Fic: Beneath These Skies - 6/7 (BBC Sherlock + Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance)
Title: Beneath These Skies
Rating: R
Wordcount: 4.4k this part, 37k overall
Betas: vyctori, seijichan, lifeonmars, hiddenlacuna
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: An ex-soldier-turned-healer, a priest, and an unhorsed knight flee for their lives after the invasion of their homeland. John didn't expect the road to safety to be easy, but the addition of a petite mage and a scowling former prisoner to their small band opens his eyes to horrors beyond imagining.
Warnings: blood, violence, references to torture, references to mutilation, references to past rape and threats of rape (no rape occurring during the course of the story), fantasy racism (racism toward magical creatures), war, suicide contemplation.
Prologue: Flight to the Border
Chapter One: A Fight in the Dark
Chapter Two: Behind Enemy Lines
Chapter Three: A Friend Lost
Chapter Four: Besieged
Endgame: Strength and Stratagem
“I think you understand the situation you’re in,” the laguz man, the tiger says. He may have crossed his arms in the dark. He sounds like a man with crossed arms.
“You wanted to... rescue Sherlock,” John says. “That’s what this was for.” He touches the sash still about his waist. The darkness pricks at his skin from all sides, blocking his sight and preventing no harm.
“And what are we to do with you instead, I wonder,” the tiger muses. “It’s too dark to send Mrs Hudson back for that idiot, and the archers are waiting for her now. Any suggestions?”
Something behind John grunts and the laguz woman laughs. The younger cat, not the hawk.
“Anything productive,” the tiger says. Then: “Wait. Beorc, what’s your name?”
“John,” John says.
The tiger groans. “Of course it is. You’re supposed to be dead, you know.”
“I’m not terribly sorry about that,” John half-apologises.
“He could be a different John,” the cat says.
“Your friends and the girl you were travelling with,” the tiger says. “What were their names?”
“Bill, Mike, and Molly,” John says.
The tiger grunts. “You’re him, then.”
“I, yes.” If that means they’re not about to kill him, yes.
“Fine,” says the tiger. “Beorc, you’re with Mrs Hudson. Donovan, guide them to the camp and put a watch on him. Anderson, get Dimmock. We need a new plan.”
The something behind John slips away, movements close to silent.
“Was Sherlock supposed to be a scout?” John asks.
There’s a laugh and someone-the cat?-says, “That’s what you get for trusting a crow.”
“Donovan,” the tiger chastises. “You, John: you try to run off and my people will kill you. Stay with Mrs Hudson, and I’ll see about you in the morning. We’ll have plenty of wounded by then.”
“What about Sherlock?” Mrs Hudson cries. “You can’t leave him!”
“He’s made his choice very clear. I’m sorry, but we can’t wait another night. Donovan, with me!” With that, there is a shimmer of grey light and something huge lopes away into the shadows. Another shimmer, purple this time, and that’s Donovan gone as well. All around him, the flickering firefly lights of transformative magic herald the advance of the laguz. It is soft and nigh silent, too beautiful to be trusted.
“Will they keep him inside?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sorry, what?”
“Sherlock,” she says. “Will they keep him inside, away from the fighting?”
“They, they should,” John says. Something brushes by him in the dark, and he jerks away from it. Chuffing noises around him, heading north: the laughter of enormous cats. “They, um.” Stay calm. Stay calm. “Sorry, where are you?”
“Hard to say at the moment,” she replies. “Hold out your hand toward me, and I’ll reach around for it.”
John obeys, and a hand finds his wrist.
“There you are. We’ll be here for the night, so be careful.”
They shift a bit until they’re linking arms. She’s shorter than he is, and her arms are thin. Her skin feels like the skin of any woman who survives to old age. No feathers, no fur. Only the fragile softness of age. A long, feathery expanse settles behind John’s back, tangible if not touching.
“Were you the hawk?” he asks. “The one that carried me off, that was you, wasn’t it?”
“It certainly wasn’t anyone else.”
“Oh. Um.” Something-someone?-roars through the dark, and being polite is abruptly important. “Thank you. I, er, hope I wasn’t thrashing around too much.”
“Oh, no, you went nice and still,” she assures him, patting his arm. “You were heavier than I was expecting, that’s all. When Sherlock and I practised, he wasn’t-” Her voice breaks. She gasps in a breath and continues, “He’s lighter than you are. He’s so much smaller now, you see.” Her voice breaks again.
“How about we sit down,” he suggests. He has a sense of her nodding, and they lower themselves to the forest floor. There’s a rustling, folding sound, and John wishes he could see how she manages those wings.
“They’ll come back for us when they’re done fighting for the night,” she assures him. “Fire spells blind beorc at night. It’d be funny, how their aim goes, if it weren’t so serious.”
John doesn’t quite know what to say. The roars grow louder through the trees, now joined by shouting. John turns his head, watching for flares of magic, but there are too many trees and too much distance to the fort to see more than flickers of red. Those might be arrows, lit in the dark to be shot into the ground. The shouting grows worse and echoes strangely. The confusion of a night raid.
“What will they do to him when they realise he can’t use magic?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“I think he’ll stutter his way through,” John says. “I can’t see them killing him.”
“They’ve already done everything else,” Mrs Hudson says. The tremble touches her voice yet again.
“Is it... I’m sorry, I’ve not been taught any of this. Is it like the tails? Like the tigers and the cats. Are the, um. The wings. Are they the same?”
“He would have flown away if they weren’t,” Mrs Hudson says.
“Right. Sorry. That should have been obvious.”
A particularly bad scream pierces the night. It doesn’t sound human, but then, it never does.
“Is this the same bunch?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sorry?”
“The men who tore off his wings,” Mrs Hudson says. “The Daein soldiers who broke into that Crimean villa. Are they in there with him?”
“I... don’t know.”
He thinks of the man he met in the manse. In the cell. Locking himself inside to lock John and Molly out. Bleeding in the dark and ready to scream at a touch. He must have been as blind there as he was in the forest. But had the soldiers thrown him inside or had they found him there? A manacle about his leg, Molly had said, and the scarring is certainly there, old and foul. They’d found him there, chained in a cell meant for peacekeeping long ago. But why?
“He said he was imprisoned in Begnion,” John says.
“That’s where they trapped him.” The tremor is back in full. “We told him not to go, but he’s always been so stubborn.”
“Still is,” John says.
“Good,” she says. “I didn’t think they’d break him, not so quickly.”
“They had him nearly twenty years,” John says. “He was a kid.”
“He still is, in some ways. Laguz take longer to grow up, dear.”
“He was a kid,” John repeats.
“I know,” she says, more tired than tearful. “That doesn’t change anything, I’m afraid. It would have when I was a child, but not now. Begnion’s changed too much since then.”
He tells himself the churning of his stomach is from the charred scents on the night breeze. They’re downwind, after all.
“He’ll find a way out,” John says. “After the assault. They’re not going to break into the fort, not in one night. There’s time. The Daeins might expect him to heal, but he should be able to play frightened enough that they’ll stick him away somewhere. I don’t think they’d beat a priest-they think he’s a priest-and I’m sure they wouldn’t do it during a siege. You don’t break morale like that.”
“He’s good at picking locks,” Mrs Hudson says.
“He is,” John agrees.
She squeezes his hand in the dark and John squeezes back. If a Daein sally breaks through the laguz and into the woods, he thinks he’ll be able to hide her behind him. He’s not sure how large her wings are or how well she can tuck them away. Those could prove impossible to hide. Even so, he’ll try.
The roars and the shouts die down, fall silent, and rekindle into new conflict all through the night. The roars are irregular in timing and terrible in sound, and the second time John is jarred awake by the noise, he realises this is the point. He wonders what the panic is like inside.
“Strange things, walls,” Mrs Hudson muses. “Now, a roof will keep you out, but walls without one always seem silly, don’t they?”
John tries to find a way to explain walls to a woman who is also a bird. “They’re good for putting archers on,” John says.
“That’s always such a problem.”
They sit in relative silence. The night is still and strange between the bellows of the beasts. Every so often, a flare of fire will gleam through the darkness, but no one ever seems to hit anything.
John shifts a bit, his bum aching and damp from the forest floor.
“Was he shot down?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sherlock?”
“Yes. Was he shot down?”
“I don’t know,” John says. “He’s never spoken about it.” An understatement of the highest degree. “He said they imprisoned him for asking questions.”
“He wouldn’t turn down the job,” Mrs Hudson explains. “We begged him to, but he refused.”
“Investigating the massacre? The assassination that sparked it, I mean.”
Mrs Hudson hums agreement.
“So he went into Begnion right after a mass laguz killing,” John says.
“And just as the slave trade became part of the black market and nearly impossible to trace,” she agrees. She sighs. “But at least we have him back, what’s left of him.”
“He’s still alive,” John says.
“Half of him. And he can’t go home. Oh, I could carry him back, but what then? Leave him on a cliff for the rest of his life? He’d starve to death if he didn’t kill himself first.”
“There’s always Gallia. Two of my friends are there, and, well. I think she’s his friend. Sort of. Passably his friend. We could stay in Gallia, look after each other. We’ve done it before. Not actually in Gallia, but on the way. We could try, at least.”
“You won’t be going after the princess, then?” Mrs Hudson asks.
John searches for honesty on a face he can’t see.
“Princess Crimea?” Mrs Hudson prompts. “She’s the only one about these days, isn’t she? I don’t think King Daein has a daughter.”
“I didn’t think she was real,” John says. “I mean, is she? Where did you hear this?”
“Gallian soldiers,” Mrs Hudson says. “Some quite high up. I fly messages for Phoenicis. That’s the hawk island, dear. The ravens are over on Kilvas. There are some who won’t go back and forth, these days, but it all seems a bit silly, doesn’t it? I can still remember when we all lived in Begnion. But now everyone needs their own country, and then they all need to invade each other and it simply never stops. Beorc governments move so quickly, too, don’t they? I don’t know how you keep track. Half a century of this king, half a century of that queen; that seems terribly confusing.
“Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Princess Crimea. King Gallia recognised her as King Crimea’s daughter. Said she had the right smell and all of that. You can’t fake scent, not for families. And she seems to be a nice girl, by the sound of it. Terribly young, not even two decades old! Imagine that, an infant on the throne. But good ideas. A beorc princess coming to a laguz king for help: I would never have imagined! It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
Laguz living in Begnion? A princess of nearly twenty called a baby? John tries to make sense of any of that and settles on asking, “Hope for...?”
“Peace,” she says. “Not many of us can remember it anymore. It makes me sad for the children. And you poor beorc! It’s hardly a wonder you don’t know any better.”
“Sorry? When were you living in Begnion?”
“Oh, that was before Crimea, dear,” Mrs Hudson tells him.
“Crimea is over three hundred years old,” John says. “Or it was, I suppose.” Maybe it still is, if they do have a real princess.
“That sounds about right,” says Mrs Hudson.
“You’re over three hundred years old.”
Mrs Hudson laughs, a surprised sound. “Of course I am. I know it’s dark, but I would I have thought I sounded older than that.”
“You sound, you sound sixty. Seventy or eighty at the most,” John says, bewildered.
She swats at his arm. “Oh, you’re a charmer. My husband was just the same way.”
“How, um.” What in the world. “How old do you think I am?”
“Beorc age so quickly,” she muses. “Sixty?”
“Um. No.”
“Seventy?”
“Thirty-six,” John says.
“Are you really? That’s so young.” She sounds appalled.
John’s been a soldier since he was sixteen. It’s been close to twenty years since someone’s said something like that to him. “That’s middle age,” John says. “For us, I mean.”
A slight pause, and Mrs Hudson squeezes his arm.
“How old is Sherlock?” John asks.
“In his late two’s, I think. He might be in his early three’s by now.”
“Oh.” Hundreds. She means hundreds.
Without their whispers, the night is tense and quiet. Roars shatter the stillness, but not his mood.
“Are you all right, dear?”
“Fine.”
She squeezes his arm again.
“It’s good,” he says. “That he wasn’t a child for it. It’s not... it can’t be good, but. It was worse the other way.”
“It’s bad every way,” she whispers.
John nods in the dark, unseen, but certainly not unobserved. They speak no more that night.
Dawn is a slow, dragging light that reveals Mrs Hudson to be a perfectly normal woman, save for the odd clothes and the giant wings on her back. Each wing is wider and longer than John is. Through the immediate copse of trees and the dew-shining grass beyond, the fort is a small figure in a barren, torn field. John can’t see the outworks, not from this distance, and as the torches go out with the rising of the sun, it’s difficult to tell to what extent the Daein forces are still moving.
“We’ll wait until someone comes to get us,” Mrs Hudson says. When she looks about, the tips of pointed ears are visible against her short, tousled hair.
“You’re very calm for a civilian,” John notes. He knows what a civilian is, and she definitely is one, laguz or not.
“When you’re old, waiting doesn’t take as long.”
“No, I mean sitting on the edge of a battlefield all night.”
“Oh, it was hardly the edge.” She stretches out her arms and the wings follow, immense and lovely. They suit her, which is not something John thought wings would ever do on a person. They suit her, brown and orderly, never quite folding.
They wait, and John thinks of Sherlock’s back, his tense shoulders. How, early on, he balanced better for carrying a pack. How much do wings weigh? And has John ever seen his ears? Was that the real reason Sherlock kept his hood pulled low?
John’s interrupted from his thoughts by the return of one of the cats. Large and dark brown, it races toward them as if about to pounce, then rears up into a light jog, into a woman. Purple shimmering light, a stomach-twisting melting of features, and somehow she has clothes. Probably not a safe subject to ask about, the mysteriously appearing clothing. Why aren’t you naked is a frowned upon question in most places.
“You’re a healer,” the cat says, her voice familiar.
“You’re... Donovan?”
“I am,” she says, and the simple answer is somehow defiant. “Are you going to look after our wounded, or do we have to put you somewhere until the fighting ends?”
John picks up both staves.
“Is there any sign of Sherlock?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Crows don’t come out at night,” Donovan replies. “You of all people should know that. Might be out now, behind the wall. If you think you can keep out of arrow-range, an aerial report wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Oh, I should be all right,” Mrs Hudson says.
“Good. I’ll be there-” she points generally back toward the way she’d come “-with Lestrade. We need to know where they’re most likely to let out a ground attack.”
“West side,” John says. “That’s where the horses are, and the cavalry are the ones you’ll want to look out for.”
For the first time, Donovan doesn’t look at him as if he were something unpleasant stuck to her foot. Her bare foot, he notices. Clothing, but no shoes. “Come on, then,” she says.
“Take care,” Mrs Hudson says, then takes a few quick steps forward before jumping, and rising, and soaring. Again, the shimmering light, and then a hawk meets the sky.
Donovan changes back as well, a fluid yet grotesque transition of shifting bones and sprouting fur. Good of Mrs Hudson to change high up, though John doubts she had him in mind upon taking off. Maybe it’s easier to fly that way. Donovan pads forward before glaring over her shoulder, tail twitching.
“Right, coming,” John says and follows.
The laguz are wary of his spells, and burned as they are, John can’t fault them. The few who have trained with the Crimean army are willing to let him near, but the Daein robes do little to recommend John’s character. John shucks them, stripping down to shirt and trousers, and everything seems a bit better after that. As if he’s thrown off a weight he’d thought was merely part of his skin.
The work is much the same as it ever is, even with the change in patients. The same sense of unending blood and pointless waiting. The night assault has long since finished, and many nap in anticipation of the night to come.
“There’s going to be a sally before dark,” John says the moment he catches sight of Lestrade. One of Lestrade’s ears twitches in John’s direction, and he holds up a hand to a pair of transformed laguz before joining John.
“I’d gathered that, thanks. What are we looking at?”
“Mostly cavalry,” John says, certain of it. “They’re going to lay a trap in the surviving outworks and bait your troops into it. That means horses charging out and charging back. I wouldn’t pursue them all the way back to the wall, not into firing range.”
Lestrade shakes his head. “This lot will chase anything.”
“Then you’ll have to surround the horses,” John says. “They’ll have to turn and they won’t be able to do it tightly. There’s your chance. Failing that, hamstring as many horses as possible. Daein soldiers won’t last on foot.”
Lestrade says nothing, simply tilts his head and looks at him.
“Sir,” John amends belatedly.
“Sherlock knew what he was doing, I’ll give him that.”
John meets his gaze squarely.
“Right then.” Lestrade folds his arms. “What’s the best way to knock a beorc off a horse?”
“From the side. The saddles are made to withstand force from the front.”
“What will they be armed with?”
“Mostly lances. Some will have swords, possibly as secondary weapons in case the lance is pulled out of their hands. They all train right-handed, so attack on their left, your right.”
“Weaknesses in armour?”
“Legs,” John says immediately. “There’s no armour on the thighs. If you can tear out the back of the knee, they won’t be able to ride.”
Lestrade nods along. More questions, more answers, and when Lestrade trots away on four legs to tell his troops the new plan, John tells himself he’s doing the right thing.
It’s a slaughter.
“Those poor horses,” Mrs Hudson murmurs. They stand close to the tree line, ostensibly out of sight of the fort under the green cover. The animals scream more than the people, somehow more heart-wrenching for it. Its deceased rider flopping out of the saddle, one horse bolts for the trees. John runs to catch it before it can encounter the laguz troops still stationed within the forest.
He doesn’t manage it, not even close. When he catches up, he stares at Donovan, dumbfounded.
“Don’t frighten it,” she hisses at John, one hand stroking the horse’s neck, the other on the reins. John knows the horse by sight. It’s Edmund’s gelding. Edmund is dead.
“Oh,” John says. “I thought... Never mind.”
“I’m not about to mistake a horse for the enemy.”
“Right, sorry, of course.”
Another scream from the battlefield and the horse whinnies worriedly, tossing its head.
Immediately after come the roars.
Donovan perks up, looking past John toward sights unseen. “That’s finished, then.”
“Sorry, could I...?” He points to the horse’s saddle, to the sheathed sword still fastened there.
“Not a chance.”
He backs away immediately. “Right.”
Another roar. “Lestrade wants us.” Donovan hands the reins to another laguz before setting off at an absurd pace that John strains to match. She stays on two feet, which is the only reason John is able to keep her in sight.
When they arrive, it can’t be said Lestrade is waiting for them. He’s far too busy for that. At least, John assumes so: that grey tiger must be him. Growls and grunts and chuffing, a world of unknown body language, and those must be the orders. In the centre of the circle is a corpse, its dark amour lightened by dust and scuff marks. The other laguz move out, and Donovan looks at John expectantly.
Lestrade rises up into a man, a motion not unlike stretching the back after touching the toes. “Can you ride?”
“A bit,” John says.
“Can you ride with armour on? He’s about your size, isn’t he?”
John looks at the corpse. Though the throat was torn out, the helmet is still on, barely. Beneath it is a face John doubtlessly knows. “I can try,” he says, “if there’s a good reason for it.”
“Oh, there is,” Lestrade tells him, a spot of enthusiasm boosting his words. “Get changed, quick as you can.”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand the briefing.”
“That’s all right,” Lestrade says. His is the confident amusement of a commander about to do something terrible to someone he dislikes. “All you need to do is ride. Fast as you can.”
“No chance you’re about to say ‘to safety,’ is there?”
“Nope.”
“Thought so.”
The armour is heavy beyond expectation, and the padding that should go under it is soaked through with blood in sticky patches. Once wearing the mess, climbing onto Edmund’s horse is borderline impossible. The scent of blood has the animal skittish, and the stirrups are too high. The greaves weigh down his shins though the poleyns fit well enough for him to bend his knees. Ultimately, Donovan and two other laguz help lift him onto the poor beast. It is an extremely undignified process for all involved.
Once he’s up and firmly entrenched in the saddle, Donovan hands up the helmet. Beneath him, the horse tries to shy away and can’t seem to decide which way to go. John tries to stop it with solid pressure on the reins, but the animal simply begins to walk backward. Putting his heels down brings the horse to a stop, and it’s with uncertain hands that John drops the reins to put on the helmet. The visor is terrible, the metal still warm, and perhaps some dry padding would have been a good idea.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to tell me apart?” John asks.
“I’ll stay with you the whole way,” Donovan says. “Now draw the sword and wait for the signal.”
It’s not very reassuring, but John keeps his mouth shut and does as told. All he has to do is keep his seat. That is literally all he has to do. That, and not die, but they all know the not-dying is always optional.
The wind whistles through the trees, one last moment of respite, and then a roar splits the air and startles away the few returned birds.
“Go!”
John hears a slap and a growl, and the horse bolts, taking John and two stone of armour with it. Nigh instantly, the horse breaks into a loping canter, a wave of motion that threatens to throw him, high saddle or no. Outside the visor, all blurs. All sound becomes the pounding of hooves and the snarls of great cats chasing close behind.
Donovan lets out a yowl, behind and to the left, and John pulls at the reins in the attempt to turn accordingly. Before him: the glacis and the pit beyond. The horse turns of its own volition before clearing the top, more instinct than control, and left, left, around the glacis, through the ruined outworks, toward the sallyport! The horse knows where safety is, or it thinks it does.
A double yowl now.
He screams, a wordless shout of terror.
Closer, closer, closer still, and the whistling of arrows is audible even above his own racket.
“Open the gate!” he yells. “Open the gate!” They have to. The laguz must be lagging by now. They must open it, must think they have time.
A man opens it-please, not Brian-and John charges through, slashing at the man’s head as he passes. He feels it connect, feels it up his arm. One man dead, an army to go.
The Daeins rush at him only after a fatal pause, and John blocks the first lance as the laguz swarm the gate. A flurry of fur and fang, and then there is nothing more to block, no human weapon left raised save the sword in John’s own hand.
In and in the laguz force rushes, overrunning the last outwork, pressing up against the fort proper.
“Rocks!” John shouts, but the first object to fall from the wall is no object at all, but a man, a mage knocked from his perch. He sees the fall but not the landing, vision too limited by the visor. Dropping the reins to do so, he tears the helmet off and lets it fall. Below, someone hisses.
John looks down and there she is, Donovan, guarding horse and rider against mistaken identity. “Sorry!” John shouts, and another sort of cry splits the air. He looks up in time to see an archer taken out, arrow half-drawn, Mrs Hudson’s talons to his eyes.
Beyond, lower: a loud crack. The main gates. No battering ram needed with an army of tigers. Human screaming resumes, and John sits on the horse, trapped in the saddle, trapped outdoors, trapped waiting.
One death at a time, the siege ends.
previous | next
Rating: R
Wordcount: 4.4k this part, 37k overall
Betas: vyctori, seijichan, lifeonmars, hiddenlacuna
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: An ex-soldier-turned-healer, a priest, and an unhorsed knight flee for their lives after the invasion of their homeland. John didn't expect the road to safety to be easy, but the addition of a petite mage and a scowling former prisoner to their small band opens his eyes to horrors beyond imagining.
Warnings: blood, violence, references to torture, references to mutilation, references to past rape and threats of rape (no rape occurring during the course of the story), fantasy racism (racism toward magical creatures), war, suicide contemplation.
Prologue: Flight to the Border
Chapter One: A Fight in the Dark
Chapter Two: Behind Enemy Lines
Chapter Three: A Friend Lost
Chapter Four: Besieged
Endgame: Strength and Stratagem
“I think you understand the situation you’re in,” the laguz man, the tiger says. He may have crossed his arms in the dark. He sounds like a man with crossed arms.
“You wanted to... rescue Sherlock,” John says. “That’s what this was for.” He touches the sash still about his waist. The darkness pricks at his skin from all sides, blocking his sight and preventing no harm.
“And what are we to do with you instead, I wonder,” the tiger muses. “It’s too dark to send Mrs Hudson back for that idiot, and the archers are waiting for her now. Any suggestions?”
Something behind John grunts and the laguz woman laughs. The younger cat, not the hawk.
“Anything productive,” the tiger says. Then: “Wait. Beorc, what’s your name?”
“John,” John says.
The tiger groans. “Of course it is. You’re supposed to be dead, you know.”
“I’m not terribly sorry about that,” John half-apologises.
“He could be a different John,” the cat says.
“Your friends and the girl you were travelling with,” the tiger says. “What were their names?”
“Bill, Mike, and Molly,” John says.
The tiger grunts. “You’re him, then.”
“I, yes.” If that means they’re not about to kill him, yes.
“Fine,” says the tiger. “Beorc, you’re with Mrs Hudson. Donovan, guide them to the camp and put a watch on him. Anderson, get Dimmock. We need a new plan.”
The something behind John slips away, movements close to silent.
“Was Sherlock supposed to be a scout?” John asks.
There’s a laugh and someone-the cat?-says, “That’s what you get for trusting a crow.”
“Donovan,” the tiger chastises. “You, John: you try to run off and my people will kill you. Stay with Mrs Hudson, and I’ll see about you in the morning. We’ll have plenty of wounded by then.”
“What about Sherlock?” Mrs Hudson cries. “You can’t leave him!”
“He’s made his choice very clear. I’m sorry, but we can’t wait another night. Donovan, with me!” With that, there is a shimmer of grey light and something huge lopes away into the shadows. Another shimmer, purple this time, and that’s Donovan gone as well. All around him, the flickering firefly lights of transformative magic herald the advance of the laguz. It is soft and nigh silent, too beautiful to be trusted.
“Will they keep him inside?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sorry, what?”
“Sherlock,” she says. “Will they keep him inside, away from the fighting?”
“They, they should,” John says. Something brushes by him in the dark, and he jerks away from it. Chuffing noises around him, heading north: the laughter of enormous cats. “They, um.” Stay calm. Stay calm. “Sorry, where are you?”
“Hard to say at the moment,” she replies. “Hold out your hand toward me, and I’ll reach around for it.”
John obeys, and a hand finds his wrist.
“There you are. We’ll be here for the night, so be careful.”
They shift a bit until they’re linking arms. She’s shorter than he is, and her arms are thin. Her skin feels like the skin of any woman who survives to old age. No feathers, no fur. Only the fragile softness of age. A long, feathery expanse settles behind John’s back, tangible if not touching.
“Were you the hawk?” he asks. “The one that carried me off, that was you, wasn’t it?”
“It certainly wasn’t anyone else.”
“Oh. Um.” Something-someone?-roars through the dark, and being polite is abruptly important. “Thank you. I, er, hope I wasn’t thrashing around too much.”
“Oh, no, you went nice and still,” she assures him, patting his arm. “You were heavier than I was expecting, that’s all. When Sherlock and I practised, he wasn’t-” Her voice breaks. She gasps in a breath and continues, “He’s lighter than you are. He’s so much smaller now, you see.” Her voice breaks again.
“How about we sit down,” he suggests. He has a sense of her nodding, and they lower themselves to the forest floor. There’s a rustling, folding sound, and John wishes he could see how she manages those wings.
“They’ll come back for us when they’re done fighting for the night,” she assures him. “Fire spells blind beorc at night. It’d be funny, how their aim goes, if it weren’t so serious.”
John doesn’t quite know what to say. The roars grow louder through the trees, now joined by shouting. John turns his head, watching for flares of magic, but there are too many trees and too much distance to the fort to see more than flickers of red. Those might be arrows, lit in the dark to be shot into the ground. The shouting grows worse and echoes strangely. The confusion of a night raid.
“What will they do to him when they realise he can’t use magic?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“I think he’ll stutter his way through,” John says. “I can’t see them killing him.”
“They’ve already done everything else,” Mrs Hudson says. The tremble touches her voice yet again.
“Is it... I’m sorry, I’ve not been taught any of this. Is it like the tails? Like the tigers and the cats. Are the, um. The wings. Are they the same?”
“He would have flown away if they weren’t,” Mrs Hudson says.
“Right. Sorry. That should have been obvious.”
A particularly bad scream pierces the night. It doesn’t sound human, but then, it never does.
“Is this the same bunch?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sorry?”
“The men who tore off his wings,” Mrs Hudson says. “The Daein soldiers who broke into that Crimean villa. Are they in there with him?”
“I... don’t know.”
He thinks of the man he met in the manse. In the cell. Locking himself inside to lock John and Molly out. Bleeding in the dark and ready to scream at a touch. He must have been as blind there as he was in the forest. But had the soldiers thrown him inside or had they found him there? A manacle about his leg, Molly had said, and the scarring is certainly there, old and foul. They’d found him there, chained in a cell meant for peacekeeping long ago. But why?
“He said he was imprisoned in Begnion,” John says.
“That’s where they trapped him.” The tremor is back in full. “We told him not to go, but he’s always been so stubborn.”
“Still is,” John says.
“Good,” she says. “I didn’t think they’d break him, not so quickly.”
“They had him nearly twenty years,” John says. “He was a kid.”
“He still is, in some ways. Laguz take longer to grow up, dear.”
“He was a kid,” John repeats.
“I know,” she says, more tired than tearful. “That doesn’t change anything, I’m afraid. It would have when I was a child, but not now. Begnion’s changed too much since then.”
He tells himself the churning of his stomach is from the charred scents on the night breeze. They’re downwind, after all.
“He’ll find a way out,” John says. “After the assault. They’re not going to break into the fort, not in one night. There’s time. The Daeins might expect him to heal, but he should be able to play frightened enough that they’ll stick him away somewhere. I don’t think they’d beat a priest-they think he’s a priest-and I’m sure they wouldn’t do it during a siege. You don’t break morale like that.”
“He’s good at picking locks,” Mrs Hudson says.
“He is,” John agrees.
She squeezes his hand in the dark and John squeezes back. If a Daein sally breaks through the laguz and into the woods, he thinks he’ll be able to hide her behind him. He’s not sure how large her wings are or how well she can tuck them away. Those could prove impossible to hide. Even so, he’ll try.
The roars and the shouts die down, fall silent, and rekindle into new conflict all through the night. The roars are irregular in timing and terrible in sound, and the second time John is jarred awake by the noise, he realises this is the point. He wonders what the panic is like inside.
“Strange things, walls,” Mrs Hudson muses. “Now, a roof will keep you out, but walls without one always seem silly, don’t they?”
John tries to find a way to explain walls to a woman who is also a bird. “They’re good for putting archers on,” John says.
“That’s always such a problem.”
They sit in relative silence. The night is still and strange between the bellows of the beasts. Every so often, a flare of fire will gleam through the darkness, but no one ever seems to hit anything.
John shifts a bit, his bum aching and damp from the forest floor.
“Was he shot down?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Sherlock?”
“Yes. Was he shot down?”
“I don’t know,” John says. “He’s never spoken about it.” An understatement of the highest degree. “He said they imprisoned him for asking questions.”
“He wouldn’t turn down the job,” Mrs Hudson explains. “We begged him to, but he refused.”
“Investigating the massacre? The assassination that sparked it, I mean.”
Mrs Hudson hums agreement.
“So he went into Begnion right after a mass laguz killing,” John says.
“And just as the slave trade became part of the black market and nearly impossible to trace,” she agrees. She sighs. “But at least we have him back, what’s left of him.”
“He’s still alive,” John says.
“Half of him. And he can’t go home. Oh, I could carry him back, but what then? Leave him on a cliff for the rest of his life? He’d starve to death if he didn’t kill himself first.”
“There’s always Gallia. Two of my friends are there, and, well. I think she’s his friend. Sort of. Passably his friend. We could stay in Gallia, look after each other. We’ve done it before. Not actually in Gallia, but on the way. We could try, at least.”
“You won’t be going after the princess, then?” Mrs Hudson asks.
John searches for honesty on a face he can’t see.
“Princess Crimea?” Mrs Hudson prompts. “She’s the only one about these days, isn’t she? I don’t think King Daein has a daughter.”
“I didn’t think she was real,” John says. “I mean, is she? Where did you hear this?”
“Gallian soldiers,” Mrs Hudson says. “Some quite high up. I fly messages for Phoenicis. That’s the hawk island, dear. The ravens are over on Kilvas. There are some who won’t go back and forth, these days, but it all seems a bit silly, doesn’t it? I can still remember when we all lived in Begnion. But now everyone needs their own country, and then they all need to invade each other and it simply never stops. Beorc governments move so quickly, too, don’t they? I don’t know how you keep track. Half a century of this king, half a century of that queen; that seems terribly confusing.
“Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Princess Crimea. King Gallia recognised her as King Crimea’s daughter. Said she had the right smell and all of that. You can’t fake scent, not for families. And she seems to be a nice girl, by the sound of it. Terribly young, not even two decades old! Imagine that, an infant on the throne. But good ideas. A beorc princess coming to a laguz king for help: I would never have imagined! It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
Laguz living in Begnion? A princess of nearly twenty called a baby? John tries to make sense of any of that and settles on asking, “Hope for...?”
“Peace,” she says. “Not many of us can remember it anymore. It makes me sad for the children. And you poor beorc! It’s hardly a wonder you don’t know any better.”
“Sorry? When were you living in Begnion?”
“Oh, that was before Crimea, dear,” Mrs Hudson tells him.
“Crimea is over three hundred years old,” John says. “Or it was, I suppose.” Maybe it still is, if they do have a real princess.
“That sounds about right,” says Mrs Hudson.
“You’re over three hundred years old.”
Mrs Hudson laughs, a surprised sound. “Of course I am. I know it’s dark, but I would I have thought I sounded older than that.”
“You sound, you sound sixty. Seventy or eighty at the most,” John says, bewildered.
She swats at his arm. “Oh, you’re a charmer. My husband was just the same way.”
“How, um.” What in the world. “How old do you think I am?”
“Beorc age so quickly,” she muses. “Sixty?”
“Um. No.”
“Seventy?”
“Thirty-six,” John says.
“Are you really? That’s so young.” She sounds appalled.
John’s been a soldier since he was sixteen. It’s been close to twenty years since someone’s said something like that to him. “That’s middle age,” John says. “For us, I mean.”
A slight pause, and Mrs Hudson squeezes his arm.
“How old is Sherlock?” John asks.
“In his late two’s, I think. He might be in his early three’s by now.”
“Oh.” Hundreds. She means hundreds.
Without their whispers, the night is tense and quiet. Roars shatter the stillness, but not his mood.
“Are you all right, dear?”
“Fine.”
She squeezes his arm again.
“It’s good,” he says. “That he wasn’t a child for it. It’s not... it can’t be good, but. It was worse the other way.”
“It’s bad every way,” she whispers.
John nods in the dark, unseen, but certainly not unobserved. They speak no more that night.
Dawn is a slow, dragging light that reveals Mrs Hudson to be a perfectly normal woman, save for the odd clothes and the giant wings on her back. Each wing is wider and longer than John is. Through the immediate copse of trees and the dew-shining grass beyond, the fort is a small figure in a barren, torn field. John can’t see the outworks, not from this distance, and as the torches go out with the rising of the sun, it’s difficult to tell to what extent the Daein forces are still moving.
“We’ll wait until someone comes to get us,” Mrs Hudson says. When she looks about, the tips of pointed ears are visible against her short, tousled hair.
“You’re very calm for a civilian,” John notes. He knows what a civilian is, and she definitely is one, laguz or not.
“When you’re old, waiting doesn’t take as long.”
“No, I mean sitting on the edge of a battlefield all night.”
“Oh, it was hardly the edge.” She stretches out her arms and the wings follow, immense and lovely. They suit her, which is not something John thought wings would ever do on a person. They suit her, brown and orderly, never quite folding.
They wait, and John thinks of Sherlock’s back, his tense shoulders. How, early on, he balanced better for carrying a pack. How much do wings weigh? And has John ever seen his ears? Was that the real reason Sherlock kept his hood pulled low?
John’s interrupted from his thoughts by the return of one of the cats. Large and dark brown, it races toward them as if about to pounce, then rears up into a light jog, into a woman. Purple shimmering light, a stomach-twisting melting of features, and somehow she has clothes. Probably not a safe subject to ask about, the mysteriously appearing clothing. Why aren’t you naked is a frowned upon question in most places.
“You’re a healer,” the cat says, her voice familiar.
“You’re... Donovan?”
“I am,” she says, and the simple answer is somehow defiant. “Are you going to look after our wounded, or do we have to put you somewhere until the fighting ends?”
John picks up both staves.
“Is there any sign of Sherlock?” Mrs Hudson asks.
“Crows don’t come out at night,” Donovan replies. “You of all people should know that. Might be out now, behind the wall. If you think you can keep out of arrow-range, an aerial report wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Oh, I should be all right,” Mrs Hudson says.
“Good. I’ll be there-” she points generally back toward the way she’d come “-with Lestrade. We need to know where they’re most likely to let out a ground attack.”
“West side,” John says. “That’s where the horses are, and the cavalry are the ones you’ll want to look out for.”
For the first time, Donovan doesn’t look at him as if he were something unpleasant stuck to her foot. Her bare foot, he notices. Clothing, but no shoes. “Come on, then,” she says.
“Take care,” Mrs Hudson says, then takes a few quick steps forward before jumping, and rising, and soaring. Again, the shimmering light, and then a hawk meets the sky.
Donovan changes back as well, a fluid yet grotesque transition of shifting bones and sprouting fur. Good of Mrs Hudson to change high up, though John doubts she had him in mind upon taking off. Maybe it’s easier to fly that way. Donovan pads forward before glaring over her shoulder, tail twitching.
“Right, coming,” John says and follows.
The laguz are wary of his spells, and burned as they are, John can’t fault them. The few who have trained with the Crimean army are willing to let him near, but the Daein robes do little to recommend John’s character. John shucks them, stripping down to shirt and trousers, and everything seems a bit better after that. As if he’s thrown off a weight he’d thought was merely part of his skin.
The work is much the same as it ever is, even with the change in patients. The same sense of unending blood and pointless waiting. The night assault has long since finished, and many nap in anticipation of the night to come.
“There’s going to be a sally before dark,” John says the moment he catches sight of Lestrade. One of Lestrade’s ears twitches in John’s direction, and he holds up a hand to a pair of transformed laguz before joining John.
“I’d gathered that, thanks. What are we looking at?”
“Mostly cavalry,” John says, certain of it. “They’re going to lay a trap in the surviving outworks and bait your troops into it. That means horses charging out and charging back. I wouldn’t pursue them all the way back to the wall, not into firing range.”
Lestrade shakes his head. “This lot will chase anything.”
“Then you’ll have to surround the horses,” John says. “They’ll have to turn and they won’t be able to do it tightly. There’s your chance. Failing that, hamstring as many horses as possible. Daein soldiers won’t last on foot.”
Lestrade says nothing, simply tilts his head and looks at him.
“Sir,” John amends belatedly.
“Sherlock knew what he was doing, I’ll give him that.”
John meets his gaze squarely.
“Right then.” Lestrade folds his arms. “What’s the best way to knock a beorc off a horse?”
“From the side. The saddles are made to withstand force from the front.”
“What will they be armed with?”
“Mostly lances. Some will have swords, possibly as secondary weapons in case the lance is pulled out of their hands. They all train right-handed, so attack on their left, your right.”
“Weaknesses in armour?”
“Legs,” John says immediately. “There’s no armour on the thighs. If you can tear out the back of the knee, they won’t be able to ride.”
Lestrade nods along. More questions, more answers, and when Lestrade trots away on four legs to tell his troops the new plan, John tells himself he’s doing the right thing.
It’s a slaughter.
“Those poor horses,” Mrs Hudson murmurs. They stand close to the tree line, ostensibly out of sight of the fort under the green cover. The animals scream more than the people, somehow more heart-wrenching for it. Its deceased rider flopping out of the saddle, one horse bolts for the trees. John runs to catch it before it can encounter the laguz troops still stationed within the forest.
He doesn’t manage it, not even close. When he catches up, he stares at Donovan, dumbfounded.
“Don’t frighten it,” she hisses at John, one hand stroking the horse’s neck, the other on the reins. John knows the horse by sight. It’s Edmund’s gelding. Edmund is dead.
“Oh,” John says. “I thought... Never mind.”
“I’m not about to mistake a horse for the enemy.”
“Right, sorry, of course.”
Another scream from the battlefield and the horse whinnies worriedly, tossing its head.
Immediately after come the roars.
Donovan perks up, looking past John toward sights unseen. “That’s finished, then.”
“Sorry, could I...?” He points to the horse’s saddle, to the sheathed sword still fastened there.
“Not a chance.”
He backs away immediately. “Right.”
Another roar. “Lestrade wants us.” Donovan hands the reins to another laguz before setting off at an absurd pace that John strains to match. She stays on two feet, which is the only reason John is able to keep her in sight.
When they arrive, it can’t be said Lestrade is waiting for them. He’s far too busy for that. At least, John assumes so: that grey tiger must be him. Growls and grunts and chuffing, a world of unknown body language, and those must be the orders. In the centre of the circle is a corpse, its dark amour lightened by dust and scuff marks. The other laguz move out, and Donovan looks at John expectantly.
Lestrade rises up into a man, a motion not unlike stretching the back after touching the toes. “Can you ride?”
“A bit,” John says.
“Can you ride with armour on? He’s about your size, isn’t he?”
John looks at the corpse. Though the throat was torn out, the helmet is still on, barely. Beneath it is a face John doubtlessly knows. “I can try,” he says, “if there’s a good reason for it.”
“Oh, there is,” Lestrade tells him, a spot of enthusiasm boosting his words. “Get changed, quick as you can.”
“Sorry, I didn’t understand the briefing.”
“That’s all right,” Lestrade says. His is the confident amusement of a commander about to do something terrible to someone he dislikes. “All you need to do is ride. Fast as you can.”
“No chance you’re about to say ‘to safety,’ is there?”
“Nope.”
“Thought so.”
The armour is heavy beyond expectation, and the padding that should go under it is soaked through with blood in sticky patches. Once wearing the mess, climbing onto Edmund’s horse is borderline impossible. The scent of blood has the animal skittish, and the stirrups are too high. The greaves weigh down his shins though the poleyns fit well enough for him to bend his knees. Ultimately, Donovan and two other laguz help lift him onto the poor beast. It is an extremely undignified process for all involved.
Once he’s up and firmly entrenched in the saddle, Donovan hands up the helmet. Beneath him, the horse tries to shy away and can’t seem to decide which way to go. John tries to stop it with solid pressure on the reins, but the animal simply begins to walk backward. Putting his heels down brings the horse to a stop, and it’s with uncertain hands that John drops the reins to put on the helmet. The visor is terrible, the metal still warm, and perhaps some dry padding would have been a good idea.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to tell me apart?” John asks.
“I’ll stay with you the whole way,” Donovan says. “Now draw the sword and wait for the signal.”
It’s not very reassuring, but John keeps his mouth shut and does as told. All he has to do is keep his seat. That is literally all he has to do. That, and not die, but they all know the not-dying is always optional.
The wind whistles through the trees, one last moment of respite, and then a roar splits the air and startles away the few returned birds.
“Go!”
John hears a slap and a growl, and the horse bolts, taking John and two stone of armour with it. Nigh instantly, the horse breaks into a loping canter, a wave of motion that threatens to throw him, high saddle or no. Outside the visor, all blurs. All sound becomes the pounding of hooves and the snarls of great cats chasing close behind.
Donovan lets out a yowl, behind and to the left, and John pulls at the reins in the attempt to turn accordingly. Before him: the glacis and the pit beyond. The horse turns of its own volition before clearing the top, more instinct than control, and left, left, around the glacis, through the ruined outworks, toward the sallyport! The horse knows where safety is, or it thinks it does.
A double yowl now.
He screams, a wordless shout of terror.
Closer, closer, closer still, and the whistling of arrows is audible even above his own racket.
“Open the gate!” he yells. “Open the gate!” They have to. The laguz must be lagging by now. They must open it, must think they have time.
A man opens it-please, not Brian-and John charges through, slashing at the man’s head as he passes. He feels it connect, feels it up his arm. One man dead, an army to go.
The Daeins rush at him only after a fatal pause, and John blocks the first lance as the laguz swarm the gate. A flurry of fur and fang, and then there is nothing more to block, no human weapon left raised save the sword in John’s own hand.
In and in the laguz force rushes, overrunning the last outwork, pressing up against the fort proper.
“Rocks!” John shouts, but the first object to fall from the wall is no object at all, but a man, a mage knocked from his perch. He sees the fall but not the landing, vision too limited by the visor. Dropping the reins to do so, he tears the helmet off and lets it fall. Below, someone hisses.
John looks down and there she is, Donovan, guarding horse and rider against mistaken identity. “Sorry!” John shouts, and another sort of cry splits the air. He looks up in time to see an archer taken out, arrow half-drawn, Mrs Hudson’s talons to his eyes.
Beyond, lower: a loud crack. The main gates. No battering ram needed with an army of tigers. Human screaming resumes, and John sits on the horse, trapped in the saddle, trapped outdoors, trapped waiting.
One death at a time, the siege ends.
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