Chapter 10.3

Author's Notes: 1,348 words.  I know I gave her a name - I should probably find it sometime.  Also, should it be referred to as "the boy," or find a name that more aptly fits it (rather than whomever it controls)?

It was quick, and nobody dared to get in its way.

Summoned from her reverie by the waving of a fan and numerous rushed comments, the middle-aged, somewhat large lady came to her post. She stood atop one of the short towers that surrounded the deep chasm that itself enclosed an imposing castle. Dressed in green and brown baggy trousers, as well as a tattered shirt with an emblem of a sweeping arc suspended over a lake with an island poised in the center, she draped a cape around her as the guards saluted towards the oncoming procession.

“What’ve you come for?” she asked, groggy and confused as the guards on both sides of her pointed their spears warningly at the troop below. The latter group was led by a boy with dirty-blonde hair, an outfit coated in blood and dust, and eyes that pierced the heavens in their clarity.

This boy saluted her and called in a scratchy and shattered voice, almost indecipherable, “Where is the King? Who are you?”

Taken aback by these questions, the woman hesitated for a few seconds. “I’m…a nobody, really. And the King you’re looking for all depends on who you think is the King, because we’ve got a lot of people pulling strings here.”

She was intensely disturbed by the way the boy glared at her in contempt, fingers awkwardly forcing themselves into fists, as though he didn’t know how to make the gesture. “Cath,” he boomed in a broken syllable.

After an awkward pause, the woman frozen in place and left to contemplate whether she should point at the boy and order the guards to arrest him, she sighed and began to walk down the steps into the tower. Guards swarmed her with every step she took, each patiently waiting for a command or call to action. She merely focused on reaching the ground safely, walking across the barracks - and a weapons storage area that was sliced in two by the path snaking in the walls and around the castle - and opening a creaking door to the outside world.

The city was alive, but it was not to her benefit. Groups of crowded and concerned citizens were shoving against the barricade of guards that formed a semi-circle stretching across most of the square that the woman had entered. Some of the polished granite stones of the King’s Square of the Earth were covered in ashen footsteps that appeared to have melded with the rock itself. The fountain spewed water complacently as soldiers escorted lone musicians away, kicking aside their hats, which spilled out coins, in the process, and allowing straggling merchants and sellers to drag their carts of wages away in discontent. She was lucky that it was sunset, with the sun casting its final rays behind her, so that the crowd had already begun to diminish – few liked the night. However, to her surprise, she could see further men, women, and children gathering around the square, massing in their underclothes and some shouting of danger. Many of them looked horrified.

Waving at the soldiers around her, the woman said, “Let no one else step foot in this square, and may nobody else see this.” There was shouting and arguing as the guards advanced and pushed upon the crowd, but the crowd moved away without too much conflict. They, of course, were rather used to being shoved about the military of Eimhin. Regardless, she chose not to watch, instead focusing on the troop that moved out to surround the boy tapping his foot in impatience.

“A map?” half-asked, half-demanded the stranger as the lady pushed her way through several people and breached the perimeter of the circle. Nobody dared to stop or challenge her, particularly with the chill that radiated from her.

“Or else…?” she questioned, rummaging through the cape to inspect various inside pockets. Pulling out a few scraps of paper and notes, she shoved them back in and persisted.

When she, at last, succeeded in finding and unfolding a parchment atlas depicting, in general terms, the country and its greatest cities and landscapes, she noticed the boy waving his arm behind him. It was upon following the strange motion that she became quite aware that she should not have been napping. Indeed, she cursed her habit of being a heavy sleeper, having completely ignored the opening of a gaping hole through the stone that marked the humungous, 30-foot-wall enclosing the interior of the city. The new entryway looked as though it had been blown apart and scattered in ashes, the hole reaching high enough that it threatened the tower and battlements on top. Beams of distant energy indicated that the healers were busy, and their near-constant lights indicated the devastation. All of the guards around the boy stared at him and, for the first time in the woman’s brief tenure as the captain, quivered in fear. Lastly, at his feet, the stone blackened.

Grumbling, the woman displayed the map in front of the boy as her spare hand searched through her outfit for anything to make a mark with. “The King is in the middle of a meeting at the moment, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind visitors.” She pulled out a dry stamp and stuck it against the northeast corner of the map. “He’s somewhere by a town around here, and he’s so vainglorious his army shouldn’t be hard to spot,” she finished, pointing to the location in question before handing the marked map to the boy. He gripped it with his usual lack of grace, crumbling the paper slightly as his hand trembled and he peered at the spot.

Looking up at her, the boy frowned. “I had…expected a fight,” he said with slightly more clarity than before, stressing each word slowly.

The woman, for the first time that day, laughed. “You must be joking,” she responded, slapping her thigh as she stared at the flustered teen. She spent a minute of alternating between deep breathing and laughing before she composed herself and stood at full height. “I have no experience whatsoever protecting or commanding anyone. The real captain of the guard left with the King, his son, and all the competent people, and my husband thought it would be a brilliant idea to put a couple of decades of marriage to the test. You’ve torn a hole through a wall that hasn’t been breached in over a hundred years, killed a few of the remaining competent people in this city, and are going after a man I couldn’t care less about. If you have good intentions for him, then he’ll succeed in his goal, he or his son will come back, and I’ll be out of a job. If you have bad intentions, then he’ll be dead, his son or someone else will take the crown, and I’ll still be out of a job. If you die in the process, either of the above can happen, and I’ll still be out of a job. I’m a reserve and a failure, so there wouldn’t be any need for me.”

The boy’s frown deepened, but he swiveled about and began to walk away, still holding the map. Guards jumped in fright out of his way as he walked. “Cornered rats fight best,” he called out to the woman before stopping at the fountain and shoving his head in for a great gulp of the water. Pulling himself out, he coughed and spluttered as water dripped down him, partly soaking the map. Struck by a thought, he turned to the woman and asked, slowly and warily, “What does the King seek to do?”

“How should I know?” she replied, disgusted. “Nobody thought I was worth enough attention to tell. Whatever it is, it’s important enough that Cath was willing to abandon his own capital to meet with other nations, so one party or another is worried about being stuck in the same place at him. And that means there’s armies involved, and where there’s armies, there’s plots. I think the Alliance has decided it’s done waiting.”