Vaelith Crownhold had arrived at the army's forward position bearing the banner of his house. He found the pageantry of bearing of his house banners faintly absurd and was doing it anyway because that was the norm of the situation.
He was not exactly stoked with the prospect of the war.
This was not a position he advertised. He was the heir of House Crownhold, which was a house of considerable renown for its Senate accomplishments and its military history and the particular combination of both that had given it the institutional weight that made bearing its banner meaningful rather than decorative. He had arrived at the army because the army had requested or in all seriousness ordered for provision of Adepts and House Crownhold had assessed the 'request' and decided that sending the heir was the correct political decision, which it was, and Vaelith had agreed that it was the correct political decision, which it also was, and neither the house nor the heir had publicly discussed the third element, which was that he would have chosen to come regardless.
He had never been simple about the war. The people who were simple about the war — the ones who either glorified it cleanly or condemned it cleanly — had, in his observation, never been in one. War was not simple the way that any sufficiently large and consequential thing was not simple: because it contained too many different experiences happening simultaneously to the same person, and the experiences contradicted each other, and the contradiction didn't resolve into something cleaner with time, it just became something you carried.
The way you came into it was never the way you left it.
He had watched enough men return from enough conflicts to know this as a fact rather than a sentiment. There were chips in mirrors after. Cracks that weren't there before. Like becoming a copy of a copy — never the original, each iteration losing something in the reproduction, and the loss invisible until you looked at the copy and the original side by side and found the difference in the faces.
Still. He had come.
His first order of business, after clearing the administrative requirements, was finding out how the war they were engaged in could serve him. He was an heir. His job was to ensure that what he engaged with served the house and the house's longer interests, which were intertwined with the Republic's longer interests in ways that made purely self-interested calculation and institutional service genuinely difficult to separate.
He was also, in the quiet of his own assessment, simply curious. The war had surfaced things. People, specifically. There were names in the forward command's informal networks that had been moving faster than their rank should have allowed.
He had heard of a familiar name being mentioned
more than once in the last forty-eight hours and found a position in the camp where he could observe the student company's section without being obviously present in it, which was a skill he'd developed young and had maintained with the same attention to maintenance that he gave his actual tools.
He observed.
-----
Adam felt the shiver somewhere around the third hour of the rest cycle.
He was making his rounds with his squad — which was the most accurate description of what he was doing, though making rounds implied a function that his actual role in the squad didn't quite justify, since his actual role in the squad was regular member under a platoon leader he had assessed in approximately eleven minutes as a man whose primary relationship to problems was the bastard sword at his hip and whose secondary relationship to problems was also the bastard sword at his hip.
He did not say this out loud. He was in an army, not a debate society, and the army had a specific relationship to the expression of opinions about leadership that he had calibrated his public behavior to respect while his private assessments remained what they were.
Men with bastard swords.
He thought about this in the way he thought about things that interested him despite their irritation: with the genuine curiosity that characterized his relationship to patterns he hadn't fully mapped yet. Men with bastard swords were always on top. This was an observable fact, documented across every institution he'd been in, and the documentation raised the question of why, and the answer to why was not because bastard swords are better than other options. Bastard swords were not, by any objective measure, better than other options for most of what life required.
The answer was simpler and less satisfying: the bastard sword or any sword in general solved a specific problem — the problem of immediate physical threat — with immediate effectiveness, and the people who needed immediate effectiveness valued that, and the people who provided it accrued resources from the people who valued it, and the accrual of resources from people who needed protection produced power, and power produced position, and position meant you were always on top regardless of what other things might also be valuable.
You could paint a beautiful picture. You could place it in your room. When the man with the bastard sword decided he liked it, the painting's days were over.
Adam had spent his time in the academy trying to find the version of information and intelligence that produced the same resource-accrual as the bastard sword, and the answer was that information produced leverage when it was correctly placed and correctly timed, but leverage was not the same as force and the situations in which leverage was more valuable than force were fewer than the situations in which force was more valuable than leverage, and the gap between those two categories was the gap Adam had been navigating his entire life.
He was navigating it currently in a platoon whose leader had a bastard sword.
This was fine. He had learned to work with what was available. He was learning the platoon's informal structure by observation, by the patient mapping of who deferred to whom and why and what the deferrals communicated about the actual hierarchy beneath the official one. By his third day in the platoon he had a working model. By his fifth day he had identified three leverage points and two potential allies. By the rest cycle he was beginning to understand the relationship between the platoon leader's bastard sword and the specific way the platoon's more competent members managed the space around his instructions.
Peace was a very hard thing for men with swords. He had thought this for years and continued to think it, because it remained true. The sword was optimized for conflict. In the absence of conflict, the optimization became a liability — you couldn't think of another way to stop conflict than the sword, and so you found conflict, which created more conflict, which required more sword, which was the specific loop that had been running since the first man picked up the first sword and discovered that having it solved one problem so efficiently that having it created the need for the problem.
He was mid-thought when the shiver arrived.
He looked up from the squad's route.
Across the camp, at the edge of the student company's section, he could see — barely, at a distance— a figure.
He didn't know who it was yet but it was certainly odd he cared.
"Hope I'm not catching a cold," he said, to the empty air beside him, because the shiver hadn't stopped and he had developed the habit of narrating his physical states quietly as a form of grounding when the information-processing part of his mind was running ahead of the available data.
A cold would be unexpected.
Whatever was actually causing the shiver was going to be something else entirely.
He filed it and kept moving. The work continued whether or not he understood everything it contained yet.
That had always been the condition. He was used to it.
The morning would tell him more.
