to contradict the story.

  I suddenly felt a lot less confident about my decision to aid Gruin after his attack, and it took all of my growing practice to force my face into a continuously neutral and stoic expression as we set off to enter the castle. Our breastplates clattered and mail rustled with every step, arms holding shields and shortswords instead of poleaxes to better fit the tight environments ahead.

  Not a single one of us seemed confident in what was coming up, save for Bakeswill. Bakeswill practically giggled as we stepped up to the main gate of the fort and, surprisingly enough, managed to slip our way into it. The thing provided no small amount of resistance as we shoved it open, but it wasn’t locked and certainly not bound. It was only weight and rust that tested our strength in forcing it.

  Inside, the light spilled through old corridors as if a new dawn were rising. One thing struck me right away, but it wasn’t until we’d taken a good few paces inside that I could articulate it.

  “This place isn’t dusty enough,” I whispered, “look at it. This isn’t the amount of dust years of abandonment brings about.”

  That brought on a new level of terror in my fellow soldiers, and as we entered I felt a disturbing sense of familiarity. This place, one might have called it a dungeon, was striking me with an uncanny resemblance to a certain other structure I’d set foot in just a few months earlier.

  Of course I’d gone through a lot since then, had countless opportunities to change. I was, however, still me, and so I behaved in exactly the same way as I had then—trying to take charge and hiding my own fear even at the expense of suppressing common sense.

  You don’t get to be a hero by neglecting your image.

  Well, that was a bit harsh on myself. A consequence of showing no fear was that I slowly peeled ahead of the other men as we went deeper, and noticed them gradually relaxing around me. If they’d been planning to kill me, I was giving them second thoughts now. That, and the faster we permeated this fort’s bowels, the sooner we encountered something dangerous, the less time they’d have before I wasn’t their biggest problem.

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