Liqaria, 9th of Eighthmoon 3045
When Hawk came to, his first thought was that he was warm, so very warm and comfortable that for a moment he did not remember where he was. It was long since he’d last awoken feeling quite so safe and calm. Hawk inhaled slowly. The air was humid and heavy with the resinous scent of coniferous trees.
All around him there were silent noises, a strange crackling sound. The crackling of fire, Hawk realised, and it was the glow of a campfire that was warming his face. In the same instant he became aware of his head resting against something. A soft something against his cheek, tickling at his skin.
He forced his eyelids open, though they seemed welded shut. It was dark. The only things he could make out apart from the glowing flames were the black shadows of trees, and the snow, falling in slow, thick flakes between tree branches.
Hawk let out a quiet whine. His throat was drier than the wasteland itself.
”Are you awake?” a familiar voice asked by his ear. Warm breath tickled at his cheek. ”All is well. You keep sleeping.”
Hawk recognised the voice at once, and the events of the past day came back in a crash. Ren’i. Of course it was Ren’i. Hawk raised his head just enough to realise he’d been leaning against Ren’i’s shoulder in his sleep. No wonder he was warm. Ren’i had wrapped his cloak around them both at some point, and his arm was resting around Hawk’s shoulders.
Hawk tried to speak. ”How… how long have I been…?”
”It’s past midnight already. You’ve been sleeping for hours.”
Ren’i’s pale face was mere centimetres from his own, so close that Hawk could have counted his freckles one by one. He’d washed his face, revealing just how deep the circles beneath his eyes really were. He’d managed to catch even less sleep than Hawk the previous night, Hawk could recall that now. The attack had come almost exactly at the same moment that Hawk and Blueleaf had woken up for their watch.
Ren’i handed him a waterskin. ”Drink. Your lips are all parched.”
Hawk brought the waterskin to his lips. The water was warm and carried a mild aftertaste he could not place. He emptied it all in one gulp. Ren’i took it from him, reached out to take the kettle from the fire, and filled one of those battered wooden cups that Kishans tended to carry with their camping equipment. The drink in the cup was steaming, and Hawk warmed his fingers around it before taking a careful sip.
”It’s the same tea as in the waterskin,” Ren’i explained. ”There’s not that much energy you can get from it, but still, it’s better than nothing.”
”Where did you get tea from?”
His smile was subdued. ”Well, it’s not tea, not exactly. When I was a rookie we used to boil spruce needles in hot water sometimes if the training camp ran out of hot chocolate. The taste is nothing to shout about, but in these circumstances…”
”Good enough for me,” Hawk interrupted him. He inhaled deeply. Now that he knew what was in it, he could detect the woodsy scent in the drink. ”It warms you up. Well thought.”
”Well, I can’t take credit for the idea. Rookies don’t get any vacations, and training camps tend to run out of everything except the most essential provisions at some point, so we learn to be flexible.”
Ren’i withdrew his arm while Hawk stretched. Hawk could feel the aches left by his sleeping position in his neck and back, and thought longingly of his fur-covered cot in the cottage. It wasn’t a bed, not in the true meaning of the word, but an old-fashioned, akheri-style berth, almost like a nest embedded to the floor with regards to the hot summers. Hawk decided he’d never again accuse it of discomfort if he ever saw Hatam-Ile again. His legs were numb all over and protested as he tried moving them, forcing his blood to start circulating once more.
Ren’i took a sip from his own cup, watching him from the corner of his eye. ”How’s your leg feeling?”
Hawk bent his knee. ”Better. The swelling’s gone down a little.” He glanced at Ren’i while he tended the fire. There was a pile of broken branches by the fire, and Hawk guessed Ren’i had gathered them while he’d been sleeping. ”Have you slept at all?”
Ren’i shook his head. ”I’ve been watching the camp. I don’t believe the Liqaris have followed us all the way to the woods, but I won’t breathe freely until we reach the land bridge.”
”In that case it’s my turn to keep watch. Rest.”
”I had thought to go hunting now that you’re awake. We need something to eat.”
”You’re not going,” Hawk said sternly. ”You look like you’re about to pass out where you sit at any given moment.”
”I’m all right,” Ren’i protested, though it did not become a very convincing protest. He let out a wide yawn before he’d so much as finished the sentence.
Hawk squinted. ”You. Sleep. Now.” Ren’i did not miss the fact that he emphasized each word deliberately. ”I’ll keep watch.”
Hawk’s tone left no room for negotation. Ren’i threw up his hands to signal his surrender.
”Okay, okay, if it makes you happy.”
Hawk watched with some amusement how Ren’i grunted and squirmed while trying to find a comfortable position below their home-made lean-to. In the end Ren’i gave up upon realising the sheer impossibility of the task and rested his head on Hawk’s shoulder, sighing deeply.
”This isn’t the most comfortable arrangement imaginable,” he muttered.
”Close your eyes and sleep.”
He sighed again, but closed his eyes anyway. ”I don’t know if I can catch any. Everytime I try to relax I just keep thinking about what I could’ve done differently. If the others headed the wrong way in the storm or ran into another patrol—”
”Shh. We can’t do anything for them right now.” Just like that Hawk wrapped an arm around Ren’i’s shoulders and pulled him against himself, just as Ren’i had done to him. This up close Hawk could feel Ren’i’s heart beating restlessly, and had no difficulty guessing that the same worries that weighted on Hawk’s mind were roiling around in his, too.
After the assault Hawk had thought about it all to the point of exhaustion, going over each and every decision they’d made a hundred times while Ren’i had been hauling them to their current camp. Should he have stayed with the others and helped them escape? Should he have left Ren’i to his fate? He couldn’t explain what had caused him to go after Ren’i, but Hawk didn’t regret his decision. They were still alive, both of them. All they could do was hope the others were, too.
Blueleaf had managed to flee from the Liqaris once already, Hawk reminded himself. They were just as experienced a hunter as he was, having started their apprenticeship with Onniar around the same time. If any of them knew how to take the others safely back home, it was definitely Blueleaf.
They had to. Hawk did not want to think about how Dewdrop would react if her only sibling never came home.
Ren’i’s head shot up as a faint crack disturbed the silence. The sound was followed by shrill chattering and a pair of squirrels in their winter grays dashed up the trunk of a nearby pine towards the treetops, chasing after one another. Hawk pulled him back resolutely.
”Relax. I will tell you if I need you for something.”
”I’m trying, I’m trying.”
Hawk thought feverishly. He recalled his mother’s voice from years ago, talking this and that by his ear until the restless thoughts had ceased racing in his head, and he’d dozed off listening to the sound of her voice. He’d always been a night owl, and his parents had been forced to get creative to get him to sleep when he’d been small.
He gave Ren’i’s shoulder a squeeze and said in quiet tones, ”you said Kishan rookies don’t get any vacations from military service. What does that mean exactly?”
”Oh, that.” Ren’i yawned. ”The rules are more strict during our rookie time. We live in the barracks all year around, follow the daily military routine all nine days of the week, weekends and holidays included. We only get to keep our vacations once the rookie time ends and we get assigned to our actual stations. It’s rough, but in the end the service goes faster if we don’t get the chance to go back to normal life in-between.”
”How long does the service last?”
”Ten years. Didn’t you know?”
Hawk scowled. ”Ten years is a very long time. How the hell do you prevent people from escaping?”
Ren’i laughed, which made his shoulders shake. ”There’s always some who try, believe me. Just think, barracks full of adolescents who’ve only just received their first tattoos, cohabitating with hundreds of other rookies, ordered around by people other than their parents for the first time in their lives.”
”I’d probably try to scale the wall during the night, if I was forced to endure the same.”
There was an amused note to Ren’i’s voice when he said, ”that’s exactly why they send rookies out on training camps regularly, away from the barracks. A few weeks crawling in the woods, hundreds of leagues from civilisation, gets rid off any unnecessary incentives.”
”Tell me more about it.”
”You actually want to know?”
Hawk shrugged. ”I want to know what I’m missing out on when I refuse to enlist.”
”Of course,” Ren’i said with a laugh. He didn’t say it out loud, but he could not deny the facts: there was something in Hawk’s eccentric sense of humour that really pleased him. ”So the basic idea of training camps is to learn survival skills in primitive conditions. The first months in service are mentally demanding and camp life far away from the daily chores tends to improve anyone’s morale. Once we’d learned to take orders and tell one end of the sword from the other, we were taken, one company at a time, in the North-Kishan woods, and dealt into platoons. Each platoon was responsible for managing their own camp’s provisions and defenses. The captain and the officers made sure we had our hands full, but otherwise we were on our own.”
”I’m not sure I understand all these military terms.”
”A company consists of five platoons, and each platoon consists of fifty soldiers,” Ren’i explained. ”A company is lead by a captain and each platoon by an officer. Captain Hamr was the captain of my company.”
Hawk huffed a laugh, remembering the hot-tempered Kishan captain. ”That explains why he still treats you like a bunch of misbehaving children.”
”He was even worse back then. Nowadays he can’t make me do just whatever, but while I was still a rookie, only the sky was the limit. He didn’t care if I was the crown prince or not. He made me run around the barracks all night if I underperformed during practice.” Ren’i grimaced. ”Truth to be told he could do that now, too, and I’d probably obey out of habit.”
Ren’i’s voice grew sleepier and sleepier as he described in colourful terms the summer camp, tormented by mosquitoes and marshes, that he and his platoon had been forced to defend against another. The resulting squabble hadn’t been much to write home about – they knew just enough to march in a single rank and put on their half-plate armour – but it had improved the general morale, oddly enough. His first winter camp had been less eventful, but the captain had still made them crawl on all fours in the snow for a couple of weeks and train in biathlon, longbows in tow.
”So this is how the empire spends its tax money,” Hawk said dryly when Ren’i had finished his story. ”By sending a bunch of adolescents to play war in the woods with each other.”
”Everything sounds so trivial when you put it like that,” Ren’i murmured in response. Hawk waited, but Ren’i did not continue the tale. A moment later a steady wheezing started emanating from his mouth.
Hawk tugged the cloak more firmly around them and let Ren’i sleep until morning.