Archive of Our Own ^beta

Valor had changed. Where the wagon wheels of a ragtag army had once carved ruts in the sandy soil, the grass had grown in again, and in the place Leila’s body had been buried—the only death that truly hurt, for it was unpreventable, inevitable, and Mark regretted not being able to predict it—sat a worn white rock dappled over with moss.

“Funny,” he said to the silent air, “that I got into this mess because I was looking for adventure, and I stumbled through a war that saw not a single loss on the winning side.”

But now, he didn’t say, the words trapped in his throat like tar, they were all dead. Every single one of them.

He continued down the old path, staring at the tiny purple flowers that grew in the shade of the great trees, remembering the sound of battle and the hammering of his heart in his chest.

The old ruins looked wild, now. He ran a hand over the cool stone of an archway. Darin of Laus had died here, on the end of a spear.

It reminded him of Kent, whose earnest expression felt heavy in his memories.

“I just don’t understand how winning did them any good,” he said aloud again. “They all ended up dying anyway.”

Kent had perished of despair, or so the rumor went. Sain lost his life to common thieves. Bern had taken down Vaida. Erk succumbed to the elements of nature…

And Lyn, all alone on the plains.

Exactly the way he’d met her.

Fargus was old now, and could only barely walk. He lived in a quiet little shack in Badon by the docks. Mark sipped his drink and stared out of the single window in the run-down little building. A ship was in the process of leaving port, heading far off to sea.

It was hard not to imagine the old captain had chosen this place for its view, warped as it was through the old pane of glass.

“What do you think luck is?” Mark asked him, turning from the window. “Is it winning? Losing?”

“Luck’s luck,” Fargus said, his voice hoarse. “Ye think ye’ve got all th’ luck in th’ world, but along comes a dragon and ye realize maybe yer luck weren’t blessed after all.”

“We killed the dragon, though,” he returned, taking his seat again at the table.

“Figuratively speakin’, Pup.”

Mark wondered at the term when both of them had lines etched deep in their faces and his own hair was more grey than brown. Then again, Fargus had twenty years on him, so he supposed it gave the other man a right to call him whatever he saw fit.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m sayin’ luck ain’t good or bad. It just is.” Fargus patted his twisted leg. “Was it bad luck that drowned half me crew with the Davros? Was it good luck that I was rescued from the water by a fishing vessel?”

“So you’re saying luck can be both good and bad.”

“Luck’s luck,” he said again. “Not good, not bad. A coincidence, maybe. An interesting turn of events. Perhaps unfortunate. People like to blame bad luck when somethin’ bad happens, and good luck when it’s wonderful, but,” he continued, balancing his hands like a set of scales, “it all evens out in the end.”

Mark sighed. He’d hoped for some life-altering truth, perhaps, but doubted he’d get it now.

“Is it luck if a weapon misses you by a hair, or is it just how things are? How things were meant to be?”

“I don’t know if I believe in fate.” Mark liked to imagine that people had control over their destiny, over their own death, if only a little.

“I don’t think you’d know fate if it bit yer ass,” Fargus said with a grin. “Destiny is predetermined, but fate is a fickle thing. It bends like river-reeds, influenced by every decision ye make every single day. If ye’d said, Lass, stand a little to the south of that pillar, she would have died when it fell, but ye didn’t.”

He’d had Rebecca stand to the east, he remembered. “You don’t think that was luck?”

“I can’t say,” Fargus said, gulping down the last of his drink. “What do you think?”

Mark stared down into the muddy looking ale. “I suppose blaming your successes and failures on luck, good or bad, could be a mistake.”

“Attaboy,” Fargus said, slapping the table. “When a man goes out to hunt a mighty beast, does he rely on luck?”

“No,” said Mark. “Skill.”

“Yes, and it’s true for a lot of things. Ye can’t just hope ye get lucky and food appears on the table ‘cause that ain’t how the world works. Ye can’t just hope the woman ye love will love ye back without putting in any effort to win her affection. And ye can’t—”

“—expect to win a war by merely getting lucky.”

“It takes work,” Fargus told him. “Ye weren’t relyin’ on luck all those years ago, boy. Ye had skilled warriors who knew when to get the dragon’s attention and when to back off. Ye had skilled fliers and sages, and every last one of yer group used wit and skill. It just happened to be more than the dragon had for himself, the poor thing.”

Mark turned the thought over in his head. “Do you suppose I was more skilled than Lyn? That I had more wit than Sain?”

“Naw,” he said, and pushed his drink back. “But we’ll never know, will we? Had ye gone alone to Sacae, or been ambushed by roadside robbers willing to kill for an old nag, ye might have died, too.”

“I didn’t, though.”

“Lord Hector was a mighty strong lad, but even with your stellar plan he lost that battle at Araphen. Was it his personal lack of skill that got him killed, or was his opponent stronger, better equipped, better trained?”

All of those battles so many years ago and yet not a single life had been lost. He remembered Priscilla saying that Kent would never have the full use of his left leg again, and he’d never forget the fear in Farina’s eyes when the bandages had come off her left hand and she stared at her two missing fingers, but not even one person had been left behind.

Could that be skill? Determination? Or was it simply the way things were?

“I studied strategy in Etruria,” Mark finally said when the silence grew awkward. “We played chess and other war games with pieces on boards. But war is different. It’s personal. The deaths are real, and so are other consequences.”

He thought of Farina again, of the gaps where two of her fingers had been. “It’s all over now,” she’d whispered to herself. Two missing fingers on her dominant hand; she would probably never work again. Her expression had closed after that, hardened. And then she’d wrapped it up again.

Fargus pushed back his chair and hobbled over to the window, leaning on a cane that seemed nearly as twisted as his leg. “Young pups always long for adventure,” he said fondly, perhaps thinking of himself, “but they often mistake it for a game. The difference is, when you lose a game, it’s jest yer pride that’s hurt.”

“Yeah,” Mark said, shoulders slumping. “I wish I had known that a few decades ago.”

It was the end, he was certain of it. He was surrounded by four walls, bars, and a locked gate…not to mention the thirteen or so guards that stood watch in rotation.

He didn’t even bother to think about escape. At the end of the day, he just assumed his luck had finally run out. Maybe the real end of it had been the day he’d faced down a dragon and lived to tell the tale.

It was reasonable to imagine that one person’s luck couldn’t carry them further than that. He still remembered the sight of the great beast as it roared, its mouth large enough to swallow a horse without any trouble. He’d thought, then, that nothing could save them…but against all odds they’d killed the dragon anyway.

In doing so, perhaps they had only managed to outrun death for a little while.

The idea of it didn’t seem so bad to him now, when the best part of his day usually involved some kind of passable sort of food or the hoarse singing of a bawdy song from the next cell over.

He was there three months when his luck turned. A guard dropped a key right outside his cell, and it was, with much twisting and strain of his shoulder that Mark managed to get his hands on it.

But guards did not simply drop keys, least of all men trained under the strict rule of Bern, so Mark wondered about it, and waited another week before he decided he didn’t care anymore about the trivialities of living or dying. What was the worst that could happen? A swift death? As far as outcomes were concerned, it might almost feel merciful.

He was halfway down the darkened corridor during the four-minute change of the guard when he heard a quiet, weak voice.

“Mark,” it said,” and he turned to find himself staring down at Oswin. Oswin, whose only resemblance to his old self was in the shape of his nose. “You still have that damnable luck.”

“Oswin,” he said. “You have to—” But the key he held would not fit the lock to Oswin’s cell, and he would never find the right one in time.

“Go,” his old companion said, and his expression and posture betrayed more than any words could have possibly spoken in that moment. Oswin was ready to die, and had been, perhaps, for far longer than just the past few months.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the words rough in his throat, and fled, slipping out of the prison with only moments to spare.

War was loud and it stank. The deafening crash of weaponry dulled his ears until the screams of friend and foe alike sounded equally unimportant. The smell of copper grew so thick that Mark gagged on it.

But it was over—the battle, and perhaps the war.

They’d lost.

If Lord Hector weren’t being led away that very moment, Mark might have gone to him, might have grabbed the front of his tunic and shaken him vigorously until both their teeth rattled. “I was right,” he’d say, “I was right, and you were a fool for not listening!”

But judging by the blood, Lord Hector would not survive imprisonment. Most of his men were already dead, and of those who remained, himself included, he imagined a slower end, rotting away in a dungeon somewhere with no privacy and little understanding of the passage of time. But even that would be better than some of the rumors he’d heard about the Bernese soldiers and the games they played with their prey.

“Are you certain?” Mark asked, the last question he would ever ask Lord Hector.

“It has to be you,” Hector told him. “This army marches on your command.”

Mark pushed down the bile in his threat through sheer willpower and bent low over the map spread out before them. “Okay,” he said. “This is what we’ll do.”

“You’re good,” someone said, and Mark looked up from his game of chess against Oswin to see a face he didn’t recognize.

“Years of practice,” he answered, capturing one of Oswin’s pieces.

“It’s supposed to represent an army, right?” The man sat down on the edge of a crate while Oswin contemplated his next move.

“Yes,” Mark said, and tried to keep the bitterness from his voice, “but make no mistake; there are few actual similarities.”

Oswin looked older, thinner. His face had grown worn and tired. It was strange, Mark thought, to have one’s memories tarnished so; the Oswin he remembered was strong and stout. He’d had a firm jaw and a strength about him that this older version lacked.

“Do you know what happened to our old companions?” Mark asked him when they had a moment to talk, just the two of them. “Erk? Lyn? Serra?”

Oswin looked stricken for a moment, but then his expression turned into something more neutral. “Dead,” he said slowly. “Sain as well. And Florina, though you knew about her already.”

“Elimine,” Mark said. So many.

“Lucius and Priscilla, too, among others.” His face softened for a moment. “It’s difficult to look back and realize more of the people you knew twenty years ago are dead than alive, isn’t it?”

“But how?” Mark wondered allowed, looking down into the cold coffee left at the bottom of his tin cup. Of course some people were bound to die in the span of twenty years, but so many? He’d led them all to victory, and even if that was a fluke or a lucky break, it was odd to think that they’d survived the flames and large scaly tail of a dragon to die to other, simpler things.

“Erk was supposedly asleep in the library when it was struck by lightning. Speculation is that Lady Lyndis died a few years after abdicating, or at least that’s whose body Kent thought it was he’d found. Serra delivered many healthy babies but died giving birth to her—our—own daughter. Sain was killed for his money and his horse on a well-traveled road. Lucius was—”

“Enough,” Mark interrupted, his voice sounding as brittle as the rest of him suddenly felt. He lowered his head. “Please, no more.”

And he wondered, not for the first time, if they all should have had a quick death at the Dragon’s Gate instead.

“Why me?” Mark asked.

Hector gave him a companionable clap on the shoulder. “Because we need you. We need someone who can do what you did for Eliwood and I all those years ago. We need someone who can get us through the worst of it, even when the odds look bad.”

“I’m not the right person for this job,” he whispered.

“You’re the luckiest person I’ve ever known,” Hector said. “Remember when Rebecca was nearly crushed by that old stone column? If you hadn’t said—”

“But eventually,” Mark interrupted, feeling pained, “luck runs out.”

“I trust you.”

Mark didn’t dare speak as Hector walked away, though he wanted to. You shouldn't, he thought instead, and had to lean against the wall to calm his nerves.

When the sound of someone sitting down reached his ears, Mark looked up with bleary eyes. The sight of a familiar face made him stand immediately, and his wobbly legs betrayed his state of sobriety far more than his voice as he said loudly, firmly, “I shouldn’t have come back.”

“Wait.” A hand reached out and clutched at the edge of his worn traveling cloak, preventing him from doing much more than stumble a step or two. “Hear me out. Please.”

“You don’t need me, Lord Hector,” he said without turning around, keeping his eyes on the exit. “You don’t want me.”

The sounds of the tavern pressed around them, but then Hector’s voice, quieter than Mark remembered it being, reached his ears.

“I haven’t forgotten how you led us to victory so many years ago.”

“Things change,” Mark replied, but his mind felt sluggish and he could not form the words he meant to. “People change.”

“It was a gift,” Hector argued. “A talent. You had it and I’ll never forget it. I told Eliwood that last day, I said, we’re going to die, and he said, probably. We both figured hey, if there’s anything worth dying for it’s got to be saving the world, even if nobody else ever found out about it. But we didn’t die.” He paused as if in thought, and Mark turned to see the lines in Hector’s face as he pulled his cloak around himself.

He chanced a smile. “Still sneaking out of the castle?”

“When it’s necessary.”

“You’re desperate,” Mark said. “Desperate to want me.”

“We need you. We need someone who can win a war. And you brought a group of fools through a war when they should have all died fighting it.”

“Things were different back then,” he tried, swallowing hard. “They,” he threw a glance around him at the crowded, dimly-lit room, “weren’t like this.”

“Like what?” Hector asked solemnly, his expression and mannerisms so different from how Mark remembered them that he understood, more than felt, his age. “High-risk? Dangerous?”

“On such a large scale,” he replied, his voice so quiet he wondered for a moment if he’d even dared to speak aloud.

“Is any war really small-scale?” Hector asked, and for a moment Mark thought he might see the old Ostian lordling give one of his careless wide grins, but it never came.

“Well,” he said, feeling resigned, “if you’ve no one else…”

“There is no one else,” Hector assured him, the beginnings of a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Nobody at all I’d trust more to lead us to victory.”

“Is there such a thing as luck?” Mark wondered aloud to no one in particular.

The man sitting up against the side of the building didn’t look up, but he hiccuped as he lifted his empty cup. “Yeah,” he said, “I just got the bad kind is all.”

“I’m talking about war, man,” Mark said.

“Luck’s all it takes, sometimes,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Maybe iss just luck that your arrow hits tha’ hart and kills it, but if it’s dead it’s dead, ain’t it? Aaaand…maybe the other army’s general woke up sick, so you’re lucky he did and his own troops are unlucky for it, huh?”

“You think a dragon could be defeated with luck, too?”

The man lifted his knees, tapping his cup against the ground. “Well,” he said, “they’re all dead, so who’s to say?”

“I fought a dragon once,” Mark said. “I guessed. I made that plan up on the spot. It was just a guess, but it worked. It was luck.”

“What?” the man asked, and hiccuped again before laughter bubbled up in his voice. “You must be drunker’n me to be talkin’ nonsense like that. Buy me a round, will ya? If you’ve got the coin.”

“What are you going to do?” Lyn asked before they parted ways. “Are you going to ask Hector or Eliwood for a position in the military?”

Mark paused, thoughtful, and eventually offered her a sad sort of smile. “Lyn,” he said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets, “I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ve known you longer than the others and I trust you.” He paused, took a breath, and pushed through his own awkward embarrassment. “I’ve no right to join a real military; we won every battle by sheer dumb luck.”

Lyn raised an eyebrow, but her composure didn’t waver. Mark thought she looked quite noble. “Luck?” she asked.

“Luck.”

“Well,” Lyn said, “how do you think ten people, most of whom are children, survive a massacre of nearly two hundred? Must be luck, I think.”

Relief allowed his shoulders to relax and he offered her a smile. “I’m glad you understand.”

“More than you know,” she said. “I don’t think it was all luck, though. Sometimes it was teamwork that saved us, like Hector managing to stop swinging his axe around like a lunatic long enough to take out an archer that might have managed to shoot Heath out of the sky.”

“You don’t think that was luck?”

“It wasn’t your luck, at least.” She returned his smile, though hers was kinder. “Your plans were solid. I just believe it takes more than careful planning to win a battle. After all, you can only plan so much.”

“Still,” Mark said, “I was guessing most of the time.”

“As were we,” she said. “How many of us had extensive first-hand experience in fighting a war?”

The dragon was dead.

Nergal was dead.

They’d won the battle—no, the war.

It felt strange, as if a million heavy burdens were suddenly lifted from him. Mark looked around, did a headcount, and came up with the correct number.

Everyone had lived. Every last person.

He marveled at it. For all intents and purposes and despite everything, including his careful planning, they had not expected to fight a dragon on this day. Yet they had, and they had won.

He turned around and gave the nearest person a bone-shattering hug. Florina, who usually beat a large path around him and most other men, gave him a shaky smile and a squeeze back.

“You did it!” she said.

“No,” Mark insisted, “we did it.”

“What do you think about this war we’re fighting?”

Mark perked up and turned to see Farina talking to Dorcas.

“I think it’s not really a war,” Dorcas answered after a moment.

“I agree,” she said, and took a seat near him. “This isn’t an army. We’re just a small group of people infiltrating places. Common goals and all that.”

“Right,” he said. “We’re a bit like a mercenary troupe.”

“Some people think we’re a grand army,” she said, laughing.

“If we were a real army our orders would not be so particular.”

“That’s what I told Priscilla,” Farina said. “A real army would just charge in. Hell, a wing of pegasus knights would do it too, for better or worse.”

“And in a real army,” interjected Lucius, whose voice startled everyone as they’d missed him sitting on the other side of a sack of grain, “there would be a lot more graves to dig.”

Kent approached him, his expression solemn. “Mark,” he said by way of greeting, and twisted his hands in front of him. Mark knew this meant that he was about to ask something difficult.

“What can I do for you?” he tried in an attempt to hurry the process along.

“When we fight Lord Darin,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as if worried that someone might appear there, “I would like to lead the charge.”

Mark started. His plans usually involved a lot of sneaking around, and very little direct confrontation. “Why?” he asked, feeling suddenly overwhelmed.

“Sain,” Kent started, and swallowed, “and myself feel that…it would be best if Lady Lyndis did not have to face him after what he has done.”

It was an understandable concern, but Mark sighed and turned away. “If a charge is necessary,” he said, “then I will let you lead it. But no man in this army is expendable, even you.”

“I understand.”

Mark doubted he did, but one week later Kent led the charge because it was the best strategy. If Kent and the men going with him could catch the attention of their opponents for long enough, it would be easy for the rest of the group to surround them without them even realizing it was happening.

Miraculously, nobody died, and the worst injury belonged to Kent: his left leg had been crushed beneath the weight of his own horse.

“Your plan worked flawlessly,” Eliwood complimented him, giving him a warm smile and a pat on the shoulder.

“I thought Kent was going to die,” Hector said. “It seemed like a done deal. That javelin just barely missed his face!”

It was terrible that they could speak of it so casually, as if it hadn’t almost happened, as if they couldn’t possibly be burying Kent or Marcus or even Florina right now.

And here they were complimenting his plan as if he’d somehow been the one to move the javelin a quarter-inch off its mark so that Kent wouldn’t lose his head. No, that it had missed him was nothing more than luck—if indeed one could call it that.

The first javelin had missed, but the second spear struck Kent’s horse, sending it to the ground along with its rider. Mark doubted he’d ever be able to forget the way the dying animal had thrashed with Kent half-pinned beneath it.

“What game are you playing?” Wil asked.

“It’s called War,” Raven said, sounding bored as Mark took one of his pieces.

“We call it Chess in Etruria,” Mark offered.

“So which piece is which? What is the point of the game?”

“To win, I think,” Raven said with a straight face. “But I might be wrong.”

Mark hid a smile. “It’s like a small-scale battle,” he explained. “Each piece can move in a different way. You take pieces off the board who have been defeated, and in the end you must put the other team’s King into checkmate, which means he cannot move without losing his life, and must surrender.”

“I understood…maybe half of that,” Wil admitted with a sheepish grin. “Who’s winning?”

“It could go either way at this point.”

“So…kinda like a real war then,” said Wil, frowning a bit as he watched.

Raven moved a knight, but left one of his pawns open and defenseless. As Mark moved to take it, he gave a resolute nod. “Yes,” he said. “Sacrifices must be made.”

Mark looked up at Wil. “In a game like this one sacrifices make a lot of sense, but in real life, in real battles and real wars, I like to think there are better ways.”

“What happened?” Mark asked by the fire.

Fiora stared at him. “What?”

“On Valor,” he explained.

The color drained from her face. “It was my fault,” she said. “The mission was—I shouldn’t have—”

“I’m not blaming you for it.” Mark fiddled with the hem of his cloak. “I’m just hoping to learn from the experience.”

“To better guide everyone?” she asked.

“I hope so.” She was probably the only person in their group who truly understood the weight he carried in directing the group’s military maneuvers. Others had a good idea of the pressure, but none knew it like Fiora.

Fiora, who had been ambushed along with the rest of Ilia’s fifth wing, and was the only survivor.

“I’ve gone over it a thousand times,” she said quietly, staring into the fire. “I don’t know what I could have reasonably done differently. But surely I could have done something, anything…to save even just one life.”

Mark touched her arm, drawing her gaze to his own. Her face looked pained in the firelight. “A life was saved,” he said. “Yours.”

“I understand what you are trying to do,” she said, shaking her head, “and I appreciate it, but I was in charge. It was my responsibility to protect them, but when the worst happened all I could do was protect myself.”

“I think you’re lucky to have survived at all,” Mark said. “From what you described, you should have died with the rest of them.”

“Do you think there’s a purpose to it?” she asked, hands twisting in her lap. “To my having lived?”

It wasn’t a question he could answer truthfully. “I don’t really believe in fate,” he said, “but I do believe that, when given a chance to make a difference, we should probably take it.”

She was quiet for a long while as they both stared into the fire.

“Maybe my survival was nothing more than luck,” she said, getting to her feet, “but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make the most of the life I have. Please, do your best to direct me along with the others in our next battle.”

“Do you regret leaving the plains?” Mark asked Lyn. They were mere weeks from Caelin and he couldn’t help but wonder how she felt about it. The others had left things behind to join them on the trip, but it was different for her than for them; she was leaving the only place she’d ever known.

Lyn rolled her ankle as she gave him a tight smile. “Regret? No, but I do miss it already.”

“What do you miss the most?”

She paused, looking thoughtful. “The smell of the air, the sound of the grass in the wind, the knowledge that I am right where I was meant to be.” She smiled a little helplessly. “But I mostly miss things I’ll never have again.”

“I see,” he said, knowing she was thinking of her parents and the rest of her people, and perhaps also customs that would die along with the dissolution of the Lorca.

“If I hadn’t come with you and the others,” Lyn said, “I might have died alone.”

“You seemed to know what you were doing out there.”

“I never had to do anything on my own,” she said. “I was just guessing.”

“You’re not alone now,” Mark said. “You have friends.”

She smiled again; this time it was gentle. “And so do you.”

The bandits were long gone, but they’d left him in sorry shape and had taken most of his possessions. Mark supposed he was grateful he was half-starved when they’d happened upon him or else he might not have looked so close to death after a few kicks to the face. They definitely thought he would perish out here alone on the plains.

“Come all the way out here to study tactics from Sacaen tribes only to find out the one I was looking for is dead,” he mumbled as the world spun around him. “Try to go back to Etruria only to get jumped by bandits…”

The sun was hot overhead, and he was so thirsty he could hardly stand it.

“Just my luck,” he said.

And then he fainted.