In which we meet Kilin

At the first bell on Alyssa, Kilin threw his boot at Allen. Allen was asleep of course, and that’s why Kilin threw the boot. The boot hit him in the chest, bounced off the blanket he was wrapped in, and landed on the floor. Allen rolled over and swatted at it, missing by near three feet, and then pulled the blanket back over his head. It was one of those mornings….

“Wake up, sailor!” Kilin shouted from across the small room the two young lieutenants shared. “It’s almost dawn, and you have to help me dress.”

Allen feigned sleep. How was his friend so impossibly cheerful this morning, after last night?

“Get up, get up!” Kilin exclaimed, rattling the metal capped end of his scabbard along the walls. When that failed to rouse the other lieutenant, he picked his shield up from the corner and began to hammer the hilt of his blade against it. And to sing. Badly.

She walked like a lady and spoke with a lisp,
danced like a demon and her kisses were bliss;
came to the corner where I was standing guard,
and made me lose my head in the captain’s yard.

Half-a-dozen missed notes and several forced rhymes later, Allen couldn’t take it any longer. “Ahh, gods, shut up Kilin. Why are you up already?” He unrolled himself from the blanket and sat up, and winced at his aching head.

“You can’t have forgotten,” Kilin replied, waved his scabbard in the general direction of the wardrobe along the back wall of the room, or maybe at the window that was still dark. “Alyssa! Spring!”

Allen rubbed his temples with his hands. What was Kilin talking about? Then, after a moment of wandering thoughts, it clicked. The reason they’d been out last night and the reason his head felt as if a blacksmith had set up shop in it. “Ahh, right…promotions.”

“Yes! And today I make senior lieutenant, while you are still just a measly junior. So get up, junior sailor lieutenant, and help me dress.”

Right. He’d promised he would help Kilin get ready for the ceremony. That promise was somewhat clearer than the events of last night, since he’d made it a week ago when the coming promotions had been announced. “All right, all right…just stop singing and banging on things. If I had known what I was getting into, I would never have roomed with you.”

He picked the boot up off the floor beside his bunk and threw it back at Kilin for good measure. “You’re going to need that.”

A bit later, after he had helped Kilin don his new uniform, he paced around his friend and looked for flaws in it, any creases in the cloth or smudges in the polish on the boots. The black and grey of the Griffins’ uniforms helped to hide stains, but the very fact that it was dark just made the examiners look harder.

“You’re fine,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” Kilin pretended to preen in the small mirror above their washstand.

“Fop.”

“Deckhand.”

Allen snorted. Kilin hadn’t changed much in the year since they’d met, right after Allen had been accepted into the guard. Kilin had been equally new, but he was from Rylar and had been assigned to show Allen around. The first impression he’d had of Kilin was that the young lieutenant liked clothes far too much for his own good, and women and drinking more than his clothes.

But appearances had been deceptive, as he’d learned the first time they’d gone drinking. Kilin’s apparent libertine nature had concealed a careful restraint, and Allen had been the one hung-over in the morning: a not unfamiliar situation, since even when he did drink the other lieutenant seemed to be immune to the ill-effects of the morning after–such as this morning.

At times like this, sometimes accompanied by even worse musical efforts, Allen considered strangling him in his sleep.–for the good of the Guard and Kilin’s future roommates.

When dawn was breaking, the two of them left the junior lieutenant quarters and joined the other young officers on the parade ground in front of the Captain of the Guard’s duty quarters.

“Salute arms!” came the shout from the captain’s second, Senior Captain Leysa.

The junior lieutenants, already standing in one long row, drew their blades and brought them to salute in front of their faces in three sharp movements.

The Captain of the Guard, the highest commander of the Northern Guard, walked down the row in front of them, pivoted to the right at the exact center of the line, and came to a rest facing them, with Leysa at his shoulder.

“Salute Guard!”

“Heart!” The lieutenants brought the hilts of their blades level with their chests, and beat the fist curled around the hilt against their chest. Without armor, it hurt. But in this case, Allen figured that was the point.

“Hand!” They hammered their fists against their chest again.

“Stone!” And again.

“Rest arms!” Leysa shouted.

The lieutenants sliced their blades around in a half-circle until the blades were pointed downward and gripped the hilt with their left hand, reversed the grip on their right hand; then flipped the position of their hands until their left hand covered their right. Allen restrained himself from looking down to see if the blade was properly straight and off the ground.

The Captain nodded to the gathered lieutenants, and spoke to Leysa. “Announce promotions.”

Leysa took a scroll from a basket on the ground, unfurled it, and shouted. “Junior Lieutenant Heris, advance to fore!”

Heris saluted with his blade, sheathed it, stepped forward a pace, turned and marched down the line to the center, pivoted, advanced, and stopped in front of the Captain. He saluted with his fist against his chest.

The Captain nodded to him.

Leysa read off the scroll, “Junior Lieutenant Heris, from this date, Alyssa First of spring, in the eight hundredth seventy-ninth year since the founding of Aciel, to be made Senior Lieutenant Heris, by order of the King and People of Aciel. Promoted for skill at arms and exemplary behavior.” She handed Heris’ new insignia to the Captain, who pinned it at Heris’ collar. Allen couldn’t see it, but he knew the pin was a silver and black enamel sword. The pin worn by the junior lieutenants was a bronze sword set in green enamel. He figured Kilin’s excitement for promotion came mostly from the new pin that would match his uniform.

Heris saluted the Captain again, and marched back to his place in the line.

Poren and Tyria followed Heris, and then it was Kilin.

“Junior Lieutenant Kilin, from this date, Alyssa First of spring…” Leysa announced. “Promoted for skill at arms and exemplary behavior.” Allen kept his face carefully expressionless, but smiled inwardly as the Captain pinned the sword on Kilin’s collar. Until he was promoted to an equivalent rank, their friendship would have to be distant in public, but he was proud of his friend. There was more to promotion than the claim of skill at arms and exemplary behavior, he knew. Kilin was terrible with a sword. The senior captains met with the Captain of the Guard to determine promotions. He knew of no set pattern to it.

Kilin returned to the line, and broke the protocol of the situation enough to wink at Allen when he marched by, although it was little more than a twitch of the eye out of sight of the Captain and Leysa.

One more lieutenant was promoted after that, and then the lieutenants were dismissed to their duty assignments. Allen and Kilin had been together beneath Senior Captain Felim, helping to organize the 9^th Foot, but he didn’t know if Kilin would be reassigned now. The 9^th’s Griffins had been retired from active service nearly a century before, but two months before the King had ordered the old standards brought back out and polished off, and the Foot reconstituted from a mix of new recruits and veterans drawn from the other legions.

The 9^th was only one of the three legions being so reconstituted. The 11^th and the 17^th had been given the same treatment, and the size of Aciel’s standing army increased from its typical ten legions to thirteen. The word in the barracks said that the Kingdom of Karn in the south was preparing a new offensive, but Allen doubted it. The word in the barracks was seldom more than half-truths wrapped in superstition.

More likely, Aciel was preparing fortifications against the northern steppes. The far north was a belligerent furnace of warring religions and constantly changing leaders, and recently there had been a major coup that put a new leader in power, apparently backed by one of the innumerable priesthoods. The King of the North, he called himself.

Most of the Northern Guard dismissed the far north as too chaotic to provide a challenge, and focused on Karn as their traditional enemy, but Allen’s relative newness to Rylar gave him a different perspective. It had been almost three and a half years since he had arrived, as near as he could remember, which put the date of his arrival somewhere around late autumn, eight hundred seventy-five.

Knowing the date gave him some sense of certainty, as he felt himself adrift in this land, untied to it by blood and tradition. He had been born in it, he thought, and he remembered a childhood in a pastoral country, but wherever that had been, it had been a place very distant from the capital of Rylar. Perhaps that lack of a past was why he had come to the Northern Guard, the traditional core of the legions of Aciel, every one of them sworn personally to the king. Since he did not know his own, he had found a tradition to believe in.

In the years since he’d woken to find himself in the great forest, he’d learned a great deal about the world and its history, but still knew nothing about how he had arrived in those woods or what the mark above his left eye meant. There was certainly a gap of some years between that pastoral childhood and the fleeting images of mother and sister and that morning on the edge of the wood. The mark above his eye, despite that it sometimes made him feel as if he were a pawn on some divine or mystical chessboard, had probably been what enabled him to find a place in the world. People had taken one look at it and accepted him, even offered him a position like Raeli, captain of the rivership Dhara, who had taken him on when she found him in the forest on the shore of the Aela river, and many continued to seek him out for what they thought he could offer them by way of divine favor.

If there were any gods, giving him a mark must have been a great divine trick. First find a random young man and take away his past; then give him a mark so he’ll attract attention; finally, wait to see what happens. They must have been bored that day.

“Tonight, we celebrate!” Kilin announced, and clapped his arm around Allen’s shoulders.

Allen snorted. “We were just out last night, o’ mighty senior lieutenant. I don’t know if my head can take another one of your celebrations.”

“If I get you drunk enough, you might marry my sister. It’s a sad thing; she’s head over heels for you and you won’t even look at her.”

“Scoundrel. You don’t even have a sister.”

“I know, and fortunate for my parents too, as I would have married her off by now, probably to you, which would have made them eternally disgusted with me over your lack of wit, charm, fashion, and drinking ability. Everyone knows that these four requirements are all to which a young aristocrat should aspire. My sister would have never forgiven me for marrying her off to such a wholesome character.”

“Enough!” Allen chuckled. “All right…we’ll go celebrate…again….”

Kilin turned more serious for a moment. “It might be the last chance we have. I still don’t know where I’ll be posted. Maybe we can find you a new roommate, before the Guard assigns you one.”

Allen nodded. Kilin was his greatest, and nearly only, friend in the barracks. Now that he had been promoted, they wouldn’t be rooming together. The Guard kept a strict discipline between the ranks whenever possible.

Allen got along with the other junior lieutenants, but he rarely spoke to them. When Kilin wasn’t distracting him, he spent most of his time thinking about the world. Usually to no new conclusions. Kilin called it brooding, and had declared it his job to prevent it as often as possible. Allen would miss him when he left, and his friend’s departure also meant that he would be alone with his thoughts again.

“Tonight then,” he said.

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