Chapter 10 A Soldier by Any Other Name
Chapter ten
A Soldier by Any Other Name
The snow hadn’t lasted. By dawn it was turning to slush, sinking into the trampled ground until the whole of camp smelled like damp leather and woodsmoke.
Men moved through the fog like ghosts burdened with too much flesh—armour creaking, breath steaming.
Somewhere a horse coughed; somewhere else a man laughed too loudly to convince anyone he wasn’t afraid.
Clyde made his rounds quietly, helm under his arm, gloves tucked into his belt. He liked the mornings before the drills began, when the world was half-asleep, and the noise of living hadn’t yet drowned out the silence that came after battle. The silence that clung to him still.
“Sir Clyde!”
The voice broke through the mist. Marreck came striding across the mud, chewing on a crust of bread and looking like he’d slept less than an hour.
“You look like hell,” Marreck said, grinning. “Did you fight the bottle or your conscience last night?”
Clyde raised a brow. “Can’t it be both?”
Marreck barked a laugh. “Saints preserve me. You’ll end up the first man in history to drink himself into sainthood.”
“Wouldn’t that make me the second?”
“Fair. The first was my uncle Garen. We buried him with a cask.”
Clyde almost smiled at that. It was easy with Marreck.
The man had a way of cutting through the air of reverence that followed Clyde like an unwelcome shadow.
Around him, Clyde wasn’t the King’s hound or the Lord’s favoured knight.
Just another soldier with mud on his boots and aches that never quite faded.
The clang of steel rang out nearby. A few of the younger knights were already sparring in the training ring, blades flashing dull silver through the mist. Renn was among them—barely grown, all quick limbs and wide eyes, trying his best to look older than he was.
His sword arm was decent, his footwork better, but his gaze kept flicking toward Clyde like a compass that refused to point north.
“Boy’s going to sprain his neck looking at you like that,” Marreck muttered. “You’ve got a fan.”
Clyde ignored him and stepped closer to the ring. “Renn,” he called.
The lad turned so fast he nearly dropped his sword. “Sir! Morning, sir!”
“You call that a stance?” Clyde asked mildly. “You’ll fall over the moment someone breathes on you.”
Renn scrambled to correct himself, flushing red. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Marreck leaned on the rail. “Gods, he’s terrified. You could tell him the sun’s coming up, and he’d apologize for it.”
Clyde sighed. “He’s green. I was the same.”
“You were worse,” Marreck said cheerfully. “You glared at anyone who spoke to you for the first six months.”
“That was strategy.”
“That was arrogance.”
“Worked, didn’t it?”
Marreck laughed again, the sound warm as a hearth in the cold air. “Aye. And look at you now—leading drills, scaring the whelps, pretending you don’t care that they like you.”
Clyde didn’t answer. But when Renn hesitated again, glancing over for approval, Clyde stepped into the ring.
“Come on, lad. Show me what you’ve got.”
The other knights drew back to watch. Renn swallowed, nodded, and raised his sword.
The first strike was cautious; the second had more weight.
Clyde met them both easily, shifting just enough to parry.
The rhythm of it—steel, breath, step—was familiar, soothing.
He remembered being fifteen and too proud to show fear.
He remembered older men watching him and saying, He’ll be good one day, if he lives long enough.
He’d lived. He wasn’t sure it was the same thing as being good.
Renn was lucky he’d made it to his 20’s before being tossed into battle. Less lucky for this to be his first.
Renn’s boot slipped in the mud; Clyde used the opening to twist the boy’s blade free and send it skittering across the ring. Gasps rose around them. Renn froze, chest heaving, face flushed. Then, unexpectedly, he grinned.
“Again,” he said.
Clyde blinked. “You sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
A beat. Then Clyde nodded. “Pick it up.”
They went again. And again. By the third bout, both were sweating despite the cold, Renn’s grin wider than before, his breath coming in quick bursts that turned to steam between them. When Clyde finally called a halt, the boy was grinning like he’d won.
Marreck tossed Renn a flask. “Not bad for someone who still has peach fuzz.”
“Thank you, sir,” Renn panted. He turned to Clyde, earnest as sunrise. “If I ever fight half as well as you, I’ll die happy.”
Clyde busied himself with retying his gauntlet. Compliments were harder to parry than blades. “Don’t aim to die happy,” he said. “Aim to live long enough to regret it.”
The other knights laughed, but Renn didn’t. He just looked at Clyde with a strange, unguarded light in his eyes; something deeper than admiration that unsettled Clyde. Was this what Aerion saw in his own eyes?
Marreck noticed. Of course he did. “Careful,” he muttered under his breath as they left the ring. “You’ve got the boy half in love with you.”
Clyde shot him a look. “He’s a soldier.”
“So are we,” Marreck said, not unkindly. “Doesn’t mean we stop being human.”
They walked toward the mess tent, boots crunching in the frost. Around them, the camp was stirring to life—men stoking fires, checking gear, cursing the weather.
The sky was the colour of pewter. Somewhere far east, a horn sounded a long, low note that trembled on the edge of meaning.
It wasn’t a summons yet. Just a reminder that one could come at any time.
Marreck stretched his arms and sighed. “Eat now while you can. Might be the last quiet meal before the thaw.”
“Optimist,” Clyde said dryly.
“Realist,” Marreck countered. “You’ll learn to tell the difference once you’ve stopped brooding long enough to laugh.”
Clyde didn’t answer, but the corner of his mouth twitched. That was enough for Marreck.
Later, when the camp had gone quiet again, Clyde sat outside his tent, journal entry half-written, candle guttering in the wind. The sounds of laughter still carried faintly from the other knights—Marreck’s deep rumble, Renn’s bright one tangled among them. For once, it didn’t grate.
He looked down at the page.
They trust me more than I trust myself, he wrote. And I don’t know if that makes me lucky or dangerous.
He hesitated, then added, almost an afterthought:
Marreck still makes me laugh. The boy, Renn, reminds me of what it felt like to believe in things. I fear for them both.
He set down the quill, blew out the candle, and let the dark settle around him like a cloak.
Two days later, the road unspooled before them like a dull ribbon—mud, frost, and the faint sheen of thawing snow. The army moved slow but steady, a hundred hooves drumming the rhythm of patience into the frozen ground. Banners hung limp in the weak sun, the wind too tired to stir them.
Clyde rode at the head of the column, his horse a dark bay, restless beneath the bit. The air smelled of iron and damp leather. Ahead lay the next encampment, closer to the edge of the war that had been threatening to spill over for months.
Marreck rode beside him. His usual grin was absent, though the warmth hadn’t left his voice. “You ever notice, the closer we get to the front, the quieter the men get?”
“They’re conserving what courage they have left,” Clyde said.
Marreck snorted softly. “Or what jokes.”
“Same thing.”
They rode on in silence for a while. The road narrowed, forcing the ranks closer.
Behind them, Renn was speaking quietly to another knight, his voice low, eager, full of the energy of someone who hadn’t yet seen what awaited them.
Clyde didn’t turn, but he could feel the weight of youthful eagerness pressing forward, unaware of the cliff ahead.
Marreck shifted in his saddle. “You’ve changed,” he said at last.
Clyde kept his eyes forward. “I’ve gotten older.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He looked over. Marreck’s gaze was steady, the easy humour gone. It was rare, this tone—Marreck the soldier, not Marreck the friend.
“You carry yourself different now,” Marreck continued. “Not just older. Heavier. You wear that title like a chain, Commander.”
The word caught Clyde off guard. He’d heard it spoken a thousand times, barked in reports or shouted across the field, but from Marreck’s mouth it sounded strange. Weighted.
“You outrank me now,” Marreck added with a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Feels odd, doesn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t,” Clyde said.
“But it does.”
Clyde’s hands tightened slightly on the reins. “I didn’t ask for rank.”
“No one ever does. You earned it.”
“I didn’t want it.”
Marreck shrugged. “Most good leaders don’t.”
They fell silent again, the horses’ hooves filling the space between words.
In the distance, the line of forest marked the horizon; a dark edge beneath a sky the colour of old parchment.
Clyde watched it, but his thoughts were elsewhere; hundreds of miles south, in a room lit by the low glow of candlelight on gilt.
A desk scattered with letters. A man’s hand tracing the edge of a seal before breaking it.
After a time, Marreck spoke again, softer now. “You know, I remember when you used to talk about home.”
“I don’t have one,” Clyde said.
“You did once. Before the wars. Before all this.”
Clyde didn’t answer. The memory was there, somewhere behind his ribs—the weight of a wooden door, a mother’s voice, the smell of smoke from the hearth. But it felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone long dead.
Marreck exhaled through his nose. “You could still have one, you know. When all this is done.”
“When all this is done,” Clyde repeated quietly, as if testing the shape of the words. “And if it never is?”
Marreck gave a humourless smile. “Then we’ll die doing what we were born for.”
Clyde huffed a small laugh. “You think we were born for this?”
“Maybe not. But it’s what we’re good at.”